The girl's piercing wail sliced through the roar of the blizzard, a beacon of pure terror that both men instantly registered. The mage, seasoned and cold-blooded, didn't allow the sound to break his concentration. He continued to weave his next incantation; his eyes fixed on the Frost Grizzly. The beast was a patchwork of agony; several arrows were buried deep in its hide, and a previous fire spell had left its massive torso a charred, smoking ruin. The mage knew with clinical certainty that the creature was flagging—given a few more minutes, it would be a carcass.
But do I have minutes to spare? the mage wondered, his mind a calculated blur of mana and strategy.
For the archer, however, the situation was far more visceral. Being closer to the beast's hot, rancid breath, his nerves finally frayed at the sound of his "merchandise" escaping.
"Don't you dare move, you brats!" he roared, his focus snapping away from the predator to glare at the back of the cart.
It was a fatal lapse in judgment. In the world of apex predators, a second of distraction is an invitation to die. The Frost Grizzly didn't miss its opening. With a lightning-fast surge of white fur and raw muscle, it lunged. The archer's scream was cut short as obsidian claws sank into his thigh, followed by the sickening, muffled crunch of a femur shattering under the beast's immense weight.
A guttural scream tore through the archer's throat as he collapsed, clutching his mangled leg. The Frost Grizzly, sensing blood, lunged for the kill, but a volley of flaming arrows erupted from the mage's wand, hammering into the beast's chest. The monster let out a low, pained moan and recoiled a few staggered steps.
"Move, you fool! Get back!" the mage barked, his mind racing through his depleting mana. With him crippled, the odds are shifting. I can't keep this up much longer.
With a heavy sigh of resolve, the mage's voice turned grim. "Listen! I'm going to bind the beast. When I do, you put an arrow through its skull. Don't miss."
The archer spat a mouthful of crimson, wiping away tears of sheer agony. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to stand on his shattered limb, trembling as he notched a heavy shaft.
The rain of fire subsided, leaving the grizzly scorched but far from defeated. The beast let out a violent, bone-shaking roar and charged, its massive paws thumping against the frozen earth.
The mage closed his eyes, began chanting, centring his remaining power. As the grizzly bore down on them, his eyes snapped open—glowing with a harsh, radiant light. He thrust both hands toward the sky as if wrenching something from the depths of the earth.
Suddenly, dozens of glowing golden chains erupted from beneath the snow. They lashed out like vipers, wrapping around the grizzly's limbs and throat. The beast snapped the first few with raw strength, but as the golden links multiplied, it was forced to its knees, thrashing against the magical restraint.
"Now!" the mage screamed.
"Die!" the archer grunted, his voice a rasp of agony and defiance. He released the bowstring. The arrow whistled through the freezing air, a lethal streak that struck true, piercing the Frost Grizzly's skull.
The golden chains dissolved into shimmering mist, and the massive beast slumped into the snow, its life extinguished. Exhausted, the archer fell back to his knees, but there was no time for relief. Both men snapped their heads toward the back, their hearts sinking as they looked toward the transport they were supposed to protect.
The cart was empty.
The archer's throat erupted in a volley of jagged curses, his voice scraping against the howling wind as he screamed at the empty void where the children should have been. The mage ignored the outburst, his boots crunching through the deepening drifts as he circled the cart, eyes scanning the ground with clinical intensity.
The blizzard was a relentless eraser; any footprints had already been swallowed by the white void. They're just brats, the mage reasoned, his gaze boring into the wall of trees that hemmed in the road. Their panics should've made a mistake.
The region was pinned on a narrow, elevated ridge-road that sliced through a dense, ancient forest. To either side, the land dipped into steep, shadow-choked ravines thick with gnarled roots and freezing mist. The road itself was a straight, exposed ribbon—the only way back led toward the distant safety of Buskon, while the path forward passes toward Morpine Village.
He looked back toward the path to Buskon—it was a wall of grey static, visibility murdered by the storm. With a faint, cold smirk, he stepped over to the archer, who was huddled in the red-stained snow. The mage snatched a roll of coarse bandages from the cart and flicked them at the wounded man's chest.
