Chương 39: Calm Before the Blizzard

The morning Stelle finally left the inn, Sierra was already waiting by the door, arms crossed, an expression on her face that fell somewhere between amusement and something more sincere she clearly wasn't in the habit of showing.

"You really going to leave just like that?" Sierra shook her head, though there was no real reproach in it.

"Most people wouldn't even dare travel there."

"I'll travel with the caravan. There are many people there," Stelle said.

"And I can't afford to waste more time since I have more things to do than staying in this place."

"Efficient. Of course." Sierra huffed a quiet laugh.

"You really are an odd little thing." She reached into the pocket of her coat and withdrew a small, circular emblem—the same one pinned at her own collar, though this one was plain, unweathered, clearly never worn. She pressed it into Stelle's palm.

"Take this. If you run into any of my people up on the Ridge, show them this and tell them you're with me. They'll try to help you if you ever put yourself in danger." Stelle turned the emblem over once, studying the fine engraving.

"Why are you giving this to me?"

"Because you're annoying and persistent—asking me for gold for something so simple, and never listening when I tell you enough is enough. I'm giving this to you so at least you can avoid troubles in the future. Don't worry, I have plenty of them in my case." Sierra's eyes softened as she looked at the small girl. She knew the kid could handle herself after seeing it firsthand—and yet, an unbidden ache of worry settled heavy in her chest.

It made no sense to care this much about a child she'd only met days ago, but looking at her, Sierra didn't just see a capable survivor. She saw a girl robbed of a normal life, desperately in need of guidance and protection. She shouldn't have to carry the weight of the world just because she was strong enough to bear it.

"I really wanted to go with you, but I'm stationed here in this village, so no corruption ever touches this place." She stepped back, tucking her hands into her coat.

"Try not to die. I want to see you again here, when you're done."

"I'll remember that," Stelle said, and meant it more than the tone suggested.... The staging yard near Dorkin's northern gate was already a controlled chaos of noise and motion by the time Stelle arrived—wagons being loaded with mining tools and crates of salted meat, miners checking harnesses on the six-legged draft beasts, a handful of local guards moving through the crowd with the bored efficiency of men who had overseen this exact departure a dozen times before.

One of them peeled off toward her as she approached, his eyes tracking her small frame with open skepticism.

"You heading out with this caravan, girl?"

"Yes."

"What business do you have in that place?" He crossed his arms, waiting for an explanation.

"I have some—" Before she finished her sentence, a familiar voice rang out beside her.

"You're far from the inn, girl." Stelle turned to find Doran standing beside the lead cart, checking a harness strap. He wore the same dark, scarred iron armor, the massive broad-headed claymore strapped to his back. His cold gray eyes settled on her, unblinking, taking in her small frame and the quiet, steady hum of her core. He didn't smile. He simply looked at her with a stern, heavy stillness.

"Turn around and go back," Doran said flatly, his voice carrying the immovable weight of a Tier 3 Awakened.

"Mourning Ridge is no place for a child. You have no business up there."

"I have business at the mine camp," Stelle replied evenly, meeting his gaze without flinching.

"I am going to Ironvale Camp." Doran's jaw tightened, clearly disliking the answer, but before he could shut her down entirely, the woman beside him stepped forward. She carried a healer's satchel across her chest and adjusted its strap with a soft sigh.

"If it's just the camp, Doran, it's fine," the woman said, her voice gentler.

"There are children at Ironvale and even the foremen bring their relatives up for the season to learn a trade. It's properly guarded."

"Elsie's right," the broad-shouldered man beside her added, resting a massive hand on the head of a mace slung at his waist. He grinned down at Stelle, his wide frame casting a huge shadow over the snow.

"Don't mind the big guy here, kid. He just worries too much about things. If you're going as far as the camp, you can walk near our wagon. You're safer with us." Doran remained silent for a long moment, his cold gaze shifting from his companions back to Stelle. He didn't argue further, though the quiet disapproval never fully left his eyes. Finally, he gave the same subtle, silent motion with his chin he had used in the tavern—a simple signal that the discussion was over and she was permitted to move along.

"Stay close to the wagons," Doran growled, turning back to his harness work.

