The bright light of morning slowly invaded his eyes, but there was no warmth in it.
It was cold. Extremely so.
From the air he breathed into his lungs down to the very tips of his limbs, an unbearable chill permeated his entire body, as though the cold itself had seeped beneath his skin and settled within his bones.
He felt half dead, but somehow, he still held tightly to his life force, clinging to that final thread of vitality that had become his only saving grace during these trying times.
Finally, after what seemed like a century, his eyelids slowly shook open, and the vile, frozen wasteland came into focus.
That was the first thing he saw.
Kyle groaned as though to complain about it.
To wake up in this hell after being killed felt like hell within hell.
Kyle slowly sat himself up, groaning a little as his weakened body protested the movement. He blinked a few times before his gaze fell to his stomach, the very place that had been brutally breached by Karciel’s horrendous sword.
It was now sealed.
Only a deep, ugly scar remained as testament to the fact that he had once been gutted.
"Hahahahha!"
Kyle suddenly laughed, his voice loud and mocking in the otherwise silent cave.
"Bastard could not even kill me right."
Kyle jerked his head backward and laughed once again, seemingly taking great pleasure in the fact that he was still alive.
"You look quite lively."
Kyle’s expression instantly changed.
His hand lurched toward the sword that should have been resting at his side, but his fingers grasped nothing but cold stone.
His gaze snapped toward the source of the voice.
There, seated closely beside a small bonfire made from bent, skinny sticks, was the strange mage, Rita.
The fire raged unnaturally high despite the poor quality of its fuel, the flames twisting and dancing violently as though they were being sustained by something far more potent than mere wood.
Kyle took a long look at her, his sunken eyes staring at her from head to toe with a skeptical look.
"You ran, you bastard."
Rita remained silent for a moment.
Her gaze shifted away from Kyle before eventually settling upon the bonfire, her expression as indifferent as ever.
"I sensed that you had enough confidence in facing Karciel, and if it helps to ease the matter, I did tell you to run," Rita replied.
She was cold.
And Kyle could only shake his head in defeat.
With the little amount of time he had spent with Rita, he could already tell she was the cold, calculative type.
Maybe even sadistic.
After all, she had been awfully right and edgy about some things.
Recalling when she first talked to him up until now, Kyle found that her strange behavior had remained almost entirely consistent.
"Its nice you came back for me, even if you ran," Kyle said, drawing closer to the bonfire to bask in its heat.
The warmth helped.
Only a little, but it was still acceptable considering the immense cold that surrounded them.
"I won’t ask how you survived Karciel’s attack. Every Awakener has their own secrets. It’s surely nice to have someone else in this cold, horrid wasteland."
Rita spoke this time strangely warmly as she hugged herself between her knees.
Kyle rolled his eyes.
Her attempt at being warm was somewhat pitiful.
’Is she perhaps some sort of machine?’
He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and sighed.
"What is our current condition?"
Rita shrugged, raising her gaze back to Kyle.
"You have been asleep for three days. It took that long for you to heal. I had to stuff your organs back inside you, though, and keep you warm and fed during that time. I also had to protect you until I found this shelter."
Kyle stared around the small cave they now inhabited.
It was not exactly a comfortable place.
The walls were ancient and uneven, the stone covered in frost that glittered faintly beneath the dim light of the bonfire. The corpses of monsters that Rita had slain were sprawled across the ground, some half-decayed and others reduced to little more than bones that had been long forgotten by time.
The stench of death lingered faintly in the air.
Kyle’s eyes moved across the remains before he finally turned back to Rita.
"I see."
He rubbed the back of his head, his expression becoming more serious.
"What’s our next plan? How do we get out of this place, or even survive longer? With the amount of cold and tiny branches we have, we won’t last too long."
Rita nodded.
She already knew most of these things.
"Our only solution here is to fight, Kyle."
Kyle raised his eyes to stare at her in question.
Fight?
Against what?
Rita slowly rose to her feet.
She walked toward the mouth of the cave and stopped there, her figure becoming silhouetted against the distant blizzard.
Outside, the frozen wasteland stretched endlessly into the horizon.
Snow and ice were swept through the air by violent winds, the blizzard roaring across the land like some ancient beast that had never known silence. Visibility was almost nonexistent. The world beyond the cave was nothing but an endless expanse of white, cold, and death.
Rita stared into it with a blank expression.
"Nothing can stop us now, Kyle."
Her voice was calm.
Almost eerily so.
"As long as we are together, who can stand before us?"
She slowly turned toward him.
The light of the bonfire reflected within her eyes.
"This world, this vast wasteland, is ours to conquer."
Kyle stared at her.
For a moment, he wondered if Rita had finally lost her mind.
Then she continued.
"As of now, we cannot stand against Karciel or the entire cohort in that cave."
Her expression remained emotionless, but something deeper seemed to lurk beneath her words.
Determination.
Perhaps even hatred.
"But I can promise you this, Kyle."
Rita’s eyes narrowed slightly.
"We will exact our revenge."
She looked past him, toward the endless frozen wasteland beyond the cave.
"And we will return to the real world soon enough."