Chapter 52

Chapter 52 : Even Artisans Are Selective About Their Tools (3)

“What are you?”

“Riwin……?”

“I’m not asking your name.”

I rubbed the back of my neck and avoided his gaze.

I happened to pull out the dagger lodged between the creature’s wing joints, and frowned at the blue blood that spurted out.

If I had lowered my head just a little more, it would have splashed straight onto my face.

After wiping the blood from the dagger on the creature’s pure white fur and tucking it back into my belt, I raised my head.

Hwipone, who did not hide his bewilderment past even shock, strode over, grabbed my shoulder, and turned me around.

“I thought something was strange earlier too.”

“Mm…….”

“The you I remember……!”

“Our first meeting was not exactly pleasant.”

Cutting off Hwipone’s words, I examined the spot where I had stabbed the dagger in.

The sensation I had felt at the tip of the dagger earlier had definitely been the feeling of breaking some object. Probably the puzzle piece a Phantasmal Species carried within it.

My prediction was not wrong. Perhaps it had been dragged out when I pulled the dagger free, because the broken fragment had been exposed quite close to the surface.

A complete death.

Back when I had half-lost my mind and dealt with Phantasmal Species in the Black Forest, I had clung to life by a similar method.

The only difference was that back then, I had been rampaging almost entirely on instinct and stumbled into it, while now I had done it intentionally.

I looked away when the crow-tit, which had appeared at some point, gulped down that broken puzzle piece. Unlike with Woldeer, there did not seem to be any particular change.

“How did you kill it in one strike?”

Also, it seemed Hwipone could not see that puzzle piece. Or perhaps no one else could, and only I could see it?

“I was just lucky.”

I stepped away from the mutant yeti and shook my head.

If I explained this, he might decide we should take this chance to subjugate this entire place.

But after we went through similar situations five more times, Hwipone, unable to hold back any longer, seized me by the collar.

---

“Try lighting a campfire or something.”

Before night deepened, we dug into a suitable pile of snow and made a space to avoid the blizzard.

“Do that if you want the snow to melt, bury us, and send us to the next world.”

“Do you not have some ability to keep us warm?”

“If I did, don’t you think I would have used it already?”

“……Useless.”

“Hah, stop grumbling and eat this.”

I accepted the dry ration Hwipone threw me and put it in my mouth. The tough, chewy texture made me wonder if I had tasted it before, and then I realized it was the same food I had eaten when we first met.

‘Back then, it had seemed like the most delicious food in the world…….’

I raised my brows at the strange feeling that came over me.

It was hard, tough, fishy, and bland. What exactly had I found so delicious back then, eating it so frantically……?

My current situation was not different from back then, yet my thoughts were completely different, making me realize just how comfortably—full-bellied and warm-backed—I had been living.

“Tell me what we are doing from here on.”

I knew nothing about this terrain. Since I did not even know our approximate location, I had to trust Hwipone’s guidance, but I needed to know at least some of it to follow along.

“First of all, this place is basically a lake. Roughly…… it is shaped like this.”

Hwipone drew a rough, distorted circle in the snow with his finger. More precisely, it was a clover shape, though the boundaries were much more blunted.

“Our location is here.”

Hwipone stuck a piece of dry ration into the center as a marker, then pointed to the upper part among the four corners and said,

“The expected destination is here. I have finished scouting the other three places, but this one is the only one left.”

“So the direction we are going now is that way?”

“No. The direction we are going is this way.”

I frowned. Hwipone pointed at the lower corner, the exact opposite direction, and laughed as though it were no great matter.

“You cannot get to the final destination easily. There are creatures we have to catch in these three places.”

“Must we?”

“We must.”

Hwipone stuck pieces of dry ration into three directions and continued explaining.

“There is a huge barrier wall around the destination. More precisely, it is like a curtain made of snow, and every time you cross one layer, the temperature drops sharply. Even I have not reached the final area yet.”

“And?”

“If we catch the Phantasmal Species in these three places, one layer of the curse draped over the former site is lifted.”

He meant the curse cast during the “Great Incident.”

The curse that made mutant Phantasmal Species appear and brought extreme cold raging through the place.

“So there are specific Phantasmal Species?”

“There are.”

“Have you caught them before?”

“Of cooourse.”

