Chương 16: Chapter 15: Trapped

That night, I didn't sleep much. The wind had found the house sometime after midnight. Not the quiet, patient wind that brushed against the walls on normal nights. This was different, It was like a living force that threw itself against the windows and howled through every gap it could find. The house creaked. Over and over. Each time, I woke expecting to find something broken. Each time, I stared at the ceiling in the dark until my heartbeat settled, then closed my eyes again.

Yato had abandoned his usual spot on the bed. At some point during the night, he had retreated to the closet — the one enclosed space in the house where the wind's voice was muffled. I found him there in the morning, curled inside a pile of old sweaters, watching me with the quiet resentment of a creature who expected me to fix the weather and was disappointed I hadn't.

"Sorry." He blinked slowly.

"I don't control the wind." Another blink. His expression did not change. Apparently, that wasn't an acceptable excuse. I left the closet door open so he could come out when he was ready and walked to the kitchen. The floor was cold beneath my feet. Colder than it had ever been. The thermostat in the hallway read eight degrees. Inside the house. The heating was running — I could hear the system working. I turned it higher. Now that I was out of bed, the house felt too cold.

I reached the kitchen and opened the cabinet where the coffee had always been. Empty. I stared at the shelf for a moment. Then I checked the other cabinets, just in case I had moved it and forgotten. No. Nothing. The coffee was gone. It wasn't surprising. I had been drinking coffee every morning since arriving here. Every expedition had started with coffee. Every bad night had ended with coffee.

I had watched the supply shrink week by week and done nothing about it because doing something would have meant admitting it was finite. Now it was all gone. I stood in the cold kitchen and let the absence settle. Coffee was a small thing. In a world where I had killed a beast with crushed pills, met a giant dragon, and watched a forest sink into the ground, running out of coffee should have been meaningless. It wasn't. I was a disaster, because I knew...

It was merely the first irreplaceable item of a long list that would eventually run out. I closed the cabinet. Yato ate better than I did that morning. I opened one of the remaining cans of cat food — there were still plenty, I had stocked more for him than for myself — and set it beside his water bowl. For myself, I ate a piece of the beast's meat, of course Yato didn't hesitate one second, even if his bowl was full my food just smelled more appealing and he would get a piece.

Even if I had to skip coffee I was still in the mood to share with my little friend, I took a small piece from my plate and gave it to Yato, and as usual, he smelled for a moment, licked timidly a couple times, and then went for the bite. he looked at me satisfied and went back to his bowl. He had emerged from the closet long enough to eat, when he was done he retreated back to his safe spot. I ate standing at the counter, watching the snow through the kitchen window.

It was still falling heavily — the blizzard hadn't passed with the night. It was an endless descent of white that showed no intention of stopping or even slowing down. The yard was gone. The clearing was gone. The world outside was a single flat expanse of white, broken only by the distant shape of the mountain rising above the snow line. The mountain. I could barely see the shape at this point. I finished eating and went to the computer.

The monitors took a moment to warm up — even electronics seemed slower in the cold, or was I the one turning impatient? While I waited, I plugged my phone into the computer and opened the folder where I had saved the summit photos when the PC finally turned on. Dozens of images. The floating island's edge. The clouds beneath. The ruined city on the far slope. The river. The meadow. The distant shape of my house. I had taken pictures of everything I could see. Now I was going to look at them properly.

The first image filled the screen. The mountain's view from the top was even stranger at full resolution. The camera had captured details my eyes had been too overwhelmed to process — the exact curve where the forest ended, the texture of the clouds far below, the sharp line where land became sky. I zoomed in on the ruins first. The city — or what was left of it — sprawled across the opposite slope in broken lines. Individual buildings became visible at this magnification.

Structures with roofs still partially intact. Walls that had crumbled. A central building larger than the rest, its roof collapsed inward but its walls still standing. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Whoever had lived there had built something significant. But it definitely looked like no one had lived there for a very long time. I saved a copy of the zoomed image in a separate folder and moved on. The meadow.

The sheep were absent — they must have been hidden by the distance or already moved elsewhere before winter. The land was beautiful. The river. A silver thread cutting across the landscape. At full zoom, I could see the white turbulence of rapids in several places. The water from this large stream was moving fast even from kilometers away. I moved through more images. The clouds beneath the island edge. The forest stretching in every direction. My house, small and isolated in its unnatural clearing.

I almost moved past that one. The quadrant around the house was the least interesting part of the view. I had already explored much of it. The forest was dense there — nothing but trees in every direction. There was no reason to study it carefully. But I had time. That was the one resource winter had given me in abundance. I zoomed in. Trees. More trees. The natural corridor I had driven through on my expeditions. The road-like open ground that led toward the meadow. The path I had taken toward the river.

All familiar. All empty. I moved the zoomed image slowly, scanning from left to right. Nothing. More nothing. I was about to switch to the next photo when something caught my eye. A shape. Not a tree. I stopped. The shape was small — barely a few pixels at this zoom level. But it was too angular to be natural. Too pointed. Too deliberate. I zoomed further. The image degraded immediately. Pixels became blocks. The shape became harder to read, not easier. But I had seen enough. This had to be a roof. Stone. Sloped.