"And don't fall behind."

"I will," Stelle said. The caravan pulled out from Dorkin's gates a short while later, wheels creaking, the long line of wagons and travelers on foot stretching out behind the lead cart. Stelle walked near the middle of the procession, close enough to Doran's group to seem accounted for, far enough to keep her own thoughts to herself. Further ahead, she caught fragments of conversation drifting back from a cluster of adventurers walking the line.

"—someone saw one just outside the slope," one of them was saying, a lean man with a crossbow slung over one shoulder.

"Seems like there really is a rift in the Ridge."

"Doesn't much matter though," another cut in, older, gravel-voiced.

"Riftwalkers here for a week or two. Whole team of them. If anyone can shut it before it spreads, it's them." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"So it should be safe enough," the first man said, though something in his tone suggested he was reassuring himself as much as anyone else. Stelle filed the exchange away, cross-referencing it against everything Sierra had already told her. Traveling alone remained an option—her own pace would have outstripped this slow-moving column considerably. But the problem was that Mourning Ridge was complicated terrain to navigate alone, and the only reliable landmark along the way was the Ironvale camp.

To pinpoint Saint Lilian's resting place, she would still need considerably more information from the adventurers making this trip, and a fixed starting point to work from. So she decided the caravan was, on balance, the safer and more efficient choice. Stelle continued walking alongside the large group, toward the mountains.... Four days into the relentless climb toward the high passes, a low undercurrent of unease began working its way through the more experienced travelers.

"Should've passed a returning caravan by now," an old miner muttered around the evening fire, working a whetstone along the edge of a pick.

"Ironvale run's regular enough. Someone's always coming back down the same path."

"Avalanche, maybe," another offered.

"Held them up a few days." The old man didn't look convinced, though he didn't press the point further, chewing instead on the edge of his own unspoken worry. The silence that answered him from the road ahead the following morning did nothing to ease it.

They found the survivors by midday, stumbling down the frost-hardened road in a ragged, limping cluster—six people, three of them barely upright, all of them carrying the particular hollow-eyed look of people who had run a very long way from something they hadn't fully escaped yet. The caravan ground to a halt. Doran and Gareth were already moving forward before anyone gave the order, Elsie close behind them with her satchel already open.

"I—Ironvale… it's gone," one of the survivors managed, sinking to his knees in the snow the moment steady arms caught him.

"The camp—it's gone. Blood Tribe hit us at dawn, and something came with them. A—a massive beast! Corrupted! It's corrupted… Ron is dead. Siela—" The words rippled backward through the caravan like a physical shock.

"Don't go any further!" another survivor said, her voice raw and cracked.

"There's nothing left to resupply. Nothing left to find but bodies and monsters!" Panic surfaced fast and ugly in pockets through the crowd—miners backing toward their wagons, a few adventurers already muttering about turning back before anyone could ask them not to. Others pushed forward instead, desperate for names, for confirmation or anything. A man in his late thirties shoved through the gathering crowd, his face bone-white.

"My son," he said, gripping the nearest survivor by the shoulders hard enough to make the man wince.

"Tomas! my boy! did you see him? Please, did anyone see him?"

"I don't know," the survivor said helplessly.

"It was chaos. Everyone was running. I don't know who made it out and who didn't." Others pressed in with their own names, their own desperate questions—a sister, a partner, a longtime traveling companion, all of them scattered somewhere between here and a camp that no longer existed. The survivors had no answers to give any of them, only the same exhausted, guilty helplessness repeated over and over.

The caravan master finally called a halt to the questioning, his own face grim, and the group fractured within the hour. The miners turned their wagons back toward Dorkin without argument, taking along some adventurers who didn't want to press on any further. What remained—smaller, quieter, considerably more determined and prepared to press forward, toward whatever was left of Ironvale and whoever might still be alive inside its wreckage.

