Chapter 195: Abyssal Frozen Sea
An S-rank Gate.
Immediately after entering the Abyssal Frozen Sea.
The first thing that filled his vision was scenery almost identical to what he’d left behind outside.
A sea frozen white.
Sheer glacial cliffs, blue-veined and taller than any building in Key West.
Waves that had risen a hundred feet and then frozen solid mid-crest, caught in the exact instant before they broke, curls of water turned to glass and left hanging over an empty shore. Scenery that lived up to the name of a frozen sea.
There was only one thing.
One thing that differed from outside.
[Warning! Temperature dropping sharply.]
[Current temperature: -121°F]
The temperature was far lower.
His prediction had been right on. Walfred exhaled a plume of frozen breath, watched it hang in the still air and drift down as fine glitter, and looked around, entirely unbothered by the cold.
’Nothing particularly special here...’
An endless, frozen ocean.
No wind. No sound. Not even the low groan that ice always made when it shifted against itself.
In a world where everything had frozen solid, the only thing moving was Walfred himself. No sign of the White Whale’s true body, not even a common monster.
And then.
[Dad?]
A familiar voice sounded in his head.
Elsa’s voice.
She kept calling out to him through her [Telepathy] skill, the words arriving faint and thin, as if they’d had to cross something enormous to reach him.
[Where are you?]
Her voice was clearly startled.
She’d probably panicked when his presence suddenly vanished. Walfred answered her through telepathy in kind, keeping his tone as level as he could.
[I stepped into a gate for a bit.]
[Oh, okay.]
Elsa understood right away.
Then she immediately asked:
[Can I come over there too?]
Elsa, asking whether she could enter the gate.
The truth was, he’d wrestled with whether to bring her along before he came in here. He’d stood in front of that white vortex turning it over for longer than he’d let anyone see.
If the White Whale’s true body was in here, he’d need [Ice Shatter] to bring it down.
’But...’
He hadn’t.
For one reason only: he had zero information about this gate.
A gate that came out of a monster instead of the other way around. A gate that had spat out a corpse he had already made. Every part of it was wrong in a way he couldn’t yet name.
He couldn’t rule out the possibility that this whole situation was a trap the White Whale had laid, so he’d held off on bringing Elsa with him.
[I’ll call you if I need help later, so can you wait there a little longer for now?]
[Hmm, okay!]
The words were barely out of his mouth.
Elsa gave a spirited answer, and the telepathic conversation ended.
With their brief exchange over.
Walfred looked out at the frozen sea.
’I suppose I’ll look around a bit more.’
Not that there was much to look at. The horizon in every direction offered the same white nothing, and it was impossible to tell whether he’d been walking toward it or away from it.
But standing still felt wrong, so he started walking slowly. His boots left prints in a crust of snow that made no sound at all as it broke.
Every sense stretched to its limit.
And in that moment.
Whooooosh!
A fierce blizzard suddenly swept in.
It came from nowhere and everywhere at once, a solid wall of white that closed the world down to an arm’s length.
No warning signs whatsoever. It happened in the instant it took him to blink.
This was no natural weather phenomenon. Weather built. Weather announced itself. The change felt far too deliberate, as if a hand had drawn a curtain, and his expression hardened.
Crunch!
Footsteps came from beyond the blizzard.
Slow ones. Uneven. The gait of something tired rather than something hunting.
A moment later, a man in his early forties appeared, dressed in thick winter gear. The hood was pulled tight around a windburned face, and a rime of ice had built up along the fur trim where his breath had frozen.
He was trudging along with a gaunt, exhausted face, and he flinched as he belatedly spotted Walfred.
"...!"
His eyes went wide with shock.
But only for a second. Then his whole face lit up with relief, the kind that only comes to someone who had stopped expecting to see another living thing ever again. He hurried toward Walfred, letting out a long breath.
"Haa! Ajunngilaq..."
But whatever he said after that was completely unintelligible.
Because it wasn’t English.
’Greenlandic?’
That was the likeliest answer. The White Whale had come down out of Greenland, after all, swallowing everything in its path.
Meanwhile, the man closed the last of the distance, still talking, the words tumbling out of him faster now, his face relieved.
"Gatemut ilanngunneqarama, ilumut naggataarusimallunga isumaqaraluarpunga..."
