Sunny didn’t run until he was out of breath; he ran until his heart felt like an iron weight hammering against his cracked ribs, threatening to split the bone-white chitin vest wide open.
He only slowed down when the frantic, heavy impact of steel-hard wood against chitin and the wet, squelching sounds of Hero’s desperate final stand were swallowed entirely by the howling mountain gale.
‘He’s dead,’ Sunny thought, dropping his shoulder against the frost-dusted overhang of a slate outcrop.
He wiped a streak of icy grime from his nose with his sleeve, his breathing coming in shallow, agonizing rasps.
‘Hero was strong, but strength without vision in a blizzard just means you die tired.’
He slid down into a sitting position, burying his lower face in the wool cloak to warm his frozen skin with his own stale breath.
He reached inside his tunic and pulled out one of the stolen bricks of traveler’s bread.
It was hard as stone, smelling faintly of stale wheat and damp grain, but to Sunny, it was a feast.
He brought the iron hatchet up and used the dull butt of the head to smash the bread into smaller, bite-sized chunks on his knee.
He shoved a piece into his mouth, sucking on the dry, hard block until his saliva softened it enough to swallow.
‘Current inventory,’ Sunny listed internally, forcing his mind into cold, methodical order to suppress the rising tremors in his limbs.
[Item: Iron Hatchet (Mortal)]
[Memory: Scavenger’s Carapace (Damaged)]
[Food: 1.5 Bricks of Hard Bread]
[Soul Fragments: 1/100]
He leaned his head back against the frozen rock.
‘No Awakened weapon.
No divine protection.
Just a broken vest, a cheap hatchet, and one fragment,’ he mused, a bitter, self-deprecating smile curving his cracked lips in the dark.
‘If the Nightmare Spell was trying to test my resolve, it’s doing a fantastic job.
I’m basically a stray dog chewing on a stolen bone while mountain gods fight overhead.’
Suddenly, his shadow—still merged with the dark slate beneath his feet—flickered violently. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
It didn’t stretch toward the open pass.
It recoiled backward, wrapping itself tightly around Sunny’s ankles like a warning leash.
Sunny stopped chewing instantly.
He didn’t move a muscle.
His dark blue eyes, sharp and hyper-aware in the gloom, scanned the narrow shelf of rock ahead.
Thump…
Thump…
The sound wasn’t coming from the trail.
It was coming from above.
A heavy, low vibration rattled through the granite wall against his back.
Small, jagged icicles detached from the rock face, shattering softly into the snow beside his boots.
Sunny slowly tilted his head up.
Through the thick, swirling curtains of white fog, a massive form was descending the vertical cliff face.
It wasn’t the Lurker that had butchered the slaves, nor was it the bone-white mountain scavengers from the camp.
It was something far worse.
The creature was sprawling, easily ten feet long, its body covered in dark, matted fur coated in thick sheets of ice.
Its head resembled a deformed, skinless bear, but where its eyes should have been, there were only four gaping, hollow nostrils that expanded and contracted in rhythmic, wet pulses, sampling the mountain air.
[Nightmare Creature: Frost Hound]
[Rank: Dormant]
[Class: Monster]
‘A tracking predator,’ Sunny’s blood ran cold.
‘It doesn’t hunt by sight.
It hunts by scent and body heat.’
It paused barely fifteen paces away from Sunny’s hideout.
Its hollow nostrils expanded violently.
SNIFF…
SNIFF…
Sunny held his breath, his hand freezing over the handle of the iron hatchet.
He willed his body to go completely limp, blending into the frozen stone, but he knew the terrifying reality: unlike the bone-sheared scavengers who relied on motion and sight, a scent-based predator in an enclosed mountain shelf was a death sentence for a hidden human.
The hound’s head snapped directly toward the slate outcrop where Sunny sat.
It had smelled the stale, warm scent of the dry bread… and the faint, unmistakable metallic tang of human blood lingering on his stolen wool cloak.
The beast opened its wide, needle-fanged maw, letting out a low, vibrating growl that shook the frost from the rocks.
GRRRRRRRR…
It took a slow, heavy step forward, its black claws digging deep into the icy slate.
Sunny looked at the heavy beast, then down at his small, rusted iron hatchet.
‘I can’t cut its hide with this,’ Sunny thought, his mind racing through calculations at breakneck speed as cold sweat froze on his brow.
‘If I swing at its head, the hatchet will bounce off its skull, and it’ll snap my neck in half before I can draw a second breath.’
He had no Awakened blade.
He had no army to hide behind.
He had no slaves left to use as bait.
He was completely, utterly alone.
A dark, desperate spark ignited deep within Sunny’s blue eyes as he gripped the hatchet, not by the handle, but by the heavy iron head.
‘If I’m going to die like a roach in the snow,’ Sunny thought, his jaw setting into a terrifying, rigid line as the monster lunged forward, ‘I’m going to make sure I choke the damn dog on my way down.’