"Shut your mouth and bind that leg, you shithead," the mage hissed. "They couldn't have gone far in this. They're likely shivering in the brush just off the shoulder."
The archer hauled himself up with a guttural groan, his face pale from blood loss, but the makeshift first aid was enough to keep him mobile. "Don't even know why we're bothering," he grumbled, his voice a low snort.
Suddenly, his eyes narrowed. Something was glinting at the very edge of the road, a silver spark against the dull white. He leaned over, his breath hitching, and snatched a small bracelet from the slush. A slow, predatory grin split his face, stretching his lips wide as he thrust the jewellery into the frozen air.
"Let's go catch our money bags!" he barked, his eyes alight with greed.
The mage turned, his eyes locking onto the shimmering metal. A matching, twisted smile spread across his face as the hunt moved from the open road into the tangled, dark descent of the forest.
Felix's breath escaped in ragged, explosive gasps that hung in the frozen air. Beside him, the girl's weeping had dissolved into a rhythmic, hiccupping sob that had been his only companion for the last several minutes. Their small legs fought a losing battle against the deepening drifts; here, the snow was a treacherous, waist-high mire, far removed from the packed, manageable paths of the village.
Two tiny silhouettes against a wall of white, they scrambled blindly through the undergrowth. Felix led the way, his boots sinking deep with every desperate stride, while the girl's cries were ruthlessly strangled by the howling wind. A flood of panicked questions hammered at his skull: Where am I going? How long can we last? When will this forest end?
Only his borrowed maturity kept his legs moving. In any other life, he would have collapsed long ago, but the terror of the dark forest—a place of biting cold and invisible predators—acted like a lash against his back. He was running aimlessly, a rabbit lost in a labyrinth of pines. A cold, cynical thought flickered in his mind while knowing that if he were alone, he could move faster, hide easier, survive longer.
Should I have stayed on the road? he wondered, the doubt gnawing at him. He considered turning back, but the logic of a grown man reminded him that the road was where the hunters waited.
Suddenly, a long, mournful howl tore through the trees. Felix froze near a bunch of trees, his head snapping toward the sound as he searched the gray static of the storm. The girl's sobbing spiked in volume.
"No—please, stay quiet," Felix urged, his voice a frantic whisper. She couldn't understand his words over the roar of the blizzard, but the raw desperation in his eyes silenced her instantly. She watched him, her chest heaving with silent, shuddering hiccups.
Felix scanned the horizon, but there was no horizon—only the endless, suffocating repetition of black trunks and white powder. Gritting his teeth, his brow furrowed in a mask of despair, he pivoted and plunged back into the deep snow, his lungs burning with every icy breath.
The pursuit was a gruesome, desperate grind. While the kidnappers' longer strides allowed them to gain ground, their physical states were deteriorating rapidly. The mage's mana core was a hollow, scorched husk; every breath felt like inhaling ground glass, the magical depletion triggering waves of agonizing dizziness. Beside him, the archer was a walking corpse. His face had drained to a sickly, translucent parchment as blood gushed from his makeshift bandages, staining the snow a vivid, rhythmic crimson with every uneven step.
Should I just leave them? the mage wondered, the cold logic of survival tempting him to abandon the hunt. But the thought was quickly strangled by fear. If those children reached Buskon, their faces would be plastered on every bounty board in the territory. It was a simple, binary reality: find the brats or perish in the white void.
The mage tried to conjure a flicker of foxfire to pierce the gloom, but instead of flame, a spasm of jagged pain erupted in his chest. He doubled over, coughing a spray of hot, metallic-tasting blood into the snow. Wiping his mouth, he forced his leaden legs to churn again.
Their luck turned behind a massive, ancient thicket. There, partially sheltered from the wind, was a fresh trail of small, frantic divots in the powder. The blizzard hadn't yet had time to bury them. The mage's lips peeled back in a predatory smirk as he pointed out the tracks to the archer.
They surged forward in a final, agonizing sprint. Through the haze of falling white, two tiny, blurred figures finally materialized. The distance closed to forty meters, but the mage was at his limit. He vomited another mouthful of blood, the world tilting dangerously.
