Free Web NovelChapter 154: « Second Match »
The Blizzard King tried to shake me off three times in the next two minutes.
The first attempt was the torso rotation again, faster this time. I held the blade in the seam and went with it, the same as before, but the speed put more force through my grip and my left hand slipped. I caught the seam edge with my fingers instead — rough ice, sharp at the fracture line, cutting into my palm. The HP drain from the cold and the HP drain from the cut ran simultaneously in my bar and produced a combined drop that was not comfortable to watch.
I watched it anyway. Kept track. Made sure I knew exactly how much margin I had left.
Thirty-four percent was the number I had started part two with. Now it was twenty-eight.
The second attempt was the arm coming up and over — the King reaching across its own chest to scrape me off the way you’d scrape something off your coat. I read the wind change early and moved laterally along the seam before the arm arrived. The hand passed close enough that I felt the cold off it as a distinct impact even without contact, and two points of HP dropped from proximity alone.
The third attempt was the King simply standing to its full height after having been partially crouched during the engagement. The elevation change was significant. The group below, which had been level with the King’s lower torso, was suddenly looking up at its knees. Climbers scrambled back from the shadow of it. I went up with it, still anchored to the chest seam, and the view from up here was white in every direction with the blizzard pushing hard and the floor spread out below me as an arrangement of dark shapes in the snow.
I could see the HP bars of the climbers below in my group interface. Most of them were somewhere between forty and sixty percent. Two were under thirty. One of those two was Grey, which was a specific problem because it meant she had been spending her healing on others until her own reserves ran her into the danger zone.
The Blizzard King was doing the smart thing: weathering the attacks, not trying to kill individual climbers, just maintaining its cold field and letting the environment do the work. Attrition. It didn’t need to fight. It just needed to wait.
We couldn’t afford to wait.
I moved back to the exposed section of the chest cavity and took out the second match.
The first fracture line in the core was still there — a dark crack running diagonally across the blue-white surface, one third of the way through. Two more matches should complete it. Should. The first match had produced one fracture. If the subsequent matches produced the same result, three matched three fractures. If the core required the fractures at specific angles to properly ignite, two more wouldn’t be enough.
I filed the uncertainty and struck the second match.
It lit first try. Same small, divine flame, orange and stubborn.
I pressed it to the core’s surface at the point where the first fracture terminated, aiming to extend the existing crack rather than start a new one. The core’s defensive response was faster this time — the cold pulse came out hard and the flame bent almost horizontal. I brought it back with my cupped hand and held it against the resistance.
The fracture line extended.
Not cleanly. The crack branched at the terminus, splitting into two smaller fissures rather than continuing as one. The core’s surface went from one clean fracture to a forked one. More total length, less concentrated depth.
I didn’t know if that was better or worse. The physics of igniting a mana-core were not the physics of igniting anything I had experience with.
The match burned down to my fingers and I held it past comfortable, held it until the flame was genuinely against my skin, chasing the last heat out of it before it died.
Match two — out.
One remaining.
Below me, the situation had gotten worse during the time I spent on the core.
The second wraith — the one that had held back after I killed the first — had brought company. Three wraiths now, circling the group at the standard fifteen-meter radius, taking turns diving at the outer formation members. The combination of wraith hits and cold drain and proximity to the boss was compressing HP bars across the board.
Junho’s light column was visible from up here as brief flares of pale blue cutting through the white. He was managing the wraiths — timing the columns to intercept dives the same way I had timed my blade on the first one — but three was more than he could track alone. Commander’s team was supporting, but the coordination required for invisible targets in a blizzard was stretching their discipline.
I watched one of the central-mass climbers break formation.
A young man, maybe twenty-two. He had been solid through floors twenty-six and twenty-seven and into this one — reliable, kept his position, didn’t panic. He panicked now. The HP bar dropped below twenty and something in him decided that the plan wasn’t working and ran his own calculation about the matches.
He struck one.
The flame bloomed immediately into something much larger than I expected. The single match scaled up in his hand, expanding into a sphere of warm orange light about five meters across that pushed the blizzard back and revealed the immediate area with sudden clarity. The cold drain stopped. The warmth hit the nearby climbers like a physical hand, and every person within range made some involuntary sound of relief.
Two wraiths became visible inside the light radius.
The people inside the sanctuary could see them. Could fight them properly.
The match burned.
It burned fast. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
Faster than it should have — a two-minute match compressed into what looked like forty seconds. The variable duration from the item description was resolving itself on the short end. The sanctuary shrank as the flame dropped, the warm radius pulling inward like a tide going out. When it extinguished, the cold came back with a front-loaded impact from the temperature differential. The climbers who had been warm for forty seconds hit the blizzard cold twice as hard.
