Five minutes later, all three warriors formed a perfectly silent line behind the mage who was supposed to go last.
“Don’t worry. We will jump out whenever we see a monster too close by.” White Light glared at the seventh hole that they had casually walked past thanks to Ice leading. He had heard rumors of the mage’s high luck stat, but he had never thought it would include this. “How are you walking past all holes? Does this even make sense, stat-wise? How can a game luck stat affect this?”
Ice continued looking forward and thought about it for a moment. “You can see the holes if you watch out. They open up even if you don’t step into them.”
The warrior looked past Ice and on the ground. A bit farther away, the snow crumbled away to reveal a gap that could be easily avoided.
“Stupid luck stat”, Bloody whispered under his breath. “If it wasn’t one fixed account, I’d have restarted right after seeing it. How is it that you can’t increase it at all…”
Unnecessary to say that this phenomenon did not happen while any of them were walking on their own.
“What are the enemies we have to watch out for in the next ring?”, Ice asked White Light, who quickly gave the info his people had gathered.
“Harpies. Flying, humanoid bird monsters with terrible voices. My guys said they didn’t even hear them coming and they move in groups of two to four. Their wings are sensitive, but they are quick – it will be hard to get a hit in.”
“They’ve thrown level 100 flying monsters into here?! How are you supposed to bridge the gap between 85 and 100? Grinding? That would take forever. Or are they expecting us to kill common mobs in huge groups?”
“People have started complaining about that already.” Knightrider interrupted their musing with some surprising news. “According to Lusanna Corp, the players are supposed to not get impatient. A way would open up soon.”
“Why do I have the strong feeling that this is connected to our quest? Maybe something will happen in a month, no matter if we fail to get there or not…”
“Although a lot of things are planned by the AI, the developers should still be able to set a certain route. For example, this mountain had to be opened somehow, no matter who the crown prince is and the like. This could be a fixed event.”
The Ice Emperor listened in on their discussion but did not participate. He walked while switching between staring at the ground and at the sky. A lantern or something similar would have been nice, but it would also have attracted every monster within range.
“Look at this”, he whispered after what felt like and endless amount of time. He slowed and pointed at shadows in the sky, then towards the side where the mountain ridge grew higher. “Are these caves?”
“It… looks like it.” Bloody squinted into the direction. “Though it might be too much to call it a cave. It looks quite shallow, but you might be able to sneak by the monsters if you use those… Are the things up there the harpies?”
Without talking about it, the three warriors circled around Ice and hid him in their midst. Everyone lowered their bodies and moved to stand close to a larger stone. The mage pressed air out between his lips, trying to calm his quickly beating heart and focusing on every single shadow.
“Can’t see shit”, Bloody cursed. “There are… three?”
“Looks like it. Which one of us has the best agility? Ice?”
“No.” The mage quickly shot it down. He might be an elf, but his agility was bad.
“Me”, Bloody responded instead. He already knew what Knightrider wanted. The beastman pulled his hood over his dark hair and crouched even lowered. On all fours he inched out from behind the stone, keeping an eye on the sky as he made his way towards one of the depressions.
Ice opened his chat immediately. He watched Bloody reach one of the caves, stop, and finally a message reached him.
“It’s shallow but it works. There’s a ledge here that you can crawl under… But it really would be crawling on your stomach. You can progress quite a bit from there on. I’ll try it first, you three stay where you are. If I die, wait for a while before you try it again.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Bloodless Sunset vanished from their sight. A harpy screeched once for no reason, drawing a large circle. You could hear the flapping of its huge wings and, when the moon hit it right, see a weirdly twisted face. Its mouth was bulging out like a beak, the eyes more at the side than it would be if it was a human.
In the silence, Ice remembered a statement that one of the designers had made once: As long as he worked on the humanoid monsters, there’d never be a pretty one. Wouldn’t it be a shame if he created little beauties only for them to be cruelly torn apart?
With that as his reasoning, harpies were truly ugly creatures. Ice stared at them – level 101, another level 101, and a level 102. Common monsters, titled Angry Harpy.
They looked angry, alright.
After the fights they had already gone through, Bloody’s health was down to half. He hadn’t taken a potion yet, for a very good reason; if the harpies found him, there wouldn’t be a lot of leeway for him to struggle.
Minutes passed.
Sitting in the snow without moving was bound to lower your body temperature again. Before, they had relied on daytime and their hunts to gain additional warmth, but both of it was missing now.
