Chapter 660: Diving Deeper

Before leaving, Kayn cut down one of the dark trees with a few clean strokes of his blades, and the team assembled the logs into a rough standing pillar, driving it upright into the frozen ground and packing snow around its base so it wouldn’t topple. It stood tall enough that the falling snow wouldn’t bury it.

The tree served as their anchor point. A fixed marker in a wasteland that erased everything else, so that no matter how far they wandered, they would always have one place they could navigate back to.

They headed north.

Five minutes in, they found the first sign of humans.

A war hammer, buried head-down in the ice, only its haft protruding from the frozen ground. A few meters further, a shield, half-swallowed by a drift, its face scored with deep gouges.

The team quickly looked around the vicinity for corpses, but found no bodies.

Moon crouched and inspected the hammer, then the shield, running his eyes over the forge marks and the construction.

"This is Association work. The forging pattern on the haft, the alloy in the shield, both match the equipment they hand out."

Nina’s expression darkened. She stared at the abandoned gear for a long moment.

"So it’s safe to say that this is the previous team’s equipment."

The group members nodded their heads in agreement with Moon and Nina.

The team grew more vigilant at once. Their hands drifted closer to weapons as their eyes swept wider across the surrounding snow.

If the previous team’s gear was scattered here, then this was the direction they had traveled after entering the gate. Which meant they were now following the exact path that had led the previous seven capable fighters to their deaths.

Moon rose from his crouch, his eyes tracking north along the faint suggestion of a route the discarded equipment implied.

"Let’s keep going," he said quietly. "But walk in formation. Whatever happened to them happened somewhere ahead of us."

They pressed north in formation, weapons ready, eyes moving across every drift, looking for any signs of danger.

Not long after, a beast appeared over a low ridge of packed snow, and it was massive.

Seven meters tall, hunched forward on four thick limbs that ended in splayed claws.

Its body was covered in a shaggy coat of frost-white fur crusted with sheets of ice hanging from its flanks like armor plates.

Its head was broad and flat, with small pale eyes set deep beneath a heavy brow, and its breath came out in the form of great clouds of freezing vapor that fell as snow the moment it left its mouth.

Moon immediately cast Eye of Truth on the beast.

[Snow Creeper]

[Details: An apex predator native to the frozen region, the Snow Creeper controls the ice element with instinctive mastery and uses the terrain itself as a weapon.

When mortally wounded, it channels every remaining scrap of its power into a final blizzard, attempting to kill everything around it as it dies.]

Moon read the information in an instant, and the last line was the one that mattered the most to him.

The rest of the team had grew cautious at the sight of the beast, because it was unfamiliar.

They were elite fighters, every one of them, and elite fighters carried knowledge of many beasts you would encounter. But none of them recognized this one. It wasn’t in any bestiary they had read or fight they’ve been in.

It was new, a creature that existed only inside this gate, and that uncertainty was more dangerous than the beast’s size.

"Listen. This is a Snow Creeper, it’s an apex ambush predator that controls the ice element and here’s the part that kills people. When it’s about to die, it dumps everything it has left into a blizzard, a suicide attack of sorts, enough to kill everyone standing near it at the same rank. We fight it normally until it’s almost done, then the second it starts to go, we retreat. All of us. Nobody stays close to finish it, it will do that by itself. Understood?"

The team absorbed the warning fast. Nobody questioned how he knew. His reputation was enough.

"Understood," Vela said, hefting her hammer with a grin on her face "I anchor. Same as before."

"Same as before," Nina confirmed.

The fight opened with Vela drawing the beast’s attention.

She charged its front and slammed her hammer into its foreleg, and the Snow Creeper turned on her with a roar that shook loose ice from its coat. Its claw came down, and she caught the blow on her guard, her boots skidding back through the snow, holding.

The team went to work immediately.

Kayn flanked and flashed at the beast’s hamstrings, forcing it to keep shifting its weight.

Elsa tried to rain ice arrows on its neck and eyes, but the Snow Creeper managed to stop them with its hands and arms.

Marek reinforced Vela’s line, helping her stop the beast’s attacks, his shield ringing under the impacts.

Theo worked the blind spots, appearing and vanishing, his daggers finding the gaps in the ice armor. Nina pressed the flank opposite Kayn, splitting the beast’s attention.

Moon supported with lightning.

The stronger the enemy, the more he contributed to the battle.

Moon’s lightning stunned the beast for fractions of a second at exactly the moments his teammates needed the openings.

Within the short span of a minute, the beast’s movements slowed considerably.

Its angry roars grew weak and ragged, no longer carrying any danger. Its natural ice armor was covered in cracks, and dark blood steamed in the snow beneath it.

It was almost done, which meant one thing.

Its remaining eye flared with a cold white light, and the temperature dropped hard. "That’s it! Retreat! Everyone back, NOW!" Moon’s voice boomed across the battlefield.

The team broke off from the engagement instantly without any hesitation.

Vela disengaged and hauled backward, Marek covering her. Kayn and Nina peeled off the flanks. Theo was already gone and so was Elsa that stood at range.