Ice Age (3)
"Act cute. Number one."
"Stop making me do things like that!"
I looked down with a satisfied smile at the fox rolling onto its back, yapping indignantly. So once this little guy fully matures, he becomes a Fire-attribute supporter? That is what she said, right?
"Aww, good boy. What a good boy."
As the fox rolled across the snow-covered field, the drifts melted away with a soft hiss. His body temperature was steadily climbing. Even now, he felt like he was running at around seventy or eighty degrees Celsius; given time, he was going to burn like actual fire. Just how was he built on the inside to maintain that kind of internal furnace?
The sudden burst of curiosity made me stare hard at him. For some reason, he shrank back with a terrified expression, so I gathered him up in a tight hug. His fur felt wondrously soft, but an unmistakable wave of intense heat washed over me in the next heartbeat.
After holding still like that for a few minutes, the burning sensation suddenly vanished into my skin, and the snow touching my bare feet began to melt away on its own. Guess that does it. True to form, my body had diligently adapted to the stimuli, and the results spoke for themselves. I had been fretting over how to build thermal resistance, so this was a welcome relief.
"Who's my little lucky charm?"
I scooped him up beneath his forelegs and lifted him high into the air. Seemingly fond of the ride, his tail wagged back and forth. Do foxes really wag their tails when they are happy?
Watching him do that stirred up memories of Baekgu, the dog I raised as a kid. He was truly adorable. A big, sturdy Jindo dog with fur as pure and white as fresh snow, showered in love by my whole family. After my parents passed away, I tried my best to take care of him, but maybe I just was not cut out for it—he did not live very long.
Nothing about Baekgu's daily routine had actually changed. The only thing that changed was me.
From that day forward, I never once petted him or held him close. I put on the toughest front imaginable, but deep down, that part of me was completely shattered. Baekgu must have sensed it too. He must have known that the warm family who once loved him was gone forever.
Dredging up a memory tucked away for so long left a bitter taste in my mouth. My hand stopped stroking the fox. Letting out a long, slow sigh, I reached back for my gear.
"Heh. Now this is what I'm talking about."
Just looking at them made me feel full. My precious babies: a brand-new solid steel shield and a whip.
To start with the shield, it was a medium-sized barrier cast from a solid block of steel, measuring one meter wide by one and a half meters tall. The bottom tapered into a sharp wedge, meaning it could easily double as an offensive bludgeon. Then there was the whip. Tipped with an iron weight, it was reportedly braided from the hide of some ferocious beast—supposedly so durable it would never snap no matter how hard you lashed it.
Fighting those ice golems had hammered home the vital importance of reach. Losing the advantage in range made seizing the initiative an uphill battle. That was why I came up with the whip. When it comes to extended reach paired with sheer destructive force, nothing beats a whip.
Handled with proper skill, no weapon is more flawless. The trajectories it can carve and the freedom of utility it offers are practically boundless. Its lone drawback is a disadvantage at point-blank range, but that was precisely why I bought the shield to compensate. A solid steel slam to the face would pack more concussive force than a stab from most ordinary swords. All I had to do then was step back and reset the distance.
Flawless.
Add this whip to the length of my arm, and my total reach stretched to an astonishing four meters and eighty centimeters. What was more, the whip happened to be the very first man-made weapon in human history to break the sound barrier. I had no intention of relying on it as my primary armament, but as a secondary tactical option in specific engagements, it promised absurd returns.
I took a practice swing. The whip cut through the air with a faint hiss, its tip blurring into a hazy streak before a resounding crack shattered my target tree into splinters. Perfect. Keep it just like this. In theory, I was completely invincible.
"Don't you think this is a bit much?"
"You do have terrible luck."
"I mean, seriously! Does it make any damn sense for blocks of ice to shoot bows?!"
Grumbling under my breath, I raised my guard and intercepted an incoming arrow. With a sharp snap, the shaft shattered on impact, spraying hundreds of glittering ice fragments like crushed diamonds.
The golems had started bringing ranged weapons to the party. Longbows, where every single release carried lethal force. How did they even craft those things? Formed entirely of ice from limb to string, the bows clearly possessed a ridiculous amount of elasticity. It made no sense at all. They were ice. Solid ice!
Desperately weaving between arrow paths, I darted my eyes across the field. Finding an opening to break through looked bleak. The fox shadowed my movements a short distance behind. Every instinct told me to scoop him up, but I had zero breathing room in the middle of active combat. Still, he was a spiritual beast; he would manage to look after his own hide.
The whip turned out to be useless the very day I bought it. Closing the gap against this hail of arrows meant sprinting at full throttle, and accurately cracking a target while running flat out was simply beyond my current skill level. After a fleeting moment of hesitation, I shoved it back into sub-space. Now, only the shield remained in my grip.
"Come at me, you bastards!"
The golems had wised up. They maintained maximum distance and dragged out the skirmish, falling back the instant I tried to close in. Even when I managed to reach one, that lone vanguard would throw itself forward to pin my feet down while the rest scrambled back to an advantageous firing range. It felt as though the difficulty had spiked several times over. Their tactical coordination had jumped suspiciously high.
Even so, the gap in raw combat power remained obvious. As time wore on, their numbers dwindled one by one while I stayed fresh. Absorbing stats meant a proportionate recovery. Against a swarm of individually weak targets, no matter how clever their guerrilla tactics were, I was never going to lose.
"Look out...!"
Right as that thought crossed my mind, the golems began merging together. Watching them coalesce like writhing clumps of mud was genuinely repulsive. What proved truly shocking was their collective volume—there had to be thousands of them piling in.