Triangular. Half-hidden by what must have been trees when I took the picture — the canopy had obscured everything except the peak. But the peak was there. And it was not alone. I moved the image carefully, studying the area around the first shape. A second roof. A third. Structures. Multiple structures. Partially concealed by the forest, visible only from above, and only if you looked closely. A village. Or what remained of one. I sat back in my chair.

The location made sense once I oriented myself — upstream of the large river I had found, a reasonable distance from the shore. Somewhere between the meadow and the mountain. Somewhere I had never driven because the natural corridors hadn't led there. Somewhere close. Not as close as the meadow. But far closer than the ruined city. I stared at the screen for a long time. A village in the forest. Not a dead and distant city — a village, here, on my side of the world. The discovery felt different from the ruins.

The ruins were distant. They felt unreachable, or at least for my small electric car it would be a one way trip The village was close, it was practical. If people had lived there, they had needed the same things I needed. Water. Food. Shelter. And if they had left anything behind... I saved the image. Then I saved another copy. Then I wrote down the approximate coordinates based on the river and the mountain's position relative to the house. The rest of the morning was inventory.

I hadn't done a full count since the first week. The expeditions had consumed supplies faster than my early estimates. Once more... I opened every cabinet. Every drawer. The pantry. The freezer. The numbers were worse than I had hoped, but better than I had feared. If I rationed carefully — one proper meal a day, supplemented by the beast's meat in the freezer — I had roughly three months of food remaining. four if I stretched it.

The water was less of a concern; the house's plumbing still worked, and I could melt snow as a backup. three months. Winter had to end within three months. If it didn't. I closed the pantry door. That was a problem for later. Today, the only thing I should focus on was preparation. I spent the afternoon in the garage. The space was barely warmer than outside. The concrete floor pulled heat from my feet through my boots. My breath clouded in front of me with every exhale. But the garage had what I needed.

Plastic containers. A utility knife. Pieces of string. A roll of duct tape. And a mesh bag recovered from the trash that once held onions. I had researched passive fish traps a couple days ago. The principle was simple: a funnel-shaped entrance that fish could swim into but not out of. Bait inside. Weight to hold it underwater. A line to retrieve it. The execution was harder than the research had suggested. The first container cracked when I tried to cut an opening for the funnel.

The plastic was brittle from the cold — it splintered instead of yielding. I threw the pieces aside and started again with a thicker container. This one held. I cut a circular opening in the lid, then shaped a second piece of plastic into a cone. The cone's narrow end pointed inward. The wide end sealed against the lid's opening. In theory, a fish would swim through the widening cone to reach the bait inside, then find itself unable to navigate back through the narrow point. In theory.

I reinforced the seams with duct tape. Punched small holes in the bottom for water flow. Tied the string to the handle. Placed a few scraps of monster fat inside as bait. The result was ugly. It looked like something a desperate person had built in a freezing garage while running out of options. Which, I reflected, was exactly what it was. I set the trap aside and checked the time. Mid-afternoon. Still hours before dark. Snow continued to fall outside the garage window. Going outside would have been suicidal.

The snow was already deeper than my knees in places. The wind would strip heat from exposed skin in minutes. The village — if it was what I thought it was — would have to wait until the weather broke. So I cleaned the garage instead. Not because it needed cleaning. Because I needed to do something. I organized the tools that had been scattered since the butchering. I checked the car's battery — still holding charge, though the cold would drain it faster. All of it was busywork.

All of it was better than sitting in the house, I mean in my prison staring at the walls. By evening, I had run out of things to do. The village was catalogued. The food was counted. The trap was built. The garage was cleaner than it had ever been during my life on Earth. I sat down at the computer. The anime episodes from last time where still on my hard drive. The download had finished a while ago. Twenty hours for twenty-four minutes.

I had been watching it in fragments, a few minutes at a time, whenever the isolation became too heavy. The protagonist was still discovering his powers. The world still always found a way to explain its rules to him through convenient side characters. The goddess was smiling. I pressed play. The episode ran. Twenty-four minutes of a life that made sense. A world where being transported meant gaining strength instead of running out of coffee.

A story where someone showed up to explain things instead of a dragon that immediately fell asleep. When it ended, I closed the video player window. It was still mildly unpleasant. Not because the show was bad. The show was fine. Competent, even. It was unpleasant because it was lying.

And I was starting to compare it to my own story, the one where nothing was explained, no one was coming to help, and survival meant building ugly fish traps in freezing garages — against the one where everything was conveniently handed to a protagonist who didn't have to earn any of it. I turned off the computer. Outside, the snow continued to fall even faster than before. Yato had finally emerged from the closet.

He sat on the back of the couch, watching the window with the same quiet intensity he used for birds that didn't exist anymore. I sat beside him.

"three months." His tail flicked once.

"Maybe four." He didn't answer. He rarely did. But his presence was enough. We watched the snow together. Tomorrow, I would check the photographs again. I would refine the village's location on my map. I would test the fish trap in the sink to make sure water could flow through it. And I would wait. Not because waiting was easy. Because right now, it was the only thing I could do that wouldn't kill me. The house creaked. Yato pressed against my arm. I didn't move.