‘A roach doesn’t lose because it gets stepped on,’ Sunny thought, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles in his temples throbbed.
‘It loses when it forgets that everything in this godforsaken world has bigger boots than it does.’
The blizzard didn’t just howl through the narrow mountain notch; it screamed with a wet, heavy violence.
The wind drove sharp granules of ice straight into Sunny’s exposed eyes, turning his vision into a blur of gray and white.
His feet, numb inside his dead soldier’s boots, sank ankle-deep into the fresh drifts with every agonizing step.
His shadow-enhanced vision, usually his absolute lifeline in the dark, was practically useless here.
The sheer density of the driving snow created a thick wall of white noise, obscuring shapes until they were barely three paces away.
‘I was arrogant,’ he cursed himself, his mind replaying the moment with sickening clarity.
‘One soul fragment.
One tiny, pathetic drop of essence, and I thought I was a hunter.’
The disaster had happened ten minutes ago on a slick, diagonal ice-shelf overlooking a frozen ravine.
He hadn’t been attacked by a Nightmare Creature.
He hadn’t been ambushed by an officer.
He had simply stepped on a patch of black ice hidden beneath a thin dusting of powder.
The slip had been instantaneous.
His legs had gone out from under him, his heavy wool cloak catching the gusting wind like a sail and dragging him headfirst down the steep, forty-degree slope.
As he tumbled wildly over sharp granite outcroppings, his hands had frantically clawed at the ice to arrest his descent.
The hilt of the Obsidian Shard—his only Awakened Memory, his single true equalizer—had caught on the sharp lip of a stone fissure.
The force of his falling weight had ripped the blade clean out of his grip.
Clatter…
CHINK.
He had watched in helpless horror as the sleek black dagger bounced off the rock face, spun through the swirling snow, and plummeted directly into the bottomless, yawning blackness of the ravine below.
A second later, his stolen shortsword’s leather strap snapped, sending the steel blade clattering down after it.
Now, sitting huddled in a shallow alcove beneath a fallen pine tree, Sunny looked down at his empty, bloodied hands.
[Memories: Obsidian Shard (Lost/Inaccessible)]
[Memories: Scavenger’s Carapace]
The golden runes hovered in his vision, a cruel testament to his absolute powerlessness.
The Obsidian Shard wasn’t destroyed—a Memory couldn’t be destroyed so easily—but it had fallen into a chasm hundreds of feet deep.
Without an Awakened soul core to dismiss and re-summon his Memories at will, he couldn’t recall the blade back to his hand.
It was as good as gone.
Even worse, the crude ‘Scavenger’s Carapace’ bound to his chest had cracked during his violent slide down the slope.
A wide fissure ran right down the center of the bone-white chitin plate, rendering its structural integrity nearly useless and driving a sharp piece of shattered carapace directly into his ribs with every deep breath.
‘No weapon.
A cracked chestplate that’s stabbing my own lungs.
Frozen limbs.
No food left,’ Sunny listed mentally, a dark, hysterical laugh bubbling up in his throat that he forced himself to swallow down.
‘Back to square one.
Back to being a pathetic, naked roach shivering in the dark, waiting for someone to crush me.’
He closed his eyes, leaning his head against the frozen bark of the pine tree.
‘Good,’ he thought, his inner voice turning icy, bitter, and sharp as a glass shard.
‘Good.
Pride makes you slow.
Thinking you’re strong gets you killed.
A roach doesn’t win by fighting.
A roach wins by outlasting the fire, eating the dead, and hiding in the tiny cracks where the big beasts can’t reach.’
A faint sound cut through the roar of the blizzard.
It wasn’t the wind.
It was the rhythmic, agonizing sound of dragging metal.
Clang… This chapter was taken from g.com without permission. drag…
Clang… drag…
Sunny’s eyes snapped open.
He pulled his ragged wool cloak tight around his body, flattening himself against the frozen dirt beneath the tree trunk, and willed his shadow to merge with the roots around him.
