Disclaimer: Samurai Jack belongs to Gendy Tartakovsky and the Cartoon Network. All other concepts will be right to me or their other creators as they come up.
XXXV. Jack and the Yetis of the West
Jack slid down a long and winding mountainside path of ice and smoothed rocks, the frozen exit to Shiva's domain, his hair billowing undone behind. He had recalled the practice he had not but days ago in the Goblin Gorge, sliding down sheer rock in a high-speed pace, now only channeling the difference of the sheer cold surrounding him. With the Gem of Fire in his hand his body was warmed right down to his shoes, which allowed him to slide without getting stuck as the wooden teeth of his sandals heated the ice into liquid that quickly froze behind him again. The Gem of Ice was stored in his inner-robe pouch with the elegant guardian Orda inhabiting it and patiently waiting for her chance to act.
That chance came faster than Jack wanted. A swift wind blew Jack off course and he slid off the smoothed path and tripped himself on a jutting rock out of the edge of the icy path. He fell a few yards into a thick drift of snow and groaned as he rose back up. The ground beneath him started to move in response and he found himself astride the back of a Yeti.
"Be careful, Jack!" Orda called into his mind through the power of the Gem. "These Yetis are of the West mountain-face! The one we rescued you from was of the South."
"What is the difference?" Jack asked. He soon noticed the first one. These Yetis were much taller than the others. Their bodies more resembled giant men than gorillas. Their snow-white fur covered down to their tows and fingertips and their heads were much less pronounced. What Jack saw as a perfectly round drift of snow, almost like a covered igloo, was actually the incredibly rounded head of the Yeti. Their eyes were wide and yellow and round. Their lips were fleshy and pouted out from under their fur under their flat noses that curved gently down their faces. They were simple looking creatures, but they had a terrible reputation.
"The Yetis of the West" Orda explained "are ruthless and sadistic! If they find a traveler they beat and taunt him, eventually breaking his legs or arms and leave him in the deadly cold. They are true beasts with no pity or even purpose as they do not live on the mountain at all! They reside in the valley caves and only come up to hunt and purposelessly kill the other Yetis of the mountain!" Jack was appalled. His disgust for their disrespectful and all-around detestable description was only pushed back by the fear that he had been called attention to. He heard some loud footfalls from behind the tall Yeti he now stood on and turned with a start as another, more stout, Western Yeti coming from around the corner of the slide he was blown from.
"That is a dangerous Yeti in itself" Orda explained. Jack hid himself by covering his black hair with snow from the Yeti's head and tucking his flesh into his white robe. "It can inflate its own body and expel great gusts of wind. It knocked you off the path just a moment ago, I believe." Jack understood. He stayed perfectly still with his heels keeping his body pushed up on the shelf of the Yeti's highest jutting vertebra that led into its perfectly domed skull. The tall Yeti started to move, taking a step forward while swinging the arm opposite its moving leg, just like a man would walk. The snow fell from Jack's head and exposed his black hair to the wind-blowing Yeti, who saw and blinked at the samurai. The stout creature stomped its feet to the snow ground and took in a deep breath. Its chest swelled up nearly twice its size and its cheeks puffed out so much that the skin underneath the fur started to peek through. Then it puffed out a powerful gale which pushed Jack against the domed head and straight over it. Jack was flung through the air and caught in an instant by the tall Yeti's quick and powerful arm.
"Quickly! Your sword!" Orda exclaimed. Jack was able to get his sword out and stabbed the Yeti's hand to make it let go. It winked one of its wide yellow eyes at the pain and dropped Jack back down to the rocky ground. The Yeti towered over Jack without emotion in its eyes. Its lips parted to reveal its perfectly squared teeth rowed together inside its big mouth. It seemed to be smiling, or at least bearing its teeth to Jack, as it stood before him with a battle intent.
"Don't be lax" Orda warned. "You must fight for your life against this enemy. Sadly, I won't be much help to you against it, as it is already naturally resistant to the cold."