Still no idea what he was saying.
The only thing Walfred caught was the word "gate."
But he wasn’t concerned about that.
Figuring out what the man’s Greenlandic meant wasn’t what mattered right now.
’The important thing is...’
From the moment the man appeared.
And especially from the moment he came close, the temperature had started plunging fast. Not gradually, not the way a front moves in. It fell in steps, and each step matched a step the man took.
[Warning! Temperature dropping sharply.]
[Current temperature: -161°F]
A staggering 161 below.
Not a temperature any hunter could casually wander around in. Unshielded flesh would go dead and gray in seconds at that number.
Yet the man didn’t look like a hunter at all, and he wasn’t showing the slightest sign of feeling cold. No shivering. No hunch in the shoulders. Nothing but that exhausted, grateful face. Suspicion was spreading across Walfred’s face when.
Ding!
[Notice: Demon Eye activated]
[The Eye of Illusion Piercing has opened.]
Along with the sudden notification.
A low groan escaped Walfred.
"Gah!"
A sharp pain flared in his left eye, hot and needling, like something behind the socket had woken up all at once.
The pain didn’t last long, though. It receded almost as fast as it had come, leaving the eye feeling strangely light.
Once he’d steadied himself, he ran the notification back through his mind.
’The Eye of Illusion Piercing...’
It was a trophy from before he came to Key West, taken from the Soul Eater, the A+ rank Elite Monster behind the Skinwalkers incident in Savannah.
Recalling how he’d embedded the Demon Eye into his left socket, Walfred blinked.
The detailed information appeared.
-----
[Name]: Eye of Illusion Piercing
[Rank]: Legend
[A Demon Eye that sees through all illusions]
[If brought to an eye that has no Demon Eye equipped, it automatically replaces it. As an additional effect, maximum mana is increased.]
▷Grants illusion-piercing ability
▷Maximum mana: +2,000
-----
An ability that saw through illusions, exactly as described.
But why would the Eye of Illusion Piercing activate right now, at this particular moment? It had stayed dormant since the day he’d taken it. Something here had finally been worth waking for.
The question had just surfaced when.
"A-ajunngilatit?"
The man, now right beside him, spoke with a worried look on his face. He raised a hand as though to steady Walfred by the shoulder. And the instant Walfred turned his head and met his eyes.
[Demon Eye: Eye of Illusion Piercing]
[Illusory entity detected.]
[Count: 1]
Along with that loaded notification.
The man’s form twisted grotesquely in Walfred’s left eye. Through the right, the tired face and the frost-caked hood stayed exactly as they were. Through the left, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, a misshapen thing made entirely of snow and ice, packed together in a crude imitation of a human shape, with two hollows scooped where the eyes should have been.
The instant he saw its true shape.
Thwack!
Walfred swung his ice axe.
The surprise blow took the man’s head clean off, and he collapsed to the ground without so much as a struggle. Not a sound came out of him. The worried expression never even had time to change.
And a moment later.
Shhhhhh!
Along with a thin mist of snow.
The headless body turned into snow and ice, the winter gear and the weathered hands going with it, until nothing was left but a low drift where a man had been standing. And that ending was a very familiar sight to Walfred.
The White Whales he’d killed outside the gate had turned into snow and ice the moment they died, just like this man. The exact same collapse. The exact same sound.
’So the White Whale I killed back there...’
Was an illusion too, just like him?
But if that was the case, why hadn’t the Eye of Illusion Piercing activated then? It had sat silent through both kills and only opened now, for one exhausted man in the snow. The question made him frown.
He didn’t get long to think about it.
Crunch, crunch, crunch!
Not long after he’d cut the man down.
Dozens of footsteps came from beyond the blizzard, layered over one another, drawing closer from more than one direction. Walfred snapped to attention and swept his eyes across his surroundings.
"Aa! Inuk!"
"Ikiunnga!"
Women, small children, elderly people. Dozens of them were walking toward him out of the white, hands raised, faces breaking into that same desperate relief he’d just seen and just cut down.
And.
[Demon Eye: Eye of Illusion Piercing]
[Illusory entities detected.]
[Count: 65]
With the notification that followed.
Walfred’s eyes went cold.