Chapter 64

Chapter 64
We tracked the remaining footprint trail. Not far from the bloodstains we had previously discovered, a pile of bodies came into view. The stark white military uniforms buried under the snow appeared immediately recognizable.

“Team 2.”

Though I had anticipated that Team 2 had turned against itself, confronting the lifeless soldiers scattered in such a grim state was a completely different experience.

“This is madness… Did they actually shoot one another—soldiers belonging to the same zone? No, Haydam-nim, hold on a moment…!”

The moment I surged forward to turn the corpses over and verify identities, Platon recoiled in absolute terror and shoved me backward.

“I will handle this. Even for you, Haydam-nim, this is entirely inappropriate.”

Well, that was fair enough. There was no reason for a ten-year-old child to put on a performance of rummaging through the dead. Only after inspecting every single body did Platon stand back up. Despite the freezing cold, beads of perspiration dotted his brow. With a breath that seemed half relief and half exhaustion, he spoke.

“The Team 2 leader and the newly commissioned officers are not among them…”

I had assumed the Team 2 leader orchestrated this massacre to eliminate the fresh officers. Why, then, were these men lying dead here without Lucas or Bones? Had some of them opposed the leader’s plot? While Platon remained unsettled, I inspected a few corpses myself. Several appeared to have been shot directly from behind. Every single one of them had died with their eyes wide open, as though harboring a bitter resentment. Ah… so the Team 2 leader intended to silence every single witness. The Commander surveyed the bodies with a cold stare, then shifted his attention to us.

“We continue our search. The missing men may have dropped somewhere else.”

We left the bodies where they rested and pushed deeper into the terrain. Ahead of us, the surroundings looked familiar. This was the crevasse zone we had previously abandoned and turned away from. I was in the middle of cautioning Platon when a voice echoed toward us from the distance.

“Save… please save me…!”

Someone was desperately shouting for assistance, the cry muffled and faint beneath the heavy blizzard. I stopped Platon from lunging forward, then crept ahead cautiously, sweeping the snow with the tip of my weapon to avoid hidden crevasses. The voice grew slightly clearer.

“Over here! Help me!”

The sound originated from a narrow fissure only about a meter wide. It was a crack we had failed to notice during our prior visit—likely blanketed by snow until someone walked directly over it and plummeted through. Peering down, I spotted the Team 2 leader clinging desperately to the wall of the crevasse.

“Your Excellency!!”

When we looked over the edge from above, the team leader wept with relief.

“Oh…! Thank you, God, thank you so much…!”

He was the only person hanging down there. I checked further down for anyone else who might have fallen, discovering only a jutting shelf of ice strewn with firearms and combat rations that the Team 2 leader had apparently dropped. There was no sign that anyone else had plummeted into the depths. The new officers must have fled in a different direction. I called down to the man dangling below.

“What happened?”

“P-please, just pull me out first…”

I restrained the hopelessly naive Platon, who was already moving to haul him up, and repeated my question into the abyss.

“I asked what happened. What about those corpses back there?”

A wave of panic crossed the team leader’s face. Clearly, he had not expected us to pass the pile of bodies. Being a seasoned officer, however, excuses poured from his lips instantly.

“It was the new officers! Bones and Lucas—those two staged a mutiny…!”

“You are claiming two newly commissioned officers committed all of that?”

“Y-yes…!!”

I crouched right at the precipice and asked with intentional sarcasm.

“Then why are you hanging down there?”

“W-well, while I was running away…!”

“So why are you still dangling? If I had chosen to kill you, someone hanging like you would have been simple enough to knock loose and leave behind.”

“Th-they didn’t notice me fall and just kept running!”

“Is that so?”

“Yes! So Haydam-nim, please…”

I dismissed his desperate pleas and continued.

“If people hunting me were wandering about, I would keep my mouth shut and hang quietly… yet your cries for help carried all the way from far away.”

“Th-that is…”

“Still planning to lie? Let us simply be honest. Speak the truth and I may hand you over to military law, but I will not drop you.”

Even that reasonable proposition failed to register fully, so I applied more pressure.

“I already encountered the new officers earlier. Why else would Father and I have traveled all this way? We know roughly what occurred, so stop spinning fabrications and spit it out.”

Platon stared at me in absolute astonishment. It was the expression of someone marveling at how a person could invent falsehoods without even pausing for breath. Still, the realization that the Commander—who had already issued an order to turn back—would not have traveled this far without a purpose seemed to hit the Team 2 leader; his gaze wavered.

“No answer? We are leaving.”

“Wait a second!!”

The hanging team leader gasped for air, hesitated, and finally broke under the pressure, starting to confess.

“Lieutenant General Max… ordered it…! I never wanted to do that to the new officers, but I was threatened…!”

Lieutenant General Max? Wasn’t that Bones’s adoptive father? He had threatened the Team 2 leader into attempting to murder the new officers? I glanced toward the Commander. He offered a brief shake of his head, indicating this information was news to him as well. I looked down into the pit once more.

“You will need to testify to that properly once you are brought up here.”

“O-of course! So please…”

“Platon.”

“I will help.”

