Astral Threads (Guardian of Aster Fall Book 4) by David North

Author:David North [North, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: High Peak Publishing
Published: 2022-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Astral Threads 26: Frostbone Crawlers

The jagged walls of the crevasse opened around Sam like a throat swallowing him into the depths of the earth. A quarter of the way down, he swept past Krana in a streak of flame as he continued to accelerate and then the cloudy grey and blue ice at the bottom appeared, growing closer by the instant.

He struck the ground with a resounding thunderclap that shook the sides of the crevasse and sent a rumble through the large cavern that the crawlers had made. Wind roared around him in a deafening whirl from where it had buffered his impact, and the ice at his feet sank down to absorb the impact, leaving a shallow blue crater around him.

There was no light that reached this deep, but it was as clear as day to Sam’s eyes, which glowed like silver stars. The cavern was about five hundred feet across and it narrowed at the ends. It must have been shaped from an internal crack in the ice here. Tunnels led off in four directions toward the Flaws they’d already closed, but he ignored them as he focused on the enemies in front of him.

The biggest was the one he’d already identified, its body fifty feet long and more than a dozen wide. It was an ugly thing. It was covered in overlapping segments of dirty white armor from head to toe that was pocked with irregular spiky bumps that might be sensory organs. Foot-long tendrils lashed out from the bumps, their tips writhing in the air, and long spikes with angled hooks at the end ran along the surface of the segments in three spiraling rows where they protected the crawler’s back.

Its mouth was a pit of jagged teeth like a leech’s that ground away at the ice in front of it, and it didn’t have any obvious legs. Instead, it moved like a worm by bunching up its body and then extending it again, showing that whatever was connecting the segments wasn’t bone. Overall, it looked like a worm mixed with a spike trap.

Armored Frostbone Crawler. Level 120.

There were two more almost as large as the first at Levels 112 and 116, and then five that were about half the size at Levels 60-92. They were scattered across the chamber as they chewed into the walls. They were either searching for something there or were extremely hungry. They twitched when he landed, but they only slowly began to pull themselves away and turn toward the new threat.

"Almost a proper cavern this time!" Krana shouted as she floated down beside him in a swirling sphere of wind. Her landing was much softer than his and ribbons of yellow Earth mana wrapped around her as she raised her warhammer. She glanced at the crawlers and then ignored them as she turned to Sam. It would take them a minute to turn around.

"This trip to Runekeld is reminding me how much I miss a real cave with solid stone walls," she grumbled as she summoned a wave of earthen spikes.

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