Promise (7)
We followed the remaining trail of footprints.
Not far from the bloodstains we had found, we came upon a heap of corpses.
The pure white military uniforms buried in snow looked familiar.
"Team 2."
I had already expected that Team 2 had turned on itself, but facing the bodies lying there in such a wretched state was another matter entirely.
"Insane… They really shot each other—soldiers from the same zone? No, Haydam-nim, wait a moment…!"
The instant I darted forward and began flipping the corpses to check their identities, Platon recoiled in horror and shoved me back.
"I will do it. Even for you, Haydam-nim, this is not appropriate."
Well, fair enough.
No need to put on a show of a ten-year-old child rifling through the dead.
Only after examining every body one by one did Platon rise to his feet.
Even in this cold, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.
With a breath that might have been relief or a sigh, he spoke.
"The Team 2 leader and the newly commissioned officers are not among them…"
I had assumed the Team 2 leader had orchestrated this to eliminate the new officers.
So why were these men lying dead here without Lucas or Bones?
Had some of them resisted what the leader tried to do?
While Platon was still unsettled, I checked a few of the corpses myself. Several looked as though they had been shot from behind.
Every last one of them had died with eyes wide open, as if nursing a bitter grievance.
Ah… so the Team 2 leader was dreaming of silencing every witness.
The Commander regarded the bodies with an icy gaze, then turned to us.
"We search further. Those who are missing may have fallen somewhere else."
We left the corpses where they lay and pressed deeper in.
Up ahead…
The surrounding terrain looked familiar. This was the crevasse zone we had abandoned and turned back from earlier.
I was just warning Platon when a voice reached us from ahead.
"Save… save me…!"
Someone was shouting desperately for help, the cry muffled and distant beneath the blizzard.
I stopped Platon from rushing toward it, then carefully advanced, sweeping the snow with the muzzle of my gun to avoid the crevasses. The voice grew a little clearer.
"Over here! Save me!"
The sound was coming from a crevasse crack only about a meter wide.
It was a fissure we had not seen on our earlier visit—probably buried under snow until someone walking over it had fallen through.
Looking down, I saw the Team 2 leader hanging from the crevasse wall.
"Your Excellency!!"
When we peered over the edge from above, the team leader wept with joy.
"Oh…! Thank you, God, thank you, thank you…!"
He was the only one hanging there.
I checked farther below for anyone else who might have fallen, but all I found was a jutting ledge of ice a little lower down, strewn with the firearms and combat rations the Team 2 leader had apparently dropped. There was no trace of anyone else having fallen.
The new officers fled in another direction.
I called down to the man still dangling there.
"What happened?"
"P-please, just pull me up first…"
I held back the hopelessly naive Platon, who was already moving to haul him up, and asked again toward the depths.
"I asked what happened. What about those corpses back there?"
A flash of dismay crossed the team leader's face.
He clearly had not expected us to have passed the pile of bodies.
But he was a seasoned officer; explanations poured from his mouth almost at once.
"It was the new officers! Bones and Lucas—those two staged a mutiny…!"
"You're saying two newly commissioned officers did all that?"
"Y-yes…!!"
I crouched right at the edge and asked with deliberate sarcasm.
"Then why are you hanging there?"
"W-well, while I was running…!"
"So why are you still hanging? If I'd decided to kill you, someone dangling like you would've been easy enough to knock loose and leave behind."
"Th-they didn't see me fall and just went past!"
"Is that so?"
"Yes! So Haydam-nim, please…"
I ignored his desperate pleading and went on.
"If people out to kill me were roaming around, I'd keep quiet and just hang there… yet your cries for help carried all the way from a distance."
"Th-that is…"
"Going to keep lying? Let's just be honest. Speak truthfully and I may hand you over to military law, but I won't drop you from here."
Even that reasonable offer failed to register, so I pressed harder.
"I already ran into the new officers earlier. Why else would Father and I have come all this way? We know roughly what happened, so stop spinning schemes and spit it out already."
Platon stared at me in pure shock.
It was the face of a man marveling at how someone could spit out lies without so much as a pause for breath.
Still, the claim that the Commander—who had already issued a return order—would not have come this far without some reason seemed to land with the Team 2 leader; his eyes wavered.
"No answer? We're leaving."
"Wait a moment!!"
The hanging team leader gasped for air, hesitated, then finally cracked under the strain and began to talk.
"Lieutenant General Max… ordered it…! I never wanted to do that to the new officers, but I was threatened…!"
Lieutenant General Max?
Wasn't that Bones's adoptive father?
He had threatened the Team 2 leader into trying to kill the new officers?
I glanced at the Commander.
He gave a short shake of his head, as if this was news to him as well.
I looked down again.
"You'll have to testify to that properly once you're up here."
"O-of course! So please…"
"Platon."
"I'll help."
Judging that Platon alone would struggle to haul the man up over the slippery snow, the Commander stepped in and seized one of the team leader's arms to pull him up.
