Chương 41: A Trail of Frozen Tears

The frost salamanders broke from the treeline in a loose, hissing pack before Stelle had finished her third pulse of the morning. [Echo-Mapping: active.] [4 signatures detected. Bearing: northeast, 50 meters. Closing.] [Current reserves: 90%]"Four incoming, northeast!" Stelle called, her voice cutting cleanly through the wind.

"Tier 2's. Spread wide—they're circling to flank." Doran didn't waste breath acknowledging her. He simply pivoted, his blade already trailing its faint, water-slicked sheen, and planted himself directly in the salamanders' widest approach angle.

"Gareth, anchor left! Enrik, high ground! Marlon, cover the gap between us! Bren, Sable, watch the rear line!" Nine people scattered into their practiced positions, the formation tightening into something considerably harder to break through than four scattered fighters ever could have managed. Enrik—lean, weathered, scrambled up a fallen trunk without argument, nocking an arrow before his boots had fully settled.

Gareth swung wide to the left flank, his heavy shield catching the morning light, a low hum of Earth-aligned mana already thickening the stone beneath his boots into something that gripped the frozen ground like roots. Marlon planted himself in the gap Doran had called out, a short, wide-bladed hatchet in each hand, while the two adventurers at the rear—Bren and Sable—kept their attention fixed outward, guarding against anything trying to use the fight as cover to circle behind them.

The first salamander lunged, its jaws crackling with a faint blue frost that hissed where it touched the air. Doran met it head-on, his Aqua-slicked blade slicing the creature mouth.

"Second one's coming around your blind side, Gareth!" Sable called. Gareth turned a half-second before it would have mattered, his shield absorbing the impact of a snapping jaw with a resounding crack, his mace answering in the same motion. Marlon caught the third with both hatchets in a fast, brutal cross-cut, while Enrik's arrows found the fourth in quick succession, each one wrapped in a thin, whistling thread of compressed Gale mana that punched clean through hide that should have turned an ordinary shaft.

The salamanders went down, and the clearing fell quiet again within a minute of the first alarm.

"Clean," Marlon said, sliding his twin hatchets back into their sheaths.

"You really are useful, girl." Stelle simply nodded, keeping her focus on the surrounding treeline. She let the pulse fade once the area was safe enough, banking what remained of the cost against whatever came next. [Echo-Mapping: deactivated. Current reserves: 87%.] The search so far had not been easy—monsters and beasts seemed to lurk almost everywhere in this stretch of the Ridge. But thanks to the formidable strength of the group, everything they'd faced so far had been handled without serious losses.

It had been only half a day since they'd left Ironvale. It was a slow, careful search. They'd all agreed to avoid unnecessary fights, especially with anything stronger than they could easily manage. Stelle and the group's other Stalker did their best to make that possible. Stelle acting as their living radar, sweeping for survivors or threats within range, while Lidia excelled at tracking old traces barely noticeable to normal senses. And it seemed the pattern consistently led north, toward the central peak.

That worked in Stelle's favor as well, since it meant they were heading close to where the ruins were said to be. Based on what she'd gathered so far, the ruins lay just below the summit where Saint Lilian was said to rest. It's as if I'm being guided there, she thought, and found she had no clean answer for whether that thought comforted her or not.

"Lidia, how's the track? Are they still heading north?" Doran asked.

"Yes, still north. Looks like a large group... around nine people." The woman's eyes were closed, her attention turned entirely inward as she read the faint traces scattered across the snow.

"I guess we should go deeper, then," Marlon said.

"Then let's not waste more time. Let's continue," Doran said. The group began to move again, continuing their search through the dense, frozen woods of Mourning Ridge. Then, after another two hours, a new signature landed in Stelle's echo mapping and it was not a simple mana beast. It emerged from a stand of blackened pine, veins of dark mana pulsing along a frame already twice the size an ordinary mountain bear had any right to be.

Stelle's mapping caught it at nearly eighty meters, giving the group the rare luxury of preparation, though preparation only bought so much against a Tier 3. [Target Scan] [Mana Output: Tier 3] [Unknown Energy Signature — mixed profile.] Stelle studied the energy radiating off it—mana, and something else. No, she corrected herself. It's the same energy I detected in the Ironvale wreckage. But this time it's more concentrated, flowing almost like mana itself.

It was her first time finally encountering a corrupted beast directly. Whatever that energy was, she knew instinctively that it was dangerous.

"Formation!" Doran barked, and the group scattered into the pattern, Marlon and the rear guard folding into the wider ring around Doran and Gareth without needing to be told twice.

It took longer this time—Gareth's shield cracking under a blow that sent him skidding backward through the snow, Enrik catching a glancing swipe across the ribs that folded him instantly to the ground, Marlon's hatchets biting deep and drawing a furious, corrupted roar without ever quite finding the killing angle, Doran's blade sinking in but never deep enough to end it outright.

