‘Silence,’ Sunny thought, his boots pressing silently into the soft, untrodden drifts of snow.
‘It’s amazing how quickly a battle turns into a memory when you put fifty yards of thick fog between yourself and the dying.’
The frantic screams of the soldiers, the metallic ringing of broadswords, and the sickening crunch of bone-white chitin crushing iron breastplates had faded into a dull, muffled thrum behind him.
The howling mountain gale had reclaimed the pass, sweeping away the metallic stench of spilled blood and replacing it with the sharp, crisp bite of sub-zero wind.
Sunny paused near a narrow crevice carved into the side of a massive granite wall.
He pulled his stolen wool cloak tighter around his neck, pressing his back against the freezing stone to catch his breath.
His lungs burned.
Every inhalation felt like swallowing tiny, jagged shards of glass, and his malnourished legs trembled from the sudden surge of adrenaline that had carried him out of the camp.
‘Calm down,’ he told himself, placing a dirt-caked hand over his chest to feel the steady, rapid thudding of his heart.
‘Panic uses energy.
Energy is body heat.
Body heat is life.’
He closed his eyes for a second, letting his mind sink into the vast, dark quiet of his consciousness.
The golden runes flickered back to life, hovering in the pitch-black space behind his eyelids like embers suspended in a void.
[Name: Sunless]
[True Name: None]
[Rank: Common]
[Class: None]
[Attributes: Fated, Mark of Divinity]
[Aspect: None]
[Memories: None]
[Echoes: None]
Sunny’s gaze lingered on the last three lines.
‘Still nothing,’ he noted, a trace of cold irritation flickering through his thoughts.
‘No Aspect unlocked, no Memories, no Echoes.
Killing that low-ranking soldier gave me zero soul strength.
It seems the Spell doesn’t reward you for butchering weak, common mortals.
If I want to unlock my true power, I’ll have to kill something that actually possesses a soul core—like one of those mountain scavengers.’
He let out a short, quiet laugh that vanished into his wool collar.
‘Kill a Nightmare Creature?
In my current state?’
He opened his eyes, looking down at his thin, dirt-smeared wrists.
He was armed with a cheap, chipped shortsword and wrapped in a blood-soaked cloak, but against an eight-foot-tall monster covered in bone-hard chitin, he might as well have been wielding a toothpick.
‘Brute force is a game for fools and dead soldiers,’ Sunny reasoned, his dark blue eyes sharpening as he looked out into the pale, crawling mist.
‘Survival isn’t about who can swing a sword the hardest.
It’s about who can hide the longest, strike when the target is blind, and run before the rest of the pack realizes what happened.’
He pushed himself away from the rock face, stepping deeper into the narrow mountain pass.
The path was treacherous.
On his left, the sheer granite cliff rose up into the black sky like the wall of an ancient fortress; on his right, the ground dropped off into a vast, bottomless chasm shrouded in thick, swirling fog.
A single misstep on the icy slate would send him plummeting thousands of feet down into the dark abyss.
For a normal human, navigating this trail in the dead of night would have been absolute suicide.
But for Sunny, the dark was his greatest ally.
His shadow-enhanced vision carved through the mist effortlessly.
While the world around him was painted in pale, monochromatic shades of gray, black, and silver, every crack in the ice, every loose pebble, and every slick patch of frost was rendered with razor-sharp clarity in his mind.
Even his shadow—the dark, living silhouette tied to his feet—seemed to stretch ahead of him, creeping across the frozen ground like an advance scout, subtly warning his senses whenever the terrain became unstable.
‘It’s almost like… it enjoys this,’ Sunny thought, watching his shadow glide smoothly over a patch of treacherous black ice.
‘It’s completely at home in the dark.’
Suddenly, Sunny froze.
His shadow had halted three paces ahead, its dark form flickering violently against the snow.
A cold, instinctual spike of warning shot up Sunny’s spine.
He dropped flat onto his stomach instantly, burying his face into the wool cloak and melting into the dark shadow of a fallen boulder.
Clack.
Click.
The sound came from the trail ahead.
Sunny held his breath, his eyes narrowing into fine slits as he peered through the fog.
A shadow emerged from the mist—a massive, hunched silhouette moving with sickening, jointed grace.
It was one of the bone-white mountain scavengers.
The beast was covered in fresh streaks of dark human blood, its jagged, vertical maw still dripping with gore from the feast at the camp.
It was returning from the slaughter, carrying the severed, iron-clad leg of an officer in its mandibles like a prized bone.
‘It’s heading back to its nest or a higher lair further up the pass.’
The monster stepped slowly along the narrow path, its needle-thin limbs driving into the ice with terrifying grip.
It passed barely five feet away from the boulder where Sunny lay hidden.
Sunny didn’t move an inch.
He slowed his breathing to a shallow, silent rhythm, forcing his muscles to go entirely limp.
He willed his shadow to merge completely with the shadow of the rock, wrapping himself in a blanket of absolute obscurity.
The creature paused.
Its featureless, chitinous head tilted toward the boulder, its translucent mandibles twitching as it tasted the air.
Sssss…
A faint, wet hiss escaped its maw as a drop of acidic saliva fell onto the snow, sizzling softly against the frost.
Sunny’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird, but his face remained a mask of stone.
‘You don’t see me.
I am just a shadow.
I am part of the rock.
I am nothing.’
For three agonizing seconds, the apex predator lingered, searching for the scent of life.
Then, finding only the bitter, empty wind and the smell of ancient ice, the beast turned its featureless head back toward the trail, continuing its slow, rhythmic trek up the mountain pass until its white silhouette vanished into the dense fog.
Sunny remained flat on the ground for a full minute after the sound of its footsteps had completely disappeared.
Only when he was absolute sure the monster was gone did he let out a long, quiet exhale, his breath rising in a faint white plume against the dark.
‘That was too close,’ Sunny thought, pushing himself up onto his knees, his hands trembling slightly from the sheer tension.
‘The mountain path isn’t safe.
The survivors of the camp are dead, and now the monsters are returning to their territory.’
He looked back toward the burning ruins of the camp, then forward toward the high, monster-infested pass, and finally down into the massive, fog-choked abyss yawning to his right.
‘Going back means running into the rest of the pack,’ he analyzed, his eyes scanning the steep, icy drop-off of the cliff.
‘Going forward means walking directly into their lair.’
His gaze settled on the dark, jagged crevice cutting down into the canyon wall below.
It was a steep, dangerous descent, filled with sharp crags and hidden drops, leading straight down into the cold, unexplored depths of the abyss.
A normal person would have called it madness.
Sunny, however, pulled his shortsword tight against his back, secured his stolen wool cloak, and adjusted his grip on the icy granite edge.
‘They expect prey to run along the path,’ Sunny thought, a cold, dangerous smirk touching his lips as he swung his legs over the precipice.
‘So I’ll climb down into the dark where even they won’t look.’
Without another second of hesitation, Sunny lowered himself into the fog, disappearing into the depths of the frozen abyss.