‘Cold.
It’s always the damn cold,’ Sunny thought, grinding his teeth together until his jaw ached.
The frost was seeped so deep into his marrow that his bones felt brittle, like frozen glass ready to shatter under the slightest pressure.
Sitting on the jagged, ice-slicked rock at the edge of the camp, he watched the thick, unnatural mist climb over the rim of the precipice.
It didn’t roll in like normal mountain fog.
It crawled, sluggish and heavy, clinging to the frozen dirt like a living shroud, swallowing the black crags foot by agonizing foot.
‘This isn’t weather,’ he observed silently, his dark blue eyes tracking the subtle, unnatural ripples within the pale gloom.
‘It’s a hunting ground.’
Around him, the mountain pass was drowning in the oppressive weight of the night.
A few yards away, the calcified corpses of the slaves who had devoured the Bloodbane berries lay perfectly still.
Their gray, stone-like skin had cracked under the plummeting temperature, revealing dried, milky-white marrow beneath the surface.
They looked less like human remains and more like shattered, forgotten statues abandoned in the snow.
‘Greed.
Foolish, desperate greed,’ Sunny thought, staring at the frozen, foamy grimace on the wrestler-built man’s stony face.
‘He wanted a sweet bite of fruit to forget his misery for five seconds.
Now he’s just an ornament for the frost.
In a world this cruel, comfort is just a trap disguised as mercy.’
A violent shudder ran through the chain bound to Sunny’s left wrist.
He turned his head slightly, his vision penetrating the pitch-black gloom with effortless, night-vision clarity—a passive gift from the faint, dormant divinity lurking within his malnourished soul.
Beside him, the shifty blonde-haired slave was curled into a tight, pathetic ball, his knees pulled up to his chest, weeping in soundless terror.
Every few seconds, the man would frantically wipe at his nose, sniffling as blood dripped from his nostrils—a symptom of the biting cold and sheer exhaustion.
‘He won’t survive the night,’ Sunny calculated dispassionately.
‘His breath is shallow.
His pulse is fluttering like a trapped moth.
The second the temperature drops another degree, his heart will simply stop.
And when it does, his dead weight will tie me to this frozen dirt.’
Sunny shifted his wrist, testing the tension of the iron link between them.
‘If I have to, I’ll snap his wrist bone to slip the cuff,’ he planned, his thoughts cold, dark, and entirely devoid of hesitation.
‘It’s him or me.
It’s always been him or me.’
Further down the iron line sat the priest.
The tall, dirt-smeared man was staring blankly into the crawling fog, his lips moving in a soundless, rhythmic sequence of prayers.
‘Praying to dead gods,’ Sunny thought with a trace of bitter amusement.
‘The runes said the divine spark inside me is just an unawakened ember of a fallen power.
If the gods were real, they died long ago.
Praying to them now is like shouting into an empty grave, begging the dirt to keep you warm.’
Across the clearing, the contrast was sickening.
The soldiers and officers of the army had built a massive fire using heavy pine logs.
The flames roared, casting a harsh, orange glare over their polished cuirasses and iron helmets.
They had set up heavy wool tents to block the wind, and the rich, greasy scent of roasted mutton floated through the freezing air, tormenting the stomachs of the surviving captives.
“Pass the skin, you greedy bastard!” one of the armored guards roared, punching his comrade playfully on the shoulder.
“Screw off! Drink the melted snow if you’re thirsty!” the other laughed, taking a long, deep gulp of fermented wine, letting the dark liquid spill over his bearded chin and stain his iron collar.
The guards didn’t care about the cold.
They didn’t care about the mist.
They were armed, fed, and protected by heavy steel and ancient sigils etched into their armor.
To them, this nightmare was just another tedious patrol through the outer wilderness.
‘Fat, warm, and arrogant.
They sit there drinking wine while men freeze to death six feet away.
They think their steel makes them untouchable.
They think their rank makes them human and us cattle.’
Sunny lowered his gaze, staring at his own bruised, filthy knuckles.
‘Power.
That’s the only difference,’ he realized, the absolute truth of this dark world settling into his core like lead.
‘Without power, you’re just meat waiting for a knife.
In Sector 25, the corporations bought your life with credits.
Here, they take it with steel and chains.
But the rules never changed.
The strong eat, and the weak bleed.’
Suddenly, the wind died down.
It didn’t taper off naturally; it stopped instantly, as if a massive, unseen hand had clamped down over the mountain valley.
The quiet that followed was suffocating.
The snapping of the bonfire logs sounded unnaturally loud, ringing out like gunshot cracks in the dead silence.
Sunny’s eyes narrowed.
His shadow, clinging tightly to his skin like a second layer of clothing, suddenly twitched.
A cold sensation, entirely separate from the frost, rushed up his spine.
It was a subtle, instinctual warning—a phantom whisper echoing from the depths of his soul.
‘Something is wrong,’ Sunny thought, his posture tensing as he pressed his back harder against the stone.