Stelle stayed by the two emptied supply wagons, watching the retreating column shrink against the horizon. The carriages still held enough blankets, water, and rations to matter, assuming any other survivors came stumbling down that frozen road. Amid the confusion, no one had paid enough attention to force her back to the village with the rest. She didn't know what kind of disaster was waiting for her or for the handful of adventurers still drawn toward the distant threat but...

she knew one thing for certain that whatever lay ahead, it was a trial she had to face. Then, with the sun climbing higher and the wreckage of Ironvale still days ahead of them, the remaining caravan gathered itself and continued on.... Deep within Mourning Ridge, far past anywhere the caravan road would ever reach, three Awakened moved as a single, lethal unit around a creature that had once, been something as simple as a large mountain bear. It bore no real resemblance to one now.

Corrupted flesh split and reformed along its back in slow, grinding pulses, dark violet veins of volatile mana pulsing visibly beneath skin stretched taut over bone that had grown wrong in at least three places. It roared, and the sound carried a second, deeper harmonic beneath it that vibrated in the soles of their boots.

"Shift!" called the leader, his voice steady, stoic, and absolute. His dark hair was cut sharp against the snowy backdrop, and his gray eyes remained dead cold, mirroring the frost around them. With a fluid, practiced motion, he unbuckled the heavy steel arming sword from his side. A sheet of dense, concentrated water coated the steel, glowing like a morning sea under the dim sky. From his flank, a flash of purple bounced through the snowdrifts.

"On it, Boss!" She was medium in height, twin tails of violet hair whipping in the freezing wind as she darted across the slippery crags with terrifying agility. A playful, mischievous grin flickered across her face despite the monstrosity towering before them. In each hand, she twirled a curved, obsidian-runed dagger, the blades humming at a sharp, low frequency. She flipped mid-air over a swipe of the bear's corrupted claws, her daggers carving two clean, smoking arcs through the monster's hide.

"Aww, did that hurt? You're way too slow for a big guy!"

"Focus, Vesper," a third voice sounded. A calm, measured, and entirely unbothered by the creature's furious thrashing. A tall man stepped forward onto a ledge above them, leaning lightly on an ornate ash-wood staff tipped with a pulsing blue crystal. He raised the catalyst with his left hand, his expression resembling a scholar reading a book rather than a warrior on a battlefield. With a soft murmur, he struck the butt of his staff against the icy rock.

An intricate circle of icy blue runes expanded beneath the beast's feet. Instantly, jagged pillars of thick, reinforced ice shot up from the snow, locking the creature's hind legs in place and pinning its arms. The monster roared in agony, but the frost held firm.

"It's all yours, Captain," the staff-bearer said softly. The black-haired man didn't waste a word. He closed the distance in a single, explosive burst, his boots leaving crushed ice in his wake. The steel sword swung in a clean, effortless horizontal arc. A brilliant crescent of pressurized mana sheared through the air, severing the corrupted beast's head cleanly from its shoulders before the echo of its roar could even die down.

The massive body collapsed into the snow with a heavy thud, its dark, tainted blood hissing as it burned into the frost. The captain flicked his wrist, clearing the dark residue off his blade before sheathing it in one smooth motion.

"Hmph." Vesper twirled her daggers, sheathing them behind her lower back with a disappointed sigh.

"That was barely a minute, Valen! You didn't even let me test my new Runed weapons on its hide."

"We are on a schedule, Vesper," the staff-bearer said, stepping down from the ledge with quiet, graceful strides as he wiped a thin layer of frost from his catalyst.

"And this is the fourth corrupted beast in two miles. The corruption is concentrating." Valen crouched down beside the steaming corpse, his gray eyes narrowing as he nudged a patch of crystallized black frost nearby with his gauntlet.

"Julian is right. We waste enough time looking for that thing." Julian knelt on the other side, extending his palm over the unnatural frost. The crystal on his staff hummed faintly as it scanned the energy signature.

"Same frequency as the previous three. Whatever is seeding this corruption, it isn't wild or random. Every trail we've mapped over the last five days runs the same rough bearing."

"So toward the center peak then?," Vesper said, her playful demeanor dimming slightly into something sharper, her eyes straying toward the towering silhouette in the distance.

"Or something already living up there is spreading the corruption," Julian finished, his voice uncharacteristically grim. Valen turned toward the high crags, his black hair catching the biting wind.

"Then we stop chasing the trace. We move directly to the center peak." The three figures then moved, vanishing toward the center of the Ridge.