Looking at the familiar neighbourhood, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. There were parts that hadn’t changed at all, they looked almost like they had before the change hit, with only minor damage from the past thirty-odd days. Other parts were simply gone, the houses nothing but blackened rubble, reminding me of images I had seen in history class, images of the World Wars and bombed-out cities. Not quite as black-and-white, but there was a bleak quality to the scenery that matched those images almost to a T.

The building I had lived in was neither of those extremes. It looked roughed up, quite a lot of windows were burned out and parts of it had collapsed but it was still recognisable as a building.

“Let’s get rid of all the Undead in the area first,” I told Lia, before starting to toss magic at the first one I could see. The newly formalised Frozen Javelins, created with three runes, one of Icicle, one of Blizzard and a simple Ice Rune to round things out, turned out quite impressive, allowing me to pierce the ordinary Undead with a single attack, sending them off to the afterlife. They might even be overkill, as I was somewhat confident that they were resistant to piercing damage, meaning my attacks simply took out their spines. Not the most efficient way to kill Undead, but it worked nicely.

“There are quite a few more coming,” Lia warned me, after checking the area around us, while I had busied myself with destroying a few more of these things. Grinning to myself, I decided to go big instead of going home.

First, I conjured up a simple chunk of Ice, nothing but a segmented pentagonal prism, the tip and bottom formed into pyramids. It took a bit of magic, as I increased the amount of power I channelled into the Ice as much as possible to make it as close to Hard Ice as I currently could manage, before forcing runes into the sides, one per side. It turned the gem-like object I had created into an impromptu focus, a casting implement that wouldn’t last long, but would hopefully last long enough. I considered adding Wind-Runes to the Runes of Hail, Blizzard and Cold I carved into the sides but decided against it. Instead of wind, I doubled up on the Blizzard and added one for Icicle, hoping to increase the size of the hailstones I would conjure. While wind would likely have added a great deal of momentum to the storm I wanted to create, I doubted that Ice was a good material to channel Wind Astral Power. That would mean I’d run into efficiency loss on both sides, the material blunting my spell, in addition to my affinity not fully supporting it. Sometimes, simple was best and in this case, sticking with simple Ice Magic and adding as much as possible was best.

Lia had destroyed a few more Undead and only now did I realise how many she meant when she spoke of a few. Apparently, I had managed to attract about five different swarms of them, making me wonder if I had been a little overconfident or simply daring. Not that it mattered, given what I was preparing, it would destroy them all, no matter how many.

My prism completed, I pushed a bit of Ice Magic into it, taking control so I could let it float about while adding a second strand to prime the runes I had carved into it, so it was connected to me. What I was trying was, in a way, a continuation of the experiment I had done on the roof, trying to channel magic into a formation that had some distance from myself. Only instead of starting the channel and moving away myself, I used my Ice Magic to float the prism into the sky, letting it hang a few metres above the roof level. Once it was there, I moved into a somewhat covered position and took a knee, allowing me to fully focus inwards. I didn’t need to fall over while forcing power through myself, I would have taken a seat but sadly, there was nothing to sit on. Maybe I should have conjured my throne.

Slowly at first, I began channelling power into the formation I had created, trying to keep the increase even so I wouldn’t crack the Ice. Above my, the prism started to glow with frozen light, mist starting to form, while I pushed the Ice magic I had inserted into it, trying to keep it together.

The mist started to coalesce into something of a cloud, spreading outwards and soon, hail started to fall. It took a minute or five to get to that point, time started to become a little blurry as I let power surge through me, and I could hear the ice crash into the street outside.

More and more power was flowing out of me, to the point that I had to either activate Overflow so I could keep the demand going, or pick one of the magical processes I was channelling power into, letting the other fizzle. In a burst of inspiration, I decided to go for broke and activated Overflow, though I didn’t try to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the Ice Magic that held the prism together. Instead, I channelled as much power as I could into the runes I could still feel, trying to turn them from something carved into Ice into something I had drawn into the sky.

For a moment, I felt resistance only for it to shatter like glass. Or maybe like Ice, immediately afterwards, I felt a wave of freezingly cold Astral Power wash over me and the cloud in the sky tripled in size, the faint, icy glow of Ice Runes shining through it, bathing the world in an eerie light. And in Ice, as the hail started to turn into a blizzard, the falling shards of Ice turned dangerous enough that Lia and Silva retreated into cover, stepping up next to me.

All around us, the hail was crashing down, I had no idea how big the cloud above us was by now, but the longer I channelled magic into it, the bigger it became. But of course, just like the formation I used to create my deadly, frozen mist, this couldn’t last forever. The larger the cloud became, the more of the magic I channelled into it was necessary to simply keep it going, forcing me to either let it remain at a certain, quite impressive, size while I got continuously more exhausted or stop channelling my magic and let it fade away.

By the time it was its maximum size, I was already pretty exhausted, the spell took a lot out of me, so I decided to let it remain at that size for a few minutes, before letting it go. In those minutes, anything trapped within would likely get pummelled to the ground or find cover if they were intelligent enough. While it was possible that additional enemies wandered into the hail, I doubted it, even the Undead had more intelligence than that, or so I thought.

Either way, I let the spell go and within a few minutes, the hail stopped although the cloud and the cold lingered for a lot longer. It had been a huge amount of Astral Power I pumped into that formation, it took a while to fade back into the Astral River. And just like the cold lingered, so did the hail on the ground, giving me an idea of just how much I had just done.

The entire area looked more like it was winter than spring, with chunks of Ice covering the ground. The smallest were hailstones the size of peas, the biggest were straight-up Icicles the size of my arm.

“Wow,” Lia whispered, looking around wide-eyed, before staring at me with a strange gaze.

Sadly, the calm didn’t last long. I was still kneeling, trying to recover from channelling an almost absurd amount of Astral Power through my body, when Silva let out an angry growl. Lia immediately went on high alert and both of them dashed off, Silva growling, Lia with her claws ready to fight.

Pushing myself up, I staggered a little and followed after them, forcing my body to move. There, in the middle of the ice-covered street, was another enemy, only this one was rather intimidating. It was a Scorched about two metres high, arms covered in bright, purple fire and clearly here to fight. There were a few spots that looked like they had been hit with Ice, but I couldn’t be sure.

Whatever the case, the Scorched was already throwing fiery projectiles at Lia, Silva and even me, forcing me to stagger out of the way in a rather graceless manner. Noticing how my two allies glanced back at me, I decided that for once, I wouldn’t even try to help, I would take it slow and find cover. I was simply too exhausted to throw any really useful magic around, the blizzard had taken a lot out of me.

My allies would be… just fine.