Judging that Platon alone would struggle to lift the man over the slick snow, the Commander stepped forward and grabbed one of the team leader’s arms to hoist him upward. That was the exact moment disaster struck.

-Kooong!

The ground violently heaved. Platon and the Commander lost their footing and dropped the Team 2 leader’s arm.

“Uwaaak!”

That alone might have been handled—except the tremor refused to stop there.

-Kung! Kung! Kung! Kung!

This was no ordinary earthquake. It was the reverberation of something colossal in motion, making the very axis of the world shudder. A large-class monster! I gripped my weapon and tried to stand, but the sensation of the earth giving way rushed straight up my spine. Damn it! The vibrations generated by the large-class monster’s movement had begun collapsing the edge of the crevasse. I instinctively curled my body to brace for the fall—then something shoved me forcefully to the side.

-Puck!

The impact sent me tumbling onto a snowdrift safely outside the collapsing fissure.

“Damn it all.”

The Commander, who had pushed me into safety, spat a quiet curse as he plunged downward.

“Father!”

I screamed without thinking and reached out for him, but the Commander twisted his body away from my grasp. He must have understood that if I caught him, both of us would fall.

“Crazy!!”

I frantically peered over the cliff edge. By pure fortune, the three men—including the Team 2 leader—had not plummeted into the bottomless depths but landed on a protruding glacier shelf partway down. They stirred and pushed themselves upright; none of them appeared severely injured.

“Are you all right?”

When I called down, the Commander found his footing, stood up, and flashed an okay sign with his fingers. The glacier ledge they occupied looked narrow, yet it stretched horizontally along the cliff face—terrain carved into a stair-like formation by the recent quake shearing away the ice. It did not appear ready to collapse, causing me to let out a breath of relief.

The real issue was that the crevasse, previously only a meter wide, had been blown open on both sides into a massive gap. At one meter, a failed pull might have allowed someone to brace their outstretched arms against the walls. Now, a single misstep meant plunging into a sheer abyss. Can I pull them up by myself…? I possessed rope. My inventory was already packed with rope, firearms, and various supplies. Until now, I had utilized only the issued rifle because observers were watching, but I also owned weapons with vastly superior firepower. These were the arms I had retrieved during our hunt for the furred crocodile previously; afterward, I reported them lost because of Unicorn Area players and kept them for myself. Having already confirmed my physical durability was greater than expected, drawing another gun from my inventory would pose no problem.

Rope or not, sturdy body or not—pulling full-grown men upward entirely by myself remained impossible. Even if I offered, the Commander and Platon would refuse immediately. A reliable anchor point for the rope would have helped, but this was a desolate snowfield, and they knew better than anyone that no such anchor existed. I would simply need to locate those new officers. If I brought them back and suggested everyone pull together using the rope, neither man would refuse. Meanwhile, Platon and the Commander appeared to have already subdued and restrained the Team 2 leader. They could maintain their composure even in this dire situation. No wonder he was the Commander.

I shouted down to them.

“I am going to find Lucas and Bones. With the three of us pulling, we should manage this somehow.”

“Will you be safe out there alone?”

The Commander clearly understood that the earlier tremor stemmed from a moving large-class monster.

“Moving by myself eliminates the worry of being detected.”

A small child like me wearing a white military uniform while wandering a blizzard-swept snowfield was difficult to spot with the naked eye. Furthermore, the reek of blood emanating from the nearby corpse pile would continue drawing aggro elsewhere. The fact that the footprints we heard earlier had already faded confirmed the monster had caught the scent of blood and shifted directions.

“Do not attempt to climb up. Just stay put.”

I tossed the line down like a joke. The Commander let out a short snort of laughter and waved me onward. Consequently, I left the three of them on the glacier shelf and set off to track down the new officers.

My initial destination was the body pile discovered only a short while ago. If the large-class monster had genuinely traveled that way, its next stop would almost certainly be wherever the new officers happened to be. Reaching the site of the bodies, I realized we were in serious trouble. The corpses were gone… The bloodstains remained, but the bodies themselves had vanished entirely. That alone confirmed the monster responsible for the quake had passed right through this area. Moreover, the tracks it left behind were far from ordinary.

“What on earth is this…”

Compared to the large-class monsters we confronted that morning, these were child’s play. Footprints of a scale I had never witnessed in my life were stamped deep into the snow. Even the swirling blizzard was insufficient to bury tracks of that magnitude; the trail stretched onward, sharp and unmistakable. They all pointed in a singular direction. Whatever created them was moving with clear intent. One of them—either Bones or Lucas—must be injured. The beast was unquestionably tracking the scent of blood.

How long I followed those footprints, I could not determine. Far ahead through the blinding snow, I spotted a massive silhouette standing in the landscape. It was too vast to label a mere monster, yet too small to be a mountain. At a glance, it resembled a colossal hill that had decided to walk. Its pace was slow, but due to its immense scale, every single stride carried it a vast distance forward. I pulled a bicycle from my inventory. I had acquired it only recently; I never anticipated needing it this quickly. As I rode closer, the vague giant shape resolved into a distinct form. The moment I recognized what it actually was, I was more than a little shaken. Why is that thing here?