"Then I shall use fire!" Jack said. He aimed the fire Gem at the golem of a beast and blasted out a powerful, compact ball of fire. It hit the Yeti's chest and pushed it back a few steps, but that was it. The Yeti was not burned or damaged and simply patted the fire out with its big palms. Then it looked down with a burning glare through its rounded eyes and stomped its huge foot forward. Jack was shaken from his feet after the quake of the stomp and fell down. The Yeti rose its other foot up with the intent to crush Jack completely. Jack fired another flare into the exposed flesh of the Yeti's foot and managed to knock it off balance and onto its back.
Jack jumped back up and sensed danger coming at him. He jumped to the side just as the stout Yeti landed with a crash where Jack had just stood with the intent to crush him. It turned around and inflated its body again, blowing a huge gust at Jack that pinned him to the sheer rocky wall. Jack took his sword and Gem together, holding the Gem in fist against the handle of his blade, and charged forward. The Yeti took in a deep, quick breath and leaned forward to throw Jack back again, but its effort was vain. Jack held a sword of fire and stood strong, pointing it forward. The wind parted at the fiery blade, cool air drastically shrinking away from the hot, and Jack was spared the Yeti's attack.
"Stab when it takes in air" Orda said "and equip me! I shall end this!" Jack nodded and dashed in. He swung his sword to draw the Yeti's defense. The beast stepped away and to the side of Jack's swings, equally as fast as the warrior despite its bulky size. Jack continued his offense, pushing the Yeti further and further back as it watched his blade swing through the air. Then, when it reached a sheer drop down, though only by a few feet to an icy glacier shelf, the Yeti acted on instinct and inflated its body. Jack threw the fire Gem up, pulled out the Gem of Ice from within his robe, stabbed into the Yeti's inflated body and tapped the artifact to his blade. Orda summoned her power and sent a wave of it along Jack's sword. The magical steel channeled her powers and let the course out in all directions, freezing the Yeti from the inside-out.
"That will do" Orda said. "You may draw you sword, Jack." Jack did so and looked up and the now pure-ice Yeti, round like a boulder with arms and legs. The dense, cool air hissed out from the narrow cut and pushed the Yeti over the short drop where it shattered like a glass ball on contact with the hard ground. Jack turned away and bowed his head in reverence for the fallen beast. "It is not your way to kill, is it?" Orda asked.
"I do not wish to harm innocent lives" Jack said. "In such cases where my life is threatened, it is permissible, but not directly desired. I know death shall come, and to these beasts, none too soon."
"Holy Dharma!!!" Orda shouted in a short fit of fangirl-ism. "You're so damn cool!!"
"Yes, thank you" Jack said modestly, glancing back at the Gem. He fixed his battle glare on the Yeti and the many stirring mounds of snow in the field before him, all of them dome-headed beasts that stood up tall and long-armed with emotionless glaring eyes and teeth. "Now please focus! A battle is at hand!"
"Sorry" Orda said. "I guess we better get to work!"
Seth walked through the windless valley of endless mountains and snow, his boots pushing down the soft and powdery mass beneath him with each step. He was a black shadow with a silver tail that moved across the rolling whiteness of the snowy valley with a glimmering weapon in hand like a frozen beam of light at his side. He was no longer the simple Gem Seeker that he was mere hours ago. Now he was a warrior, Seth the Dragon Slayer, a title he was determined to carry with the greatest pride. Suddenly, Seth fell to his knees and hands. He was too tired to carry on. The battle with the icy beast that he had so narrowly escaped taxed his body to its utter limits. He was barely conscious anymore, yet he stayed awake and tried his hardest to carry on.
"No good" Seth said. "I don't think I can keep going. It's not the cold that's getting me, my body's just so damn tired all of a sudden....I need some kind of jump-start. If I can just get somewhere that I can be seen, Jack is sure to find me." Seth realized quickly what he could do. The answer was in the problem itself. He stood up as much as he could and propped himself against his sword, then took out the lightning Gem from his insulated coat pocket. It was shimmering nicely and pointing off as a beam of light to the nearby mountainside. "Great, I'm close by. That'll make this less painful..." Seth took the Gem to his exposed neck and thought back on his moment of epiphany. The boost of energy from a source of pure energy would be enough to power his body long enough to get to safety! The Gem zapped his whole body with a surge of electricity and he was at once awake and lucid.