‘The fog… it’s moving against the wind.’
He watched the pale, milky mist.
It had reached the perimeter of the camp, creeping over the edge of the cliff and pooling around the calcified corpses of the poisoned slaves.
Then, Sunny saw it.
Within the dense, white fog, a sound echoed.
It was faint—so soft that none of the drunk, laughing guards by the fire noticed it.
Click.
Clack.
It sounded like dry bone dragging across frozen slate.
‘What is that?’ Sunny’s heart began to hammer against his ribs, but his face remained a frozen mask of indifference.
He didn’t move a muscle.
He didn’t draw attention to himself.
He simply watched, letting his shadow-enhanced vision peer deep into the white abyss.
The fog parted slightly.
Emerging from the abyssal darkness beyond the cliff face was a silhouette.
It was massive—easily eight feet tall—hunched low to the ground on far too many jointed, needle-thin limbs.
Its body was covered in a dull, bone-white carapace that glistened with frozen moisture.
Where a head should have been, there was only a smooth, featureless plate of chitin, split down the center by a jagged, vertical maw lined with rows of translucent, needle-like fangs.
It moved without making a whisper of noise, its long, spindly legs stepping over the jagged rocks with sickening, fluid grace.
‘A Nightmare Creature,’ Sunny’s mind screamed, his blood running cold.
‘A scavenger of the fog!’
The creature didn’t head toward the loud, bright bonfire where the armored guards were drinking.
It knew better.
It paused beside the calcified corpse of the wrestler-built slave.
Sunny held his breath, his eyes wide in absolute horror and fascination.
The beast lowered its featureless head.
Its jagged maw split open with a wet, sickening CRACK.
From inside the dark cavity of its mouth, a thick, barbed tongue laced with glistening digestive acid slithered out.
It wrapped around the stone-like arm of the dead slave and squeezed.
CRUNCH!
The sound of calcified flesh and frozen bone shattering echoed through the dark corner of the cliff.
The monster devoured the frozen arm in a single, ravenous gulp, the sound of grinding stone and snapping marrow echoing softly in the night.
Beside Sunny, the shifty blonde slave opened his eyes, hearing the faint crunching sound.
He turned his head toward the fog.
His eyes landed directly on the bone-white carapace of the nightmare beast.
The blonde man’s jaw unhinged in absolute, paralyzed terror.
His lungs filled with air, his chest heaving as he prepared to let out a blood-curdling, ear-splitting scream that would shatter the silence of the camp.
‘NO, YOU IDIOT!’ Sunny’s thoughts screamed.
If that fool screamed, the monster would snap its head toward them before the guards could even draw their swords.
They were chained together.
If the blonde man died screaming, Sunny would be dragged right into the beast’s jaws alongside him!
Before the blonde slave could utter a single sound, Sunny moved.
Driven by pure, predatory survival instinct, Sunny reached out with his free hand, his filthy, ice-cold fingers wrapping around the blonde slave’s throat with brutal, suffocating force.
He slammed the man’s head down into the snow, digging his thumb directly into the slave’s windpipe, choking off the scream before it could clear his teeth.
“Mmmnph! GGMMFF!” the blonde slave thrashing wildly beneath him, his eyes bulging in horror as he stared up at Sunny.
Sunny leaned down, his face inches from the terrified man’s ear.
His dark blue eyes were void of any humanity, cold and sharp as polished obsidian.
“Make one sound,” Sunny whispered, his voice a low, terrifying rasp that dripped with lethal promise, “and I will tear your throat out with my teeth before that thing even touches us. Shut up and don’t breathe.”
The blonde slave froze, looking into Sunny’s eyes.
In that moment, the man realized something horrifying: the starving sixteen-year-old boy pinned on top of him was far more dangerous, far more vicious, than any monster lurking in the dark.
The blonde man nodded frantically, tears streaming down his face as he clamped his own hands over his mouth, holding his breath until his lungs burned.
Sunny slowly withdrew his hand, turning his gaze back toward the fog.
The bone-white creature paused, its featureless head tilting toward their direction.
A drop of acidic saliva dripped from its maw, sizzling as it hit the frozen snow.
For three agonizing seconds, the beast remained motionless, sensing the air for the slightest vibration of life.
Sunny didn’t blink.
He didn’t move.
He willed his shadow to wrap around him, merging his presence into the deep darkness of the boulder behind him.
The beast found nothing.
It turned its attention back to the stone corpse, its jagged jaws crushing the dead man’s ribs with a sickening, wet crunch.
Sunny watched the monster feed, his heart beating a slow, rhythmic drum of dark anticipation.
‘Eat,’ Sunny thought, a cold, twisted grin forming in the shadows of his mind.
‘Eat your fill, monster.
Feast on the dead… because when you’re done with them, you’re going to turn your eyes toward the warm, fat guards by the fire.’
Sunny tightened his grip on his iron chains, his mind calculating every variable, every shadow, every drop of blood that was about to spill.
‘Let the bloodbath begin.’