"System, initiate sign in."
[Sign in Successful]
[The host obtained: Galakrond's Fang - Rare]
[Fang of the primordial proto-dragon Galakrond, an excellent material to make a weapon.]
Leylin took a deep look at the item that he received, as far as he could recall, Galakrond was larger than all of the Aspects combined, his mutations were caused by cannibalizing on other proto-dragons. Plus his vomited-up victims came back as undead.
Leylin wondered if whoever would be slain using this material, would they end up as undead.
Meanwhile in the upper ruins smelled of black powder, scorched stone, and things that had spent a long time burning before finally turning to ash.
The upper ruins smelled of black powder, scorched stone, and things that had spent a long time burning before finally turning to ash.
Arthas stopped at the threshold of the collapsed archway, waiting for his eyes to adjust. The dark down here wasn't total. Instead, the upper reaches of Azjol-Nerub were bathed in a suffocating, amber-tinted gloom—the stubborn residue of a space that had been illuminated for months by heavy dwarven tallow.
The air was thick, choked with dust and the unmistakable, bitter tang of sulfur. They had company. Ahead, shadows shifted with a rhythmic, disciplined precision.
This wasn't the erratic scuttle of the local nerubian survivors, nor was it the hollow, rhythmic clatter of his own Scourge vanguard.
These movements were heavy, deliberate, and loud. The iron-shod boots, the low rumbles of shouted commands, the unmistakable clicking of rifles being brought to bear—it was the frantic activity of an army that had been caught flat-footed by a threat emerging from their own rear.
Arthas picked out the command structure in seconds. Even in the chaotic dim of a subterranean cavern, a true commander always left a visible imprint on his men.
At the center of the defensive ring stood a dwarf of immense breadth, his braided beard gleaming like a spill of copper in the firelight. He was directing a fighting retreat, his voice a gravelly roar that rallied his panicked soldiers into a solid wall of iron and gunpowder. He was a veteran; he knew how to fight in tight spaces, and he knew that panic in a cave meant death.
"Dwarves," Anub'arak rumbled beside him, the massive crypt lord's chitinous plates scraping against the stone walls with a sound like grinding teeth. The spider-king's tone held no malice, only the dry recognition of a tactical complication.
Arthas let the name Muradin echo in his mind for a fraction of a second. Frostmourne pulsed in his hand, a dull, icy throb that instantly numbed the phantom pang of guilt before it could truly form.
Muradin Bronzebeard had been his friend. He had been his mentor. And he had been the first sacrifice offered on the altar of Arthas's damnation, struck down by a stray shard of ice when Frostmourne was shattered from its pedestal.
Arthas had left the dwarf's body in that frozen cavern, filing the loss away as an acceptable cost of doing business. He hadn't expected the remnants of Muradin's expeditionary force to survive out here on the edge of the world.
Yet here they were, burrowed into the ancient, dead kingdom of the spider-lords like ticks in a hound's hide. They weren't just surviving; they were occupying.
By the look of the reinforced barricades and the stacks of supply crates, they had been systematically investigating these ruins for months, treating an ancient tomb like a standard archaeological dig.
It didn't matter. They were standing between him and the Frozen Throne. They were an obstacle, and the Scourge did not negotiate with obstacles.
"Kill them all," Arthas said.
The assault was brutal, calculated, and brief. When an army that cannot feel pain or exhaustion collides with an army fueled by desperate, doomed courage, the mathematics of war resolve quickly.
The dwarves fought with the legendary, stubborn fury of Ironforge. They held their shields high, their rifles cracking in rhythmic volleys that tore through the front ranks of the ghouls. They threw themselves into the meat grinder, extracting a heavy toll in shattered bone and severed limbs. But the Scourge could afford the currency of blood; the dwarves could not.
Arthas walked through the meat of the battle like a phantom. Frostmourne hummed a low, euphoric song of slaughter, its runes flaring a brilliant, unholy blue each time the blade tasted flesh.
There was no artistry to his movements, no youthful flourish of the prince he used to be. Every strike was a study in pure efficiency. A downward cleave split a heavy steel shield; a backhand swing tore through a mail coif; a precise thrust found the gap under an armpiece.
He didn't hate them. He felt nothing at all. He was simply clearing a path.
He found the dwarven commander at the base of the massive, iron-reinforced inner gates. The dwarf—Baelgun—was covered in soot and black blood, his warhammer trembling in his grip, but his eyes were wide and wild with a defiance that defied the horror around him.
"You... you monster," Baelgun spat, his breath ragged, a bloody froth bubbling at the corner of his mouth as Frostmourne pinned him to the ancient stone doors. "You think you've won? You think there's glory down here?"
Arthas leaned in close, his pale, lifeless face inches from the dwarf's. "I care nothing for glory, dwarf. Move aside."
"We sealed it," Baelgun gasped, his fingers clawing weakly at the frost-rimed blade buried in his chest. "The old things... the horror below. We found it in the dark, and we locked the doors. If you go down there... you damned fool... you'll wake it. It doesn't care about your Scourge. It will swallow you whole."
