Chapter 661: More Information

The seven cleared a fifty radius as the Snow Creeper reared back and unleashed everything it had.

The blizzard detonated outward from its body in a thirty-meter dome of ice. Wind tore across the wasteland at killing speed, and the air filled with a storm of razor icicles, hundreds of them, spinning outward in every direction with enough force to punch through armor.

Inside the storm blizzard, visibility dropped to nothing.

The team watched from the edge, just beyond the radius, snow lashing at their faces.

The blizzard howled for several seconds, and when it finally thinned, the Snow Creeper lay collapsed at the center of its own storm, its body riddled with its own icicles, killed as much by its final attack as by the wounds the team had dealt it.

The notification flashed across Moon’s vision.

[You have killed a Level 60 Five-Star Snow Creeper]

[You have gained 3,410 Lives]

He credited the kill, though the team had earned it together.

Vela exhaled a long plume of frozen breath and looked at Moon.

"If you hadn’t known about that last part, it would’ve gotten at least one of us. Maybe more. Good job."

Vela’s voice carried respect.

Moon said nothing for a moment, his eyes on the fallen beast half-buried in the snow.

"This place has some dangerous beasts inside of it. And this isn’t even the boss. Whatever wiped the last team is still ahead of us." He looked north, toward the unbroken white expanse. "This gate earns its mutated grade."

The team took the assessment in. If these were the ordinary residents of the gate, the boss was going to be something else.

They continued north.

The terrain didn’t change. Endless snow in every direction. Their anchor pillar had long since vanished behind them, swallowed by distance, but they held their heading and pushed forward.

Then Kayn, walking point, stopped and pointed ahead.

"Look. Isn’t that a campfire?"

Moon followed his gesture.

As they closed the distance, it resolved into a shelter, dug into a low rise in the terrain, its walls packed snow reinforced with cut logs. A cold campfire sat at its center, the ash long frozen. Massive logs had been dragged into a rough ring around the fire pit, clearly used as seating. Scattered supplies lay around the shelter, some still in packs, some spilled across the ground.

Moon and the others approached and inspected it.

There was no doubt in any of their minds. This was the previous team’s work. The construction was defensive, built when they needed to rest and regroup in hostile territory. Which meant the previous team had made it this far, had survived long enough to establish a base, to cut logs, to light a fire, to plan their next move.

And then something had happened.

This was where they had made their last stand.

"Search everything," Moon said. "Anything that can tell us what they found, where they went, what killed them. Notes, created maps, damaged gear, anything. The more we know about their last hours, the better our odds."

The team spread out through the shelter.

They worked methodically, checking through the abandoned supplies, checking the packs, examining the frozen campfire and the surrounding snow for any sign of what had transpired.

Theo examined the shelter’s construction, reading the defensive choices for clues about what the previous team had been afraid of. Marek and Vela went through the scattered gear.

It was Nina who found something.

She pulled a small object from beneath one of the log seats, half-buried where it had fallen or been dropped. Its cover stiff with frost, its pages frozen together at the edges.

She worked it open carefully, peeling the brittle pages apart.

"I’ve got something... It’s a journal. One of them was keeping notes."

The team gathered around her as she read.

Most of the entries were routine. Supply counts, watch rotations, brief logs of the beasts they had encountered.

Frost Stalkers and a Snow Creeper, which they had killed, though the entry noted two injuries from a blizzard, confirming Moon’s guess about how the beast’s death mechanic had likely caught them off guard. The notes grew more messy as they read.

The final legible entry was short.

It mentioned that the scout had spotted something to the north. The writer described it only as a spire of black ice rising from the snow, and noted that the temperature dropped the closer the scout got to it. The entry ended mid-sentence, as though the writer had been interrupted and never returned to finish it.

Nina looked up.

"That’s where it ends. They saw a black ice spire. And the cold got worse the closer they went." She closed the journal slowly. "There’s nothing after that."

Moon took the information in, his eyes drifting north once more, past the shelter, toward the horizon where the answer waited.

"Then that’s where we’re going," he said. "The black ice spire."

The team searched the shelter a while longer, turning over the last of the supplies, checking the frozen ground for anything the journal hadn’t captured. They found nothing else of use. Whatever the previous team had known, it had died with them, and the journal held the last of their words.

They continued north.

The journal had pointed the way, and they followed it, pushing deeper into the wasteland with the cold pressing harder against them the further they went.

The writer’s final entry had mentioned exactly this. The cold worsening as they approached, It wasn’t simply the environment, it was whatever waited ahead, radiating cold the way a fire radiated heat, except in reverse, a thing that pulled warmth out of the world around it.

Then they crested a long rise, and they saw it.

The spire rising from the snow in the distance, massive, a jagged column of black ice that clawed toward the ash-gray sky.

Its surface so dark it looked almost wet, veined through with deeper black fractures that glowed. The structure narrowed as it climbed, twisting as it went, until its peak ended in a cluster of broken spikes threatening the sky.

"Are you seeing this..." Theo muttered, staring at the base of the spire, where his blood nearly ran cold.

"Yes..."