Sword and Snow

Avuri could feel how the fight was progressing through Emery and their Domain. Emery was handling herself well enough, even if she did take a hit. But she was still calm and in control, so Avuri just powered on through her work.

As she worked on the metals that Emery left behind for her, she still wasn’t sure if they could call whatever this was a technique. It was more like putting together a contraption or weapon while utilizing a few techniques to stabilize it. And they still hadn’t named it either, so she wasn’t sure what to call it.

Still, the damage output on the weapon was immense. They had never used it in live combat before, so she wasn’t sure exactly how well it would fare, but it did destroy every target they had put it up against. The smaller ones were basically vaporized, even. And they were pretty sure that they could pretty easily scale the weapon larger to make it more damaging, but hadn’t tried that yet.

Well, until now. Emery had left Avuri with metal beams that were larger than the ones they had originally tested. She didn’t think it would make too much difference in the end; she’d just need a slightly larger projectile to keep the size right, and the metal would take longer to freeze. It would probably take more Qi to power the thing, too, but that was alright. The smaller version took a fair bit of Qi, but not exactly dangerous amounts for a Sky Realm Cultivator. Even more so when they had more than two Cultivators’ worth of Qi at their disposal.

Avuri was well on her way to supercooling the metals when she felt Emery take the second shot. It was immediately followed by mental reassurances that she was fine, and that Avuri should just concentrate on her job. Emery apparently also figured out what Quarris’ trick was on that attack, so Avuri felt comfortable focusing. And she was almost ready.

She had pieced together several of the long metal rods Emery had left her with, and melded them together with one of Emery’s techniques. It looked crude. Four long metal bars nearly five meters in length had been melded together essentially into a huge pipe. On the inside of that pipe, there were two more lengths of metal directly across from one another.

Avuri continued to channel her Qi into the metal, cooling it down rapidly. It was already approaching temperatures cold enough that they were beginning to chill the air around them. That was a good sign.

Emery and Avuri had stumbled upon the individual parts of their weapon mostly by accident.

When they had first Bonded their Domains, they had tried a whole slew of experiments to see how their different types of Qi could work together to make something new beyond the obvious options. And with Vale’s guidance over the years, their experiments had been pretty exhaustive.

Emery’s ability to make weapons had always been focused on that alone. She had always approached her Qi techniques from the angle of ‘forging a weapon’, but that wasn’t exactly what her skill set was. She could forge metal from her Qi, as well as control its properties, like choosing the color and type of metal. Steel was almost always the optimal choice for a weapon, and she usually defaulted to it; but she could also create other metals like gold or silver. Or magnets.

Together, they also found that they could use Avuri’s Qi to chill the metals well beyond freezing. It was as if her blizzard Qi was actively trying to change the metal into something usable for her type of Qi. And it was regularly lowering the metal’s temperature to levels where just touching it felt like being burned.

It also seemed to create weird effects that they didn’t really understand.

What they did understand was how well the frozen metal channeled Qi. Normal metal - especially the stuff formed from Emery’s Qi - could conduct Qi well enough. Cultivators regularly flooded their metal weapons with Qi to make them stronger, sharper, or gain any number of effects. It largely depended on the type of Qi that flowed through the metal and intent.

Typically though, the metal would require significantly more Qi to produce a desired effect than what it would normally require. How much extra was needed varied by the metal itself, but it could vary pretty significantly, and sometimes be as much as nearly double the amount of Qi for the intended effect.

Emery and Avuri found that the colder their metals got, the less Qi was wasted when channeled into it. As the temperature went down, less and less Qi was wasted.

They had tried to utilize this new trick for all kinds of things, but found it rather prohibitive. While it was definitely a useful effect, it took time for Avuri to chill the metal enough to be notably useful. And at that point, the amount of Qi that was spent to chill the metal and keep the metal cold enough could have just been put into the desired effect instead. It was typically a wasted effort.

With one notable exception.

Emery didn’t use the technique often because it wasn’t safe, but she did know of a technique that could transfer raw Qi through a weapon to whatever the weapon touched and cause an explosion of raw energy. Usually, the way that metal ate Qi meant that you would need to dump a large amount of Qi into a weapon to get a moderate effect, which meant it was not only not worth the input amount, but the explosion was exactly that - an explosion.