Arthas pulled the blade free with a wet, heavy slide. Baelgun slumped to the ground, his eyes glazing over as the last of his life-force was sucked into the ravenous steel of Frostmourne.
"Noted," Arthas whispered to the corpse.
With a deep, groaning screech of ancient hinges, the inner gates of Azjol-Nerub swung inward, revealing the true descent into the abyss.
If the upper ruins were a testament to dwarven grit and spider architecture, the lower levels were an affront to reality itself.
Arthas had fought through the blighted, rotting forests of Quel'Thalas.
He had marched through the plague-strangled fields of Lordaeron, where the air itself felt like a wet shroud. He had witnessed the twisted, violent logic of the Burning Legion's demonic vanguard. He thought he understood the limits of what was grotesque.
He was wrong. The lower chambers did not smell of death; they smelled of something that had never been alive to begin with.
The air was oily and stagnant, carrying a heavy, metallic reek that coated the back of his throat like grease. The stone beneath his boots changed from clean, chiseled masonry to a wet, undulating substance that looked like calcified meat.
And then came the whispers. They weren't spoken words, nor were they the telepathic commands of the Lich King that constant echoed in his skull. They were an ambient, wet scratching at the inside of his mind—a nonsensical gibberish that made his teeth ache and his eyes lose focus.
"They are coming," Anub'arak warned, his massive scythe-like claws clicking against the floor. "The master's power does not reach this deeply, Death Knight. Guard your mind."
Out of the weeping shadows, the Faceless Ones emerged. They were creatures born of a different geometry. They had no true faces—only a shifting mass of writhing, rubbery tentacles clustered around a central, predatory maw.
They didn't move like men or beasts; they slid and scraped across the wet floors, their massive, asymmetrical arms ending in crab-like claws that could crush a man's torso with a single contraction.
The fighting here wasn't a tactical engagement; it was a meat-grinder. There were no flanks to turn, no high ground to seize. The tunnels were choked with a writhing mass of purple flesh and flailing appendages.
The ghouls and crypt fiends Arthas brought with him were torn apart, shredded by inhuman strength or blasted into purple mist by strange, void-born energies that burned even dead flesh.
Frostmourne screamed. For the first time since Arthas had taken the blade, it didn't feel like a master consuming prey; it felt like a wild animal cornered by a predator. The sword struck out frantically, hacking through rubbery hide and severing thick, pulsing tentacles that bled a black, tar-like ichor.
Anub'arak was a tempest of chitin and bone. In these narrow, suffocating depths, the crypt lord was in his true element. He burrowed beneath the writhing mass, erupting upward to impale three of the aberrations on his spiked back, his carapaced weight crushing everything in his path.
But for every five creatures they slaughtered, ten more seemed to ooze from the damp fissures in the walls. It was an endless, grinding war of attrition, and for the first time, Arthas felt the cold weight of a clock ticking down. Illidan was on the surface, marching toward his master.
Every second spent hacking through these nameless horrors was a second closer to total failure.
They fought their way into a cavern so vast that the ceiling was entirely lost to the dark. The floor was a literal lake of black, stagnant water that didn't ripple, even as their boots splashed through it.
At the center of the lake lay the thing that Baelgun had died trying to protect. It was the Forgotten One. To look upon it was to invite vertigo. It was a mountain of misshapen, gelatinous flesh, covered in thousands of unblinking, milky eyes that stared in every direction simultaneously.
From its central mass, giant tentacles—each thicker than the trunk of an ancient oak—rose toward the ceiling like the pillars of a ruined temple. It had been asleep for thousands of years, held in check by the delicate equilibrium of the deep earth, until the violence of Arthas's intrusion shattered the seals.
The moment they stepped into the chamber, every single eye snapped toward Arthas. The mental strike hit him like a physical blow. A wave of pure, unadulterated madness crashed into his mind, threatening to tear his consciousness away from his body.
He stumbled, dropping to one knee, using Frostmourne as a crutch to keep from collapsing into the black water. Images of his childhood, the burning streets of Stratholme, the cold eyes of his father—they all flashed before him, twisted into horrifying, mocking caricatures.
"Yield," a thousand wet voices whispered inside his brain. "You are a speck of dust on a dying world."
"Get... out of my head," Arthas snarled, his voice a ragged rasp. He forced himself to his feet, his fingers tightening around the hilt of his sword until his gauntlets creaked. "I am the Lich King. And I will not be stopped by a piece of rotting meat!"
The battle that followed was a blur of noise and violence. The Forgotten One did not move from its central pool, but it didn't need to. The massive tentacles slammed down with seismic force, shattering the stone floor and sending geysers of black water into the air.
Arthas and Anub'arak fought side-by-side, a dark knight and a fallen king, dancing through a rain of crushing blows. Anub'arak targeted the smaller, auxiliary tentacles, severing them to clear a path, while Arthas drove directly for the core.
