“Isac, do you see it?” Yukinoshita Yukino’s voice could barely hide her excitement.
She was certain the cabin in the distance was no hallucination — she could even make out the snow eaves that had built up along its roof from the accumulated snowfall!
However, just as Yukinoshita Yukino was feeling elated over discovering the cabin, Isac — against his usual habit — came to a stop.
“Yukinoshita.”
Isac’s voice was a bit hoarse — part of it was the exhaustion of a long, heavy-load trek, and part of it was the creature blocking the path ahead of them.
“What’s…” Yukinoshita Yukino was still confused — the goal of their journey was right there within arm’s reach, and Isac, far from showing any sign of joy, had actually stopped walking.
But the next second, as her eyes traced Isac’s line of sight, the joy on her face vanished in an instant, replaced by a deathly pallor.
Despair clutched at her throat like a pair of invisible hands, leaving her unable to breathe.
It was a wolf.
Its coat was gray streaked with white, its body about the size of a Golden Retriever you’d see kept in someone’s backyard.
The frame was long and lean, but its posture was a little hunched, carrying an air of decline — this was an old wolf who had stepped into his twilight years and been driven out by his pack.
Given that wolf packs don’t normally drive out their elders, the wolf in front of them was very likely the pack’s former alpha!
At this moment, the wolf was sizing up the two of them coldly from an extremely careful distance.
“A wolf…”
Yukinoshita Yukino instinctively clenched the tow strap connecting her and Isac.
This wasn’t some zoo wolf raised half-tame like a dog — this was a wild wolf that had clawed its way through life-and-death battles across the frozen mountains!
Just being watched by those pale, glowing wolf eyes made every hair on Yukinoshita Yukino’s body stand on end.
The tension and fear were almost beyond words.
What to do?
Run?
No way to get away.
This was the wild — and forget that her left ankle was severely sprained right now; even with two good legs, you didn’t outrun a wolf.
If they wanted to live, either the wolf had to lack any appetite to hunt in the first place, or they had to find a way to drive it off.
Judging by that wolf’s locked, unblinking stare and its lowered, crouching stance, “no appetite to hunt” was clearly off the table.
As for driving it off — her leg was lame, she didn’t have a weapon in hand, and while Isac had the stick he’d been using as a trekking pole, his stamina had long since been bled dry by the endless miles of mountain trail.
Was there really no way out?
…
No — actually, there was one way.
Yukinoshita Yukino knew it perfectly well.
As long as Isac handed her over to the wolf — with prey already in front of it, the beast wouldn’t waste the energy chasing after him.
He wouldn’t even need to outright throw her aside.
All it would take was loosening the tow strap somewhere mid-flight…
Yukinoshita Yukino bit her lip, her body trembling uncontrollably.
She told herself, over and over deep down, that her life was one Isac had pulled out of the snow to begin with anyway.
If he really did it… she’d just call it a life for a life.
“Stay calm.
Listen to me.”
Isac took a deep breath, speaking slowly, as if worried about startling the old wolf eyeing them like a hungry predator across the way.
He had no idea what was running through Yukinoshita Yukino’s head behind him.
There was one — and only one — thing on his mind right now: figure out how to get them out of this.
Run?
Isac didn’t entertain the idea for even a second.
Turning his unguarded back to the apex predator of this snowfield — how was that any different from suicide?
Even if he could run, could Yukinoshita?
As for abandoning Yukinoshita Yukino — if he’d been going to do that, he’d have done it back on the road.
Now, with a new shelter in sight, never mind a wolf — even if a bear came at him, he was willing to take his chances!
On top of that — once this wolf got a taste of human flesh, humans would land permanently on its menu, and Isac would be a dead man anyway.
That was exactly why, in the modern world, any wild animal that attacked a person had to be put down.
So the only option left was to leverage the natural fear wild animals had of fire — pump up their own presence as much as possible, and force this hunter in front of them to give up its designs on him and Yukinoshita Yukino.
Isac slowly let out a breath, his gaze locked tight on the lone wolf a short distance away.
He tightened his grip on the wooden staff in his hand and called back to Yukinoshita Yukino behind him:
“Remember the torch we made last night?
Get it out — find a way to light it as fast as you possibly can.”
Hearing Isac’s words, Yukinoshita Yukino froze for a moment, but she snapped back quickly.
She immediately fished out the tinderbox she’d been keeping tucked against her chest, peeled away the tightly wound cloth strip, and revealed the charcoal hidden inside the foil container.
Compared to when she’d put them in — glowing red almost all the way through — the dim red patches on the charcoal had shrunk by more than half.
Mercifully, they hadn’t gone out entirely.
The girl quickly pulled some dried pine needles coated in pine resin from her pocket and laid them over the dim red areas of the charcoal.
Then she blew on them slowly.
The dull red gradually brightened to vivid red, and the heat from the renewed combustion soon caught the tinder above.
Right after, she pulled out the torch that had been digging into her the entire ride, and pointed the cloth-wrapped end straight at the fledgling flame.
The fabric shriveled the instant it met fire, sending up a thin curl of black smoke laced with the sharp, acrid stink of plastic.
The torch caught.
“Here.”
When Yukinoshita Yukino handed the torch over to Isac herself, the girl was no longer trembling.
Looking at his back, somewhere along the way her fear and tension had simply melted away — and in their place was a sense of safety she had never felt before.