I... can't keep up, he silently admitted, his vision tunnelling. He leaned against a frost-slicked trunk and wheezed to his partner, "Give them the choice. Return... or end them."
The archer's haggard face twisted into a grotesque, jagged grin. He notched an arrow with trembling fingers and let out a roar that shattered the silence of the woods.
"Brats! Turn back now and live, or I'll pin you to the trees!"
For the first time, Felix sensed that there was someone in his tracks, his heart stopping as he realized the monsters had finally caught their scent.
The girl, who had only just begun to steady her breathing, erupted into a fresh, jagged wail at the sound of that ominous roar. Felix didn't look back; he didn't dare. He threw his small body forward, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. As if mocking his desperation, the blizzard began to thin, the chaotic white curtain settling into a cold, clear clarity that stripped away his only cover.
He lunged for the shadow of a massive oak, his every movement screaming his refusal to surrender. The mage's eyes went cold. "Tsk. Die, then," he hissed, dropping the hand that had been restraining the archer's bow.
With a sharp, cruel laugh, the archer released. The arrow sliced through the air, tearing a shallow but burning path through Felix's leg. A strangled cry escaped him as he stumbled, his movements turning heavy and clumsy, yet he refused to stop.
Behind him, a choked gasp followed by the heavy, muffled thud of a body hitting the powder signalled the girl had tripped on the snow. In that frantic heartbeat, the "maturity" Felix had meticulously built over years of rebirth evaporated, replaced by a jagged, primitive cowardice. He didn't turn. He didn't reach back. Even as her thin, desperate cries for her mother clawed at his spine, his legs kept churning through the drifts, abandoning her to the shadows in a blind bid for survival.
Then, the freezing air was sliced by the sudden, metallic snap of a bowstring.
The sobbing stopped instantly. The silence that followed was absolute, a suffocating void that seemed to pull the very breath from the clearing.
Felix's knees buckled under the weight of that silence. Against every survival instinct left in his adult mind, he forced his head around.
The sight was a jagged blade to his soul. The girl lay face-down and motionless in the drifts, the heavy iron-tipped shaft protruding from the back of her head, driven deep by the archer's lethal precision. A thick, dark crimson was already blooming beneath her, staining the pristine white snow like a spreading, irreversible poison. The memory of Yamato's dead, hollow stare roared back into his consciousness—a deafening internal scream that paralyzed his lungs. He collapsed into the powder, a broken shadow staring at a fresh corpse he had just abandoned.
The mage offered a curt, indifferent nod, his eyes already calculating the lost profit. Without a flicker of hesitation or remorse, the archer notched a fresh shaft. A predatory, jagged grin split his face as he levelled the iron tip at the boy who had finally run out of road, his finger beginning to slip from the string.
The arrow sliced through the air, parting the suspended snow crystals with a lethal, rhythmic hiss. It was a cruel, four-edged iron tip, stabilized by stiff fletching that spun the shaft into a blur of grey and silver. Felix didn't flinch; he met the projectile's gaze.
He made no move to dodge, no effort to scramble into the brush. How could he? The "adult" within him was screaming a truth far more painful than any wound: he had let a child die by his side. He was the one with the lived experience, the one she had relied on in the dark, and he had abandoned her to the shadows out of raw, primitive cowardice.
His heart thrashed against his ribs, a frantic, drum-like rhythm that grew louder with every inch the arrow closed. Was it the terror of his own impending death, or the crushing weight of the guilt that he hadn't saved her? He couldn't tell where the fear ended and the self-loathing began.
Felix drew one final, jagged breath of the freezing air and pulled his eyelids shut. He surrendered his weight to the snow, centring his mind and bracing for the impact, waiting for the cold iron to finally silence the internal ghost of Satoshi.
The impact never came. The arrow should have found its mark, a perfect, lethal trajectory intended to tear through Felix's skull—but the air itself seemed to hitch.
A hand, moving with impossible, fluid grace, snatched the bolt mid-flight just inches from Felix's face. Standing a mere two steps away was a figure who held the deadly projectile as if it were a common twig. Without a word or a second glance, he tossed the four-edged iron aside like trash and stepped firmly between the boy and his executioners.