Frostmourne flared with a blinding, desperate intensity. As Arthas leaped onto the main body of the creature, driving the runeblade deep into its central mass, the sword began to drink.
The energy it absorbed wasn't the clean, vibrant life-force of mortals; it was a volatile, toxic poison that turned the blade's runes from bright blue to a sickly, corrupted violet.
The creature let out a sound—not a scream, but a low, subterranean vibration that shattered the remaining stalactites hanging from the roof. The gelatinous flesh beneath Arthas's boots began to liquefy, turning into a foul mud that hissed as it touched the cold iron of his armor.
It took an eternity to die. It died piece by piece, eye by eye, its massive tentacles flailing blindly in their death throes, smashing against the cavern walls until the very foundations of the mountain began to buckle.
When the creature finally went still, collapsing into a deflated, steaming mound of gray tissue, the world did not settle.
A sharp, deafening crack echoed through the chamber, followed by a low, rumbling roar that Arthas recognized instantly. The structural integrity of the cavern had been tied to the monster's mass—or perhaps the violence of its death throes had finally broken the ancient pillars holding up the upper kingdom.
"The roof is falling!" Anub'arak shouted, his voice nearly drowned out by the thunder of collapsing stone. "We must go, Death Knight! Now!"
Before Arthas could answer, a massive slab of bedrock—the size of a keep—came crashing down between them. The impact was cataclysmic, sending a shockwave that threw Arthas off his feet and into the icy water.
When he stood, wiping the black muck from his visor, a solid wall of stone separated him from his crypt lord ally.
Through the telepathic link of the Scourge, he could feel Anub'arak's presence. The spider-king wasn't dead; he was already burrowing, his massive claws tearing through the fallen rock with the natural ease of a creature born to the dark. But he was moving along a different trajectory, a path that Arthas, with his fragile human frame, could not follow.
He was entirely on his own. The cavern was tearing itself apart. Boulders the size of wagons rained down around him, smashing into the black water and sending shards of stone flying like shrapnel. To make matters worse, the ancient traps of the nerubians—dormant for centuries—were being triggered by the seismic shifts.
As Arthas sprinted down the collapsing tunnel, a row of massive, rusted iron spikes slammed out of the wall, missing his throat by inches.
A second later, the floor beneath his feet dropped away, revealing a pit of roiling, freezing water. He didn't think; he didn't calculate. He lunged forward, throwing his weight across the gap, his fingers catching the far lip of the stone ledge just as the path behind him vanished into the abyss.
He scrambled up, his breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps. The water was rising fast, a torrent of sub-zero groundwater unleashed by the shifting fault lines. It swirled around his greaves, cold enough to crack steel, dragging at his stride.
He ran. He didn't run with the grace of a prince or the cold confidence of a general. He ran with the primal, desperate urgency of an animal fleeing a collapsing cage. The Lich King's voice was a frantic scream in his mind now—a jagged, painful signal that grew sharper with every step he took toward the surface.
"Come to me... there is no time... he is at the gates..."
Up ahead, a pinpoint of light appeared. It wasn't the dim, amber glow of the dwarven torches, nor was it the sickly purple of the void chambers. It was a clean, blinding, unforgiving white. The sun. The ice. The sky.
Arthas threw himself through the narrow fissure, tumbling out of the dark and onto the blinding white expanse of the Icecrown Glacier.
The impact with the snow was like a slap to the face. The sub-zero wind caught his cloak, tearing at it like a living thing, but to Arthas, the freezing gale felt like a triumph.
He lay there for a long moment, his face buried in the snow, his lungs burning as he inhaled the clean, frozen air of the surface.
A heavy crunching sound made him turn his head.
A few yards away, the snowpack erupted. A massive, chinked carapace broke through the crust, followed by six segmented legs and a pair of terrifying scythe-arms.
Anub'arak shook the loose ice from his back, his compound eyes gleaming in the harsh northern light.
"You survived, Death Knight," the crypt lord noted, his voice a low rumble that seemed almost amused. "Few surface-dwellers could have navigated the old ways alone."
Arthas forced himself to his feet, leaning heavily on Frostmourne. The blade was quiet now, its runes having settled back into their familiar, cold blue glow, though a faint hint of dark violet still lingered deep within the metal.
"I am not a surface-dweller anymore, Anub'arak," Arthas said, his voice flat, devoid of the panic that had consumed him only minutes before.
He looked down at his armor, which was dented, covered in black slime, and frosted over with a thick layer of rime. He turned his gaze northward.
There, rising out of the jagged ice like a crown of black iron, was the Citadel. The Frozen Throne was waiting at its peak, and through the haze of the howling blizzard, Arthas could feel the precise moment his rival's boots touched the base of the mountain.
Illidan was here. The final act was beginning.
Arthas took his first step forward into the snow. The cold didn't bite; it welcomed him. He was finally home.