I Opened My Eyes to a White Snowfield
I Opened My Eyes to a White Snowfield
The world was black.
...No.
Not black. It just felt like something was pressing against my eyes.
Ian brushed away whatever had settled on his eyelids.
— Plip, plop.
When I opened my eyes, a white snowfield stretched before me.
An endless sea of snow greeted Ian.
"Hah..."
It was obvious who had orchestrated this and what they intended.
That vast tournament ground where the matches had been held. The whole place was a sacrificial altar.
A scheme by the Northern Archduke, Richard Pierce, to consume everyone present.
And we all got dragged into it.
"...Damn."
The curse slipped out of Ian's mouth before he could stop it, a reflex of sheer helplessness.
Originally, the sacrifices were supposed to be the Northern Archduke's own children.
Hermann, Yergina, Sharon.
Richard Pierce raised them specifically for that purpose.
His reasoning was plain.
Those who carry the Pierce bloodline are all born with the highest talents. A sacrifice's efficacy is proportional to the talent of the offering. For Richard, a follower of the Blood Rock Sect, having such children around him meant having the best possible prey.
So I thought he would only try to swallow them up.
"...I let my guard down."
A man who breeds his own children for slaughter.
There's no way the invited nobles wouldn't become targets too.
'Could it be that the reason he entrusted everything to his eldest son was...'
He intended to pin the blame on him.
The dead can't speak, after all.
In any case, it was all in the past now.
Regret could wait until after we escaped this place.
I surveyed our surroundings.
An endless snowfield.
"How the hell do we get out of here?"
It was unclear whether this place was a real world or some damned illusion.
The only certainty was that it had taken the form of some kind of barrier.
Among the Blood Rock Sect's most potent absorption techniques were spells that corralled humans inside a barrier and then slowly digested them.
Which meant we had to find a real escape route before we died in here...
"Ah-choo!"
It was freezing. The moment I registered the cold, it felt sharp enough to flay my entire body. My fingers and toes already burned like they'd been cut.
Ian glanced around.
A plain covered entirely in snow.
Snowflakes drifted down from the sky.
Right next to him, a flash of crimson hair was half-buried in the snow.
"Rina, wake up!"
"Mm... Ian. Harder."
...I had no idea what kind of dream she was having.
After a few shakes, Rina's eyes blinked open.
Then.
"Ahh-choo!"
She sneezed right at me, her nose bright red.
'Well, she seems normal enough.'
I couldn't speak for her head, but her body was fine.
Next was Danya.
"Where's Danya?"
Ian looked around.
Danya was nowhere to be seen.
If Rina was here, Danya had to be nearby.
As he scanned the area, a small clump of cherry-blossom-colored fur poking out of a distant snowdrift caught his eye.
With no hesitation, Ian grabbed the tuft of fur and pulled.
"Hyat!"
Danya popped out with a bizarre little shriek.
Dangle-dangle.
Held up by her tail, Danya hung upside down from Ian's hand and stared at him with a look of utter disbelief.
"What are you doing!"
"You looked like you'd been planted headfirst in the snow, so I saved you."
"I was not!"
Plop.
The moment he released her tail, Danya landed on the snow with elegance.
"Hmph! Who do you think I am, the great Lady Danya!"
With that cry, Danya dove back into the snow.
Watching her rear and tail swaying in the air again was... exactly like a fox hunting prey buried under the snowfield.
After a moment.
"Found it!"
Danya beamed, holding up a magi-tech backpack.
"Huh? How is that here?"
"Hmm. Hmm. The backpack-keeper did her job properly!"
The memory came back to Ian.
The talk about how anything could happen inside the Pierce estate, so we should carry emergency supplies.
He hadn't known Danya brought it all the way to the tournament ground.
"Danya, you..."
"Hm?"
"Are you a god?"
"Heheh."
At Ian's praise, which sounded genuinely awed, Danya scratched her head with a pleased look.
"Ah-choo!"
Rina let out another huge sneeze.
Trying to fend off the cold with sheer grit was a losing battle—this was the dead of winter.
Danya hastily pulled cold-weather gear from the backpack and handed it out.
Once they had bundled up, Rina and Ian finally looked like they might survive.
"You're really the best, Danya."
"Ian's right. You're the best, Danya."
Danya's nose rose a little higher.
Ian ruffled her hair once and then glanced around.
"First, we should find someplace we can stay. It looks clear now, but we don't know when the snow might pick up again."
"Snow?"
"When I woke up, my face was covered in it."
"Ah... you're right. That did happen, didn't it?"
"Let's get moving."
As he spoke, Ian took Rina's hand.
"?"
"!"
The two girls froze for entirely different reasons.
"Ah."
Ian offered an explanation.
"Share some warmth with your fire magic. The efficiency drops if there's no contact."
"O-oh! Right! Of course! Hehe. That's why you're holding it, right? What else would I think?"
