[You have received a Divine Artifact — Sword of the Six-Headed Dragon]
Sorry Dawn... He thought as he felt the power of the sword surge through him.
However, as seconds passed, the power continued to flow through him... it never ended.
The small bruises on his battered body, the frostbite on his cold feet, his shredded skin, and the hunger and tiredness within him vanished as his grip on the sword tightened.
What is this?! He had never expected Dawn's Artifact to be this strong.
Sure, all Gatebearers can use Artifacts of any and all Elements. But to extract an Artifact's full potential, having a Gate of the Element the Artifact represents is necessary.
And since Astor didn't have an Inferno gate, he didn't expect much from it. But his expectations were shattered.
Am I able to extract its full potential?? No... this is something else.
It could only be explained if Dawn's Artifact, which he was holding onto, was already of a really high tier. Which made the small fraction of its power he was experiencing a lot more than he expected.
What was I thinking when I rejected Dawn at the start... I'm so stupid. Astor pointed the sword straight at the wolf, which took one final step to finally reach him.
It growled as it looked down upon him, opening its mouth ready to swallow him in one bite...
But then it stopped.
What's it doing now? Astor thought as the wolf slowly lifted its neck once again and turned back to look at the statue, where a young girl with bright red hair could be seen trying to climb the stone platform.
The moment the wolf saw Rose, it immediately turned around and started to sprint towards her as fast as it could.
A distraction! Yes! So that girl isn't completely useless! Astor, who saw this as an opportunity, jumped onto the wolf's tail as it was turning.
You're not going anywhere!
By the time Rose climbed the platform and turned back, the wolf had already sprinted half the distance between them.
"Damn you, Astor! You were supposed to keep it distracted!" She said as she ran towards the legs of the statue as fast as she could.
And just as she reached the opposite side, the wolf stepped onto the platform and jammed its face in the narrow gap between the legs of the statue. But luckily, only its unusually long snout was able to pass through.
Rose collapsed on the other side of the platform as she saw the wolf meters away from her, struggling to free itself. The wolf's snout was so tightly jammed that it couldn't even open its mouth.
She removed a small knife that was on the side of her waist as she stood up and pointed it towards the shaking wolf.
"How do these runes work?!" She looked down at the glowing circle of runes that was meant to teleport her back to Mytherra...
However, nothing was happening. She turned back to the wolf and realised it would eventually free itself somehow.
And she was right, as after a while, the wolf calmed down, and its shadow began to warp once again, slithering towards its snout, and wrapping itself around it. Then, when it tried to pull its snout back, it was easily able to do so.
After shaking its face, it slowly walked around the statue; however, it was left confused after seeing that the girl it had chased after wasn't there on the platform — not anymore.
It looked everywhere, but it couldn't find her. It was about to give up and turn back towards Dawn, but it heard something...
something from above — and when it turned towards the noise, it saw there, desperately clinging to the waist of the statue, Rose, the frail red-haired girl.
The wolf growled as it opened its maw and roared at Rose; however, before it could jump towards her, it felt something blocking one of its eyes, and stopped.
Astor, who had grabbed onto the wolf's fluffy tail, had slowly crawled all the way across the wolf's body to eventually reach the top of its head. Then, he grunted as he stabbed one of the wolf's eyes using Dawn's scorched sword.
"Take that, you damn bastard!"
The wolf unleashed a roar once again, which was so violent that it rattled the air itself. Then, it thrashed wildly, shaking its massive body in a desperate attempt to throw Astor off.
Amid the chaos, Dawn's sword slipped from Astor's grasp and vanished into the snow below the wolf, and his fingers began to slide against the wolf's coarse fur.
He was seconds from losing his grip.
But before that happened, Rose, who had climbed the statue, hurled herself down onto the wolf's head, landing hard beside its left eye — on the side opposite Astor.
Then, she took out her knife once again and screamed as she repeatedly stabbed the wolf's other eye.
The wolf howled as the final bits of light entering its eyes turned dark. The wolf had been completely blinded. But for Astor, that only meant more thrashing and more shaking.
"So you did know how to climb! Damn whore!! You even had a knife!" Astor shouted as he slipped down even further.
"Well... I don't trust myself, alright?! But I trusted you! See, it worked out well, didn't it? This is the first step of friendship, to trust each other."
Rose said as she gripped onto the wolf's fur as tightly as she could, letting go of her knife in the process.
Hasn't a minute already passed?! Damn it! Astor screamed in his mind as he tried his best not to let go of the wolf. However, as he turned to look back at Dawn, he noticed something else...
The wolf, now blind, was trying its best to shake them off; however, in doing so, it had climbed down the platform and was moving closer and closer to the edge of the ravine.
Realising this, Astor immediately let go, falling onto the glacier, right in front of the enraged wolf. It was better to slip now than to lose his grip when the wolf was next to the ravine.
However, the moment Astor's feet touched the icy surface of the glacier, onto Regulus' shadow. The wolf stopped its panic and stared straight down at Astor.
No! Damn it! How does it know!?
He had just landed on the ice and had yet to regain his balance. So he could do nothing as he saw the wolf's enormous maw head straight towards him.
He was about to die...
But just as the next second passed, Astor's promise to Dawn had been fulfilled. He had successfully distracted the wolf for sixty seconds.
On the east, beyond the horizon, the sun finally fully rose above the raging storm, spilling its golden rays across the jagged glacier, and painting the already colourful sky in shades of amber.
To the north, the beacon rose to the heavens, blooming into an array of colours which dissolved into the sky, painting the sky just above into a shimmering rainbow.
But Astor noticed a third source of light. One much brighter than both, the beacon, and the sun combined... One coming from the west — where Dawn was standing.
The sphere of water between Dawn's hands was glowing white-hot. The heat it radiated burned straight through the bandages wrapped around his chest, and his hands themselves were lost behind the blinding light the sphere emitted.
The green crystal on Dawn's chest was on the brink of vanishing. But now, the water he had formed, once twice the size of his palm, had been compressed to around half its original volume.
The glacier surrounding Dawn had completely melted, and he was now standing in an ankle-deep puddle of boiling water as he pointed the radiance between his scorched hands at the blind wolf, Regulus.
Then, just as the green crystal vanished, Dawn uttered the words:
"Phase... Burst."
The glowing sphere of water launched from his hands at unimaginable speeds.
Splitting into thousands of smaller, yet equally powerful, glowing pellets, creating a shifting stream of shadows across the jagged surface of the glacier as they traversed the distance between him and the wolf.
The wolf couldn't see. But even if it could, it would have never had enough time to react. Thousands of water pellets, travelling many times faster than sound itself, tore through its body, spewing its blood and guts all around, painting the white surface of the glacier red, as whatever remained of the wolf went flying with the pellets.
And then —boom! In the next second, the sound caught up to the light. The wolf's lifeless body landed meters away. It was instantly dead! They had defeated the wolf! The path home lay open at last. The final hurdle had been cleared.
However, not everything went perfectly...
***
"Da... damn it."
A young boy with dark hair, wearing a thin, tattered tunic, uttered in a soft echoing voice as he hung to the rough edges of the glacier, hanging above the void of the ravine.