Chapter 194: Again, and Again
A gate had burst out of the White Whale’s body.
It came tearing up through the ruined mountain of flesh from the inside, shouldering aside ribs the size of ship masts, and the snow that had served the thing as blood went scattering across the ice in a wide white fan.
At that impossible sight, Walfred and every other hunter went stiff as stone.
"A g-gate?"
Someone’s voice cracked apart in the middle of the word.
"Wait, why would that come out of the White Whale..."
The hunters were all thrown.
Monsters came out of gates, not the other way around. That was the order of things, as fixed as sunrise, drilled into every hunter from their first day in a training hall. Nobody there had seen a gate emerge from inside a monster in their entire life.
And that wasn’t the only strange thing about it.
"It’s, it’s enormous."
Aria murmured blankly.
Her ice axe hung forgotten at the end of one arm, and she didn’t seem to notice her own hand shaking.
She was right. The gate that had erupted from the White Whale’s body was staggeringly large.
An ordinary gate was maybe ten to sixteen feet across or tall at the very most, wide enough for a squad to file through shoulder to shoulder. But this one looked to be at least three hundred feet. It hung above the shattered corpse like a second sky had opened up, and every hunter standing beneath it had been reduced to the size of an insect.
’And one more thing.’
There was a difference that set it clearly apart from every other gate he’d ever seen.
The color.
Gates generally came in two colors.
Red for gates that hadn’t been cleared. Blue for gates that had.
’But that one...’
It was unmistakably pure white.
Not the gray-white of old snow, not the milky white of frost on glass. A white with nothing behind it and nothing inside it, so clean it hurt the eye to hold.
As if you’d compressed a snowstorm flat and driven it into the air. That was exactly what it looked like.
After a moment, Walfred turned to Elma.
She had far more experience as a hunter, more years in the field than he had been alive by some counts, so maybe she knew something about a gate shaped like that.
"Have you ever seen anything like..."
"...No. Not once."
But the denial came back flat and firm.
Elma shook her head, eyes trembling as she stared at the gate. Frost had gathered in the fine hairs along her jaw and she hadn’t wiped it away. Walfred looked back at it and narrowed his own.
At the same time, he called up what Elma had told him about the White Whale before.
’The White Whale is a monster that swallows gates.’
She’d said it had swallowed at least thirty gates on its way across Greenland and down to Key West. Thirty holes in the world, taken down whole like a whale taking krill.
So a gate coming out of its body wasn’t all that bizarre, in a sense. It might simply be one it hadn’t finished digesting.
’No, more likely...’
The far more plausible theory was that all the gates it had swallowed had fused inside its belly into a single one. Melted together in that cold furnace of a stomach, thirty mouths becoming one.
Judging by the size of the thing that had come out, it looked like dozens of gates merged together.
’That’s the best explanation I’ve got for now.’
But separate from that, one question remained unanswered. He’d torn the White Whale to shreds, reduced a creature the size of a city block to drifting powder, and the powerful enemy extermination notification still hadn’t appeared.
The silence in his field of vision was louder than any alarm.
He was mulling that over when.
Crrrack!
Suddenly, along with an alien sound.
The gate’s vortex expanded violently.
The white surface bulged outward the way ice bulges over a rising spring, and pressure rolled off it in a wave that flattened the loose snow for a hundred feet in every direction.
A phenomenon every hunter knew.
It happened when something on the other side of a gate was trying to come out.
"Fall back!"
"Something’s coming through!"
The hunters all opened up distance.
Boots scraped and skidded across the glassy surface of the frozen sea as they scrambled backward, weapons swinging up into guard.
Nobody let their guard down. They watched the gate closely, and then a sight unfolded that turned their faces to stone.
Crunch! Craaack!
An enormous dorsal fin.
It broke the white surface the way a blade breaks water, rising and rising until it blotted out the light behind it.
Then a body the color of fresh snow revealed itself, and every eye went wide.
"That’s..."
"Th-the White Whale?!"
The monster they had definitively killed moments ago. The one whose remains still lay scattered across the ice not fifty yards away, not yet even finished settling.
Watching the White Whale appear again, completely unharmed, without so much as a scratch on that vast pale flank, Elma and the hunters gaped in horror.
In the moment everyone froze like statues.
Walfred alone moved.
"Ice Spear."
The instant he recognized that the thing coming out of the gate was the White Whale, he began charging [Ice Spear]. Mana surged down his arm and condensed in his palm, and the air around it screamed as it gave up its last remaining warmth.
And a moment later.
Just as the White Whale cleared the gate, its body still half-committed, its momentum still building.
Whoosh! Kabooom!
The [Ice Spear] left Walfred’s hand and punched clean through the top of its skull.
The White Whale, in the middle of taking off, crashed to the ground without managing any real resistance. The impact threw up a wall of powdered ice fifty feet high. Walfred charged in at the same instant and unloaded on it, axe rising and falling in a rhythm that never once broke.
Not long after.
Thud! Rattle-rattle!
The second White Whale met exactly the same end as the first. Its whole body broke apart and turned into snow and ice, the vast bulk of it losing shape all at once, the way a sandcastle loses shape when the tide finally reaches it.
And this time too.
No extermination notification appeared.
Walfred stood in the settling white, breathing slowly, waiting for a message that refused to come. He narrowed his eyes, and only then did he understand.
’Is there a real body somewhere else?’
Maybe the two he’d killed were clones or projections, and the true White Whale was hiding somewhere else entirely. Two decoys thrown into his path, and something patient sitting behind them.
Right now, that seemed most likely.
And if that guess was right, where would the real body be hiding?
There was only one place it could be.
"Don’t tell me it’s inside that gate..."
"...Do you think the real one is in there?"
At the same moment Walfred muttered it.
Elma, standing nearby, arrived at exactly the same conclusion out loud.
The two of them looked at each other.
Neither needed to say anything else. Whatever doubt had been left in either of them died somewhere in that shared look.
A moment later, after a single exchange of glances, Walfred turned. Toward the pure white gate that had come out of the first White Whale’s body.
"I’ll go check it out."
"Are you sure you’ll be all right alone?"
Elma asked, worried.
Her hand had lifted halfway toward him before she caught it and let it fall.
Walfred nodded.
"It’s the best option."
The interior of a gate housing a frost attribute Boss Monster was, as a rule, an extreme environment below negative 148 degrees Fahrenheit. Cold that killed unshielded hunters in minutes and ate through mana barriers not much slower.
He was the only one who could move freely in a place like that. So Walfred turned back to Elma with a request in his voice.
"I’ll be back soon. Hold out as long as you can."
"...Yes. Please be careful."
She nodded quietly.
Leaving Elma behind, Walfred approached the shimmering white vortex. The cold coming off it grew heavier with every step, less like temperature and more like weight.
And.
[Notice: Entering gate]
[S-rank Gate: Abyssal Frozen Sea]
With a short notification message.
Walfred disappeared through the gate.