The climb didn't get any easier, even after the Frost Behemoth had been reduced to an ice sculpture of itself. The Northern Ridge was less of a mountain and more of an endless, jagged staircase designed to test the limits of human—or in Kazriel's case, reincarnated—patience.
Aria continued to glide effortlessly over the drifts, her wind vortex acting as both a heater and a deterrent to the frostbite threatening to claim Amien's sanity. Amien, meanwhile, had stopped complaining entirely. He had reached that specific stage of hypothermic delirium where he simply followed the black-armored back in front of him, occasionally whispering to his stone pillar as if it were a long-lost sibling.
"We're close," Kazriel muttered, his gaze fixed on a sheer cliff face that looked like nothing more than solid, impenetrable granite.
"The intelligence was right, then?" Aria asked, her eyes scanning the desolate landscape. "They really built a base inside the mountain itself. How quaint."
"It's not just a base, it's a structural insult," Kazriel replied.
He didn't bother looking for an entrance. He simply stopped a few meters from the wall, raised his right hand, and snapped his fingers.
The air didn't just vibrate; it groaned. Using localized gravity manipulation, he didn't just open a door—he peeled the mountain open like a fruit. Massive slabs of granite were torn away from the cliffside, floating into the air before being crushed into fine dust. The entrance revealed a massive, high-tech cavernous corridor lit by flickering, illegal mana-crystals.
Standing on the other side of the threshold were roughly fifty rogue weapon masters, all mid-swing or mid-shout. They froze, their faces turning from battle-ready snarls to expressions of absolute, primal confusion.
"Oh," one of the bandits stammered, his sword dropping into the snow with a dull thud. "Is... is the gate supposed to be a pile of sand?"
Kazriel stepped into the base, the black armor absorbing the dim light of the cavern. He looked at the assembled rogue masters, then back at Aria, who was checking her nails with complete indifference to the hundreds of weapons currently pointed at them.
"I told you, Aria," Kazriel said, his voice echoing through the massive hall with a tone of profound boredom. "The décor in these secret bases is always terrible. It's like they don't even care about aesthetic consistency."
A massive, scarred man—clearly the commander—stepped forward, his blade glowing with a sickly, corrupted violet energy. "Who the hell are you? Do you have any idea how much this fortress cost to conceal?"
Kazriel didn't answer. He simply reached out and flicked his wrist.
The gravity in the hallway shifted instantly. Every single bandit in the front row was slammed face-first into the stone floor with the force of an oncoming train, their weapons clattering uselessly out of their grip.
"I don't care about your budget," Kazriel said, walking calmly over the prone, groaning bodies as if they were nothing more than uneven tiles on the floor. "I'm here because your local mountain boss decided to disturb my walk, and now I'm bored. Which one of you is in charge? I want to see if the 'cleaving glaciers' talk is true, or if you're all just loud-mouthed trash."
Amien trailed in behind them, finally dropping his pillar with a heavy thud that shook the base. He looked at the fifty elite killers sprawled on the floor, then at Kazriel's back, and just let out a hollow, defeated laugh.
"Internship, right," Amien whispered to the ceiling. "I'm definitely going to die here."