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Biting Chill ( 18 ) : The cold is strangely harsh, and even the still wind is vicious enough to sting. But the cold isn't the worst part of tonight--it's what comes with it. Out of a swirl of blowing snow, a massive, wispy wolf takes shape, enormous and snarling, with fur spiked like jagged icicles. Its eyes glow with a cold, wild intelligence, and before you can even react, it lunges as though you’ve trespassed deep into its territory.
Every strike it makes feels like the bite of winter itself. Wherever its claws slash, wherever its jaws snap, frost cakes over. Even if you're lucky enough not to take massive damage, the cold seeps bone deep. When you manage to land a hit, the creature bleeds a strange, clear blood--icy water that freezes instantly into slush on the ground. The more damage it takes, the more its form flickers, shredded like wind-torn snow.
The wolf fights with the relentless instinct of a dire beast, but it is not invulnerable. It will never run. It will fight until its body is broken and flickering, then--finally--a sudden gust will rip through the air and carry its dissolving body away. Howls echo on the wind. The rest of its pack probably isn't too far behind.
Every strike it makes feels like the bite of winter itself. Wherever its claws slash, wherever its jaws snap, frost cakes over. Even if you're lucky enough not to take massive damage, the cold seeps bone deep. When you manage to land a hit, the creature bleeds a strange, clear blood--icy water that freezes instantly into slush on the ground. The more damage it takes, the more its form flickers, shredded like wind-torn snow.
The wolf fights with the relentless instinct of a dire beast, but it is not invulnerable. It will never run. It will fight until its body is broken and flickering, then--finally--a sudden gust will rip through the air and carry its dissolving body away. Howls echo on the wind. The rest of its pack probably isn't too far behind.
Trying to get better at doing Negaverse Lieutenant things……felt like a bit of a process, if Nekoite were perfectly honest.
One thing he’d learned the hard way: starseeds were very easy to sneak up and pull, but not always so easy to keep your hands on, once you got them. Collecting them didn’t strike him as being too terribly different from going after things like the talismans and runes in Elden Ring. Or, even more accurately, the Stones of Barenziah in Skyrim, the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, or the hundred feathers you needed to unlock the Auditore cape in Assassin’s Creed II. Probably the Korok seeds were the most accurate comparison, since as far as Nekoite had gathered, everybody had a starseed, which meant they were pretty numerous, like the Korok seeds.
Except that, at the end of the road, gathering up starseeds was supposed to have, like, a way better reward than a passive ability to enhance your gem-finding abilities, a sparkling pile of Korok s**t, and/or a cape that literally made Ezio notorious and set everyone who could attack him immediately turn hostile. The Negaverse, or so Ms. Captain Andesine had promised, definitely had better rewards than that.…… At the end of the road of being a Lieutenant, y’know, whenever Nekoite managed to figure out what and where that was……and how to avoid getting his a** handed to him by Order people on the way there (which, he kept telling himself, was sort of the point of these early level slogs, so getting beat up was really just on him needing to git gud and stop being a scrub).
The snow outside tonight was swirling like crazy. Nekoite couldn’t even tell if there was new stuff falling, if the wind was whipping old stuff up for funsies, or if both things were true. Probably this wasn’t the best weather to be out in, but: A., winter levels always forced you to hone your skills and get better, enduring the cold and adverse conditions would be good for him; and B., he had a warm scarf that he’d thrown on with his cute little uniform. There weren’t really any people out from whom to drain energy, though, but……y’know, maybe that just meant he needed to look a bit harder? Dedication! Persevering until he found the energy he needed to hit his quota for this week! Like, Generals Ashanite and Arsenolite obviously hadn’t made it to their ranks by being weaksauce quitters!
But instead of civilians he could drain, wandering through the snowy park only led Nekoite to the trail of another aura. A friendly one, at least, and following it led him to a Lieutenant with really fun looking hair.
“Hey! You with the cool hair! Hiiiiii!” He called out to her, waving at her as he moved closer. “Rough night out here, huh? Do you want to patrol together maybe?”
Two things spectacularly failed to occur to Nekote: first, maybe it would’ve been a good idea to include his name in that vaguely introduction-shaped pile of words. And second, something out in the whirls of snow was beginning to take on a distinctly wolfish shape.
LP
