The crunching of bone was a slow, methodical melody in the dark.
‘The guards won’t hear it,’ Sunny realized, his breath suspended in his chest as he pressed his spine against the sharp frost of the rock face.
‘The roaring bonfire, the clattering of wooden flagons, the howling gale dragging across the eastern ridge—it swallowed the sound of that thing tearing into stone-flesh whole.
To those fat bastards by the fire, the night is still just cold and quiet.’
His dark blue eyes remained locked on the white, armored abomination feast-bound in the mist.
The passive blessing of his divinity—the strange, subtle shadow-sight—carved through the swirling fog like a razor.
Where any normal human would see an impenetrable wall of white, Sunny saw every jointed limb, every serrated plate of chitin, and the thick, milky acid dripping from its maw, sizzling silently as it hit the frozen turf.
‘It isn’t a Scavenger,’ he corrected himself, refining his mental assessment with razor-sharp precision.
‘A Scavenger wouldn’t linger on a dry, stone-hard corpse when warm, living meat is sitting fifty paces away.
It’s testing the perimeter.
It’s an ambush predator, gathering the scent of the camp.’
Beside him, the shifty blonde slave was hyperventilating through his nose, his entire body quivering so violently that the links of iron between their wrists threatened to rattle.
‘If he makes a noise, we die,’ Sunny thought, his shadow creeping closely over his skin, dampening his thermal presence against the biting wind.
‘No… worse than that.
If he panics and bolts, he drags me straight out into the open.
These shackles aren’t just binding my hands; they’re anchoring me to a corpse in the making.’
Sunny tilted his head, his cold gaze shifting down to the iron cuff biting into his left wrist.
The skin underneath was raw, bruised, and smeared with dark, dried blood from their long march through the mountain pass.
‘There is no key,’ he observed.
‘The guards carry the master ring on a iron hoop, tucked beneath three layers of boiled leather and steel plate.
I can’t steal it.
I can’t break the iron.
My physical strength right now is laughable—just a starving street rat from Sector 25 trapped in a malnourished vessel.’
His eyes flicked back to the monster.
‘So I need the monster to break the chain for me.’
It was a insane, suicidal thought, but in the dark, twisted arithmetic of Sunny’s mind, sanity was a luxury reserved for those who weren’t bound in rags.
Across the camp, the senior officer let out a boisterous laugh, throwing an empty wooden mug into the snow.
“Bring more ale from the supply wagon! And tell the night watch to stay awake! We cross the high pass at dawn, and I want no slacking!”
“Sir, yes, sir!” a younger guard barked, unbuckling his broad belt as he stepped away from the fire ring, wandering casually toward the dark perimeter to relieve himself.
Sunny watched the soldier approach.
The guard was careless, his heavy iron boots crunching loudly over the frozen soil, his hand resting lazily on the hilt of his unsheathed shortsword.
He was heading straight toward the edge of the cliff—straight toward the crawling white fog.
‘He doesn’t see it,’ Sunny analyzed, a dark satisfaction blooming in his chest.
‘The firelight ruined his night vision.
To him, the edge of the camp is just black space.
The young soldier stopped barely ten paces from where the bone-white creature was crouched over the crushed remains of the slave.
The guard whistled a dull, tuneless melody as he unfastened his trousers, completely oblivious to the pair of translucent, needle-like mandibles flexing in the darkness right before him.
‘Three seconds,’ Sunny counted silently, his pulse dropping into a eerily calm, rhythmic beat.
‘Two seconds.’
The fog parted without a sound.
The bone-white monster didn’t roar.
It didn’t screech.
It simply lunged forward with terrifying, blinding velocity, its needle-thin limbs driving into the snow like iron pikes.
CLANG!
The initial strike hit the guard squarely in the chest.
The heavy steel of his cuirass caved inward with a sickening, metallic crunch, the impact snapping his ribs instantly and driving the breath out of his lungs in a red mist.
Before the soldier could even scream, the creature’s jagged, vertical maw clamped down over his helmet.
CRUNCH!
The sound of iron crumpling mixed with the wet, explosive shattering of human bone echoed across the quiet clearing.
The guard’s body went instantly limp, his legs twitching once before the creature dragged him backward into the dense, suffocating fog, leaving only a dark, jagged trail of crimson blood smeared across the white snow.
For a second, the camp remained dead silent.
The tune the soldier had been whistling seemed to hang in the freezing air like a phantom ghost.
Then, the senior officer turned his head toward the dark perimeter, his brow furrowed.
“Hey! What’s taking you so long out there?!”
No answer came from the white abyss.