...Okay, this is going to be rough.
Thousands of golems were terrifying enough as a horde. If that combined mass condensed into a single entity, it crossed into the realm of a walking natural disaster. Even factoring in standard losses during the fusion process, the end result would be devastating.
"It's an Ice Queen! An S-rank monster!"
"There were ranks like that around here?!"
Over Belba's panicked screech, I swallowed my disbelief and tightened my grip on the shield. The towering creature, its entire form as crystalline and translucent as an ice sculpture, glared down at me with chilling indifference. Odd. I assumed it would inherit the collective memories of its parts. Did an entity born of fusion exist entirely separate from the lives consumed to make it?
A heartbeat later, she swung her arm in my direction.
BOOM!
Blindingly fast. I braced the shield flat against my front, throwing the entirety of my body weight into absorbing the Ice Queen's strike. True to her mage-like appearance, she attacked by conjuring and launching dense artillery shells of ice. That single hit caved the steel inward and sent me rolling violently across the frozen ground.
Shit. This was ridiculous.
I scrambled to my feet and tried rolling my arm. All right, my shoulder was pulverized. A dull throb pulsed through my skull, signaling a concussion, and warm blood was already trickling down my side.
"Weakness... Does it have a weakness?!"
"This isn't the time to act tough! You have to run!"
"What are you on about?!" I snarled. "...Do I look suicidal to you? You think I actually want to fight that thing?! I can't outrun it like this! I need to force an opening first!"
I briefly contemplated drawing the whip, but unleashing a clumsy attack in this state would get me killed on the spot. Tossing the mangled shield aside, I pulled a steel spear out of sub-space and locked my stance.
"I found a weakness! To counter her, you need a high-tier fire spell of the 5th Circle or—"
"I'll just handle it myself."
"...I'm sorry."
Judging by her posture, she was the stationary artillery type, planting her feet to rain down long-range bombardment. It was unlikely she had blazing sprint speed to match. But what about her tactical intelligence? Since she was an amalgamation of countless golems, she would not be an idiot. Which meant...
CRASH!
The next instant, a chunk of ice the size of a bowling ball grazed past my ribs, carving a crater into the earth behind me. The resulting shockwave whipped my hair wildly in every direction. And yet—even at a velocity far too blistering for the naked human eye to track—I had read the trajectory and successfully dodged it.
"Ahhh..."
The Queen looked visibly taken aback. Even I had not expected to predict the attack line so cleanly. If she had retained the form of a faceless golem, I would already be dead several times over. Even with a humanoid shape, had she perceived the world through something other than eyes, that shot would have pulverized me.
Veteran goalkeepers often say that in a one-on-one shootout, you do not watch the ball—you watch the striker's eyes. Eyes never lie. Under extreme urgency, instinct takes the wheel. No matter how many feints a shooter employs, they invariably glance toward their intended target at least once right before the strike. Elite goalkeepers pick up on that gaze with pinpoint accuracy.
And just now, in that microscopic sliver of a second, I had caught the fleeting glint of clear intent in her crystalline pupils.
"Raaagh!"
Ducking beneath the shot, I lunged forward to erase the distance and drove the spear forward with everything I had.
Skrrrrt!
Screeching friction echoed out as shards of ice sprayed everywhere. The Queen let out a piercing shriek.
"From just that much...?!"
Talk about overreacting. Her torso was so ridiculously dense that even a thrust backed by my full mana reserves left nothing more than a superficial scratch. If anything, the recoil rattled my wrists far worse. Yet instead of pressing her advantage inward, she hurriedly backed away to open up space.
That single exchange produced two distinct outcomes. First, I had inflicted unilateral damage. Second, the sheer shock of taking a hit had thrown her into disarray. Oh, and there was a third.
Right now was my only chance.
"...?"
Now!
Breaking the suffocating tension, I spun on my heel and bolted at top speed. Every golem in the surrounding area had been fed into creating the Ice Queen, so there was not a single foot soldier left to block my path. Throwing all decorum out the window caught her completely off guard; by the time an attack finally chased after me, the timing was hopelessly delayed.
Hahaha! Is that the best you've got?!
No matter how fast a projectile flies, if the aim is thrown off, hitting the mark is out of the question. Hitting me while I was sprinting like Usain Bolt on steroids—running with mana flooding through my legs—was utterly beyond her.
"Just you wait! You better brace yourself next time I see you!"
"That line is so painfully clichéd!"
"Stop nitpicking and open the shop window! Potions, buy potions! Potions, now!"
I might have sounded playful, but I was deadly serious. I was genuinely hovering between life and death. Every ragged breath sent white-hot agony ripping through my chest, suggesting broken ribs, and blood was gushing freely from my nose where the blast had caught me. That was a terrifyingly close shave. If that monster had been just a little more aggressive...
"Still... I'm so glad you're alive. Truly."
After sprinting flat out for several minutes, I reached a stretch of desolate snow where nothing else stirred. This was far enough. Honestly, it was nowhere near completely safe, but my body had reached its absolute limit. My legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the snow like a puppet with its strings cut.
"...Yeah. Glad to be alive."
A blinding migraine washed my thoughts in static. My limbs trembled uncontrollably beyond my ability to steady them. Even if living meant enduring this agony at every waking turn, I had zero desire to let go. Because being alive was wonderful. No matter what happened, staying alive was the greatest thing in the world.
Whispering the words like a quiet prayer, I tipped the potion past my lips. Across the vast, virgin snowfield where no footsteps had ever trodden, my blood slowly spread, staining the white expanse a deep, crimson red.