Realizing that Eli was winging it during probably the most dangerous thing they have encountered to date, Bethany sighed. She was starting to realize that her destiny was more than just napping with no clothes on, she was going to have to work on helping with normal everyday things, some of which he might not be aware. There was a nurturing side to her lately that had been buried deep in her heart before the world ended and was now coming out without her realizing it until after the fact. Which led her thoughts to a chicken and egg situation; Was she warm and nurturing because of her system recognized destiny, or did she get her destiny because, with Eli at least, she was warm and nurturing.
Eli listened to everyone's thoughts patiently, but nothing anyone said was any different than, go in, check it out, adjust as we go, so he just decided to open the door. The temperature of the wind that blasted its way in the open door was brutal, it wasn’t enough to knock anyone off their feet but it was cold enough to freeze parts of exposed skin in an instant. He quickly held his cloak closed and stood in the door to try and block some of the wind, he was afraid if he let the door close that it would go on an hour reset and waste time.
Turning to everyone he yelled, “stay here, I’ll go have a look at what is outside, don’t let the door close all the way.”
Bethany pulled out her spear and stuck it in the ground just outside the door, while keeping a grip on the handle, holding the door open by just the width of her spear handle. She held the door closed while the others tried to put on as many clothes as possible. The safe room had been a cave made of ice, but their resistance had been too high for normal freezing temperatures to have any effect. The wind, snow, and freezing temperatures on the outside of that door were something else, being below negative fifty degrees and with frost magic boosting it. After everyone else had been able to bundle up as much as they could, Lucy and Beau held the door while Bethany took a step back and put on 2 sets of warm clothes and a second set of armor over that.
Now that they were doing their best to keep warm, or at least avoid the frost, they just had to sit and wait for Eli to return. Bethany was sitting on the floor in front of the door holding it closed, she told the others to go to the other side of the room, but instead they all kind of cuddled together. Beau tried to activate his lava armor to stay warm but there weren’t any stones around, in fact, he was pretty sure there weren’t any stones in the walls of the safe room at all, it was all ice. They were quiet and just focusing on trying not to shiver too much when they heard the faint sound of a bear's roar heard over the sound of the wind. A minute or so later they heard it again along with what could be a fox and maybe something similar to a snow leopard.
Bethany wanted to go running out there to save Eli, after the impulse passed she was shocked that the reason she wanted to do that wasn’t just because she needed him to survive this place, she also had feelings for him. This was far from the first time she had felt them but they still didn’t quite fit right, not in an awkward way, just in an unfamiliar way. Like wearing a boyfriends hoodie from when she was in high school, it didn’t fit, but it felt so good to wear it. The noises were getting closer and then Bethany realized that despite all these animal roars and growls, there were not any signs of combat. The ground wasn’t shaking and there wasn’t the tell tale sound of hollow bone hitting rock that his conjured cudgel usually made, there wasn’t any of the usual noises associated with Eli being in combat that she was used to.
Eli was lost, when he first left the safe room, he was expecting a hallway or something with a clear direction, but the safe room was essentially just inside a cave that opened up to a frozen lake, this wasn't a cave and tunnel system, but more like a terrarium With the snow and wind all he could see in every direction was a frozen lake. At first, he wanted to turn back due to the cold but he thought about how he used light magic to make himself glow in the dark so he used his fire magic to make his body warmer. The problem was he became too warm and he started melting the lake around him, with a planet level fire node, his fire flavored magic coming from his node was very potent. He figured that the best option was to run to the shore of the lake so he didn't sink.
Not used to regulating the magic from his planet level nodes outside of using them for spells, he was getting too hot and apparently not getting close to the shore of the lake. His fire magic was stronger than the frost magic in this floor so he was sinking into the ice with every step. He thought he was seeing the shore but it turned out to be a sheer cliff face going up higher than he could see through the snow. This was the same thing he had seen around the cave that held the safe room door. He just remembered that he needed to get back since he told them not to close the door, they had to be freezing. Eli wasn’t sure, but he thought Bethany had an open fire node so she will probably be ok, and Beau has his heat stone armor ability so they were probably nice toasty.
Turning around and heading back the way he came, he could see the indent he had made on his way out and there was water inside the indents, his fire magic was lingering. Now there was a real fear of him sinking, but all he could do was turn the fire magic off and on, he didn't have the familiarity with it enough to use it like a dimmer. Just when he thought he was going to make it back without sinking a massive polar bear came out of nowhere and plowed into him, knocking him off his feet and instantly freezing the trail of water he was using to make it back to the cave. The bear's claws gave it good grip on the ice that Eli’s bare feet were no match for, so he did the best option he could come up with in the limited amount of time that he had before the massive polar bear bit into him. He turned left his fire node open so he would melt the ice and he blinked himself into the frozen lake.
Something he had discovered and tested after his chaos node reached planet level, was that he could blink into things, they would just get annihilated. He tried this with a couple different things, stone and water seemed to be ok as long as they weren’t too magic dense, but it didn't work on almost anything with even the smallest bit of magic. He couldn’t end up inside a person or a tree or stone with magical properties because the magic would be too stable. It would take more chaos magic than he had to destabilize the magic enough so that it would be able to be destroyed. However, something about water was different, it always felt like he blinked into water easily and without disturbing it. He wasn’t sure if ice was the same but it couldn't hurt to try in this situation, at least those were his thoughts right before he was about to be eaten.
