Cass took a deep breath as her opponent’s struggling slowed to ineffective wriggling beneath thickening ice.

  Across the room, Salos’s attack had not stopped. 32 was covered in cuts. There wasn’t a joint in his armor that wasn’t bleeding, and a good number of his plates had new, bleeding holes.

  And yet he still hadn’t fallen.

  Salos dashed behind him, his dagger again diving for the man’s neck.

  Again, that shimmering shield appeared in the way. Something tugged at Cass’s attention as it did.

  Salos, do that again.

  Salos leapt back as the paladin’s sword swung through. He rolled her shoulders. Sure, it’s not like body shots are any more effective.

  Cass pulled up Mana Sense to max as Salos slipped around the man again and slashed his neck from yet another angle.

  Mana burst around the man’s neck as the shield manifested, glowing vibrant green in her Mana Sight yet fading out of existence entirely when the blade fell away.

  Now the heart again, Cass directed.

  Why?

  Just try it, please.

  Salos didn’t argue further. He slipped through the paladin’s guard again, the blade puncturing a new hole in the man’s chest. There wasn’t the whisper of mana reacting there.

  Still hard as rock, Salos reported as he pulled back. You going to tell me what the point of that exercise was?

  His rock heart isn’t magic. Cass explained what she’d seen.

  Interesting, but I’m unsure what we can do about it. Salos danced through another flurry of the paladin’s sword strikes.

  If it’s really stone, Cass said slowly, a twisted idea spinning into her mind, maybe I can Manipulate it.

  Hardly, Salos shot her down. You can’t just directly affect other bodies like that. Every body has its own domain that outside skills cannot directly alter. Otherwise, mages could just manifest rocks in their opponent’s brains and be done with it.

  There was a kind of sense to what he was saying, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before.

  You have not.

  In the Deep, fighting the Lord. I summoned a Wind Blade inside its body.

  It had been hard. Harder than forming Wind Blade typically was. And she’d needed a bonus range modification to do it.

  Is that what Skill Injection is? she asked.

  Salos actually stumbled at the question. 32 drew a cut across her forehead.

  Salos recovered quickly, wiping the blood away with the back of a hand and leaping back. How do you know that term?

  Bonus range offered it to me back then, in the Deep, Cass said.

  Unease rolled across their bond, but he sent the sentiment of agreement over it. If you can do that with Elemental Manipulation, and you have the Focus for it, then sure, your plan might just work.

  Focus: 78/549

  Stab him in the heart again and then switch with me, Cass said. She had to have enough.

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  Alright. Again, Salos drove his blade into the puncture wound he’d driven in the paladin’s chest plate, driving the blade into the paladin’s heart. As the blade pierced his flesh, Cass activated Shifting Mind.

  The world spun. The dagger was clumsy in her hand, but she didn’t fight the existing momentum. It drove down, hitting something hard.

  “How many times will you try this before you understand?” the paladin cackled, no idea his opponent had changed.

  She reached through her dagger for the object with Elemental Manipulation, only to find no stone.

  It was metal. Steel.

  Never mind Skill Injection, she couldn’t Manipulate that.

  But she couldn’t just pull back either. Her mind whirled to maximum speed, her Alacrity accelerating her thoughts until time crawled.

  She couldn’t Manipulate the metal. There was no getting around that. But hadn’t she found a perfectly good method of bursting metal pipes earlier? What was a heart, but a liquid filled tube, twisted into an odd shape? What was blood, but iron filled water?

  She turned her Elemental Manipulation on the blood. Yet it slipped from her grip. A pressure pushed her back. The skill emphatically said this was a bridge it would not cross.

  Blood was not water. Blood was not an Element.

  Why? How was blood special?

  The skill refused to negotiate. No. Not her skill. The System itself.

  There wasn’t time to fight the entire System. She could unravel this mystery later. Time to pivot. What else could she do?

  There had to be more.

  If not Elemental Manipulation, could she do something with Tempest Blade? Maybe a Tempest Blade through his heart?

  It would be simple enough to summon a lightning blade along the surface of her dagger. There was plenty of space in the gouge Salos had dug in the paladin’s chest. But could lightning burn through enough metal to breach his heart?

  What if she summoned the blade super-imposed over the heart? The same way she’d killed the Lord of the Deep?

  She reached for it. Lightning formed along the dagger’s edge. It pressed against the steel heart.

  Cass willed it to extend through that space. To replace the metal, if that was what it took to breach its defenses.

  Error: You are attempting to manipulate the Body of another Being. Injections are outside the standard range of your skill’s function and require significantly more Focus to perform. Cost is too great against chosen target.

  Without further warning, the Tempest Blade broke under her. The lightning fizzled out.

  There had to be something else. Another skill. Another application.

  She kept coming back to Elemental Manipulation. But she couldn’t manipulate either the steel flesh or the blood within. What can you do, she asked it.

  As usual, the skill was silent.

  She’d been able to summon a Tempest Blade in his chest along the blade’s length. Some summoning was possible as long as she wasn’t trying to replace his flesh with her summoned material.

  Air couldn’t cut the steel. She’d never managed a cutting edge with water. She couldn’t see creating the pressure water would need to cut through steel here, either.

  Fire could burn. Burn steel though? Could she get it hot enough? Steel melted in the thousands of degrees, several magnitudes more of temperature change than freezing ice had required. How much Focus would that cost?

  Too much. Almost certainly too much.

  If only she could freeze the blood. But she couldn’t.

  Could she?

  What was fire? What was fire, really? Not an object. Not really. Not the way water was an object. She didn’t start her campfires by replacing wood with flames. They started from the ignition of nearby heat released from her summoned fire.

  It was nothing more than a chemical process—the release of heat and light.

  Could she summon the reverse? A chemical process that consumed heat instead? What would that look like? What would that be?

  A blue flame sprang to mind.

  Cold to the touch.

  Dim. Devouring.

  She could feel it. It was ephemeral, hovering at the edge of what she knew was possible.

  She reached for the substance, nameless but real. Elemental Manipulation pulled away from her, resisting, rejecting her command.

  But Cass didn’t let it escape. She flooded the skill with Focus.

  Focus: 58/549

  With more.

  Focus: 32/549

  Until the skill submitted.

  Focus: 18/549

  And a ball of cold flames formed at the tip of her blade.

  The cold radiated up the handle, pulling the heat from her hand.

  Pulling the heat from the body before her.

  Pulling the heat from the blood within.

  “I am unkilla—AH!” His exclamation was cut off with a grunt of pain. His shield fell from his hand as he clutched at his chest.

  “What—” he tried to choke out, but his lungs failed him before he could finish that sentence, suddenly too frozen to continue pumping.

  He crumpled to his knees, Cass followed him down, holding the dagger—holding her summoned blue flame—against his metal heart.

  This was worse than she’d imagined. Heat was pulled from across his body. Frost crept across his paling skin. His heart pounded under her as it tried—as it failed—to spread heat from his center of mass through his bloodstream. As it only spread the cold instead.

  And then came the snap of metal. The snap Cass has been waiting for.

  It came with a rush of energy. Experience. His life, becoming her power.

  Cass released her skill. The cold flames died immediately. Cass dropped the dagger, all the strength leaving her body.

  The paladin was very dead.