The Frost Hound didn’t leap with the graceful, terrifying precision of a apex hunter.
It lunged like a avalanche of meat, fur, and black claws, driven by the instinctual, relentless hunger of a Dormant beast that had gone weeks without a warm kill.
Sunny didn’t try to dodge to the left or right.
On a three-foot-wide shelf of frozen granite, lateral movement was an illusion; one misstep meant falling into the fog-choked abyss below.
Instead, he dropped flat onto his back, wedging his shoulders straight into the narrow fissure between the stone wall and the ice floor.
CRASH!
The massive, fur-covered body slammed directly over him, the beast’s black-clawed forelegs driving into the slate on either side of his ribs.
The sheer, crushing weight of the ten-foot monster pressed down onto Sunny’s chest, making the cracked ‘Scavenger’s Carapace’ shriek under the pressure.
The sharp, fractured edge of the chitin vest bit deep into his skin, drawing a thin line of hot blood across his sternum.
The hound’s four gaping, hollow nostrils flared violently right above his face, blasting his cheeks with a cloud of foul, rancid heat that smelled of decayed fat and old copper.
‘It can’t see me,’ Sunny’s mind screamed over the deafening roar of his own racing pulse.
‘It feels the heat!
It smells the blood!’
With its hollow nostrils contracting in rapid, wet pulses, the hound opened its needle-fanged jaw, snapping down blindly toward the heat radiating from Sunny’s throat.
Sunny didn’t raise his hands to block.
A mortal man’s forearms were like dry twigs to a beast that snapped pine trunks for fun.
Instead, Sunny jammed his stolen brick of traveler’s bread straight into the monster’s gaping maw.
CRACK!
The hound’s jaws snapped shut with terrifying force, its needle-thin teeth splintering the stone-hard block of dried bread into a spray of coarse flour and stale crumbs.
For a fraction of a second, the beast hesitated, confused by the dry, powdery texture filling its throat instead of the warm, gushing iron of human blood.
That fraction of a second was all the roach needed.
Sunny raised his right hand, holding the iron hatchet not by the wooden handle, but tightly by the heavy, rusted iron head itself.
He didn’t aim for the thick, matted fur covering its skull.
He drove the sharp, exposed corner of the hatchet’s poll straight into the beast’s left hollow nostril—the softest, most sensitive organ on its entire skinless face.
STAB!
The iron edge sank three inches into the wet, fleshy membrane.
“GWRRRRRRR-AAAAAGH!”
The Frost Hound let out a horrific, muffled shriek, its massive head thrashing violently upward as black, foul-smelling blood erupted from its nostril, spraying across Sunny’s face and wool cloak.
It reared back on its hind legs, thrashing its heavy skull against the overhang of the granite cliff.
Sunny didn’t hold on.
He let the momentum of the beast’s recoil throw him sideways out from underneath its belly.
He rolled across the frozen slate, his hands clawing at the loose gravel, until his boots dangled over the precipice of the sheer drop.
He scrambled back onto the ledge, gasping for air, his dark blue eyes locked onto the thrashing monster.
The hound was blinded by its own black blood, its hollow nostrils rupturing as it dragged its face against the jagged rock face in a desperate attempt to dislodge the iron hatchet still embedded deep in its breathing cavity.
Every thrash drove the rusted metal deeper into its brain pan.
THWACK!
THWACK!
The beast’s heavy, frantic movements turned its own immense weight into its worst enemy.
On the slick, black-iced shelf, its heavy black claws lost their footing.
SLIP.
The Frost Hound’s rear legs slid off the edge of the granite shelf.
It let out a final, gurgling howl as its ten-foot frame tipped backward, its black claws wildly scraping against the slate, leaving five deep, bloody grooves in the ice before it plunged headfirst into the swirling, white abyss.
The howling wind swallowed its dying shriek a second later.
Silence returned to the high pass.
Sunny lay flat on his stomach, his chin resting against the frozen stone, staring down into the impenetrable blanket of fog where the beast had vanished.
[You have slain a Nightmare Creature: Frost Hound.]
[Your soul receives nourishment.]
[Soul Fragments +1.]
The golden runes flared briefly in his vision, then faded away into the dark.
[Soul Fragments: 2/100]
Sunny let out a long, shuddering breath, his chest rising and falling in violent, uneven heaves.
‘Two fragments,’ he thought, a dark, breathless laugh bubbling up from his throat, turning into a harsh, bloody cough that left him wiping dark phlegm from his chin.
‘Two fragments… out of a hundred.
He rolled onto his side, pressing his forehead against the freezing stone to cool the burning fever flushing through his skin.
He had no hatchet now.
It had gone down into the abyss along with the hound and his Obsidian Shard.
He had no food left; the traveler’s bread was currently powder inside a dead monster’s stomach.
His ‘Scavenger’s Carapace’ was completely shattered across the front, holding together by thin threads of dried tendon.
He was entirely, utterly weaponless.
‘Everyone is dead,’ Sunny realized, his flat, dark eyes staring into the swirling fog.
The army detachment, the noble officers, the heavy cavalry, the draft horses… all slaughtered in the initial ambush at the lower pass.
The crippled priest, his knee smashed by a wooden club, left to be torn apart in the snow.
The shifty blonde slave, his throat ripped open while screaming for help that never came.
Hero, the mighty gladiator, who thought he could outsmart the mountain by sacrificing everyone around him, ultimately crushed beneath the talons of a Camouflaged Lurker.
And the Frost Hound, a predator that had ruled these frozen peaks for years, dead at the bottom of a ravine with a cheap iron tool wedged in its nose.
Out of the hundreds of men who had marched into this frozen hell in chains or on armored warhorses, only one single, pathetic, malnourished sixteen-year-old street rat from Sector 25 was still drawing breath.
Sunny pushed himself up onto his knees, his hands trembling violently from the bitter cold.
“I’m still here,” Sunny whispered into the screaming wind, his dark voice devoid of pride, triumph, or fear.
It was simply a statement of fact.
He didn’t stand up tall.
He didn’t raise his fists to the sky or curse the dead gods who had abandoned this realm.
Instead, Sunny pulled his stolen, blood-stained wool cloak tight around his shivering shoulders, tucked his head low into his collar, and willed his shadow to lead the way through the blinding snow.
He turned his back on the ravine, stepping off the narrow shelf and resuming his slow, silent crawl deeper into the high, frozen peaks of the mountain pass.
He was cold.
He was starving.
He was completely powerless.
But as long as the shadow beside him kept moving, the roach would keep walking.