"UUUAAAHHHH!!!!!" Seth screamed. "I feel like I'm on fire! I've gotta MOOOOVE!!!!" Seth dashed through the snow with amazing speed, sprinting like a quicksilver shadow of a far-distant cloud. In his run Seth had to slow down upon seeing a strange sight out of the corner of his eye. He saw what looked like huge rounded snow drifts moving up out of the ground and assuming huge human forms. He thought his mind was simply going from the overdose of energy he had just taken in. He shook his head as he sprinted and hopped off of an unusually dense mound of snow, thinking nothing of it, and flew briefly through the air before landing in his quicksilver dash yet again. The Yeti he had stepped on rose itself up out of the snow and opened its wide yellow eyes, tracking down the obvious black figure retreating rapidly into the distance. It rose up to its full height with its massive palms full of snow and packed together a dense ball. Then, winding back its arms, it threw the snowball at Seth. The apparent attack landed just to Seth's side, not hitting but startling the fast warrior into a slower pace as he ran backwards.
"What was that!?" Seth exclaimed. He saw more and more figures popping up from the ground, a whole troop full of round-headed Yeti beasts with markedly human characteristics. "Are those Yeti? Those big lumbering things? They don't look at all like the Yetis I saw before...." Seth disregarded it, as he was quite far away, and turned to run forward again. He reached a sheer wall of ice and sprinted up it with the lightning Gem heating the metal soles of his boots to stomp quick holes into the great wall's side. The Yetis behind Seth kept packing together boulders of pure snow and throwing them. Their actions didn't dictate any real instinctive or natural finesse. At best, they were heaving their heavy snowballs out of the sheer pleasant feeling they got by attacking an unknown creature, so they continued until Seth finally took a stand at the peak of the glacier. He sliced at the snowballs, exploding them on contact with his electrified sword, and glared down at the advancing, ever-increasing horde of menacing dome-headed beasts.
"If it's a range game, you won't win!" Seth declared. "My sword can cut through anything! Metal, bone, time or space! It's an instrument of pure power!!!" Seth swung his sword with such speed that the flash of light it produced vanished like a bolt of lightning before him. A wave of slicing energy sped through the air, pulled together by powerful electrical magnetic forces, and hit a Yeti square on the chest. It was thrown backward, tumbled over itself smoothly and finally rested with its broad, flat tongue hanging out and its fur slowly staining itself with a deep red. The rest of the Yetis paused in their attacks to look back and see their fallen comrade with empty, round eyes. Seth charged his sword and held it back behind his back with an anxious, panting grin. "You giving up? Knowing what I can do now, are you ready to surrender to me, the Dragon Slayer!?" The Yetis all turned to him and their lips parted. Their mouths opened wide and down past their collarbones, big yawning maws with huge open throats lined at the front with gums and perfectly rowed teeth. A monstrous roar shook the valley suddenly and Seth was nearly knocked from the slick surface he stood on.
Once the roaring died down the first Yetis from the back started running forward. Their athletic and muscular bodies allowed them to move at an incredibly swift pace. Their arms pumped with their legs, like how a human would run in any desperate flight, and their bodies were leaned forward as they ran to increase their momentum to travel. The air pushing against them rolled over their domed heads and offered their bodies little actual resistance, granting them even quicker movement overall. They were faster than Seth at a glance and came en mass to destroy the warrior. One jumped from the ground at the base of the wall where Seth stood atop clear up to the top, its hands just reaching up to grab at the sheer surface of the wall. It hung there for a moment, then started to drop with the ice still in hand. Seth had retreated already and cut a swath through the ice, leaving the wall's sheer face an impossible slope for the beasts to scale.
"I may be a Dragon Slayer" Seth said as he ran and looked back in a panic, "but there was only one dragon! I can't seriously take on all those beasts! Even as good as I am, I have human limits!!!" Seth rounded a quick corner, slid under a narrow fallen rock and jumped across a wide gap. He ran around the edge of a short mountainside pathway somehow carved out of the sheer ice and rock from some meticulous hacking, and stopped to rest. "I can't keep up....with my body." Seth clutched at his heart and tried to sheathe his sword with his right arm. "My heart...is racing....like I'm running a marathon, even though I'm not moving...this is very bad. I have to get my heart-rate down!" Seth, out of desperation, struggled his way off the curving path and back to a wide and snowy plain between two scaling mountainsides. He fell down to his knees and opened the fabric of his shirt. Then he took a handful of snow and shoved it into the breast of his clothing, right next to his heart. He winced at the sheer coldness of it and it started to melt in an instant against his hot skin. He persisted, however, cooling his head by rubbing it in the snow and stuffing snow down against his heart while keeping his body as stretched out and flat as he could.
