The First Snow of the Northern Empire
The First Snow of the Northern Empire
Aslan surveyed the encampment where frost had settled like a burial shroud.
A camp that had held thousands. Just yesterday the air had thrummed with the clamor of warriors.
Now it was silent. Still as a corpse. Not a whisper stirred.
Death had come to rest here, heavy and deep.
A pale, bone-chilling death.
The camp was nearly half-consumed by rime, frozen solid where it stood, and everyone who had been sleeping within it had frozen with it. No exceptions.
Save for the monsterized warriors who had gained regeneration.
Even they had only barely survived, amputating frozen limbs or searing themselves with fire. A wretched existence. But it was better than being dead.
The casualties had fallen heaviest among the common soldiers.
"C-cold... h-hurgh, h-heugh."
A soldier lay on the ground, gasping, dragging shallow breaths. Aslan's gaze drifted past him, catching on a scattering of corpses, and he bit his lip.
The scene was monstrous.
Half of thousands. The death toll would still measure in four digits.
With so many bodies strewn about, death itself lost any sense of distinction. It felt common. Ordinary. Something to kick aside while walking.
Aslan took in the devastation with a bleak expression, then something crossed his mind. He turned and ran.
He sprinted across frozen ground and reached a tent—the one Tiyamal and Richard shared.
When he threw back the tent flap and stepped inside, the breath left him in relief.
"You made it."
Tiyamal had not frozen to death.
"Ah, Aslan. Come in, quickly."
Ereta was right beside him, radiating heat—a searing warmth that pushed back the cold. Only then did Aslan notice the others behind her.
They greeted him easily.
"Aslan, is the Northern Empire always like this?"
"Obviously not. This is the work of a priest."
Richard and Angie. Both unharmed.
Seeing his companions whole and intact, Aslan felt a relief so sharp it burned behind his eyes.
Tiyamal observed this, scraped his tail idly against the floor, and grinned.
"What, you came running because you were worried?"
"Do you give people reasons not to worry? Damn it."
Tiyamal let out his usual rasping laugh at Aslan's curse. He rubbed his chin, wearing an easy smile—then his gaze caught the view through the still-open tent flap and his expression froze.
"...What in the hell."
Corpses beyond counting lay out there.
Cold radiated from those bodies.
Richard scowled with naked discomfort at the white-bloomed death spreading across the camp. Angie crossed her arms, her face tight with what might have been fury. Ereta looked largely unmoved, though she kept stealing sidelong glances at Aslan, clearly aware that he was not pleased.
And Ereta's assessment was correct. Aslan's expression was grim.
He stood with his eyes downcast, face hollow with dismay. Then he lifted his head.
"Ereta."
"Yes."
"What happened here? Did the Veil of Compassion manifest or something?"
He was searching for the cause of this mass death, and the question carried the implicit assumption that a fellow former priest would know.
Regrettably, Ereta did not know much.
But one thing she could state with certainty.
"No. If the Veil of Compassion were spreading death here, nothing short of Mother's true body would stand against it."
She murmured the words while toying with the symbol resting above her ample chest. She elaborated.
"The Fire-weaving Spider—Mother's flame is the fire of resurrection that burns the universe and remakes it. That is why it can oppose the death the Veil of Compassion sows. But the flame I carry is only a remnant. Not nearly enough to face the Veil."
"Which means."
"Yes. This is magical cold."
Magical cold.
The clarity of those words, the evidence before his eyes, darkened Aslan's expression. He bit his lip.
As if on cue, a system window flickered in the corner of his vision, almost mocking.
[Ongoing Sub-Quests]
[ ! Exterminate the Priest of the Self-Birthing Mother, Astrid the Wailing]
[ ! Exterminate the Priest of the Self-Birthing Mother, Monster of Kravrig]
[ ! Exterminate the Priest of the Self-Birthing Mother, Knight of Lelanda]
Astrid the Wailing.
Aslan clenched his jaw, let out a breath, and turned away.
"I'm going out to assess the situation. Everyone gather your weapons and equipment. Be ready to move at any moment."
