Free Web NovelChapter 111: The Things Beneath the Snow
Embedded in what had once been a wall, the instructor of Selena’s expedition group slowly returned to consciousness.
He, along with the rest of the group, had fallen into that crack, and from that moment on, everything had gone dark.
The cold reached him first.
It seeped into his body before his mind had finished waking up, pulling him back into awareness through sheer discomfort. He didn’t move immediately. He remained still for a few seconds, letting his senses return one at a time, first the cold, the most immediate thing, then the silence, and finally the awareness that he was in a rather uncomfortable position.
’What happened?’ he thought as his slightly blurred vision gradually focused on his surroundings.
The first thing he saw was white. All white.
’This... is it snowing?’
He couldn’t understand how that was possible.
It was the middle of summer.
There was no way it should be snowing.
His body was stiff and aching, but he pulled himself free from the wall he was embedded in and, with some effort, finally managed to extract himself completely.
Only then did he get a better look at his surroundings.
In fact, the place where he had awakened was far from being a forest.
It looked like a city.
He stood in the middle of what appeared to be a wide street, flanked by structures unlike anything he had ever seen in his life.
Massive vertical buildings, their sides completely covered in windows.
Hundreds of windows, some intact, others reduced to empty frames with jagged edges. Their facades were crossed by deep cracks, corners had crumbled away, and the material they were built from was unlike stone, unlike wood, unlike anything familiar.
Everything was covered in snow.
Not the light snow of a recent fall, but old, compacted snow that looked as though it had been there for years. It filled broken doorways, covered shattered windowsills, and buried countless objects beneath its endless white blanket,
And then there was the other detail about this place. The most unsettling one.
There was no one.
No sound. No movement. No trace of life beyond his own.
"Am I still dreaming? What kind of place is this?" he muttered, unable to make sense of where he was or why he was here.
Then he remembered the students in his care, and immediately looked around. If he was here, they might be too.
After all, they had fallen into that crack together.
His gaze quickly swept the ground and soon found Percival and Lirien nearby, both still unconscious.
He approached them and quickly checked their vital signs.
Their breathing was steady.
There were no visible injuries.
Seeing that, he let out a sigh of relief.
’At least they’re alive,’ he thought, though he also noted that both of them, like him, had their bodies in a noticeably weakened state. More importantly, there were faint, strange traces of ice that had formed at several points on their skin.
As if sensing his gaze, both of them began to stir.
Percival moved first, letting out a muffled sound as he opened his eyes and immediately tensed against the cold.
"What—" he started.
"Easy," the instructor said, keeping his voice low. "Get up slowly. No unnecessary noise."
The tone was enough. Percival closed his mouth and pulled himself upright, looking around with an expression caught somewhere between confusion and unease. Lirien woke shortly after, in silence, and her reaction was to stare at the road for a few seconds before standing without a word.
Under normal circumstances, their subdued behavior would have seemed out of character, especially for those two. But given their current condition, the fact that they managed to get up at all was already something.
It was clear that, just like him, their bodies were severely weakened.
"Where are we?" Percival asked quietly, his eyes moving across the structures around them.
"I don’t know," the instructor replied, and the fact that he said it without hesitation seemed to disturb Percival more than any other answer could have.
Lirien was looking upward, along the flank of one of the buildings. "These buildings... I’ve never seen anything like them. How tall are they?"
The instructor didn’t answer. He had been thinking the same thing.
The buildings stretched toward the sky to a height that surpassed anything he had ever seen, and the way they were arranged, dense and parallel, with that wide road running between them and disappearing into the snowstorm in both directions, suggested a level of urban planning that was new to him.
He had seen something approaching this only in large cities like the royal capital, but even there, nothing came close to this kind of layout or these kinds of structures.
That said, he didn’t dwell on the matter for long,
"Check the immediate area," he said. "See if the other three are nearby."
Lirien and Percival, still confused and tired, nodded without argument and looked around.
Unfortunately, they found nothing.
The instructor had already scanned the area himself, yet he found no trace of them either.
The realization left him somewhat worried.
’Let’s just hope they’re alive,’ he thought.
Those three were the strongest students in the group, so he still had some confidence in their ability to survive.
Just then, he felt a faint prickling sensation across his skin and noticed the strange frost from earlier forming on his body once again.
It was the same frost that had appeared on Percival and Lirien.
’Strange. This shouldn’t be possible.’
At his rank, resistance to extreme temperatures was well above average, more than enough to spend time outdoors without protection and feel nothing worse than mild discomfort. And yet here he was, not just feeling the cold, but watching his own body begin to ice over.
This snow wasn’t normal.
He immediately circulated mana through his body, generating heat from within. The frost began to recede almost at once, dissolving into faint wisps of steam that curled off his skin.
’Much better.’
He turned to warn Percival and Lirien to do the same.
He didn’t get the chance.
Something stopped him, not a sound, not a visible movement, Just a sudden, overwhelming sense of danger.
He didnt stop think what it was and simply threw himself sideways in an instant.
The ground where he had been standing erupted upward.
A hand burst through the snow, large, clawed, fingers too long, closing around nothing where he had been a fraction of a second before. An arm followed. Then shoulders. Then the rest.
The creature that straightened up before him stood nearly five meters tall.
Humanoid in shape, Its body was grotesquely overbuilt, its muscles swollen beyond any natural proportion. Snow-white skin covered its frame, giving it the appearance of something that only vaguely resembled a human.
It had no eyes, only smooth blank surfaces where they should have been. Its mouth was a jagged line, and two massive horns curved outward from the sides of its head like those of a bull.
The instructor immediately expanded his mana sense.
He felt nothing.
The creature was right there, visible, real, it had shaken the ground just by pulling itself out of the snow, and yet his sense didn’t register it at all.
No mana signature. No energy presence. Nothing at all.
’What in the world is this thing?’
He could already tell at a glance that it was dangerous. Very dangerous. He had the distinct feeling that if he had been caught in that grip, he would not have gotten back out.
Before he could begin to process what he was looking at, he felt the ground beneath him vibrate faintly.
Then another one appeared.
And another.
From the corner of the road, from beneath the snow, from cracks in the ground, different shapes, different sizes. Some as tall as the first, others leaner, others smaller but no less unsettling.
All of them with that same total absence of any perceivable presence. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
He couldn’t assess their strength. He couldn’t read them at all. The only thing his instincts, honed through decades of life-and-death battles, were telling him was that if he stayed here even a few seconds longer, he would die.
He wasted no more time.
Without hesitation, he turned and shot away at full speed.
Within moments, he reached the location where the other two were.
He found Lirien first, then Percival a short distance away, and the moment he saw them, his eyes widened. Percival, who had apparently used his mana to warm himself, was completely unaware of the large, clawed hand emerging from the wall of a nearby building directly behind him.
"Watch out—"
Before either Percival or Lirien could even register his presence, the instructor arrived beside them at incredible speed.
He grabbed both of them by the collars and immediately launched himself forward.
The creatures that had gathered behind them watched with unnatural calm for exactly one second, as though weighing their prey, and then, without hesitation, every single one of them gave chase.