Through the veil of white snow, three figures emerged.
They were moving along the upper edge of the ravine, moving slowly, like ghosts condemned to march through hell.
It was the surviving slaves from the army’s chain-line.
Leading the group was the tall, broad-shouldered man—not the wrestler who had died from the Bloodbane berries, but a former gladiator-turned-slave named Hero.
His face was a mask of cold, brutal determination, his massive jaw set as he dragged the heavy iron chain wrapped around his left arm.
Unlike the others, Hero’s tunic was torn to ribbons, exposing thick, corded muscle covered in crisscrossing scars and fresh, frozen whip marks.
He carried a heavy, blunt wooden club he had scavenged from a broken wagon.
Chained directly behind him was the priest.
The tall man was barely standing, his dirty robes caked in mud and blood, his lips moving continuously in a soundless, mad chant.
His left leg was dragging uselessly, shattered when the supply wagon had collapsed on him earlier.
And trailing at the very end of the line, clutching his throat with raw, bleeding hands, was the shifty blonde slave.
He was sobbing silently, his eyes darting wildly into the blizzard with every rustle of the wind.
The guards were nowhere to be seen.
‘The army abandoned them,’ Sunny analyzed, his dark blue eyes tracking the trio with cold, detached precision.
‘Or the guards got slaughtered in the pass, and these three managed to slip away while the monsters were eating the horses.
But they didn’t break the master chain.
They’re still bound together.’
Hero suddenly halted, holding up a heavy, calloused hand.
The priest stumbled into his back with a soft groan, while the blonde man immediately dropped to his knees, clutching the snow in exhaustion.
“Quiet,” Hero barked, his voice a deep, gravelly rasp that barely carried over the wind.
“Look ahead.”
In the middle of the trail, fifty yards past their position, lay a massive, overturned supply crate.
Scattered around it were several sealed wooden casks and small cloth sacks—rations that had fallen off the army’s rear wagons during their frantic retreat.
The blonde slave’s eyes lit up with wild, ravenous greed.
“Food! Gods above, it’s bread! It’s meat!”
He made a desperate move to lunge forward, but Hero’s heavy hand slammed back against his chest, throwing the blonde slave onto his back in the snow.
“Shut up, you fool,” Hero growled, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the white fog surrounding the crate.
“Look at the snow around the barrels. It’s too smooth. There are no tracks leading away from it.”
The priest leaned heavily against a pine tree, his hollow eyes sunken deep into his skull.
“It… it is a blessing from the divine, Hero. The gods have provided for us…”
“The gods don’t leave fresh meat sitting in the middle of a choke point, priest,” Hero spat, his grip tightening on his wooden club.
“It’s bait.”
Hidden beneath the tree roots twenty yards away, Sunny watched the interaction, a cold smirk touching his chapped lips.
‘He’s right,’ Sunny thought.
‘It’s a textbook ambush setup.
A apex predator or a clever scavenger wouldn’t chase three starving slaves down a mountain.
It would leave something they desperately want in the open, sit in the high ground, and wait for them to walk into the trap.’
Sunny’s shadow-enhanced vision slowly crept up the rocky overhang above the supply crate.
There, crouched silently beneath a canopy of ice-covered pine branches, was a shape.
It wasn’t a common scavenger.
It was a Nightmare Tyrant’s spawn—a broad, four-eyed horror with pale, translucent skin that shifted color to match the surrounding snow.
Its body was flat, sprawling six feet wide like a massive, skeletal spider, its long, jointed legs tipped with curved, hook-like talons designed to drag prey into the trees before a single scream could be uttered.
It sat in absolute silence, its four milky-white eyes locked onto the three slaves. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
‘A Camouflaged Lurker,’ Sunny identified, his heart giving a small, cold thump against his cracked chestplate.
‘It’s not moving.
It’s waiting for the first one to step into the killing zone.’
Back on the trail, a sickening, tense dynamic began to unfold among the three bound men.
