SCREEEEECCCHHHH!
"What the fuck!?"
Jason suddenly turned around when he heard a loud screech echo from behind him, and he saw a white creature that was about half the size of a man and had an appearance that was similar to a rabbit! The snow rabbit was looking up at him with pale blue eyes, and its mouth was open in a loud, continuous scream that echoed through the air like a siren! Jason immediately put his hand out and activated a skill!
[Iron Storm] has been activated
A barrage of silver blades formed in the air and shot down toward the snow rabbit, and the snow rabbit immediately stopped screaming as it jumped to the side to try to avoid the blades! Some of the blades struck the rabbit’s skin, but they bounced off its thick hide and fell to the snow harmlessly, and the rabbit was about to begin screaming again as it ran!
SLASH!
Jason suddenly appeared from behind the rabbit and cut it in half with a perfectly timed [Horizontal Slash] and he watched as the rabbit fell to the ground in two halves and its red blood spilled out on the blue ice. What the actual fuck was that? Jason asked this question to the system, and the system responded immediately.
[The system does not have any recorded information regarding this species of snow rabbits. But the system is certain that this creature is not a native to this world, and therefore it must have come from another world.]
’Huh. That doesn’t sound good. But why the fuck was it screaming like that? That didn’t sound like a sonic attack, so was it trying to call my attention or something? Wait, wasn’t this in the poem from earlier? It said to ’beware the screaming beast of snow’. Is this what it was talking about?’
Jason frowned as he looked down at the rabbit suspiciously. The rabbit was weak, and Jason knew it wouldn’t be anywhere higher than S-Rank, and with that much power, there was no way it would have posed a threat to him even if it attacked. But from what Jason learned about magical beasts, they don’t really think about how strong you are before they attack you. Most of them just attack mindlessly, and if a beast doesn’t attack you, then there was every chance that it was smarter than regular magical beasts.
But Jason realised that this wasn’t a magical beast that you had to worry about defeating. Usually, Jason wouldn’t believe any random piece of information like that poem, but right now, he knew that the smartest thing to do was to follow the warning! The poem had said that the screaming beast of snow would make the Beast know, and Jason didn’t need to be a genius to figure out what that meant.
Jason immediately activated the [Wandering Shadow], and he fell into the shadow behind him and moved away from the road just as another group of snow rabbits appeared from the side and hopped towards where the first one had been. That scream that the snow rabbit let out wasn’t a sonic attack that would harm Jason, and it wasn’t some battle cry either. That meant that this rabbit had been using it to call for reinforcements. Jason could have easily killed all of these monsters since they were so much weaker than him, but Jason realised that fighting these monsters would bring an even bigger problem to him. The giant footsteps that Jason had just seen were frozen, so he couldn’t really tell if they were recent or not, and that meant that there was every possibility that the screams from these rabbits would be able to draw the attention of the Beast of the Apocalypse if it was close enough.
The small group of rabbits looked at the body of their dead comrade for a few seconds, and they felt anger fill their bodies! One of them screeched in a low voice and passed a message to the others, and they all began to move into the town in search of the killer. Jason took the opportunity to spread his mana out towards the dead rabbit, and as he called out.
"Resurrect."
The white rabbit immediately began to rise from its dead body, and it opened its mouth to let out another screech in excitement, but Jason quickly told it to shut up and the rabbit’s ears dropped sadly as it obeyed Jason’s orders immediately. Jason told the rabbit to go into his Alternate Dimension, and it vanished before Jason quickly scanned through its memories to get as much information as he could about what it was. And what Jason saw in there just further assured him that he had made the right decision by not attacking the rabbits. Those monsters were known as [Siren Rabbits]. They were S-Rank monsters that existed in the snowy plains of a world known as Antrica, but ever since the Beast of the Apocalypse took their world under its territory, they had gained more freedom to move around all the cold regions in the beast’s territory. The Beast of the Apocalypse allowed them to do whatever they wanted, but in exchange, they acted as the beast’s eyes and ears in its territory, and if they saw any foreign creature or intruder, then they would let out their screech, and that would attract the Beast. The rabbits didn’t know exactly where the beast was right now, but from what Jason could see, Jason was at least certain that the beast was either in this world or somewhere close by. The footprints in the middle of this town were created about a month ago, so they were very recent.
’It’s like a symbiotic relationship. The Beast gives them freedom, and they act as the Beast’s watchdogs. And since they feed on frozen meat, they can thrive in this world from the abundance of frozen creatures.’
Jason frowned as he quickly thought about what he was going to do next. The rabbits didn’t really pose any threat to Jason other than their loud screech, and the only dangerous thing about them was how quickly they reproduced. Only five rabbits had come to this world at the start, but they had reproduced so much that it would be difficult to go to any region without seeing a rabbit. Since he couldn’t kill all the rabbits without alerting the others to his presence, he decided it would be best to just ignore the rabbits and move on. There might be a lot of them, but it wasn’t impossible to avoid them if you were smart. Jason used the shadows to move quickly through the town, and it wasn’t until he had crossed outside the town’s border that he rose from the shadows again and looked around before he sprinted into the frigid cold wilderness.
In truth, Jason would have liked to remain in the shadows and simply use it to travel all the way to the other side of this world, but the lack of any significant light source in this world meant that there were hardly any shadows at all. And when Jason was travelling over large winter landscapes that didn’t have any buildings or trees, there were no shadows at all for him to latch onto, so he was forced to make the long walk like anyone else. As Jason ran, he made sure to keep his senses sharp for any sign of more snow rabbits. Jason had only been caught off guard by the previous snow rabbit because he had been distracted studying the large footprints, but since Jason was now a lot more alert, he was able to pick out the mana signatures of the strange creatures before they could even get close to him. And Jason realised in that moment that there were a LOT of snow rabbits around this region!