The young man looked at his remaining two matches. Then at the other climbers. Then up at the boss. Then back at his matches.
The chat saw it.
💬 GhostClimber_: he’s going to light another one
💬 Watchdog_KR: DON’T
💬 SeoulTowerFan: he doesn’t know about the absolute zero condition
💬 KangMinFanatic77: Kang Min can’t warn him HE’S ON THE BOSS
💬 TowerWatchKR: Commander can’t warn him either without speaking
💬 user_83421: someone in the group knows. someone has to have figured it out
💬 RealMvpStream: Junho. Junho will have figured it out
💬 KangMinFanatic77: JUNHO PLEASE
Junho had figured it out.
I saw it from above — he moved through the crowd toward the young man at a pace just fast enough to be purposeful without triggering a panic response from the people around him. He reached the young man and put his hand over the match. Firmly. The young man pulled back, startled, confused, HP bar still deep in the red.
Junho held up one finger. One match left for this person. ƒгeewebnovёl.com
The young man stared at him.
Junho pointed up at me — at the boss — and made a small striking motion. Match. Core. Connection.
The young man didn’t fully understand, but he understood enough. He closed his fingers over his remaining matches and stepped back into formation.
The wraiths circled. The cold continued.
I pressed myself flat against the chest cavity and waited for the HP drain to slow enough that moving wouldn’t put me into critical range. My bar sat at nineteen percent. That was close. I had fought at lower in my previous life but not on a floor where the environment itself was the attrition source.
The Blizzard King had stopped trying to remove me. It had shifted tactics to pressing its cold field outward more aggressively — a sustained, active push rather than the passive ambient emission. The change in strategy was felt across the group: HP drain rates jumped across all the bars I could see. Two climbers hit critical range.
Grey reached one of them. The other was on Commander’s side of the formation.
Commander reached them personally, pulling them inward to the tightest proximity cluster, where the combined body heat of the most active climbers was greatest. It wasn’t enough to stop the drain but it slowed it. Commander’s face, visible even at this distance, was doing the thing it did when they were running resource calculations and not enjoying the results.
The Blizzard King was winning by arithmetic.
I looked at my one remaining match.
The core had two fractures in it — the first clean diagonal, the second a fork branching from the terminus. I had one match left. The core needed to ignite from those fractures, which meant the third match needed to hit the exact convergence point where both cracks met and drove heat into the deepest structural fault in the core’s surface.
If I placed it wrong, the match would extend a surface fracture. Surface fractures wouldn’t ignite the core. They would just crack it further, and a cracked but intact core was the same as an intact one — still generating cold, still draining HP, still running its Absolute Zero timer at the bottom of all three match counts.
I needed to read the fracture geometry and find the convergence.
The blizzard made it nearly impossible. The chest cavity was partially sheltered from the wind but the cold from the core itself was worse than the external temperature. My hands were operating at a level of precision that cold made expensive — every fine movement required more conscious effort than it should.
I pressed my face close to the core and looked at where the two cracks met.
The convergence was offset from center. Not dramatically — maybe two centimeters left of the midpoint, where the diagonal first crack had bent slightly before the second match extended it. At that convergence, the two fracture lines created a stress point where the core’s internal structure was thinnest.
That was where the third match went.
I had one problem.
Getting to that point with a burning match meant holding the flame within two centimeters of the core’s surface against a cold pulse that had already bent two previous matches nearly horizontal. One hand holding the match, one hand cupped around it, full pressure applied to maintain the flame against the defensive push.
I would have nothing holding me to the boss.
I looked down. Twenty meters of frozen torso. Then open air.
Nineteen percent HP.
If I fell, Grey couldn’t reach me before the cold drain and the impact finished what the floor had started.
"You don’t have to enjoy this," I thought. "You just have to do it."
I let go of the seam with my blade hand.
[LiveStream Viewers: 4,447,221]
💬 KangMinFanatic77: HE LET GO
💬 SeoulTowerFan: HIS HP IS AT 19
💬 GhostClimber_: BOTH HANDS ON THE MATCH
💬 Watchdog_KR: he’s going to fall
💬 TowerWatchKR: he’s going to fall oh no
💬 RealMvpStream: he’s not going to fall
💬 KangMinFanatic77: HOW ARE YOU SO CALM
💬 RealMvpStream: I’m not calm I’m just typing in lowercase
