Chapter 311. Scourge of the Frozen Wilds
Noah transformed into a searing streak of golden radiance, a comet of pure intent that tore through the troposphere. Behind him, the humble stables of the South Dakota ranch vanished into a blur of speed, leaving a bewildered horse to whinny at the sudden vacuum of air and the lingering scent of ozone. He didn't look back; his focus was locked onto the twin trails of cosmic energy etched into the fabric of reality like glowing scars.
The phantom wake left by the energy was swift, humming with a frequency that spoke of a power far beyond mortal reckoning. It was the signature of Ikaris, the high-flying warrior of the Eternals. Noah noted with a flicker of begrudging respect that without the augmentation of the Rune of Bravery or the reality-warping heft of the Infinity Stones, his own standard sorcery would have struggled to keep pace. Only by tapping into the rune's reservoir, feeling its heat thrumming through his veins, did he manage to close the distance without losing the scent.
He wasn't entirely surprised by Ikaris's velocity. He knew the Eternals boasted a roster of specialized paragons. Somewhere among them was a speedster—a woman whose name escaped him, though he vividly recalled her silence. Why would the Celestials create a deaf-mute eternal? Noah wondered, the thought drifting through his mind like a stray cloud. Did those cosmic architects have a penchant for irony, or were they simply experimenting with the sensory limits of their puppets?
Yet, even that speedster had her limits. In the cold, unyielding vacuum of space, Ikaris was peerless. Noah remembered whispers of the man's legends—how he could traverse the light-years between Earth and the Sun in a heartbeat, eventually plunging into the solar furnace in a final, scorching act of self-immolation. Whether it was minutes or seconds didn't matter; such speeds breached the fundamental laws of physics. It was the raw, unadulterated power of the Celestials, channeled through a body of synthetic perfection.
Gritting his teeth, Noah poured more magic into his flight, his form shimmering as he pushed against the atmospheric drag, hurtling toward the horizon where the cosmic trail finally began to dip.
The golden plains of the Dakotas gave way to a jagged, unforgiving landscape. Though the calendar insisted it was autumn, the world below was strangled by a premature winter. This was Alaska. To a mundane traveler, the distance from South Dakota was a journey of days; to Noah, it was a mere change of scenery.
He descended toward a dense, frost-bitten forest where the energy phantom began to spiral downward, indicating the target was near. Within seconds, Noah let the spectral tracking fade. He didn't need the past's echoes anymore; he could feel the living presence of Ajak and another soul nearby.
It was indeed Ikaris. The two Eternals stood like statues upon the jagged lip of a limestone cliff, their silhouettes stark against the swirling gray sky. They were deep in conversation, their voices lost to the howling wind.
Noah paused, hovering mid-air. He didn't want to announce his arrival just yet. With a casual flick of his wrist, the space before him fractured like a struck mirror, the air splintering into a thousand shimmering shards. He stepped through the rift, slipping into the Mirror Dimension.
Here, the world was a silent, crystalline reflection of reality. He was a ghost in a world of glass, invisible to the eyes of those in the material plane. He walked to the very edge of the cliff, standing a mere foot away from the two immortals. He could see the tension in Ikaris's shoulders and the heavy sorrow etched into the lines of Ajak's face.
Below the thirty-meter drop, the scene was far more gruesome. A frozen lake lay nestled in the valley, its surface a sheet of clouded jade. But the ice was no longer pristine. A pack of nightmares swarmed across it—beings that resembled wolves but were twisted by some eldritch geometry. They possessed a thicket of writhing tentacles along their flanks and an extra set of vestigial limbs protruding from their torsos like jagged scythes.
They were monstrous, dwarfing even the largest polar bears. Noah estimated that if one stood on its hind legs, it would loom over three meters tall. They were currently hunched over several heaps of raw, steaming carrion, tearing at the flesh with serrated teeth. Noah's eyes narrowed as he spotted a scrap of high-visibility fabric and a heavy-duty boot. This wasn't local wildlife they were eating.
A few hundred yards away, the skeletal frames of oil rigs stood silent. This had been a drilling camp. The remains on the ice were all that was left of the crew—men who had traveled to the ends of the earth for a paycheck, only to find their graves in the maws of monsters.
Are these the Deviants? Noah mused. The eternal shadows of the Celestials' grand design.
He knew the lore. The Deviants were a failed experiment, a race intended to clear planets for life but possessed of an insatiable hunger for life itself. They were a virus that stalled the "Emergence" of new Celestials, forcing the creators to dispatch the Eternals as a celestial immune system.
"They must have been trapped in the permafrost for centuries," Ikaris's voice rang out, resonant and cold. He spoke as if to the wind, but his gaze was fixed on Ajak.
Ajak's expression was grim. She looked down at the creatures they had claimed to have wiped out millennia ago, her heart sinking with the realization that their war was far from over.
"Only a few days ago, these mutations tore themselves from the ice," Ajak whispered, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and duty.
Ikaris nodded slowly. "I tracked the scent here. They've already slaughtered the entire drilling team. Not a single soul escaped the ice."
"These Deviants... they shouldn't be this strong," Ajak muttered, her brow furrowing.
She was the matriarch of her kind, a healer and a strategist who had studied these monsters for eras. She knew their evolution was usually a slow, predatory process—absorbing the traits of their prey over generations. These wolf-like horrors had just woken up; they shouldn't have been this massive, this fast, or this lethal.
"I've been watching them," Ikaris said, his eyes glowing with a faint, suppressed light. "I believe I know how they broke their chains. A few days ago, a massive surge of energy erupted from a city called New York. I felt it. I know you did as well."
Ajak nodded silently. She had watched the news from her secluded home, bound by their vow of non-interference, watching the world burn and rebuild itself from afar.
"That energy pulse carried a potent, primal life force," Ikaris continued. "The Deviants trapped beneath the Alaskan shelf must have absorbed it. It fed them, triggered a rapid evolution while they were still entombed, and gave them the strength to shatter the glaciers."
In the Mirror Dimension, Noah winced. A pang of guilt, sharp and unwelcome, pricked at his conscience. So, this is on me? He looked down at the mangled remains of the workers and then at the snarling beasts. His "Second Wind" had intended to heal the world, but it seemed he had accidentally fed the monsters under the bed.
"Well," Noah sighed quietly to himself, "once this is all settled, I'll make sure to find you guys a very comfortable spot in the afterlife. Least I can do for the unintended eviction." He wasn't exactly a man of the cloth, but he had enough power to make a few introductions in the higher realms.
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