As if, so long as that boy was standing in front of her, there was nothing in the world she had to worry about.
Adjusting his grip on the torch, Isac could feel the lone wolf nearby visibly tense.
Its bearing was no longer the loose, almost casual one from a moment ago — it had dropped its center of gravity low, caught somewhere between wanting to lunge and not quite daring to.
Seeing this, Isac didn’t hesitate any longer.
He suddenly took a big step forward, swinging the torch with his left hand and shouting with every ounce of strength in him:
“Beat it!”
The pack-less old wolf was visibly startled by Isac’s sudden roar.
It scrambled back several steps, its gaze going uncertain.
Its eyes flicked across the torch in Isac’s hand, and a flash of fear ran through them — as if it were reassessing the odds.
Isac pressed the advantage and stepped forward a few more paces.
The lone wolf, in order to maintain the same distance, retreated a matching few steps in turn.
The wolf’s aura visibly deflated.
The tail it had been holding straight out had now tucked in a touch, pressed against its hindquarters.
After a few more minutes of standoff — apparently deciding that these two ‘upright apes’ weren’t the easy meal it had pictured, and that as a lone wolf it was outnumbered and outgunned — the old outcast chose to give up.
It turned and slipped into the woods behind it to the right, and was gone in moments.
Isac didn’t move, eyes still fixed on the tree line where it had vanished.
A full five minutes passed before he was certain the wild wolf — sprung from who-knows-where — was really gone.
Only then did he let out a long breath.
The instant he let his guard down, the brutal exhaustion of sustained high-stakes tension layered on top of a long-distance trek washed through his whole body in a single wave.
A buzzing rang in his ears, his limbs went a little unresponsive, and Isac pitched forward in a stumble.
Thankfully, the staff in his hand caught him before he hit the ground.
He didn’t dare suck in air through his mouth right now either — doing that would let the brutally cold air scorch his airway and dump heat from his body fast, piling more misery onto an already grim situation!
Up until today, Isac had never once pictured himself dragging a pretty girl plus thirty-odd pounds of supplies across miles of wilderness snow on foot — with a fifteen-minute standoff against a wild wolf thrown into the middle of it for good measure.
Sure enough — people really didn’t know their own limits until they got pushed to find them.
Math being the obvious exception.
I’m basically Superman.
Isac shook his swimming head.
He was just about to tell Yukinoshita Yukino to keep an eye on their surroundings so he could rest for a minute when he heard a clatter and rattle from behind him.
Looking back, he saw Yukinoshita Yukino struggling out of the makeshift sled they’d rigged from the suitcase.
Slightly disheveled, she opened the thermos and held it out to him.
“Drink something first.”
Yukinoshita Yukino was acutely aware that Isac’s body was right up against its limit.
The saving grace was that the cabin they’d spotted was less than a few hundred meters away — close enough you could practically reach out and touch it.
Isac didn’t turn down Yukinoshita Yukino’s offer.
He took the thermos and drank a mouthful.
The thermos was actually pretty decent — in conditions this extreme, with most of a day behind them, the water inside still had a trace of warmth.
Just a trace, mind you — roughly the temperature of the room-temp tap water Isac used to drink at home before the crash.
Even so, the moment the water touched his throat, Isac felt as if he’d been brought back from the dead.
“There’s some left — you have some too.” Isac handed the thermos back.
He knew Yukinoshita Yukino hadn’t had a single sip since they’d broken camp that morning.
And on the road, to keep the thermos warm, she’d been carrying it pressed against her body the whole time, only popping it open during his rest breaks to quickly let him take a sip before sealing it back up and tucking it against her chest again.
Yukinoshita Yukino pressed her cracked, dry lips together and took the thermos.
Without so much as glancing at the rim to see whether someone else had drunk from it, she tipped the rest of the water back in one go.
Once she’d rehydrated, Yukinoshita Yukino’s mental state perked up noticeably.
She glanced at the sky, then said to Isac in earnest: “Your body’s already running on fumes.
The road ahead is relatively flat — I’ll walk the rest of the way myself.”
Isac looked at the dead-serious Yukinoshita Yukino, sat in silence for a long moment, then handed the long staff in his hand over to her.
“Tell me the moment you can’t keep going.
Don’t push yourself.”
“Thank you.”
Seeing Isac agree, a striking smile bloomed at once on Yukinoshita Yukino’s face.
She took the staff and, using it as a support, tried to push herself back upright.
“Careful — give me your hand.
Let me help you up first.”
Seeing that, Isac stepped around to Yukinoshita Yukino’s left side, slipped his right arm around the girl’s slender waist, and at the same time draped her hand over his shoulder, transferring the weight that would have gone on her left leg onto himself.
With Isac supporting her, Yukinoshita Yukino — after two days off her feet — finally stood up again.
But once she was on her feet, Yukinoshita Yukino realized: with one leg out of commission, moving around was a whole lot harder than she’d pictured.
After all, she only had a single staff to lean on — moving forward meant hopping on one leg.
And in this frozen wasteland, hopping along on one leg led to exactly one outcome: a faceplant.
So when Isac said “I’ll keep hold of you while you walk,” Yukinoshita Yukino didn’t say a word — she just quietly shifted her weight a little more toward his side.
And so, the boy and the girl — one holding a torch and dragging their supplies, the other leaning on a crutch and dragging an injured leg — supported each other along several hundred meters of mountain road, until at last they arrived in front of the cabin in the woods.