His voice was so level it barely registered any sorrow.
The flatness itself was heartbreaking. Angie stepped forward without thinking.
"I'll come with you. I can—"
"No. Don't help me. Prepare. I'm not about to run off somewhere alone. So don't worry."
He had struck exactly at her unspoken thought. Even Angie could only close her mouth and hesitate.
In that moment of hesitation, Aslan walked outside. Angie watched his back with a pained expression.
Beyond the tent, white death had been scattered like fine dust.
As his boots crunched across frost-encrusted ground, the scale of the killing grew sharper in his eyes.
Dead soldiers.
They had died without any sign of resistance.
That was only natural—even Aslan had not noticed it happening.
He looked down at one of the bodies.
Frozen solid, the skin had gone brittle and cracked, exposing flesh without spilling a drop of blood. The flesh had turned a blue so pale it was nearly white, less like human tissue and more like the bark of an ancient tree after a night of heavy snow. The corpse lay pitifully where it had fallen. Eyes still open. The lenses had shattered from the cold.
Around this body, countless soldiers lay dead where they had huddled around campfires. The sight pressed pain into Aslan.
Pain born from memory.
Astrid the Wailing was a master of the Manifestation School.
A mage who had reached a certain realm.
And mages who reached such realms always imprinted their magic with something of themselves.
As Anton's signature had been efficiency fused with combat, as Anna's had been sacrificing mana efficiency for raw destructive power—Astrid's signature was environmental manipulation through emotion and mana.
The Northern Empire, where death was commonplace.
She had been the Imperial Mage who presided over its funerals.
That was Astrid.
Her duty had been to place coffins on sleds, seal them with magic, and push them out into the faraway worlds where traces of the Ancient Empire still lingered. Her role was to freeze the coffins with mana that held some resistance to the Barrier and send them drifting as deep as possible into those distant realms.
Aslan remembered.
The woman who wept quietly whenever she undertook her duties.
The snow that fell from the sky like her tears.
He remembered.
When she wept, the world wailed with her.
Her dominion was limited to moisture and freezing, but as a Manifestation mage she stood above even Anna.
People called her Astrid the Wailing.
And this time, true to its name, the world had wailed. Had given birth to multitudes of white deaths and delivered them into the world.
Aslan laid a hand on a frozen corpse and ground his teeth with a grief-stricken face.
Astrid.
He lifted his head and rose, walking onward.
The farther he went, the worse the frozen devastation became. Some sections of the camp had simply shattered from the cold.
As he walked, understanding settled in.
Every one of these soldiers had died as if falling asleep, without a single attempt to resist.
And the freezing had not been instantaneous.
Looking at the frost and rime creeping up the tent canvas, at the dead campfires buried under ash, Aslan realized: Astrid had lowered the temperature gradually. Slowly enough to kill them all.
The metaphor of a frog in slowly heated water—it would not notice until it boiled to death.
In reality, a frog would jump out. But sleeping humans, especially Northern Empire natives accustomed to cold, would not.
"Sven! Sven, you fucking...!"
"Aagh, my leg! My leg!"
"I can't... I can't see... ngh..."
The results were unambiguous.
Many were now crippled. Those who were not could no longer fight at full capacity.
Some had lost friends. Some had lost family.
Aslan passed a soldier weeping over a dead relative with a raw, broken grief, and his fists clenched.
Yes, this was war.
People died in war. That was a given.
Every stolen life was precious and tragic.
But.
Aslan's mood curdled into something foul.
This did not feel like death on a battlefield. It felt like a slaughterhouse.
Astrid. This is your magic?
He swallowed the unanswerable question and raised his head, turning as a prickling intuition guided him.
His Luck was reacting.
A heavy thrumming in his skull, warning of danger. A sensation like a bird trying to burrow into his brain.
He followed its echo toward a distant sound, picking his way through corpses slaughtered by frost and cold, heading for the forwardmost line of the camp where the damage was worst.
"You worthless bastard! If you'd just done your damned job, this wouldn't have happened!"
"It—it wasn't me! I'm telling you! I tended the fire properly!"
A cluster of warriors had surrounded a man and were berating him.
Probably the fire keeper—an important post in the Northern Empire.
They seemed to believe his negligence had killed everyone.
They could not even imagine this was magic. They only blamed the fire keeper. Aslan approached slowly.
"Fine. If you can't even manage a goddamn fire and you won't own your mistake, then I'll just—!"
A warrior finally lost patience, drawing an axe and raising it to strike. Aslan reached out and snatched the axe mid-swing.
The blade rang against a black hand.
The warrior who had been about to swing flinched and turned his head to look at Aslan. Fear flooded his eyes in an instant.
"Advisor..."
The fear was swallowed just as quickly by rage.
"Stay out of this, Advisor! Our comrades would want this useless pig dead!"
He bared his teeth and snarled. Other warriors reached for their belts in agreement.
Aslan looked at them and shook his head, expressionless.
"The fire keeper isn't incompetent. This was caused by magic."
Magic. At the sudden word, the warrior's face flickered with confusion. Aslan exhaled a short breath.
"Can't you hear it?"
The warriors fell silent.
The silence stretched. Then, faces going pale, they whispered it.
"Oh, fuck."
...dudududu...
A sound like hoofbeats from afar. As the warriors recoiled, Aslan shouted immediately.
"Rally the remaining soldiers and prepare for battle! Get the wounded to the rear. Bring anything that can burn, anything that can block an advance—move!"
"You heard the Advisor, you miserable fucks! Move!"
Warriors scattered at a sprint, cursing, tearing down tents and hauling out the wooden frames to throw into a barricade.
Aslan stood at the center of the chaos and stared out at the frozen horizon.
And he thought.
The magic that had frozen half the common soldiers to death was not the decisive blow.
It was only the beginning.
The spell's true purpose was to paralyze the army. To break it.
It was nothing more than preparation. The softening before the charge.
...dudududududu!
The hoofbeats drew closer. Aslan raised his eyes to the horizon and watched the dark shapes take form.
Banners held high. Dragon banners.
Habrisg's army.
Monstrous mounts—a vile patchwork of moose, horse, wolf, bird, lion, bear, leopard, every beast jumbled together.
Cavalry riding these abominations.
They came clutching axes, swords, javelins, closing in on the camp.
At the front of the dark mass rode knights who could only be priests.
They wore unmistakable bestial signs on their bodies, poorly concealed beneath armor plate. Their mounts resembled dragons.
They looked like stitched-together beasts, but they resembled dragons.
Shoddy, repulsive things... yet the effort to recreate something was unmistakable.
A great legacy of the Ancient Empire, resurrected by the power of evil gods.
Dragon dragoons.
DUDUDUDUDUDU!
The dragoons charged. Aslan gripped the Beast at his back. Soldiers who had barely pulled themselves together took one look at the oncoming riders and fled in terror.
Among the soldiers scattering before the dragoons, only Aslan did not run. He drew his sword.
Grruungg...
The greatsword sang as it left its sheath.
The moment its blade emerged, gleaming with a chilling blue-black light.
CLANNNNNG!
Aslan met the dragoons head-on.
*
DUDUDUDUDUDU!
The pounding hooves of war mooses running wild.
Rumel and Fay stood amid the encircling cavalry, their expressions sour.
They had reason to be.
The moose they had ridden in on had its head taken off by a javelin. The mooses circling them, by contrast, were perfectly intact—not a scratch.
But this was not mere jealousy over mounts.
This was the realization that escape had become impossible.
Fay alone might manage it. Rumel could not flee with her.
The mooses stamped and snarled, penning in the woman and the elf girl in a tightening circle.
So Rumel swiftly abandoned any thought of flight and lifted her gaze past the cordon to the figures watching from beyond.
A heavyset, hirsute middle-aged warrior. A fine-featured, delicate-looking young man.
The moment their eyes met, Rumel knew.
"Who are you?"
They were the priests Aslan had warned her about.