Ice rubbed over his arms. He could feel the cold seep in, but it was mostly acceptable. The additional ice resistance he got through his title was very helpful. Compared to him, White Light and Knightrider were beginning to shiver.
White Light puffed out a little cloud of air and rubbed his gloved hands together. “Those potions will be very helpful indeed… It’s too damn cold. It doesn’t get that cold in the city, I’m not used to it…”
“It’s an experience”, Ice agreed. He poked a finger into the snow.
Because his parents were rich and liked travelling, he had visited all kinds of places during his school vacations. That included snowy mountains. It wasn’t too weird for him, but many players were stuck in their country and the cities, where snow wouldn’t fall. It was simply too warm.
Ultimately though, even those vacations couldn’t compare to wandering around a completely empty mountain. Where he had been were ski resorts – filled with high-class appliances and tourism spots. Not the endless wilderness of this place.
The silence shattered when the harpies began to screech. Ice whipped his head around, only in time to see the beasts fold their wings together and plummet down like arrows. Only in the last moment did they open their wings to slow their fall. The sound of fighting could be heard, echoing off the walls to their side.
Seconds passed.
Ice opened his chat system again and stared at the sobbing wolfman chibi.
“Eeeeh… So much for that… It’s manageable if you don’t try to hurry like I did, but it’s really fucking cold. You can crawl pretty far. If you watch your timing, I think you can get past them. Not sure how it looks after that. Are you three gonna try it as well?”
“Bloody asks if we will try going the same path. He said it’s probably possible to get through.”
“I would like to try. If this is the path we will go, we will have to do it sooner or later anyway. This is a world quest – dying for it once or twice is acceptable.” The redness around White Light’s eyes and the pain glittering inside them spoke another language. Ice could understand him. For a competitive player, losing experience was a pain.
Still, the objective truth was that participating in a world quest was worth it. The connections he’d make would be helpful in the long run, and Haven was far from being done with content.
Before White Light could step out, Knightrider bypassed him. White Light’s lips twitched but he didn’t call out. Instead he waited for Knightrider to reach the cave and whispered something to Ice instead. “Wait a moment before you come out after me. If the harpies notice us, don’t walk into your death but teleport back to the city.”
The Ice Emperor opened his mouth to retort. He was used to fighting and exploring alone. He was patient and willing to find ways to bypass troublesome monsters.
In the end, he didn’t say anything. White Light wasn’t being condescending with his words. Mages usually weren’t suited for travelling alone. Ice might be doing it, but that didn’t change the fact that he was more effective with a close-combat fighter like Bloody at his side.
White Light crawled forward.
Ice sat alone, watching his own breath in the darkness. How lonely it suddenly felt.
When he judged enough time to have passed, he made his way over to the little cave. Bloody hadn’t exaggerated when he had said the gap under the ledge was tight, though. Ice felt himself tense the moment his torso was pressed into the snow and under the mountain. It was dark, tight and cold. There was no end in sight at all.
He could tell he was slowly beginning to freak out a bit. Nervous, he kept one hand in the open space, repeating the same thought over and over again.
Open space was just a bit to the side. He could move out at any time, even though the space there was just flat without any place to hide and the harpies would see him immediately. It was possible, at the very least.
Ice breathed slowly, ignoring the biting cold. He had to move like a lizard, shuffling his arms forward and dragging himself across the frozen snow. Whenever he lifted his torso a bit off the ground to move, he could feel his back brushing against the stone above him.
“I hate this”, Ice mumbled to himself. He was quite slender and already thought it was tight, how had the two warriors in their armor moved through here? How was he going to get a dwarf through this?
He got the answer when he reached the next cave where he could finally stand up.
White Light was shivering badly but trying to smile nonchalantly. His cash shop clothes were gone, probably retrieved into his inventory, and the same went for his thick breastplate.
Many rankers kept one or two slots open permanently in case they had to hide an item all of a sudden, and White Light had used that to lower the amount of clothes he was wearing. Even then he was a broad man and would be one, no matter what he was wearing.
However, clothes weren’t just clothes in Haven. Armor, leather and everything could keep you warm, so White Light – dressed in nothing but a thin shirt and loose pants now – was already turning blue.
“Good thing my armor is a set”, he said without a lot of humor in his voice as he lowered himself back onto the ground for the next area. “It only needs one slot.”