Rina's hand grew hot in his grasp. She must have activated her Spirit Magic instantly. Danya, who had been pouting, caught on to the situation and grabbed Rina's other hand.
— Whooooosh.
Just as I'd expected.
A wind picked up, and then snow began to fall.
It started piling up in an instant.
Ian kept swiveling his head.
'How do we get out of here?'
Whether this was reality or a space constructed by a spell, every barrier has a release condition.
Finding that condition was our objective.
Visibility blurred as the snowstorm intensified.
"Sniff-sniff."
Danya, walking at the front while holding their hands, suddenly twitched her nose.
"I smell something."
Her ears perked up as she checked the wind's direction, and then she pointed to one spot.
"It's a human scent... but it doesn't smell good. There seem to be a lot of them."
Danya looked at Ian.
Ian thought for a moment.
A bad smell... meant the source was likely hostile. But if people were gathered in the middle of a snowfield like this, that itself probably meant something.
"Let's go check."
Whatever it was, following the clues was what mattered.
In a world filled with nothing but snow, we didn't have many choices.
◆
They walked toward the scent for a long while.
"Ugh."
Danya's nose wrinkled.
"Strange smell."
At last, human silhouettes appeared in the distance.
Ian's group observed the crowd from afar.
"...What are those?"
Could you even call them people?
Even at a glance, their condition was dire.
They were mostly skeletons draped in tattered rags. The forms of these ghastly beings looked closer to corpses.
Those who still had flesh on their bones had turned black and discolored, radiating pure menace.
A horde of frozen corpses.
They stood there like skeletons.
"Over there!"
A nasally voice called from beside me.
Danya was pointing at something while pinching her nose with her other hand.
Ian narrowed his eyes and followed her gaze.
Beyond the horde of corpses, through the blizzard, he could see something towering faintly in the distance.
"Looks like a building."
"Did they come from there?"
"It's very likely they froze to death while heading toward it. That building might be further than it looks."
"Then all of them... were originally..."
They were probably people who'd had most of their life force absorbed by Richard, becoming mummy-like husks.
Ian didn't answer.
Right now, those mummies were the enemy.
"Sniff. I'm used to it now."
Danya pulled her hand from her nose, her brow furrowed.
"Should we try to push through?"
"The numbers are pretty high; it won't be easy to engage them all. More importantly..."
"More importantly?"
"If these are the people the Northern Archduke consumed, there's a high chance they're strong."
There was no way to gauge the combat power of those corpses.
Rina and Danya's faces fell.
It was a natural reaction.
This was the only clue they had found in this endless snowfield.
More than the corpses themselves, the mysterious building shrouded by the blizzard beyond them was even more critical.
After a moment of thought, Ian spoke up.
"Danya. Can you fire an arrow at them from as far as possible?"
Danya nodded, hid herself in the snow, and launched a mana arrow.
— Pshyooooong!
But the corpses dodged it easily.
"...They dodged that."
Rina, watching from the side, sounded genuinely impressed by the corpses.
Ian felt the same.
'They'll be tough to catch... Wait, hold on.'
Ian's eyes narrowed.
The corpses' reaction was strange.
They had dodged it, sure. But afterward they just looked around and then shuffled off, groaning "Grrr..." to themselves.
Danya carefully rejoined them and gave her assessment.
"They seem to have completely lost their sight and smell, nya."
"But the way they dodged the arrow right away bothers me."
Still, it meant these creepy corpses had a weakness.
We could probably devise a strategy.
But there was also a risk of someone getting hurt in the process. The way they dodged Danya's mana arrow was definitely not normal.
Since they outnumbered us, the danger was doubled.
Ian fell into thought for a moment, hand on his chin, and then made a decision.
"Let's look for another path while we keep our distance for now."
◆
They wandered the snowfield, searching for a long while.
"Nya!"
Ian grabbed Danya by the scruff of her neck before she could tumble over a cliff, and he reached a conclusion.
That spot was the only passage. Everything else around it was a crevasse.
To be precise, it seemed the place where the corpses had gathered served as a natural bridge connecting two halves of a divided plateau.
"That makes sense."
"Mm, it definitely looks that way, nya."
Danya and Rina both nodded at Ian's theory.
Creepy as it was, we had to find a way to clear those things.
That was the thought as we headed back toward the corpses.
"Huh? What's that?"
Danya, who was scouting ahead, pointed at something.
"There's no real smell to it, nya. Faintly... a living human smell?"
Looking where she pointed, something was sticking straight up. It was the height of a grown man, but it was impossible to tell if it was a signpost or something else.
"Let's check it out."
Ian took the lead, with Rina and Danya following.
A natural tank-at-the-front formation.
And only when we got close could we identify it.
"I-isn't that a person?"
Danya was right. It was a person.
Pale white, thick thighs.
Blue hair.
Snow piled on long eyelashes.
Ian examined the person, who was so pale she looked frozen solid, and muttered.
"...Yergina?"
It was Yergina Pierce.