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After Eli disappeared, at least that's how it looked to the bear, it didn’t seem to know what to do so it just started walking around on the lake. Eli was melting the ice around him and within 20 seconds or so he could move his limbs and started walking toward what he thought would be the cliff wall where the safe room was. Obviously he couldn’t breath which was taking away most of his focus, since after about 4 minutes he was feeling his lungs collapse which was not pleasant. A solution was to breathe in water, which ended up being even less pleasant and more distracting, but he did have enough attention to spare to the temperature of the water around him. It was getting too hot, even with all of his power, he wasn’t sure he would survive a steam explosion from under 20 feet of ice. The good news was that the ice was crystal clear from under it and he could see further under the ice than when he was looking through the snow and wind above it.
The bear's steps could be heard above him every time it passed and Eli got an idea, and just like all of his ideas, it was dangerous and possibly self destructive. The water behind where he had been slowly walking was not refreezing, at least not very quickly, so he slowed down his walking while trying to stay close enough to ice to keep the temperature from going too high. It took several minutes to play with his distance from the ice in front of him before he felt like he got it right. One time the water got so hot it was actually hurting his skin, almost burning it, so he had to get really close to ice and start over moving slower and slower until he was getting close to the temperature he wanted. Now all he had to do was wait and see if the ice above him would melt enough, maybe not all the way to the surface with all the ice magic in the air, but enough to let a giant bear fall in perhaps.
The slope on the bottom was changing from slightly down hill to slightly up hill, convincing Eli that he had just passed the middle of the lake where it was deepest. Keeping with his slow pace he looked up and behind him noticing that the melted ice was about 6 feet from the surface and as he went uphill it was starting to get closer. Now he just needed to get the attention of the bear somehow to make sure it would walk over the thin ice and fall in. He wasn’t really sure how he was going to accomplish this yet so he let his thoughts freely float around in his head. The ice was now getting as thin as three feet, Eli just kept letting thoughts fly in and out of his head, most of them were about fire since his fire node was flooding his body with fire magic right now.
Campfire, heat, body heat, fireplace, marshmallows, cooking, lanterns, and on and on until the ice above him was only a foot thick and the lantern idea came back to him. He smiled from ear to ear and added the light magic to his fire magic inside his body and he started to glow. He got distracted and slowed his walking pace a bit and the ice got even thinner, he kept pouring in more and more light and finally he could see something moving above him, only it wasn’t the bear, it was an arctic fox, if arctic foxes grew to the size of a horse and had more teeth than nightmare monsters. It was soon joined by a second and third one, the ice was starting to crack a little but the three of them were making fox noises that were run though a cthulhu audio filter and didn’t notice.
Finally, right when he thought the ice was going to break, he heard the bear walking closer. At first Eli thought that they were going to fight each other but the fox creatures seemed to be subservient to the bear and they backed away from the light in the ice a little. The bear got closer and then it was standing directly over the thin spot on the ice, but it wasn’t breaking. He could hear cracks but belatedly he remembered that things always sound louder from underwater and the cracks were not very substantial. However, he had been standing still for a while now and the temperature of the water was nearing boiling. One loud crack of the ice, so loud it almost ruptured Eli’s eardrums, and all four of the monsters froze, afraid to move. They were smarter than he had given them credit for, but it was too little too late and they all fell in the water.
Eli turned off his fire node and light node, allowing himself to be harder to see as he wrapped his cloak around himself, and allowing the ice magic the monsters exuded to rapidly start cooling the ice. All that was left for Eli to do was make sure they didn’t crawl their way out, so he used his magic sense to get his best judgement of where the surface was and used blink. It turns out that blinking into ice did use more chaos magic than he thought because he appeared 10 feet above the ice and upside down. He fell on his face and landed in an undignified heap. After getting to his feet and pretending that that had never happened, he watched the water that was starting to freeze with the monsters inside.
Surprisingly it was the bear that was able to swim toward the top even with ice crystals forming around its head and front paws. Eli conjured a large cudgel and dropped it down into the water, it landed on the bear's back and the extra weight was too much as they both sank to the bottom. He quickly dismissed it so water would fill back in before it was done freezing. It only took another minute before he was relatively sure that the monsters were stuck down there. Monsters that he had seen so far, even boss types, stuck to only one type of magic, he guessed that when they got into the hundreds in levels that this would change but they would have complimentary types not opposites. At least that was his best guess from what he had seen so far.
Finally remembering to cough out the water in his lungs, he took a deep breath, before he had a coughing fit that lasted another minute. Not being able to breathe was rough, it wouldn’t kill him, but it was very painful and it slowed his magic and health regeneration by over half. He calmed his mind, breathed in and out again and used magic sense to find the safe room, or more specifically he could sense Bethany and Lucy. he wasn’t far off from his guess, through the snow he could just barely see the cliff wall, and the safe room was about 500 yards to his left. He started walking that way slowly and quietly as he realized that the bear he froze and the one that had attacked him earlier may not have been the same bear.
