Meanwhile, in an abandoned mine shaft about two or three miles from the cabin in the woods.
A blonde girl, her hands wrapped up in her sleeves, lifted a jet-black tin can off the fire and set it down to one side.
Inside, the water had already come to a boil.
After letting it cool for a moment, the blonde girl tested the temperature, then carefully brought the can up to the lips of the black-haired girl beside her and spoke:
“Lady Kaguya, please drink a little warm water first.”
But all she got back was a wordless, half-conscious murmur — fortunately, the moment the rim of the tin touched her lips, the black-haired girl named Kaguya swallowed the warm water on instinct.
With the warm water down, Kaguya seemed to recover a sliver of lucidity.
“Haya… saka?”
“It’s me, Lady Kaguya.”
Kaguya’s voice right now was so faint the wind and snow howling outside the cave would have drowned it out without trouble.
Hayasaka Ai had to bring her ear right up to Kaguya’s lips just to make out what she was saying.
“…”
Hayasaka Ai waited a long while, but after that one call of her name, no further words came.
When she finally looked up, she realized the young mistress had slipped back into unconsciousness — as if that moment of clarity had been the last flicker before the candle went out.
At the sight, Hayasaka Ai’s heart sank.
She reached out and pressed a hand to Kaguya’s forehead — the temperature had climbed significantly compared to last night, well past the range of a low-grade fever now.
If this didn’t get reined in soon, she was afraid…
After settling Kaguya back down, Hayasaka Ai tossed a bit more coal onto the fire in front of her, and her thoughts drifted back to two days ago.
She and Kaguya had boarded the Shinomiya family’s private jet, bound for a private island overseas to attend a family banquet.
But the plane had barely cleared Nihon airspace when it suffered a malfunction and went down.
When she came to, Hayasaka Ai found herself and young Mistress Kaguya in this frozen wasteland, with nothing around them but scattered plane wreckage.
Every member of the flight crew was gone — not even a body left behind.
Hayasaka Ai strongly suspected this was the work of certain people inside the Shinomiya family — a plot to have young Mistress Kaguya quietly die out in this vast snowfield, with no one the wiser.
The Shinomiya family really is too dark.jpg
There were still a lot of things about the situation that didn’t quite add up, but the circumstances back then hadn’t left Hayasaka Ai room to overthink it.
Since they’d been on a private jet, neither she nor Shinomiya Kaguya had been dressed for the cold.
Staying put would have meant hypothermia, guaranteed.
Hayasaka Ai made the call on the spot — hoisted the unconscious young mistress directly onto her back.
With no water, no proper winter clothing, and outside temperatures plunging to somewhere around ten or fifteen below zero Celsius, she trekked nearly two miles through the snow under that weight, and found this abandoned mine shaft to shelter herself and the young mistress in. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
Once they were inside the shaft, she didn’t even pause to rest.
First she confirmed there were no other hazards in the mine, then she located a pile of coal.
With coal in hand, she immediately rigged up a bow drill and got a fire going.
With all that done, Hayasaka Ai saw that Shinomiya Kaguya had come back to consciousness, and used the remaining daylight to head back to the crash site and haul in a load of supplies.
She was basically Superman!
“Two days in.
I’ve combed every inch around the crash site and still haven’t turned up any medicine.
The young mistress’s low fever is starting to climb into a high one, and what’s left of the food is barely anything…” Hayasaka Ai’s slim eyebrows knit tight together — as if she could see an invisible kill line creeping in toward herself and Kaguya.
The blonde girl paced over to the mouth of the mine.
Outside, the sky had gone completely dark, and a biting wind, laden with snowflakes, was blowing in through the entrance — landing less than an inch from the tip of her boot before melting fast into water and soaking down into the dirt.
“We can’t keep going like this.
Come daybreak, I’m pushing out farther.” Hayasaka Ai murmured to herself as she stared out at the pitch-black night beyond the cave.
An abandoned mine shaft was proof that this snowfield wasn’t completely empty of people.
Widen the search radius, and there had to be at least some chance of turning up signs of human activity — that was the only way the young mistress had any hope of being rescued.
Even if those odds were laughably slim, she had to try.
If the young mistress’s condition couldn’t be brought under control soon, they wouldn’t even have to wait for the food to run out — the fever would take her life first.
Having grown up inside the Shinomiya family from a young age and gone through the household’s elite-track training as a professional attendant, Hayasaka Ai had been at Shinomiya Kaguya’s side since childhood.
You could practically say the two of them had grown up together.
On paper they were mistress and servant — in reality, they’d long since become as close as sisters.
There was no way in hell Hayasaka Ai was going to sit by and watch Shinomiya Kaguya die in agony from a fever.
All of that said, Hayasaka Ai still didn’t have the faintest clue which direction to start searching tomorrow morning.
If only she had a precise set of coordinates…
Hayasaka Ai thought to herself — and then, probably realizing how naive that line of thinking really was, she let out a self-deprecating little laugh and turned back toward the fire, ready to bank some energy for tomorrow’s apparently hopeless rescue mission.
And just as she turned, a sharp, ringing ‘BANG—’ split the silent night sky.
A piercing whistle followed it, and the mouth of the cave was bathed in red light.
Hayasaka Ai whipped around, rushed to the cave entrance, and braced herself against the rock wall as she tipped her head up toward the night sky.
A flare!
There were people out there!
There was hope for Lady Kaguya yet!
All of those thoughts hit her at almost the same instant.
Hayasaka Ai stared at the red ball of light up in the sky.
For a flare to be visible to the naked eye this clearly through wind and snow like this, the launch point couldn’t be more than two or three miles away from where she stood!
Close!
Hayasaka Ai tracked the arc of the flare’s flight, and quickly worked the trajectory backwards to pin down roughly which direction it had launched from.
Only once the bright red glow had been swallowed back up by the darkness did Hayasaka Ai pull her gaze away and return to the fire deeper inside the shaft.
She didn’t sit idle — she went straight to inventorying their supplies and planning out the gear and rations she’d need to take with her in the morning.
Once that was squared away, Hayasaka Ai pulled a handgun out of her coat — a Glock 17.
She ejected the magazine and counted the ammo: sixteen 9mm rounds left.
Right where it should be.
By rights, a full magazine should have held seventeen — but earlier on, in order to get a fire going fast, Hayasaka Ai had pulled a single round, pried it apart, and dumped out the gunpowder inside to use as starter fuel.
That had cost her one bullet.
As for why Hayasaka Ai had a gun on her in the first place…
As a professional bodyguard-slash-attendant, carrying a sidearm on her person was perfectly reasonable, no?
On top of that, the plane they’d taken was the Shinomiya family’s private jet, and both the takeoff and landing points were Shinomiya private property.
Forget a concealed handgun — even if she’d been packing a full-auto rifle, no one would have batted an eye.
If Hayasaka Ai had known in advance that something like this was waiting for them, she’d have brought along the M16 she had stashed under her bed, too.
But what good was a gun, really?
Without medicine, she still couldn’t protect her young mistress.
Please, let tomorrow go well…
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
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