The whole world was black.
…No.
Was it really black? It felt like something was pressing on his eyes.
Ian wiped away what had piled up on his eyelids.
-Thud.
So when he opened his eyes, it was a white snowy plain.
Endless expanses of snow greeted Ian.
“Hah…”
It was obvious who had prepared this, and what their intention was.
The vast arena where the duel took place. It was a sacrificial altar in itself.
The plan of the Grand Duke Richard Pierce, intending to devour everyone present.
Everyone had fallen for it.
“…Damn it.”
Along with frustration, curses involuntarily spilled from Ian’s mouth.
Originally, it was supposed to be the children of the Grand Duke who became sacrifices.
Herman, Yerina, Sharon.
Initially, Richard Pierce raised his children for that purpose.
The reason was obvious.
Those with Pierce bloodline all possessed exceptional talents. The efficacy as sacrifices was proportional to the talents of the subjects. As those talented children surrounded him, they were the perfect prey for Richard, the Bloodstone Cultist.
So, he thought to devour only them.
“… I got careless.”
He is a b*stard who considered raising his children to devour them.
Surely, they wouldn’t target the invited nobles.
‘Surely, there must be a reason to leave everything to the eldest son…’
It must be an attempt to cover everything up.
The dead don’t speak.
Anyway, it’s all in the past now.
Regrets can be dealt with after leaving this place.
He looked around.
Endless expanses of snow.
“How do I get out of this?”
Whether this place was actually a real world or a damn illusion was uncertain.
The only sure thing was that this place would be some form of barrier.
Among the absorption methods of the Bloodstone Cult, there were methods of trapping humans within barriers and slowly digesting them.
So, he had to find a proper escape before dying here…
“Eek!”
It was incredibly cold. Once realizing how cold it was, it felt like his whole body would freeze. Toes and fingers were already numbed as if they had been cut off.
Ian looked around.
It was a plain covered entirely with snow.
Snowflakes were falling from the sky.
And right nearby, red hair was buried in the snow.
“Lina, wake up!”
“Mmm…Ian. A bit harder.”
…What kind of dream is she’s having?
After shaking her a few more times, Lina blinked her eyes open.
And then.
“Achoo!”
She sneezed, her nose turning red.
‘Seems like she’s fine for now.’
He didn’t know about her head, but her body seemed fine for now.
Next is Danya.
“Where’s Danya?”
Ian looked around anxiously.
Danya was nowhere to be seen.
Since Lina was here, Danya must be nearby.
As Ian searched around, he noticed a tuft of cherry blossom-colored fur sticking out from a little distance away.
Without hesitation, Ian grabbed the fur.
“Hyah!”
With a strange cry, Danya was pulled out.
Plomp.
Danya, with her tail caught, looked at Ian with bewildered eyes.
“What are you doing!”
“I thought you were stuck upside down in the snow.”
“No way!”
Puff.
As Ian let go of the hand holding the tail, Danya gracefully landed on the snow.
“Hmph! How dare you treat a lady like Danya like that!”
Danya exclaimed, then dived back into the snow.
Again, with her tail and buttocks exposed, Danya swayed like a fox hunting prey buried in the snow.
For a moment.
“Found it!”
In Danya’s brightly smiling hand was a magical backpack.
“Huh? Why is that here?”
“Hmm. Hmm. The backpacker does the job properly!”
Ian remembered.
The plan was to always carrying emergency supplies because no one knew what would happen within the Pierce family.
He didn’t Danya expect to bring it all the way to the arena.
“Danya, you…”
“Yeah?”
“Are you a god by any chance?”
“Hehe.”
Moved by Ian’s sincere praise, Danya scratched her head.
“Achoo!”
Lina sneezed loudly again.
To protect against the cold with just willpower alone was, literally, an ordeal.
Danya hastily pulled out winter clothing from the backpack.
After hastily putting on the clothes, Lina and Ian finally looked relieved.
“You’re truly the best, Danya.”
“Ian’s right. You’re the best, Danya.”
Danya’s nose lifted slightly in pride.
As Ian gently stroked her head, he looked around.
“For now, it’s best to find a place to stay. It looks clear now, but who knows when it’ll snow again.”
“Snow?”
“When you woke up earlier, there was snow on your face.”
“Oh…right. Really?”
“Let’s just move.”
With that, Ian took Lina’s hand.
“?”
“!”
The two girls were taken aback for different reasons.
“Ah.”
Ian explained.
“Use fire magic to share warmth. Without physical contact, the efficiency drops.”
“Ah, right! Got it! That’s why you grabbed me, huh? What was I thinking?”
Lina’s hand, held by Ian’s, started warming up. She was probably about to use elemental magic. Danya, who had pushed her nose forward, seemed to understand the situation and grabbed Lina’s other hand.