“Are you alright?”, Ice asked with a frown.
“No”, White Light said with a too cheerful voice, his teeth hitting against each other. His figure soon vanished in the darkness of the gap, but Ice heard the other’s shuffling and suddenly thought that it wasn’t too bad after all.
They got until the end of the path. Both warriors had put their armor back on, but their lips were blue and their fingers unhealthily red.
“There are more places to hide starting from over there”, White Light said in record speed. “We can probably continue running from stone to stone and- Okay, no, wild boss, I’m going, bye!”
He pulled out a cash teleport scroll without further ado and used it. Knightrider did the same. Not only were they about to freeze, Ice could also see the wild boss in the distance. It was a lizard big enough that he’d debate calling it a small, wingless dragon, and it was approaching their direction.
Ice winced and also tore a scroll apart.
The temperature difference between both places was kindly alleviated, otherwise they’d be in serious pain from the sudden warmth on their frozen bodies. Ice still shuddered once, his body shaking before he could settle into the only slightly chilly weather of a rainy day in the capital.
White Light and Knightrider next to him looked a tiny bit dead. Their eyes were blank, they didn’t move. The warmth had to be enjoyed with all senses.
“It really is fucking cold, isn’t it”, Bloody laughed. Ice looked at the approaching beastman, who must have been near the teleport point to see if they’d return on their own. He raised a fist and Ice bumped against it with his own. “How was it?”
“Tight”, Ice summarized.
“We need different clothes or a lot of potions”, White Light said in a surprisingly serious voice for someone who had looked like a broken doll a moment ago. “We have no way of warming up near a fire when surrounded by enemies and armor is too thick for the gap. Blackstone won’t be able to follow and we will all need at least one slot for our weapons.”
“One way or another, we will have to find a way to store out things near the start of the path. Maybe one of our guilds can sponsor a group that will watch over it. I think we will have to switch all of our equipment completely.”
Bloody agreed with the two of them. “No food or drink. Warm clothes, basic armor and weapons. We won’t have space to prepare for a lot of things. It’s a bit dangerous for players to walk around like that… I’ll talk to my friends. I know them in reality, they won’t betray us for sure.”
“What are their levels?”
“Levels between 68 and 72, six guys. Small enough as a party to not stand out. I’ll ask them to keep their inventory slots open so that they can keep our stuff, Ice. Whatever you need.” The beastman smiled at the Ice Emperor, who nodded thankfully.
White Light’s and Knightrider’s eyes turned wide. “…What?”
Bloody’s right ear twitched, but he didn’t respond to their surprise.
If Ice changed his equipment to increase cold resistance and the like, he’d have to leave behind his usual things. That included some very expensive accessories and potions.
Players didn’t give their expensive stuff to other players’ guildmates just like that. The thought was ridiculous from anyone’s view. It only worked because it was the Ice Emperor and Bloodless Sunset.
The Ice Emperor was a person with no attachment to his ranking or equipment – staff excluded. If he lost it, he’d get new ones.
Bloodless Sunset knew his friends of course, and he trusted them. They were childhood friends even, knew each other for over a decade. There was no envy and no greed between them.
Now, Bloodless Sunset and the Ice Emperor?
No one knew why those two trusted each other so much, but there was a reason they were famous as partners.
The wolfman was sensitive enough to those stares, but he had explained the situation often enough. Even his friends were regularly questioning the situation. But the truth was, they couldn’t really explain it. They got along, that was it. Sometimes, friends were like that. Two people who were as close as if they knew each other for much longer. These kinds of friendships existed.
For one reason or another, Knightrider suddenly turned a bit grumpy listening to them converse about which items to take along and what to leave with Bloody’s friends.
Little Theater
Bloody: spreading his arms “I’m cold! I need a hug!”
Ice: hugs
White Light: “Look, Bloody. I always knew you were a dog.”
White Light: “But that doesn’t mean you can scatter dogfood everywhere.”
Oho, that place sounds tough. A nightmare for people who fear such places/situations :’D And Knightrider… could you please just kindly fuck off? :3
Thx for the ch (ㅅ˘ㅂ˘)
thanks for the chapter <3
Thank you for the chapter 🥰
I love how everyone crowded behind Ice for his luck stat XD
also, sobbing wolfman chibi!!! 🥺🥺🥺
and the little theater…omg HAHAHA