"Is it working?" Seth wondered. He wiggled his toes and felt them. He could still feel his fingers and pinched around his body until he could feel something through his thick clothes. "I think it's working. I'm cooling down....but getting tired....that's not too good. I don't want to have to be rescued by Jack if I can help it." Seth stood up, feeling his heart-rate had slowed down to a safer level, and started to shamble away across the plain. His vision began to blur slightly and he became lightheaded. "Not good" Seth said. "I need to...lie down..." Seth stopped and rested against a rock, making a quick slice without fully drawing his blade to make sure it indeed was a rock. He fell down and started to drift off, hoping not to all the while. Still, the desperate state he was in forced him to fall. He was in no condition to carry on. His heart continued to slow, slowing itself down so much that he could no longer remain conscious, and Seth passed out entirely.
Seth was asleep for no more then a minute when the winds picked up again from the West. They blew the hair from his face and gently swept at his skin to wake him up. He swatted at the winds and opened his eyes lazily, seeing a blurred vision approaching him. At first it was a distant and unseeable form. Seth closed his eyes and reopened them out of force. The vision became closer, but it was still blurred and hard to make out. Then Seth blinked hard and opened his eyes again, viewing past a hazy cloud of his own frozen eyelashes. He looked up and chattered his teeth, trying to form some words, but his body gave out too soon and he slipped back into an unconscious state. The figure, the owner of his vision, approached to his body and took a careful, dainty hand to his face in inspection. It stroked down along his jaw line, carefully grabbed his chin and turned it from side to side.
"Well" said the girlish owner of the hand, drawing away from Seth's face, "he's at least hot, but I can't believe he's out of it already." The youthful spirit of ice Ikscala was standing over Seth, protecting him under her divine authority and power as she wanted to do. She looked back to the West, the direction she had come from, at the peak where her home was at. It was a far distant spire of ice and rock, so far that it became nothing but a shadow, the center of all the mountains in the region but far from the tallest. "You must be Jack's companion, the one he was traveling with" Ikscala began. "It seems like you managed to kill our pet dragon in your questing. What an idiotic quest that was! I can't believe Jack would take on an apprentice, no an amateur, like you! He's just such a great man that you couldn't ever keep at his pace...." From the narrow mountain path, a Yeti came. A growling and fist-clenched Western yeti with eyes glowing a fierce and rageful red.
"Oh you" Ikscala said. She threw an arm forward just as the Yeti pounced and drove a patch of icy blades from up under it. The Yeti wasn't skewered but stabbed skin-deep multiple times and lifted from the ground. "Don't you try messing with me. I'm going to defend this hot guy until the hotter guy comes around!" Her blades retracted and the Yeti fell to its chest. It managed to push itself up and growl. Its battle-calling low alerted the others that climbed up the mountainside like a dangerous swarm of beasts to aid in its battle. The spoiled creatures, sadistic by nature and ultra-defensive to each other against their would-be predators, huddled closer and closer together in the effort to intimidate the icy spirit. And it worked.
"Oh, no!" Ikscala exclaimed. "I can't fight this many at once! Mama's gonna kill me if I lose to these freaks!" Suddenly, out of nowhere, a thick blanket of snow blinded the Yetis and surrounded Ikscala in protection. The Yetis were confused and dazed by the thick falling blizzard but Ikscala could see right through it, like a one-way veil. No snow fell near her or Seth either. She looked back with a grin and saw her little sister with her hair done up like Jack's using her powers to create snow everywhere.
"Hurry up and fight, Sissy!" little Ima said.
"Alright" Ikscala said with a seething glare in her eyes. She summoned up a barbed spear of ice in each hand and a coat of icy armor to cover her. The joints were all spiked and spined, giving her a devious yet knightly appearance. "For that hot guy!!!" Ikscala charged into the snow to do battle, all for the sake of the unknown Seth sleeping in the protected center of the storm....