Behind them, Haland channeled his mana, his arm transforming into something closer to a beast's claw, stone-dark and rough along the knuckles, before he hurled his spear at the corrupted bear with monstrous force. The spear staggered it, piercing its back, but not deep enough to kill it.

"Elsie!" Doran called, already crouching beside Enrik. She was there within seconds, her hands glowing with a soft, warm Light-aligned mana that knit torn muscle back together in a way that looked almost gentle, given the violence it was undoing—the toll of it drawn from someplace deeper than simple reserve, a faint, weary flicker crossing her face each time the wound sealed shut.

"Cracked ribs, not broken. He'll ache for days, but he'll walk." She moved to Gareth next, mending a gash along his forearm with the same efficient calm, while Sable helped Marlon wrap a shallow claw mark along his shoulder that had torn clean through his sleeve. Stelle's mapping caught another signature, drawn in—likely by the noise of the fight. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. [Targets Scan:] [Mana Output: 3x Tier 2.]"Another group of monsters! At the east!"

The frost trolls found them not long after, three of them. Doran gritted his teeth.

"Change the formation! Gareth, Haland, and I will handle this corrupted beast! The rest of you, focus on the frost trolls!" From the corner, Lidia opened fire with her crossbow, a thundering bolt catching one of the trolls square in the skull and snapping its head back. She let out a heavy breath.

"One down! But that cost a good amount of mana for a single bolt."

"Stay behind me, Lidia!" Marlon pushed toward one of the trolls, his body becoming faster as shadow wreathed around him. He slashed at one of the troll's hands. It staggered slightly before countering with a heavy swing. Marlon slid low, spinning his body to cut into its leg, sending it off balance before finishing it with a dual slash across the neck. On the other side, Bren charged the last frost troll with a massive axe, swinging it with tremendous force.

The troll's counter caught his shoulder, but a layer of icy armor already covering his skin blunted the impact considerably. Sable cast a blade of flame that slashed and burned through the troll's remaining strength, and she continued the assault until Bren finally beheaded it. In the center, Doran moved like an experienced warrior, dodging the rampage of the corrupted mountain bear. Then a stone shot up from below, striking it across the face—Gareth, controlling the ground beneath it. The beast staggered.

Haland leapt onto its back to retrieve his spear before dropping back to the ground. Doran followed with a sudden burst of speed, darting to its flank and slashing deep with his water-infused blade, the edge cutting sharper than steel alone ever could. Haland didn't hesitate, driving his transformed arm and spear forward into the beast's skull, while Gareth locked its feet in place, refusing to let it move. Doran, seeing the opening, wasted no time—charging his sword with mana once more.

The water along the blade pulsed once, and a clean, smooth cut sheared straight through the beast's neck. The bear's body kept moving for a heartbeat longer, as if it hadn't yet realized what had happened, before its head finally fell to the ground with a soft thud. Doran cleaned his weapon before sheathing it once more. The place became silent again.... By the time the group finally caught their breath, the light had already begun sliding toward afternoon, and the search had produced nothing but bodies.

They found the first one an hour later—one of the missing, curled beneath the collapsed remains of a supply sled, frozen solid, the frost having claimed him long before any beast had the chance to. No one spoke for a long moment. Doran simply nodded once, and they moved on. The weather worsened as the day wore into evening, wind picking up into something that carried real teeth, visibility dropping until the treeline blurred into indistinct gray shapes on every side. Still, no one suggested turning back.

They found the clearing an hour before what should have been dusk, though the storm had already swallowed most of the remaining light. Four bodies lay scattered across the frozen ground, weapons still gripped in frost-blackened hands, the unmistakable evidence of a fight that had gone on far longer than any of them wanted to imagine. Several of the corpses were sealed inside thick shells of unnatural ice, dark, corrupted residue visible beneath the frozen surface like veins running through pale stone.

Stelle knelt beside the nearest one, triggering [Quantum Optics] for a focused scan rather than leaving it running passively, the cost registering immediately against her reserves. The corrupted signature bled faintly through the ice in the same dark, wrong color she'd already catalogued twice today, before she moved on toward a large tree standing a short distance away.

"The trail still runs north," Lidia said, tracing the residue's fading gradient.

"Toward the central peak." Doran's jaw tightened at that, though he said nothing.

"There's nothing left here," Sable muttered, voice cracking with something closer to exhaustion than fear at this point.

"We've found bodies. Just bodies. Maybe that's all there is left to find."

"Keep moving," Doran said, though even his voice had lost some of its earlier certainty.

