Winter (1)
The Floating Island drifted quietly across the sea, utterly unconcerned that the living things upon it would soon have to endure a harsh winter.
It simply followed the waves in silence, riding the current that stretched toward a vast continent of snow and ice.
After the first snowflake fell, the island's weather changed in an instant.
As if the fact that it had been a place overflowing with life and lush green foliage had been nothing but a lie, the island was blanketed in pure white snow and fell into a deep sleep.
"……."
On the morning that marked one full month since winter's sudden arrival, Monia stepped out into the yard, lightly exercising to wake her sleeping body.
"Hoo!"
After stretching and loosening up, she let out a breath, and a thick plume of white mist poured from her lips.
"Ooooh."
Watching the vapor billow out as strongly as a dragon's breath, Monia laughed and rubbed her cheeks, which had gone red from the cold.
"Mmm. It's cold."
What Monia wore on her feet were a sailor's boots salvaged from the ship. Shoes made of wood and cord could never keep out the cold, so she had modified the boots to protect her feet from frostbite.
The modification was nothing more than lining the oversized boots with leather to make them a little warmer, but even that was enough to keep her toes from freezing and falling off.
Crunching through the clean snow that had fallen overnight and piled up again despite yesterday's hard work clearing it, she walked toward somewhere—and there stood Chester, finished with his morning exercise, sweating even in this freezing weather as he stood in the snowfield.
Once he had become able to put the ore to other uses, Chester had pondered what to make and settled on exercise equipment.
In the gaps between improving the house, the storeroom, the chicken coop, and everything else for winter, whenever he had a spare moment he melted down ore and forged training gear.
Black Wind, who had come by with his girlfriend, had no concept of exercise or training whatsoever, and no matter how carefully Chester explained it, he simply could not understand.
Even among the People of the Summit there existed the idea of challenging a stronger warrior in order to become stronger yourself—but that was about as far as it went.
In truth, Chester himself had never been one for deliberate training.
Living in the wild, he had always believed that once you could move your body freely, anything beyond that was unnecessary.
It was only because he moved so violently and did such rough work so often that his body had been forged without him meaning for it to be.
But now Chester wanted strength beyond what mere survival required. Strength to protect.
The one fortunate thing was that his senses had grown sharper than before.
The lines of light that had awakened inside him when he rose to fight Rotin—ordinarily invisible, yet the moment Chester pushed every sense to the point where the world itself felt dull and distant, those luminous threads would once again settle across his retinas.
Using those lines of light, he could handle his body far more efficiently, faster and stronger than usual.
Even if his muscles grew beyond what they were now, so long as he trained enough to wield the lines of light freely, maintaining peak performance would be no problem.
Besides, in winter the work shrank to almost nothing. There was no hunting to do outside, no exploring the surroundings—simply spending time at home was the sum of what could be done.
So Chester chose to treat the season as an opportunity, a period for tempering both body and senses.
His goals for this winter were to build muscle—and to reach a state where, whenever he wished, in any situation, he could see the lines of light at will.
At present he still had to push his senses to their limit just to grasp those lines, and because of that they remained unstable, unable to hold for long.
Trying to summon, in perfect health, an awakening that had first arisen with one foot across the border between life and death—of course it would be difficult.
The sweat running down Chester's body was robbed of its heat by the frigid air in moments, turning into crystals of ice. Heat drained from his body as well, and a bone-deep cold seeped all the way into the depths of his heart.
Feeling a dreadful chill as if the goddess of winter herself had breathed directly into his heart, Chester calmly raised his senses, and gradually a hazy line of light began to appear in his eyes.
While he endured the cold and repeated the training to awaken those lines again and again, snow once more began to fall from the sky.
"……Snow."
Seeing it, Chester stopped training and headed for the nearby campfire.
He lit the fire at once, set water to boil, and let the heat thaw his frozen body for a while. When the water seemed hot enough, he ladled out a generous amount, let it cool to lukewarm, and poured it over himself.
"Hooo. Cold."
After slowly thawing his whole body with the lukewarm water, he warmed himself by the fire again until he was dry, and only then put his clothes back on.
"Achoo."
At the sound of a sneeze behind him he turned—and there was Monia, who had been quietly watching everything he did, unable to bear the cold any longer.
