By the time Isac woke up, the sky had already begun to lighten.
Noticing the color of the sky outside, Isac’s first move was to glance over at Yukinoshita Yukino, who was tending the fire beside him — and the exhaustion and drowsiness on her face were impossible to hide.
As if guessing what Isac was about to say, Yukinoshita Yukino took the initiative to explain: “For today’s move, you’re the one carrying the load.
You have to be well rested.”
Isac fell silent for a moment, but in the end didn’t say much — just a single line: “Got it.”
Then he tacked on: “Don’t make a habit of it, though.”
Yukinoshita Yukino didn’t reply.
No telling whether it had actually sunk in.
The two of them grabbed a quick bite, and Isac flipped the suitcase over — the back of it already had a two-finger-thick crust of ice on it — and began laying down the cushioning insulation layer he’d prepped in advance.
Once the cushioning was in place, he packed the items they’d need to bring into one half of the case.
Sturdier, less-crushable items went on the bottom, the easily damaged stuff on top, and anything that absolutely had to make it through in one piece was kept directly in Yukinoshita Yukino’s care.
The thermos had also already been filled with boiled water, saved for the road.
With all the prep work squared away, Isac looked over at Yukinoshita Yukino, bundled up like a little dumpling.
“I’ll lift you on.”
“Sorry to put you through the trouble.”
Yukinoshita Yukino didn’t try to tough it out — she cooperated as Isac shifted her onto the suitcase.
The suitcase wasn’t exactly small, but measured against Yukinoshita Yukino’s roughly five-foot-three frame, it still came up short.
Even with the suitcase laid wide open, a good portion of her was still hanging off the edges.
But this was as good as the two of them were going to manage — all they could do was make do.
Isac slipped the tow strap around his waist, gripped the slow-roasted, low-heat-dried staff in one hand, and turned his head to Yukinoshita Yukino to say: “We’re about to head out.”
Yukinoshita Yukino tightened her hold on the ember box and thermos held against her chest with one hand, braced the edge of the suitcase with the other, and nodded: “I’m good on my end.”
In the early going, neither Isac nor Yukinoshita Yukino was quite used to it.
For Isac, it was mostly the uneven terrain — hard to find a steady point to push off from.
For Yukinoshita Yukino, it was also the uneven terrain — she could only barely keep her balance.
The process was bumpy and stop-and-start, but in the end, they were moving.
As long as they could keep moving forward, that counted as a win.
Sticking to their original route, the two of them tracked southeast.
Whenever they hit a stand of underbrush, if it was on the sparser side Isac would press the bushes flat with the staff to let the trailer behind him pass through — but if the brush was growing too thick, he had no choice but to detour around it. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
All the way up to noon, that situation had only come up once.
In this frozen wasteland, the underbrush was generally pretty thin.
The bad news, though, was that to this point Isac and Yukinoshita Yukino still hadn’t spotted any sign of human activity.
Forget felled trees — they hadn’t even come across a stretch of ground that was slightly flatter than the rest.
Neither of them said it out loud, but the thought ‘did we pick the wrong direction?’ hung over the boy and girl like a storm cloud.
Still, they’d come this far.
The only thing left to do was ride this road out to the end.
After a short break and a quick top-off of food and water, Isac got back to his feet, ready to push on.
“Yukinoshita, keep an eye on the time for me.
If we still haven’t turned up any leads by just before sundown, we’re going to have to figure out some kind of temporary shelter for the night.” Isac’s voice was quiet as he said it — a whole morning of hauling the sled had drained his stamina, and right now his tone came out a touch limp.
“Understood.” Yukinoshita Yukino’s voice was much the same.
A sleepless night, plus the constant jostling along the way, plus the steady drain of stamina just to hold her balance — her exhaustion, body and mind, was no lighter than Isac’s.
It was only the toughness baked into her bones that was keeping her upright.
The trek continued, but at a clearly slower clip than in the morning, with breaks coming noticeably more often.
At several points along the way, Yukinoshita Yukino offered to get down and walk on her own, but Isac turned her down every time, telling her flat out that doing so would only slow them down further.
The sky began to dim by degrees, and the two of them felt their spirits sinking right along with it.
After walking all this way, they still hadn’t found a ‘way out.’
Had they picked the wrong direction, or was there simply no direction to pick?
Early on during the rest breaks, the two of them would still trade a word or two now and then — but as the day wore on, the exchanges grew fewer and fewer, until in the end all that was left was the heavy sound of each other’s breathing.
It wasn’t that either of them was sulking — it was a simple matter of conserving stamina, putting whatever strength talking would cost toward keeping moving instead.
Suddenly, Yukinoshita Yukino spoke up.
“Doesn’t it feel like the going just got easier?”
Isac didn’t stop — he just squeezed a muffled grunt out from between his teeth by way of an answer.
He could clearly feel that the ground underfoot was a lot more level than before.
Fewer bumps, fewer stones.
The rope at his waist had stopped going slack-then-taut-then-slack, settling instead into a subtle, steady balance.
But Isac didn’t have any bandwidth left to think about it.
“You need to rest.” Yukinoshita Yukino could see the state Isac was in, and her voice carried real worry.
Isac didn’t answer.
He couldn’t stop — because he wasn’t sure that if he stopped this time, he’d have the strength to take another step.
By this point, every rest break had stopped being a brief breather mid-slog.
It had turned into something more like a slow torture pulled at the same time on body and mind.
His body and his brain were both warning him he needed to rest right now.
But reason was reminding him he still couldn’t rest yet — the moment he stopped, Yukinoshita Yukino behind him would be staying in this white hell forever right alongside him.
The truth was, somewhere during the trek, the thought had crossed Isac’s mind to make the girl behind him drag her bad leg down off the sled and walk to lighten his load.
He’d even, at one point, kicked around the idea of just flat-out abandoning her, leaving her to sink or swim out in the snow on her own.
That way there’d be one less mouth eating into his supplies, plus the energy he saved would boost his own odds of making it out of the snowfield alive.
But every time that thought reared its head, he’d snuff it out on the spot.
It wasn’t that he was some paragon of selflessness or virtue — it was that Isac knew, plain and simple, that the moment he pulled something like that, even if he did end up getting rescued in the end, his soul would be locked in this dead-end forever, with no way out.
Still too much of a Boy Scout… In this moment, even Isac’s self-mockery came out limp and short on breath.
Just a little further.
They’d found the path.
Could the house really still be that far?
Yukinoshita Yukino watched the boy in front of her — body clearly already pushed to its breaking point, and still pulling her along behind him — and some emotion she couldn’t put a name to kept churning up inside her chest.
Before all this, the two of them had been total strangers — they hadn’t even been from the same country — and yet he was willing to go this far for her…
Yukinoshita Yukino bit down on her lip without noticing.
Even she herself probably hadn’t realized that the look in her eyes, fixed on Isac’s back right now, had already quietly started to change.
Time, though, didn’t bend to anyone’s will — and by now the sky had already gone very dark.
Just as Yukinoshita Yukino was wondering whether she ought to remind Isac to stop and rethink the plan, the girl suddenly caught sight of something — out where the gray-white slope met the dark-brown tree line in the distance, there stood a silhouette that looked nothing like its surroundings.
That silhouette was so perfectly squared-off.
Part of it was screened by the trees, but you could still clearly make out the inverted-V pitch of the roof and the dead-straight lines of the walls.
A house!