"Alive!" Elsie called, already channeling warmth into hands too cold to properly grip her own healer's satchel, Stelle crouching beside her. The survivor was tucked into a hollow beneath the roots of an ancient, half-collapsed tree—a woman, barely conscious, her lips blue, her breathing shallow and ragged. They worked fast, wrapping her in every spare blanket the group carried, Elsie's Light mana coaxing her body temperature back from somewhere dangerously close to a point of no return.

It took long minutes before her eyes finally opened, unfocused and terrified, before something like recognition settled into them.

"They're—" Her voice cracked entirely.

"They ran... Aroy... led them north, toward the peak. We got cornered. There was nowhere else to go."

"How many?" Doran asked, crouching low.

"Four. Maybe Five... we met them here, fighting. But that corrupted beast—you shouldn't continue." Her hands trembled violently against the blanket.

"I just... hid. I fell behind. I don't know if any of them are still—" She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. They made the decision quickly, given how little daylight remained to argue about it.

"Enrik, you're in no shape to keep pushing," Doran said.

"Take her back down to Ironvale. Bren, go with him—two of you... and both of you keep your weapons ready the whole way." Bren nodded once, already moving to help Enrik shoulder the weight of the wrapped, half-conscious survivor between them.

"We'll make it... but how about the rest of you?," Enrik said, though his voice carried the particular flatness of a man agreeing mostly to end the conversation.

"We will try to avoid danger." Doran said.

"Go. Now, while there's still light enough to see the trail back." The rest of them watched the two men and the survivor disappear back the way they'd come before Doran turned to the remaining eight.

"We're not engaging that thing if we find it," he said flatly.

"Whatever's dragging corruption toward that peak is well past what this group can handle directly. We look for survivors. Do not fight it. Is that understood?" No one argued. Then he looked down at the small figure beside him.

"You can rest. I'll carry you if you need it. You've already been pushing yourself hard enough."

"It's fine. I'm actually used to it now. I travel a lot alone. You don't need to worry about me." Doran studied her eyes... still full of energy, seemingly unaffected by the corpses she'd already seen over these past few days. He didn't know what kind of life this girl must have led, to stay unbothered, as if all of it were simply normal. He just hoped all of this got better soon, so they could finally go back to somewhere safer.

They walked for hours after that, the storm settling into a steady, grinding howl that made conversation nearly impossible, stopping only when exhaustion made continuing more dangerous than resting.

"Are we doing the right thing?" Gareth asked eventually, quiet, into the dark.

"Pushing this far. For people who might already be gone."

"I don't know," Doran admitted, which was the first uncertain thing she'd heard him say since Ironvale's gate.

"But I know what it costs to stop looking too early. I've done that once before. I won't do it again." The group remain silent. The ravine appeared out of the storm not long after they set out again, a narrow gash cut deep into the mountainside, offering at least partial shelter from the worst of the wind. They pushed through it in a tight line, exhausted but still moving, still capable, the walls rising steep and close on either side.

Stelle's pulse range barely reached the top of the ravine, which made her uneasy. The opening at the far end gave way, without warning, onto a wide, flat frozen lake, its surface a sheet of pale, undisturbed ice stretching out beneath the grey sky. And there, scattered across the ice near the center. Four of them, huddled together, alive—barely.

And near the middle of the cluster, a man knelt with his arms wrapped tightly around himself, rocking with a small, involuntary motion, his eyes fixed on something none of the rest of them could see. Stelle's head snapped up.

"Wait—""That's him," Doran said, already breaking into a run across the ice.

"That's Aroy." They'd made it perhaps ten steps onto the frozen lake when the sound reached them—a deep, grinding crack of stone splitting somewhere high above. Along the top of the ravine's cliff edge in front of them, silhouetted against the pale storm-light, two shapes stood looking down at them.

The first was massive, half-pale and half-corrupted, violet light pulsing slow and steady beneath skin split along blackened, weeping fissures—the Guardian, unmistakable, entirely unhurried, watching the scattered survivors on the ice below with something that looked almost like patience. Beside it stood a lone figure from the Blood Tribe, pale and still, white hair whipping in the wind, a staff in hand and robes that marked him unmistakably as something closer to a shaman than a warrior.

His posture carried none of the frantic urgency of a hunt already underway. He simply watched, alongside the beast, as though the two of them had been waiting there together for exactly this.

"MOVE!" Doran roared, but the warning came a half-second too late. The rockslide thundered down behind them, sealing the ravine's mouth in a rising wall of shattered stone and snow, cutting off the only path they'd used to reach the lake at all. Above them, neither the Guardian nor the shaman beside it moved to follow. They simply watched, patient and unhurried, as the last of the loose stone settled into place.

And behind them, on the far side of the frozen lake, silhouettes began to emerge from the storm—first dozens, then more, the count climbing steadily toward a hundred.