That was the exact moment it happened.
—Kooong!
The ground lurched. Platon and the Commander lost their balance and let go of the Team 2 leader.
"Uwaaak!"
That much would have been manageable—except the quake did not stop there.
—Kung! Kung! Kung! Kung!
This was no ordinary earthquake.
It was the sound of something enormous moving, making the very axis of the earth shudder.
Large-class monster!
I grabbed my gun and tried to rise, but the sensation of the ground giving way raced up my spine.
Shit!
The vibrations from the large-class monster's movement had begun to collapse the edge of the crevasse.
I instinctively curled my body against the coming fall—then something shoved me hard sideways.
—Puck!
The impact sent me tumbling onto a snowdrift outside the collapsing crevasse.
"Damn it all."
The Commander, who had shoved me into the safe zone, spat a quiet curse as he plummeted downward.
"Father!"
I screamed without thinking and reached for him, but the Commander twisted his body and slipped past my hand.
He must have known that if I caught him, we would both fall.
"Crazy!!"
I frantically looked over the cliff edge.
By sheer luck, the three of them—including the Team 2 leader—had not fallen into the bottomless depths but onto a protruding glacier shelf partway down.
They stirred, then pushed themselves upright; none of them seemed badly hurt.
"Are you all right?"
When I called down, the Commander found his footing, rose, and gave me an okay sign with his fingers.
The glacier they stood on looked narrow, yet it wrapped lengthwise around the cliff face—terrain carved into a kind of stair by the recent quake shearing away ice. It did not seem ready to collapse, and I let out a breath of relief.
The problem was that the crevasse, once only a meter wide, had been gouged open on both sides into an enormous hole.
At one meter, even a failed pull might have left someone able to brace with outstretched arms against the walls. Now a single misstep meant a plunge into a sheer abyss.
Can I haul them up alone…?
I had rope.
My inventory was already stuffed with rope, firearms, everything.
Until now I had used only the issued rifle because there were eyes on me, but I also possessed guns with far greater firepower.
They were the weapons I had taken when we went to hunt the furred crocodile last time; afterward I reported them lost because of Unicorn Area players and simply kept them for myself.
I had already confirmed my body was sturdier than I thought, so drawing another gun from inventory would be fine.
Rope or not, sturdy body or not—pulling full-grown men up by myself was still impossible.
Even if I offered, the Commander and Platon would refuse without a second thought.
A place to anchor the rope would have helped, but this was a snowfield.
They knew better than anyone that no such place existed.
I'll have to find those new officers.
If I brought them back and suggested we haul everyone up together with the rope, neither man would refuse.
In the meantime, Platon and the Commander seemed to have already subdued and bound the Team 2 leader.
They could still make that call even in this situation.
No wonder he was the Commander.
I called down.
"I'll go find Lucas and Bones. With the three of us pulling, we should manage somehow."
"Will you be all right alone?"
The Commander had clearly realized the earlier quake came from a large-class monster on the move.
"If I move alone, there's no worry of being spotted."
A small child like me wearing a white military uniform and wandering a blizzard-swept snowfield was hard to pick out with the naked eye.
Besides, the reek of blood from the corpse pile we had found earlier would keep drawing aggro elsewhere.
The fact that the footsteps we had heard had already faded away only confirmed that the monster had caught the scent of blood and headed that way.
"Don't go trying to climb up. Just stay put."
I tossed the line out like a joke. The Commander gave a short snort of laughter and waved me on.
And so I left the three of them on the glacier shelf and set out to find the new officers.
My first destination was the corpse pile we had discovered only a short while ago.
If the large-class monster had truly gone that way, its next stop would almost certainly be wherever the new officers were.
When I reached the site of the bodies, I realized we were screwed.
The corpses are gone…
The bloodstains remained, but the bodies themselves had vanished. That alone confirmed the monster that caused the quake had passed through here.
And the footprints it left behind were anything but ordinary.
"What the hell is this…"
Compared to the large-class monsters we had faced that morning, these were child's play. Footprints of a size I had never seen in my life were stamped clearly into the snow.
Even the blizzard swirling across the sky was not enough to bury prints that large; the tracks stretched on, sharp and unmistakable.
They all pointed in a single direction. Whatever made them was moving with purpose.
One of them—Bones or Lucas—must be injured.
It was definitely chasing the scent of blood.
How long I ran along those footprints, I could not say.
Far ahead, through the blizzard, I spotted an enormous shape standing in the snow.
It was too vast to call a monster, yet too small to call a mountain.
At a glance it looked like a colossal hill that had decided to move.
Its pace was slow, but it was so huge that every single stride carried it farther away.
I pulled a bike from my inventory.
I had lifted it only a little while ago; I had not expected to need it this soon.
As I rode closer, the vague giant form resolved into something clear.
The moment I recognized what it was, I was more than a little shaken.
Why is that thing here?