Hero looked at the food, then down at the heavy iron chain connecting his wrist to the priest and the blonde man.
His eyes were cold, calculating, and completely devoid of human warmth.
“We need that food,” Hero said softly.
“Then… then let’s go get it together!” the blonde slave pleaded, his voice trembling.
“We can share it!”
“No,” Hero replied, turning his hard gaze toward the crippled priest.
“All three of us move together, we all get caught in whatever is sitting up there. One of us goes first. If there’s a beast, it hits the first one. The other two pull the chain back, grab the barrels, and run.”
The priest’s face turned ash-white.
“You… you mean to use one of us as a sacrifice? A human offering?!”
“I mean to survive,” Hero growled, taking a step toward the priest, his massive frame towering over the crippled man.
“You can barely walk, priest. Your leg is broken. You’re dragging us down. If a beast comes, you’re dead anyway.”
“No! Please!” the priest gasped, scrambling backward into the snow, dragging the blonde slave with him.
“Hero, I prayed for you! I shared my bread with you yesterday!”
“And today your broken body can buy us ten seconds of life,” Hero said coldly, lifting his heavy wooden club.
The blonde slave’s mind worked frantically.
He looked at the crippled priest, then at Hero’s terrifying, muscular frame.
He realized instantly that if Hero decided to throw someone into the trap, it wouldn’t be himself.
And if the priest died, the blonde man was next on the list.
‘If the priest goes, I get to live,’ the blonde slave thought, his eyes turning wild and feral.
“He’s right!” the blonde man suddenly shrieked, lunging forward and grabbing the crippled priest by his dirty robes.
“You’re useless, old man! You’re dragging us to our deaths! Go get the food!”
“Get off me, you rat!” the priest screamed, striking out with his thin, bony hands, scratching at the blonde man’s face.
The two helpless men began to roll and thrash in the snow, hitting each other with pathetic, desperate punches, each trying to shove the other forward into the killing zone to save their own skin.
Hero stood over them, his club ready, watching the desperate struggle with cold, unbothered detachment, waiting to see who would be broken first to serve as the bait.
‘Look at them,’ Sunny thought from his hideout beneath the roots, his dark blue eyes reflecting the pathetic, bloody spectacle.
‘Three men, bound by the same iron, tearing each other apart just to buy five extra minutes of freezing to death.’
It was a dark, twisted mindgame of survival.
Hero was the tyrant, using absolute physical force to dictate who lived and died.
The blonde slave was the opportunistic scavenger, siding with the strongest predator to avoid being eaten.
And the priest, who had preached about dead gods and morality hours ago, was now biting and clawing like a cornered animal just to keep from being thrown to the monster.
‘None of them realize,’ Sunny analyzed, his shadow creeping quietly through the drifts toward the rear of their position.
‘They think only one of them needs to be eaten.
They don’t realize that thing above the crate is smart enough to wait until all three are tangled in the chain before it drops.’
Sunny reached down, his frostbitten fingers wrapping around a heavy, sharp piece of granite buried in the frozen dirt beneath the pine tree.
He didn’t have a sword.
He didn’t have his Awakened Memory.
He was powerless, cold, and bruised.
But he had a shadow, a brain, and a complete lack of human sentiment.
‘If those three idiots trigger the trap now,’ Sunny thought, his jaw setting into a hard line, ‘the monster eats them, gets full, and stays on this trail.
But if the monster drops behind them…’
Sunny shifted his posture, balancing the heavy granite stone in his palm.
‘Hero thinks he’s the master of this game,’ Sunny smirked in the dark, his dark blue eyes flashing with cold, roach-like malice.
‘Let’s see how well he plays when the bait changes places.’
Sunny raised his arm, aimed not at the monster, nor at the slaves, but at the ice-laden branches directly above Hero’s heavy head, and threw the stone with every ounce of strength left in his body.
Sorry for the future blunder announcement,but I’m gonna release 6000+ chapters even if Guiltythree finishes the original in 4000+ chapters.