— Wheeeeeee
Sure enough.
Just as the wind picked up, snow began to fall.
Snow accumulating in no time.
Ian constantly turned his head.
‘How do I escape from here?’
Regardless of whether this was reality or a space constructed by magic, every barrier had a release condition.
That condition would likely be the goal we needed to figure out.
Visibility blurred in the intensifying snowstorm.
“Sniff.”
Danya, walking ahead holding hands, suddenly twitched her nose.
“I smell something.”
Sniffing the air and confirming the direction of the wind, Danya pointed somewhere.
“It smells like someone… It’s not a good smell. I smell a lot of them.”
Danya looked at Ian.
Ian pondered for a moment.
Not a good smell…likely meant the other party wasn’t friendly. However, if people were gathered in this snowy wasteland, there might be some significance to it.
“Let’s go check it out.”
Finding a clue, whatever it may be, was important.
In a world full of nothing but snow, the options were not plentiful.
◆
They walked towards the smell for a while.
“Ugh.”
Danya frowned.
“A weird smell.”
In the distance, they saw the silhouettes of people.
Ian’s group observed the crowd of people from afar.
“…What’s that?”
Can those even be called people?
At first glance, they didn’t seem to be in good condition.
Most of them were skeletons wearing tattered robes adorned. Their eerie figures looked more like corpses than anything else.
Those with some flesh left had it turned black, emitting a sinister aura.
A crowd of near-dead bodies.
They stood like skeletons.
“Over there!”
At Danya’s nasal sound, they turned to the side.
Holding her nose with one hand, Danya pointed to something.
Ian followed her gaze with narrowed eyes.
Through the blizzard amidst the corpses, something vaguely rose up.
“Looks like a building.”
“Did it come from there?”
“There’s a chance they froze while heading there. The distance might be farther than expected.”
“Then all of these people…”
They must have been transformed into mummies after having most of their life force absorbed by Richard.
Ian didn’t bother to answer.
Right now, those mirages were enemies.
“Sniff. I’m used to it now.”
Danya, taking her hand off her nose, furrowed her brows.
“Shall we push through?”
“With so many enemies, it won’t be easy to deal with. But more importantly…”
“More importantly?”
“If those were swallowed by the Grand Duke of the North, they might be formidable opponents.”
The situation where the level of strength possessed by those corpses could not be estimated.
Lina and Danya’s faces turned gloomy.
It was understandable.
It was the only clue they found in this endless snowy wasteland.
More than them, the mysterious building obscured by the blizzard beyond was even more so.
After a moment of contemplation, Ian spoke up.
“Danya, can you try shooting an arrow from as far away as possible?”
Nodding her head, Danya hid in the snow and fired a magical arrow from her bow.
— Whoosh!
But the corpses easily evaded it.
“… Dodging that.”
Lina praised as she watched from the side.
Ian felt the same way.
‘It’ll be hard to catch them…Wait a moment.’
Ian’s eyes narrowed.
The reaction of the corpses was strange.
While they dodged, if they turned around and wandered around, they would just walk around aimlessly, making weird noises.
Danya, who cautiously joined in, also expressed her opinion.
“They seem to have completely lost their sight and smell.”
“That’s true, but it’s suspicious how they dodged the arrow so easily.”
Nevertheless, it meant that even those chilling corpses had weaknesses.
It seemed possible to devise a strategy.
However, amidst all this, there was a possibility that someone could get hurt.
Dodging Danya’s magic arrow wasn’t normal.
With even the corpses having the upper hand, the danger was doubled.
Ian, momentarily resting his chin in his hand, reached a conclusion.
“For now, let’s try to find another way while bypassing them.”
◆
They wandered the snowy wasteland while searching.
“Nyah!”
Grabbing Danya’s neck as she nearly fell off a cliff, Ian reached a conclusion.
That was the only passage, and everywhere else was crevasses.
To be precise, it seemed that the area crowded with corpses connected the divided plateau like a bridge.
“It makes sense.”
“Yeah, it seems likely.”
Danya and Lina also nodded in agreement with Ian’s hypothesis.
Even though it was suspicious, they had to figure out how to deal with them somehow.
So they returned to the path toward the corpses.
“Huh? What’s that?”
Danya, looking ahead, pointed at something.
“I don’t smell anything. Faint smell of someone seemingly alive?”
When they looked in the direction she pointed, something stood tall.
It was about the size of an adult man.
“Let’s go.”
Ian took the lead, followed by Lina and Danya.
Naturally, the tanker took the lead.
And when they arrived nearby, they could ascertain its identity.
“I-Is that a person?”
As Danya said, it was a person.
With thick, white thighs.
Blue hair.
Snow piled on long eyebrows.
Ian muttered as he observed the pale figure as if frozen.
“… Yerina?”
It was Yerina Pierce.
