It was a single-story building, the main structure apparently built from thick logs, with a stone chimney up on the roof — and because the place hadn’t been used in a long, long time, the snow had piled up extraordinarily thick on top of it.
Around the outermost perimeter of the building, there was also a ring of fencing — though most of it had already been pressed flat by wind and snow.
The sections still standing in the drifts had their wood gone black and rotted, and weren’t going to hold up much longer either.
But for Isac and Yukinoshita Yukino as they stood right now, this already counted as the ideal shelter.
Whether it was windproofing or warmth, it blew that half-stub of an aircraft cabin completely out of the water.
By now the sky had already gone very dark — the light was visibly draining out of the world before their eyes.
But the darker it got, the less they could afford to drop their guard.
“Stay put right here for the moment — I’m going to scope the place out.
If anything comes up, shout for me.”
Isac motioned for Yukinoshita Yukino to wait in place, then walked up to the cabin’s door himself and pressed his ear to it to listen for anything inside.
Inside was dead silent — not a sound.
Isac gave the door a knock, waited a few seconds — still no movement.
Only then did he reach out and try to push it.
He didn’t put much force into the first try; the door only shifted a bit and didn’t actually swing open.
Isac put more muscle into it after that, and the rusted iron hinges let out a teeth-grating creak — sharp and shrill.
The door swung open, and a wave of cold air, bundled together with the distinctive musty scent of old wood, shot straight up into Isac’s nose.
Inside was pitch black — not a glimmer of light.
Looked at from outside, it was like a great maw waiting to devour whoever stepped in.
Isac thrust the nearly burnt-out torch in ahead of him, and by what little firelight there was, he was able to make out the rough layout of the place.
The room wasn’t large — roughly two hundred square feet.
Over on the left sat a wood-burning stove, iron-bodied, with a metal flue extending up from it to connect to the chimney overhead.
Set on top of the stove was a dust-covered flat pan and a pair of fire tongs.
The stove door was cracked half open, and inside the firebox you could still see the leftover ash from burned-down charcoal.
In the middle wall was a glass window.
Below it sat a workbench, on which were carelessly piled several dust-covered books, and beside the books was a half-burnt candle.
Above the window, fixed to the wall, was a wooden shelf — but Isac couldn’t quite make out what was on it from where he stood at the door.
On the right was a wooden bed — not big, but plenty enough for him and Yukinoshita Yukino to lie down side by side on.
Spread across it was a patchwork animal-hide cover.
By the look of things, no issues.
Isac stepped inside and gave the wooden wall a few pats; the solid, thick feel of it set him a little more at ease.
After a quick walkthrough and a round of testing the cabin’s structural soundness in a few spots, once he’d confirmed there were no problems, he walked back out to where Yukinoshita Yukino was waiting.
“It’ll do.”
At Isac’s words, the weight finally lifted off Yukinoshita Yukino’s heart, and a smile at last surfaced on her pale little face.
“Let’s get inside first.” Isac stretched out his hand.
Yukinoshita Yukino gave a small nod, and then placed her hand in his.
He helped the girl inside first, then headed back out to lug their belongings in too.
Only once the door had shut every last trace of wind and snow firmly outside did the two of them, inside, truly let themselves relax all the way down.
“Let’s get a fire going first.”
Isac lifted the wood-loading lid on the stove, gave the old ashes inside a quick clear-out, then grabbed some of the scrap fabric they didn’t need from the sled and stuffed it into the stove.
On top of that he stacked a few pieces of wood that had originally been fence — and last of all he tossed in the torch in his hand, by now burnt down to almost nothing but sparks.
A few hard puffs of breath later, the dim red on the torch quickly brightened to vivid red.
The temperature climbed sharply, igniting the fabric at the bottom; soon thin green smoke began curling up from the wood on top, and very shortly that caught flame too.
Bright firelight squeezed out through the seams of the stove, lighting up the room and, at the same time, starting to push the indoor temperature back up.
