The wind that howled across the frozen cliff edge of Floor 49 was not an ordinary mountain draft. It was the Glacial Breath of the High Void. A sub-zero gale so intensely cold that exhaled breath crystal-hardened into falling blue frost before it could drift a foot from a man’s lips.
Spanning forty leagues of fractured frozen ground, the Lunar Glacial Ruins of Floors 45 through 49 had tested every ounce of endurance the challengers possessed.
Towering jagged spires of blue glacier ice rose like stone-hard dragon fangs toward a bruised, indigo sky. The ground beneath their boots was slick, dangerous frozen ground shot through with bottomless ice-slow crevasses that emitted eerie, moaning whistles whenever the wind surged.
Over the past four days, more than sixty allied parties had pushed into the frozen ground tier.
Nearly all of them had faltered. Without exquisite heat management, the biting cold froze spiritual energy within the spirit veins, turning supple muscles brittle and slowing reaction times by half a second—an eternity when facing the Frost-Horned Chimeras and Glacial Gargoyles that haunted the white drifts.
Yet standing at the summit ridge of Floor 49, the five figures of the Vanguard Alliance moved with the steady, timed together grace of a well-hardened clockwork array.