It would almost without fail disarm the weapons wielder from the force, sometimes destroy the weapon, and occasionally harm the wielder. All for a chance that it harms an unprepared enemy. It simply wasn’t worth it.

But it did demonstrate how the chilled metal could be of use - when used to channel a single extra powerful burst of Qi for a singular purpose. Afterall, theoretically, they could dump a huge amount of Qi into a piece of metal before triggering the explosion. They just couldn't figure out how to make it work.

When they finally found a use for it, it was entirely by accident. They had been working with knives in the Basin, trying to figure out how to make use of the charged metal. They kept it fairly low powered while experimenting on how to make use of the explosion of energy. The most useful thing they had come up with was using the explosion to simultaneously disarm themselves as well as an opponent by discharging the Qi during a parry or a blocked strike.

With enough Qi, the force was certainly violent enough to rip both weapons out of the wielder’s hands. But that was only mildly useful in a Cultivator fight when flying weapons and creating your own weapons from Qi were the norm. Disarming was almost always temporary, and not usually all that useful.

After that, they began trying to find other ways to use the technique. They noticed that while the metal was kept at the incredibly low temperatures, they could easily circulate their Qi through the metal and back into themselves with minimal - almost zero - losses. It wasn’t exceptionally useful, except that it seemed to tint the returning Qi with slightly more metal affinity. It might have its uses for metal users like Emery, but they didn’t see how it would be generally useful.

Then, while meditating later, Emery had decided to see what she could get out of their new discovery. In an attempt to hopefully double the effect, she held a supercooled metal rod in each hand, running her Qi through each of them. She did find that running her metal Qi through the metals almost had a purifying effect on the Qi, strengthening the metal affinity it carried.

But more interesting was what happened when she touched the rods together. The Qi flowing through each seemed to fight against her, wanting to instead flow through the contact point and shorten the overall circuit that she had created.

When she had added a third rod to the mix, playing around with it the way children did with three sticks to entertain herself while cycling, the final piece of their puzzle fell into place. When the third rod came into contact with the first two at the same time, the Qi flowed into it and used it as a bridge to travel between the two rods she held. And the third rod was pushed away from her.

That reaction is what had led them to creating the weapon that Avuri was now assembling.

Neither of them exactly understood the mechanics of how it all worked, but they had tested it enough to see how things affected the whole contraption. Longer metal rods, a smaller metal piece to connect them, and a larger amount of Qi pushed into the metal gave them absolutely destructive results.

Once Avuri had everything in place, she could already feel Emery’s smile. As she levitated the weapon using Emery’s metal control, she angled her way around one of the many steel walls that her wife had placed for her protection. While Emery and Quarris traded barbs, Avuri got the weapon into position and tried to take aim.

Aiming with the thing was a very imprecise activity. Making the barrel of the cannon longer helped with accuracy somewhat, but the force was so explosive that it was hard to truly aim.

So Avuri just pointed the damn thing at Quarris and hoped for the best. She aimed a little low, hoping to take off an arm or leg, rather than her head.

When she heard Emery say, “You should really put more oomph into your projectiles though - Like this.” Avuri dumped a huge amount of Qi into the cannon. And in the instant that she pushed the small metal ball that was the ammunition into the cannon and it touched the two charged metal rods, everything happened in a blink.

There was the sound of metal scraping metal for just a moment, followed by a strange, vibrating boom. Avuri struggled to keep the cannon together as the force of the shot fought to tear it apart. Even with her effort, she knew that the metals on the inside would be pretty severely damaged. These cannons never lasted for more than a shot or two.

But the damage still spoke for itself. She wasn’t sure how fast the projectile flew, but it was more than enough to have completely obliterated Quarris’ left arm, as well as cut straight through a swath of trees behind her. Several of them fell, broken at about chest height, with huge crashes in the snowy forest beyond.

And then Quarris screamed. In agony or rage, no one could tell. Avuri thought it was probably both, given the look of pure anger on her face.

Emery turned to her wife and gave her an approving smile.

“Nice shot.”