The group of originally ten Awakeners, now five, walked through the knee-high frostbitten snow, their footfalls heavy and painful.
The cold invaded their bodies through their metallic and leather boots, biting deep into flesh that had long since stopped feeling like their own.
Kyle felt as though his foot had gone numb entirely, but thanks to the fact that he was an Awakener, he was able to persevere through it all...
Barely.
He gritted his teeth, hugging himself as he turned to Rita, the young mage clutching her staff in her grasp. She seemed to be holding up better than he was, thanks to using her magic to keep herself warm, a faint shimmer of heat curling off her skin like steam rising from a hot spring.
The others were no different from him. Reed kept his head down, hugging himself, clearly shivering through the cold. Thors was no better, his massive frame trembling despite his size.
But Steronick, the experienced hunter, seemed to walk unbothered by the cold, though he carried himself with a rather tired and angry air.
Kyle sighed, able to see the reason for his behavior. All of his teammates had survived the attack from the strange caterpillar.
That must have been a grim experience for Steronick.
But to Kyle, he felt rather lucky.
’Me surviving that kind of situation is nothing but luck... If Rita hadn’t intervened when she did, I would have been dead.’
The group came to a halt all of a sudden, the man who had been leading them the entire time stopping and turning to face them.
The group kept their distance at this, their hands instinctively drifting to their weapons in defense.
The man’s lips curled slightly at the gesture before he sighed, all expression draining from his pale face.
His cold, blue-tinged lips parted as he spoke. "You’re lucky I came when I did. If not, you’d all be dead."
"—do you expect a thank you?!"
Steronick snapped at the mocking remark. "You saved us, yes! Do you want a fucking thank you for that?! A thank you for leading us out into more snow? Or maybe into an ambush to finish off what that wretched deviant didn’t?"
No one spoke, nor did anyone try to stop Steronick from spitting those words out.
They only stared.
The hooded man remained still for a few seconds, and then...
He laughed.
"Hahahaha!" He bent over, slapping his knee.
Steronick was infuriated. He drew his weapon and lunged forward to attack the man.
At this, Thors reacted, wrapping his arms around Steronick’s body to restrain him. Thanks to his size, he was able to hold Steronick down, though it took every ounce of his strength — this man was not just any Awakener.
Even so, the man kept laughing.
This time, it was Kyle who grew infuriated.
He frowned. "What’s so funny?"
At this, the laughter suddenly stopped.
The strange man’s expression turned serious, his cold gaze locking onto Kyle’s, sending a shiver through every fiber of Kyle’s body, screaming at him to run from this being.
"What you encountered back there wasn’t a deviant. It was a tainted."
At this, the entire group went cold. Steronick stopped struggling to break free, seeming to calm the moment he heard the word.
"You all appeared in the frozen rivers — the habitat of that monstrous fiend. That’s where most of us first spawned, and where most of us died. We call it the Place of the Fallen."
"The Place of the Fallen? What is this place? I don’t understand any of this shit!" Steronick yelled angrily.
The man simply sighed and turned away. "This place is an uncharted part of the tower. It’s purgatory. It can only be accessed through three different pathways. That’s as much as I know."
"Is there a way out?" Reed asked, his face tight with panic.
The man shrugged. "All your questions will be answered soon enough. For now, I’ll need you all to follow me. If not, we might run into more of those caterpillars in this soft snow."
With that, the man moved forward, but before he could get any further, someone else spoke.
"Wait — what’s your name?" Rita asked, her tone soft but coated with urgency.
The man stopped and smiled back at them, rubbing his unkempt goatee.
"I am Dwight."
With that, he turned and walked off.
The group lingered a moment, and then followed right behind him.
After a long hour’s worth of trekking, the sun hung at the brink of setting, its dying orange-red light spilling across the snow and casting the entire vicinity in a strange, ethereal beauty.
It almost seemed like some kind of paradise.
But they knew this place was anything but.
With Dwight in the lead, the group managed to avoid skirmishes with any monsters along the way.
Kyle had personally seen more grotesque monstrosities than he ever thought could exist. And all of them were of the tainted rank.
This made him wonder just how difficult it would be for Lord Roach, the Iron Giant, and himself to bring down a single tainted.
Beyond that was the question of how many fragments he might attain from killing one.
He turned to Rita and wondered just how much she had gained from killing the Tainted Caterpillar.
Without being told, he knew it would be enough to give her magic stats a humongous boost.
’If used well, being stuck here might not be so bad after all.’
That was, of course, if he could manage to kill a few tainted without dying himself.
And judging by how the battle against the caterpillar had gone, the probability of that was extremely low.
"Why are you staring?" Rita asked, her voice filled with worry and a touch of anger.
At this, Kyle gasped, only now realizing he’d been staring. "Oh, sorry, I was..."
’Fuck! Fuck! Stupid...’
"Uhhh, I was just going to..."
"We’re here."
Before Kyle could finish his words, Dwight’s loud voice cut through their conversation, drawing their attention to the large platform of solid rock in the distance.
Beyond the platform lay a large cave entrance, too dark for human eyes to make out what lay within, swallowed further by the dying light of the setting sun.
But Kyle — he could see deep into the cave as clearly as day.
And what he saw there caused his face to go pale.