"Monia. You could have said something when you got here."
"No. You looked like you were concentrating."
Rubbing her nose, which had gone bright red and numb, Monia looked at Chester in his butler's uniform, sailors' gloves, and boots, and smiled.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just—hehe."
The elegant butler's uniform paired with those shabby gloves and boots, Chester standing there in that odd getup against the backdrop of beautiful nature—it struck her as strangely funny.
"Let's just eat breakfast. I'm hungry."
"Yeah. What was today's ration again?"
"Two pieces of meat. One potato. One spoonful of preserved fruit."
In winter there was no way to resupply food, so their provisions naturally grew tight. The storehouse was still packed with the preserved food they had worked so hard to stockpile, but that did not mean they could eat through it freely.
"Then how about just one piece of meat for breakfast? We tough it out with half a potato at lunch, and eat a little more lavishly at dinner."
"Sounds good. Let's do that."
Back at the house, the two of them warmed themselves briefly by the fire and then set about preparing the meal.
"Ant! Ant! Time to come out. We're going inside!"
When Chester called toward the outdoors, Ant burst up out of the snowfield in the yard where it had been burrowing around.
Chester tossed a large pot with a rope tied to it down toward Ant, and Ant hopped right into it.
While Chester hauled Ant up, Monia went down to the storeroom and shivered hard.
"Ugh. There's no fire down here, so it's even colder than upstairs."
She gathered one piece of meat each for herself, Chester, and Ant, and when she came back up, Ant—still covered in snow from playing under the snowfield moments before—launched itself at her.
"Kyaa?! Look at you—Mommy's cold!"
Before Ant could rub itself all over Monia, Chester caught it by the scruff of the neck, held it out the window, and briskly shook the snow from its fur.
— Kiiing. Kiiiiiing.
Dangling outside the window, Ant trembled with anxiety, but Chester ignored it and kept brushing off the snow.
"There, just a little longer."
Once the snow was gone, Chester brought Ant back inside, and Ant immediately burrowed between the legs of Chester, who had sat down cross-legged, rubbing its body against him as if pleading not to be thrown away.
Watching Ant, Monia used a knife to slice the rock-hard frozen meat thin and put a piece in her mouth.
"This one's the salted kind."
When they smoked meat they made all sorts of varieties—plain smoked, salted, peppered, or both salt and pepper together.
The peppered ones at least had black flecks you could recognize, but salt-smoked meat was almost impossible to tell apart by sight.
Chester took the smoked meat Monia handed him, cut it with his knife, and chewed.
Ant, too, stuffed the ice-hard meat into its mouth and crunched away as if gnawing on bone.
After breakfast, Chester scooped a bowlful of grain from the storeroom and headed for the chicken coop.
From inside the coop, which they had covered in several layers of cloth for protection against the cold, came the busy sounds of chickens moving about.
When Chester lifted part of the cloth, cold air and light spilled into the coop, and the startled chickens screeched and flapped their wings furiously.
"Eat up."
He poured the grain into the feed trough and watched the hens and the chicks—now a little bigger—crowd together pecking at the feed. Then he lowered the cloth again and tied the rope tight so the wind would not tear it free.
Good thing we stockpiled so much grain. At least I don't have to worry about feed for the chickens.
While he was thinking that, Monia came over with a pot of warm tea and peered at the coop.
"Did you feed them?"
"Yeah."
"I want to see the chickens."
"You do?"
Chester untied the rope he had just fastened and pulled the cloth all the way back.
The two of them watched the chickens wandering and clucking inside the coop, leisurely savoring their tea in the winter cold.
The tea was something Monia had blended by feel from various plants she had gathered on the Floating Island.
"Mm. It's good."
"Hehe. This mix turned out pretty well, right?"
"Yeah. I think it's the best one yet."
Just as they were finishing their tea, Chester felt the wind pick up. He sent Monia inside, covered the chicken coop again, and carefully retied every rope.
"The wind's getting rough again."
The clear sky from moments before was gone; black storm clouds swallowed the heavens in an instant.
The once-gentle sound of the wind turned harsh and ominous, and a freezing, razor-sharp gale began to howl.
"Monia! Close all the windows!"
"Okay!"
It was one peaceful hour in the long winter that had settled over the Floating Island.