The cold reality of the kill settled in faster than the blood on Sunny’s face could freeze.
His lungs burned with a dry, excruciating heat, and his arms trembled so violently that he could barely keep his grip on the hilt of the Obsidian Shard.
He didn’t feel like a victorious god or a legendary warrior.
He felt like a starving, broken street rat who had barely squeezed past the jaws of death by sheer, pathetic luck.
‘A single fragment,’ Sunny thought, his inner voice raspy, cynical, and utterly unamused.
‘I nearly snapped my own collarbone, covered myself in steaming monster guts, and threw away five years of my life span from pure terror… all for one damn soul fragment out of a hundred.’
He rolled off the dead mountain scavenger, crashing unceremoniously into the snow beside its rigid carcass.
He lay there on his back, staring up at the choked, bruised sky, his chest heaving under the stolen wool cloak.
The golden runes lingered in his vision like a cruel joke.
[You have slain a Nightmare Creature: Mountain Scavenger.]
[Rank: Dormant]
[Class: Beast]
[Soul Fragments +1]
[Your soul core feels slightly enriched, yet remains terribly empty.]
‘Slightly enriched,’ Sunny scoffed internally, his lips cracking as he grimaced.
‘Right.
At this rate, I’ll have to butcher a hundred of these bone-shelled freaks to even see what my Aspect is.
And if a single one gets a clean swing at me, I’m not getting a cool death sequence—I’m getting turned into paste.’
He pushed himself up onto his knees, coughing violently as the icy wind hit the back of his throat.
He wiped the dark, foul-smelling monster blood from his eyes with his sleeve, scanning his surroundings with hyper-vigilant terror.
Killing the straggler had been loud enough.
The wet *thwack* of the blade and the monster’s brief, gurgling shriek echoed through the narrow pass.
If another one was nearby, he was dead.
‘Move.
Get off the open road,’ he commanded himself.
He dragged his thin body beneath the charred wooden frame, squeezing himself into the tight, freezing gap between a broken wheel and an abandoned grain sack.
Sitting in the cramped dark, he checked the second notification.
[You have received a Memory: ‘Scavenger’s Carapace’.]
[Memory Rank: Dormant]
[Memory Type: Armor]
[Memory Description: A rough, jagged chestplate harvested from the shell of a mountain scavenger. It offers minor protection against dull blades and teeth, but smells faintly of rotting marrow.]
Sunny summoned the Memory.
A faint shower of dull, white sparks coalesced over his chest, solidifying into a crude, bone-white vest made of overlapping chitin plates.
It bound tightly around his ribs over his burlap tunic.
It was heavy, stiff, and uncomfortable.
It restricted his breathing and rubbed his collarbones raw, but when he struck his fist against his sternum, it gave off a solid, muted *thud*.
‘It’s ugly, it smells terrible, and it’s heavy,’ Sunny evaluated, pulling his stolen wool cloak back over the chitin armor to hide its pale reflection.
‘Which means it’s perfect.
It’s better than thin cloth when a blade comes swinging.’
With his physical condition stabilized, Sunny turned his shadow-enhanced vision back toward the ruined camp.
‘Where is everyone else?’ he wondered, his dark blue eyes tracking the desolate perimeter.
He didn’t believe for a second that an entire army detachment, armed to the teeth and led by experienced officers, had been completely wiped out down to the last man.
Soldiers were cowards when the line broke, but officers were practical.
‘They didn’t all die,’ Sunny realized, analyzing the tracks in the bloody snow.
‘The initial swarm hit the front line and the slave perimeter, but when the formation collapsed, the survivors didn’t stand and fight to the death.’
He spotted the evidence quickly.
Heavy boot prints—dozens of them—mixed with the deep ruts of running horses and a few dragging, chained footprints leading away from the clearing.
They had cut through a narrow, treacherous notch in the eastern ridge—a dangerous, avalanche-prone goat trail that bypassed the main mountain road entirely.
‘The senior officer,’ Sunny thought, piecing the scene together.
‘He used the slaves as live bait.
While the swarm was busy tearing apart the perimeter and gorging on the dead, the officer and his surviving guards cut their way out, driving whatever living slaves they had left in front of them as human shields to trigger any traps or ambushes along the escape route.’
Sunny let out a cold, cynical breath.
‘Of course.
Standard military protocol.
The nobles and the armor survive, and the trash in chains gets fed to the wolves to buy them five extra minutes of running time.’
He looked down the eastern trail.
He could see faint, frozen drops of blood and broken links of chain caught on the jagged rocks along the narrow path.
Some of the slaves had survived the initial massacre—including, likely, the shifty blonde man or the tall priest if they had been dragged along by the retreating guards’ chain-lines.
But their situation was far worse than his.
They were still bound, still starving, and being driven like cattle through a blizzard by panicked, ruthless soldiers who would execute them the moment they slowed down.
Sunny rested his head against the frozen wooden wheel of the wagon, his obsidian dagger resting across his lap.
‘I could follow them,’ he pondered quietly.
‘If I track their trail, I stay close to human civilization.
But if I catch up, I’m just a runaway slave with a stolen sword and a dead soldier’s cloak.
They’ll string me up from the nearest pine tree or throw me back into the chain-line.’
He looked back toward the dark, yawning mouth of the canyon below—the path leading deeper into the uncharted, frozen wilderness.
‘Or I go alone,’ Sunny whispered to the empty wind.
‘No guards.
No chains.
Just me, the cold, and a hundred monsters waiting to eat my soul.’
Sunny didn’t hesitate for long.
He pulled the hood of his wool cloak deep over his face, gripped his obsidian blade tightly, and stepped out from under the wagon, turning his back on the surviving army once and for all.
Don’t think that I’ve done a mistake giving Sunny the Obsidian Shard and others, there’s something you’ll see…