Felix's eyes snapped open, trembling as he realized he was still breathing. Looming before him was a man who looked less like a survivor of the storm and more like a high-fantasy vision. He wore a sweeping, midnight-blue suit of exquisite tailoring, draped in a long, loose overcoat adorned with intricate white embroidery that shimmered even in the dim light. His hair was a cascading river of silky silver, falling in a luminous curtain all the way to his waist.
The stranger cast a brief, nonchalant glance over his shoulder at Felix. His features were sculpted and strikingly handsome, possessed of a calm that bordered on the divine. In that shattered, blood-stained clearing, Felix could grasp only one coherent thought: this man didn't belong in this gritty reality. He looked like the untouchable protagonist of a high-stakes webtoon, stepped straight out of the panels and into the freezing mud.
The silver-haired stranger turned his attention toward the two kidnappers, his gaze heavy with a crushing, clinical boredom. He raised a single arm with the fluid grace of a conductor, levelling two fingers toward the men as if pointing out a minor nuisance.
"You should not meddle—" the mage began, his voice cracking as he scrambled to process this impossible intrusion.
The sentence died in his throat.
Without warning, the mage's words were replaced by a violent, wet cough. A horrific torrent of crimson erupted from his mouth, followed instantly by thick streams of blood pouring from his nose, his ears, and the very corners of his eyes.
At the tips of the stranger's extended fingers, two marble-sized orbs of a dark, hazy energy coalesced. They shrieked through the air—not as physical projectiles, but as ghosts of pure lethality. They passed through the kidnappers' chests without so much as snagging a thread of their clothing. In the next heartbeat, both men collapsed like puppets with their strings severed, their bodies rupturing internally as every pore seemed to weep blood.
The transition from life to a grisly end happened in the time it took the mage to utter half a sentence. One moment, they were masters of the clearing; the next, they were cooling heaps of meat in the snow, silenced by a power that didn't even care to break their skin.
The stranger turned away from the fallen figures, his gaze never once flickering toward the remains. He moved with a chilling, silent grace toward the girl's still form, resting a palm briefly against her back. His face remained an unreadable mask of stone. Turning his attention to Felix, the man approached with an aura of overwhelming power that seemed to press the very air from the boy's lungs.
Terrified and confused, Felix looked up at this unstoppable force. In a desperate attempt at courtesy, he tried to whisper a word of gratitude. "Thank—"
The word was cut short. With a simple, sharp snap of his fingers, the man didn't strike, but rather commanded the boy's senses to fade. Felix's vision blurred, and he sank into the soft embrace of the snow, unconscious.
The man knelt beside him, his eyes hardening as he studied the boy's face. After a long moment of silent contemplation, he gave a dismissive shrug, letting his dark thoughts drift away into the cold air.
The blade emerged from the shadows of his cloak, glistening with a cold light before it was drawn across his palm. A dark, thick crimson began to well and spill from the deep mark, cascading down his fingers. With a firm grip, he tilted Felix's head up, pressing his cheeks to part his lips. He then held his hand aloft, allowing the steady, warm stream of blood to fall directly into the open mouth of the boy below.
The silver-haired stranger remained anchored in the snow for a full half-hour, a silent sentinel in the frozen woods. He held the boy with a steady, clinical grip, allowing the hot, rhythmic flow from his palm to drain steadily into Felix's throat.
Suddenly, the man's head snapped toward the treeline. He sensed a distant presence—the rhythmic crunch of heavy boots and the clanking of steel—approaching through the thinning storm. With a sharp, fluid motion, he laid Felix back onto the frozen ground. He drew his other palm across the deep, jagged incision he had made; as he wiped the blood away, the flesh knit itself back together instantly, leaving the skin as flawless and pale as marble.
"We shall meet soon," he murmured, his voice a low vibration that seemed to hang in the air even as he rose. A sudden, violent gust of wind howled through the clearing, kicking up a blinding swirl of white. When the powder settled a heartbeat later, the man was gone—erased as if he had never stepped foot in the forest.
Silence reclaimed the woods for fifteen agonizing minutes until the sound of desperate shouting broke the void. A vanguard of knights finally burst into the clearing.