Chapter 701: The End Of The Gate

"You did it! You actually killed it, a Surpasser Lesser Elf!" Nina rushed at him and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly.

Moon smiled tiredly but didn’t return the hug, his battered arms hanging at his sides.

Nina caught herself after a moment, realizing she’d probably overstepped her boundaries, and coughed as she stepped back, putting a respectful distance between them again. A faint color rose in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the cold.

"Where’s the body?" Nina asked, looking around the area. "Did you store it?"

Moon shook his head, before recalling his Beast Soul, the southern commander dispersing back into his summon pool in a shimmer of light.

"It’s over here," Moon said, nodding toward the fresh grave in the snow. "My Beast Soul decided to bury its rival, so I let it. I was going to collect it now."

Elsa frowned, studying the grave.

"Your Beast Soul is intelligent enough to carry emotions like that? Rivalry, respect, the impulse to bury an enemy? Most Beast Souls are hollow. They do what they’re ordered and nothing more. They don’t have complex feelings that allow them to do such acts of humility. I’ve never heard of one acting on something like grief."

Moon nodded. "Seems like this one’s different."

He crouched and brushed away the thin layer of snow the swordsman had piled over the archer, then stored the body in his ring. The corpse of an evolved lesser elf would be worth tens of millions to the researchers, and the Beast Soul had already gotten what it needed from the burial.

As long as Moon never told it, it would never know the grave hadn’t lasted. And in the end, that was fine. The gesture had mattered to the spirit. The body mattered to Moon. Both got what they wanted.

"We can finally go home." Marek exhaled a long, pleased breath, his shoulders sagging with relief. "I can’t wait to just relax for a few days. Once I get home, I will submerge myself in a hot bath, as far away from this freezing hell as I can get."

The others chuckled at his remark before gathering near the gate, ready to leave. They were all in high moods, nobody angry or frustrated,. The tension of surviving against the impossible odds, finally escaping their bodies.

Moon turned back toward his team before saying, "Wait, there’s something I need to check first before we leave."

The team looked at him curiously for a moment, but did not complain. Home was just a step away, they didn’t mind waiting for him, he was the reason they even made it out in the first place.

Moon walked toward the rubble of the collapsed black spire, his eyes filled with expectation. In the southern commander’s spire, beneath a hidden trapdoor, he’d found a fortune in crystals. If the northern commander kept the same kind of hoard, he wasn’t leaving without it.

If the north has the same pool the south did, that’s another hundred million or so. There’s no way I’m walking past that.

He’d never forgive himself if he missed an opportunity of that size.

He set to work clearing the rubble, using his earth element and his summoned beasts to shift the broken ice aside, which moved surprisingly easily.

Once the spire had collapsed and its heart was gone, the black ice had lost whatever strength had held it together, and it crumbled into loose fragments once force was applied. Within a few minutes, he’d cleared the debris down to the spire’s foundation.

"There it is," Moon grinned, staring at the trapdoor set into the ice a meter below his feet, identical to the one he’d found beneath the white spire.

He dropped down and gripped the seam.

"Let’s see what we’ve got."

Moon descended through the trapdoor under the watchful gaze of his team, dropping down the dark staircase with a lightning rune lit in his palm.

The chamber at the bottom held exactly what he’d hoped for. Another hoard of crystals, albeit, a little less than a hundred of them, ice-infused cores glittering in the rune’s glow, the northern commander’s own accumulated fortune stored away beneath its home just as its rival’s had been.

Moon swept through the chamber and emptied it, every crystal vanishing into his storage ring, another hundred million and more added to a haul that had already made this the most profitable gate of his life in terms of monetary value.

Unfortunately, there was no natural treasure here. He’d already taken the heart from the archer’s chest, and there was nothing else of value left in the chamber. The northern commander’s greatest treasure had ended up in Moon’s hand the same way the southern one had.

He came back up through the trapdoor a minute later, and nodded to his team.

"Let’s go."

They gathered before the gate, seven battered fighters who had walked into an impossible trial and were, somehow, walking out of it together. One by one, they stepped into the gate and vanished, leaving the frozen wasteland behind.

Behind them, the wasteland fell quiet.

The two spires that had stood as the pillars of this frozen world, black and white, were gone, reduced to scattered rubble sinking slowly beneath the endless snow. The hordes that had gathered around them were scattered and dead.

The two commanders who had ruled here, rivals bound together across a lifetime of hatred and, in the end, a strange and lonely kinship had departed. All by a stranger who had wandered into their world for an insignificant time period and unmade everything they had built.

The snow kept falling from the sky indifferent to the changes of power, drifting down over the ruins and the blood, softening it all, burying the last evidence that anything had ever lived and fought and died here.

The crimson that painted the white would fade beneath fresh layers of pale, and in time the wasteland would look as it always had, empty and silent and cold, as though no war had ever touched it.

The gate closed behind the last of them, and the frozen world was left alone with its snow, its silence, and its beasts.