“This place… might be a hunter’s cabin.” By the firelight, Yukinoshita Yukino had begun taking stock of her surroundings.
“A hunter’s cabin?
How can you tell?” Isac raised an eyebrow, a touch surprised.
Yukinoshita Yukino ran a clean little hand over the soft fur beneath her and explained: “There’s only this one cabin in the area — no other buildings — and it’s sitting on the outer edge of the woods.
Very likely this place was set up by locals as a rest stop before heading deeper into the mountains.”
After a pause, Yukinoshita Yukino added: “If that guess is right, there might just be weapons left behind by hunters somewhere inside this cabin.”
Isac had originally been planning to rest a bit before launching any proper investigation of the cabin, but hearing Yukinoshita Yukino’s full line of reasoning, there was no way he could keep sitting still.
He stood right up, ready to claim the inheritance left behind by the previous occupant.
His primary target was that shelf above the window.
When he’d come in earlier, he’d already taken a quick look around — there wasn’t much on the floor, only a few empty wooden crates that could be broken down for fuel later on.
If there really was anything important here, by all reckoning it’d be on that shelf.
The shelf wasn’t all that high; with Isac standing just shy of six feet, he only had to reach up to touch it.
The one drawback was that the firelight from the stove couldn’t reach up there, so all he could dimly make out was an assortment of bottles and jars.
But that was plenty.
The shelf, after all, was only so big — going over it slowly, there was no way he’d miss anything.
Isac took the items down off the shelf one by one, brought each over to the stove, and examined them in the firelight piece by piece.
“This one’s canned pork.”
“This bottle here is salt.”
“This stone… is flint!” Isac’s voice was full of delighted surprise.
If he’d gotten his hands on this dingy gray rock a little sooner, he wouldn’t have had to sacrifice his beloved Holy Sword that other day.
“So that’s what flint looks like.” Yukinoshita Yukino curiously studied the rock in Isac’s hand.
She’d only heard of flint before — never actually seen it.
“Here, take it.”
Seeing Yukinoshita’s curiosity, Isac just pushed the flint straight into Yukinoshita Yukino’s hand and turned back to keep ‘treasure hunting.’
If flint had turned up, who knew what else of value this cabin might still have in store.
The very next second, his hand landed on something round and stubby with a trigger on it.
Isac’s eyes went wide in an instant — could it really be…?
Filled with anticipation, he slowly drew his hand back from the shelf.
And what he held in his hand was a gun.
It was just — unlike the handgun he’d been picturing, this gun was orange-red across the entire body, with a very short barrel.
The instant he laid eyes on it, the name of it had already surfaced in Isac’s mind.
Flare gun.
Still, a flare gun was a gun all the same.
Fired point-blank, it could still do some seriously impressive damage, and the enormous report of it going off was its own kind of deterrent to wild animals.
Right at that moment, a long, mournful, piercing wolf howl suddenly cut through the air.
Even sitting inside, even knowing the thing couldn’t come bursting in, Isac and Yukinoshita Yukino both still tensed all over, goosebumps rising on their skin in waves they couldn’t suppress.
And it was that very howl that confirmed for Isac the wolf hadn’t gone far — it was still in the area.
He tightened his grip on the gun.
Besides the one flare round already loaded in the chamber, he’d also found three loose rounds of ammo.
Isac figured — he had a gun now; what was there to fear from one old wolf?
Convenient excuse to test whether the gun even worked, while he was at it.
With that thought, Isac didn’t hesitate any longer.
He unlatched the door, pulled it open, leaned half his body out of the cabin, leveled the flare gun in his hand at the sky, and squeezed the trigger.
“Bang!”
Along with the report of the gun, the pitch-black ground was lit up in a brilliant red glow.
The drawn-out wolf howl was cut off instantly by the gunshot — like a chicken with its neck wrung mid-squawk, not another sound out of it after.
After firing, he shut the door, and Isac felt his whole body unwind.
Talk about a breath of fresh air!
____
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🔥 New history: Samsara Game: