Reconnaissance (3)
In a white world where everything had been erased, only the slight weight pressing down on me proved that I was still alive.
At first, I couldn’t even tell whether my eyes were open or closed.
My vision had gone completely white, and my hearing was muffled to the point that most of my senses had simply vanished.
I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. When I tried to breathe, all I got was a mouthful of freezing snow.
It was no different when I opened my mouth.
Ah. This is bad.
Bad in a lot of ways.
I’m not dead yet.
A tragic heroine who completes her story through death? That only means something when there’s an audience.
If you die buried alone in the snow, there’s a separate name for that: a frozen corpse.
Dying alone with no genre, no aesthetics, no pleasure, no reaction, no attention—nothing at all.
That was the kind of death I hated most.
So yes. I still didn’t want to die.
“Hhu….”
I tried to make a sound, but my lips and tongue wouldn’t move properly.
All I managed to do was stuff my mouth full of snow.
If I stayed like this, I’d lose body heat faster, and breathing would only get harder. That much was obvious.
So I swallowed it.
As expected, it didn’t taste like much. Just snow.
If only it had tasted like strawberry syrup, I could’ve eaten it happily. Ha. Why was I even thinking that? Had my brain already taken damage?
...D Magic first?
Before using magic, I’d promised to ask Misty Senior Sergeant for permission, but in a situation like this, communicating was as good as impossible.
How was I supposed to talk, much less get permission, when the moment I opened my mouth, snow poured in?
Married men would understand: in the end, it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
[Static]
"...Yes. I know. Forgiveness is easier than permission, but once a relationship cracks, it never truly goes back to what it was.
And besides, forgiveness only matters if the other person is alive to give it.
I slowly stirred my mana.
D Magic.
I opened the world through detection. Snow began to pour into my mind.
I had eyes everywhere.
Snow, water, shards of ice, rocks, torn tree roots, shredded cloth, metal fragments, broken rifles, and people—all filling the space around me.
One, two, three… too many. Counting them was meaningless.
There were no living people. Only things that had once been people.
There was no pulse, no breathing, no body heat that could be called a sign of life.
What about Misty Senior Sergeant? Lieutenant Mauer?
Nothing. I couldn’t sense them at all.
Neither Misty Senior Sergeant, who had rushed to hug me, nor Lieutenant Mauer, who had been watching over us from above, registered anywhere in my range.
Instead—if you could call it that—someone was on top of me.
It was a corpse in winter gear, its neck broken. The snow had blocked my sight, so I hadn’t realized it was lying on me until after I activated the spell.
Ha.
The moment the avalanche struck, Misty Senior Sergeant had been the first to throw her arms around me. But with the shock that followed, she’d been flung far away.
Lieutenant Mauer must have been the one who rescued or retrieved her.
No matter how light Misty Senior Sergeant was, I doubted she’d been blown hundreds of meters outside my detection range.
Still, back to the point.
After the avalanche, someone’s body had landed on top of me and created a small gap in a second layer of pressure.
Because of that gap, I hadn’t been crushed to death, and thanks to it I’d been able to keep breathing all this time.
I slowly narrowed the range of D Magic.
I’d roughly mapped the surroundings; now it was time to dig into my own body.
What a rare thing, being able to look inside a beautiful girl’s body….
[Static]
"Yes. It is.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little awareness that you’re something special?
Most people wouldn’t even be able to speak to a girl that pretty.
I checked the thickness of the snow, the tiny space where I could move my arms, how much oxygen remained, and the condition of my body.
My ribs weren’t broken, but my left shoulder felt wrong somehow, and my right leg was trapped between two huge rocks.
My fingers… yes. Slow, but at least they moved. That was enough for now.
The value of the merchandise hadn’t been completely ruined yet.
I didn’t like the fact that this beautiful body had been damaged, but it was still better than dying.
Damaged or not, once you die, you’re just a corpse, except for a few niche tastes.
I moved my fingers and started digging out the snow.
Because it was mixed with water, ice, and dirt, it was much harder than the snow I remembered, but I had no choice.
The first thing to go was the tip of my fingernail.
I kept digging.
The pain came late.
I kept digging.
I couldn’t make a sound.
I kept digging.
I had to conserve my breath.
I kept digging.
If I opened my mouth, snow would get in.
I clenched my teeth and kept clawing the snow away.
My nails lifted.
Something warm spread through me—blood, maybe.
Sensation began to fade from the tips of my fingers.
Snow stuck to the places where I bled, and then it froze again. My fingers were slowly stiffening.