‘Here it comes,’ Sunny thought, his dark blue eyes flashing with cold, predatory delight.
‘The curtain rises.’
“Halt! Who goes there?!” another watchman shouted, drawing his blade as he took three cautious steps toward the blood-stained snow.
He lowered his torch, the flickering yellow light cutting through the pale mist—revealing the shattered, headless torso of his comrade being dragged beneath the crags.
“MONSTER! NIGHTMARE CREATURE!” the watchman shrieked at the top of his lungs, his voice cracking in sheer, unadulterated terror.
“TO ARMS! TO AR—”
Before he could finish his call, a second bone-white silhouette burst from the fog.
‘Not one,’ Sunny corrected himself, his eyes widening slightly as his shadow twitched violently against his skin.
‘A pack.
It was never a lone scavenger… it’s an entire hunting swarm!’
The second creature slammed into the watchman, its razor-sharp chitin limbs impaling the man straight through his throat and chest, lifting his heavy, steel-clad body off the ground like a ragdoll before slamming him into the central bonfire.
THWACK!
BANGBANG!
Sparks erupted into the night sky like a fountain of orange fire. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The burning pine logs scattered across the clearing, sending hot embers flying into the wind and plunging the entire camp into chaotic, flickering shadow.
“Draw your steel! Form a wall! Protect the commander!” the senior officer bellowed, his voice filled with fury as he unsheathed a heavy, broad-bladed longsword that gleamed with faint, runic light.
Chaos erupted in an instant.
Armored soldiers screamed as silhouettes of white chitin and razor mandibles leaped out from the dark, tearing through leather, flesh, and plate with terrifying ease.
The horses reared in panic, snapping their tether lines and trampling through the supply tents, their high-pitched screams ringing out over the roaring wind.
The surviving slaves screamed in utter despair, thrashing against their iron chains like trapped cattle as the chaos washed over them.
“Help us! Gods preserve us! Undo the locks!” the priest screamed, dropping to his knees and slamming his bound hands against the frozen dirt, his calm demeanor entirely shattered by the sight of blood spraying across the snow.
Beside Sunny, the blonde man lost his mind completely.
“WE’RE GOING TO DIE! WE’RE GOING TO BE EATEN ALIVE!” he shrieked, scrambling backward on all fours, dragging the iron chain violently to the right.
“Shut up, you fool!” Sunny growled, his voice buried under the deafening sound of battle, swords clashing against chitin, and human intestines spilling onto the frost.
Sunny didn’t run away from the fight.
He did the exact opposite.
Crouching low to the ground, his eyes mapping out every shadow, every swinging blade, and every lunging monster with unnatural clarity, Sunny dragged his iron chain straight toward the center of the slaughter.
‘Panic is death,’ Sunny reminded himself, his mind icy, calculating, and detached.
‘The guards are focused on the swarm in front of them.
The monsters are focused on the largest concentrations of meat.
The edges of the battlefield are where the scraps fall.’
A low-ranking soldier came stumbling backward out of the smoke, his arm severed at the elbow, blood gushing in thick, dark spurts over his chainmail.
“Get away from me!” the guard screamed blindly, swinging his shortsword in wild, frantic arcs.
‘An opening,’ Sunny instantly realized.
The soldier stumbled right past Sunny’s boulder, his heels catching on a frozen root.
He crashed face-first into the snow, dropping his sword into the dirt mere inches from Sunny’s bare feet.
Sunny didn’t hesitate.
He lunged forward like a striking viper, his filthy, frostbitten fingers wrapping around the hilt of the steel shortsword.
The metal was freezing cold, heavy, and awkward in his malnourished grip, but to Sunny, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever held.
“Hey! That’s mine, you slave trash—” the dying soldier gasped, turning his pale face up from the dirt.
Sunny didn’t offer a single word of reply.
With a dark, cold expression, he raised the shortsword and drove the blade straight down through the soldier’s exposed neck, pinning the man’s throat to the frozen earth.
Blood squirted over Sunny’s hands, warm and metallic against his freezing skin.
[You have slain a human soldier: Level – Common.]
[Your soul receives no nourishment from mortal flesh.]
The golden runes flickered briefly across his vision, but Sunny ignored them entirely.
He wrenched the blade free, rolled onto his back, and placed the heavy iron chain connecting his wrist to the dead blonde slave across the sharp edge of an armored soldier’s fallen shield.
‘Now,’ Sunny thought, raising the sword high above his head with both hands, his dark blue eyes reflecting the burning embers falling from the sky.
‘Break!’
He brought the heavy steel blade down with all the strength left in his malnourished frame.
CLANG!