I tried to push the corpse off me, but it didn’t budge.
Of course it didn’t. How much force could I possibly produce in a body this small?
There was no use talking to the dead, so in the end I failed to move the corpse.
I twisted my shoulder, and pain flared.
My vision went white.
Ah, it was already white.
Anyway, it got even whiter.
I grabbed the dead man’s coat hem and tried to pull, but my hand didn’t have enough strength, and I kept slipping off.
My fingers found the winter coat’s straps by touch, and I managed to draw one of them up near my mouth.
I bit down hard on it and pulled with my jaw. With my free hand, I shoved at the corpse.
It seemed to shift a little.
Maybe that was just my imagination, warped by madness. But hope appeared, however faintly.
As the corpse moved just enough to open a new space, snow poured in.
I was suffocating.
I turned my head aside and swallowed my cough. If I coughed, snow would get into my mouth, and if snow got in, I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
Again. Again. Again.
Keep going….
My nails were torn away completely.
My skin had long since split open.
Every time bone touched ice, pain shot through me.
And yet I couldn’t stop.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die.
I want to live.
I don’t want to die like this, pinned beneath an unknown corpse, in a place no one can see.
Please.
I want attention. I want to live a long time. I want people to remember my name.
Do you know that low-grade, filthy desire and the will to survive are surprisingly alike? I realized it for the first time then.
And after thousands of repetitions, at last.
The tip of my finger stabbed into empty air.
There was a void.
I shoved my hand into that tiny opening, then my elbow, then my shoulder. Little by little, I widened the gap.
My body still wouldn’t come free. My right leg was caught.
Without hesitation, I twisted my leg along with my body.
Crack.
Something snapped.
It wasn’t broken, right? Probably not. Hmm, no, I hoped not. Please.
The pain was so intense that it wrapped around into numbness. Once it crossed a certain threshold, my brain began dumping out adrenaline.
Summoning the last of my strength, I pushed myself upward.
Thunk.
With the sound of snow collapsing inward, my head burst through the surface.
Air. Air.
Damn air.
It was cold. Sharp. Every breath hurt. It felt as though my lungs were being sliced apart with knives. But it was air!
I gulped it down greedily.
“Kheuk, hihk… kuhk….”
A coughing fit erupted. Now, even if I opened my mouth, no snow came in. I was so relieved I could have cried.
Snow, spit, and blood poured out of my mouth.
Still lying face-down in the snow, I just breathed for a long time.
I was alive.
I really was alive.
I slowly lifted my head and looked around.
Flowing Snowy Mountain had stopped moving. There was no longer any current of snow and water mingling together. One of the Empire’s three wonders had come to a halt.
There was no sound.
The eastern ridge the platoon had been heading toward was buried under snow and rock, and the gentle slope had become a cliff.
We couldn’t go forward. We couldn’t go sideways. If there was any chance at all, it was….
The way we came.
I had to return to the platoon.
I had to walk back along the path swept clean by the avalanche.
I tried to stand.
My right leg wobbled. I went down on one knee at once.
Great.
My right leg seemed to be refusing to walk.
Unfortunately for it, I was the owner of this body. Even if it didn’t feel like moving, if the master ordered it, it had to obey.
[Static]
"Master?
Why would I call you that….
I opened my backpack.
My fingertips were a wreck, so even undoing the straps was hard, but biting through them with my teeth made it surprisingly manageable.
Throw out anything useless.
I tossed aside the spare cloth, utensils, mana lamp, and blanket. I decided to keep only some of the ammunition.
I needed the rifle. I needed the bullets.
It was probably unlikely that this unnatural avalanche had been a natural disaster. Flowing Snowy Mountain had suddenly stopped moving, and the entire mountain had collapsed.
This was probably the result of enemy magic, or an explosion.
...That news Lieutenant Mauer mentioned in passing. About the Federation’s new star coming to this front.
For some reason, that thought surfaced now.
I used the rifle as a cane and forced myself upright.
What remained in the pack was only a basic first-aid kit, bandages, a styptic, painkillers, dried emergency rations, and a few blue stones.
Magic stones…?
Magic stones.
I remembered the assistant instructor explaining once that they were batteries used to store and supply mana, and that they fueled mana lamps.
This world ran on mana instead of electricity.
Mana lamps, communication devices, heaters, vehicles, factories—yes! Everything ran on mana!
Then what about mages?
If a mage was a being that consumed mana—if magic was some kind of phenomenon produced through circuits—then…?
If mana were artificially supplied from outside?
“Ha… haha….”
Laughter burst out of me.