Watching Hwipone look proud for no reason, I voiced a genuine question. If he had caught all three, why had he not gone to the last place?

Hwipone suddenly looked gloomy, let out a huge sigh, and thoroughly messed up the drawing in the snow.

“They revive even if I catch them. Before I can catch all three, the first one I caught revives. I repeated that a few times and gave up.”

The reason Hwipone periodically came here, carried out a mission, and returned was also because of those Phantasmal Species.

He reset them one by one before their power accumulated.

Killing the Phantasmal Species that reappeared with great power again and again.

Probably for a very long time.

The reason they revived was obvious.

Because he had not destroyed the Fragment of a Phantasmal Species.

Either another individual ate the fragment, or it went through recovery and returned to normal again like Woldeer. It had to be one of the two.

“So what is the one we have to face now?”

“A cat.”

---

Good grief, is that not far too big to be called a cat?

It was about the size of a large feline animal inflated twenty times over. It also seemed slightly smaller than Woldeer had been when he died.

Every time its pure white fur moved, long vertical golden lines gleamed between the blizzards and flaunted its presence.

It looked like a tiger, and as an accent, it even had wings attached.

As expected of a Phantasmal Species, it had fangs larger than my forearm and thick horns that looked as if they belonged on a water buffalo. If I got caught wrong, I would not even be able to gather my bones before being stomped to pulp.

I had seen something shaped similarly somewhere.

‘A manticore?’

It was closer to a tiger than a lion, but in any case, they were both cats.

I watched Hwipone’s dazzling ice-skewer show and searched for a weakness.

After coming here and seeing imperfect mutations that had failed to become proper Phantasmal Species, I had noticed one thing they all had in common.

Everything here had wings.

And most of the time, those wings became the weak point.

I shouted toward Hwipone as he avoided the steel-like claws and drove in a skewer.

“The second one below the first bend in the right wing!”

“What kind of bullshit is that?!”

Right, bullshit.

What drove me mad was the fact that most of those weak points were in locations that were awkward to explain in words.

After barely dodging a tail attack studded densely with spikes, I tilted my head along the trajectory of the red lines tangling chaotically.

I had no idea I was this flexible.

I should have realized back when Hwipone questioned why I insisted on a dagger instead of carrying a longsword.

It was entirely an issue of range. If I knew how to shoot a bow, I would have taken one. This damned dagger was no different from hand-to-hand combat.

The knockoff cat’s weak point was on its wing. If the wing had at least been large, it would have been easier to find, but this bastard’s wings were uselessly cute, round little things plastered to its back, wings that only pretended to be wings.

“Do it properly!”

“I am not a melee DPS character.”

“What?”

I am sighing too, having to approach it.

Why do cats have four legs?

If they had two, they would be easier to dodge.

Dodging the clumps of snow kicked up by the creature’s hind legs, I seized one of its wings.

At the same time, the creature lifted its front paw high. Staggering, I put strength into the hand clutching its wing and shouted to Hwipone.

“Move—!”

THUD—!

The rumble that struck the ground and came crashing with the aftermath was far too heavy for something pressed down by a wad of cotton.

CRAAACK—.

They said this was on a lake, and from deep below, the ice screamed.

Gathering my dizzy mind, I barely pulled up my body, which had been dangling from the wing, and climbed onto the creature’s back.

Only then did I see Hwipone far away. Fortunately, Hwipone, who had fought this thing countless times, had already moved his body to a proper range.

The problem was that I was freezing.

The feeling in my right hand, covered in pure white frost, vanished, so I held the dagger in my mouth and gripped a specific part of the red-glowing wing with my still-functional left hand.

At my fingertips, I felt the creature’s last struggle.

CRUNCH—.

Unable to use the blade, I grabbed the wing feather barehanded and snapped it. Only after I felt the fragment completely shatter did I finally let go of the tension in my body.

That was why I was thrown to the ground before the creature even collapsed.

“Keuk.”

I had thought snow was soft.

I lay sprawled on the ground with one of my legs pinned beneath the creature.

Only belatedly did I realize that my palm had been half-sliced by the creature’s blade-sharp wing and blood was pouring out, but all I could do was laugh.

This was a hand that had only known how to hold a brush. I had no idea what I was doing now.

“You have finally gone insane.”

As I lay in the snow, laughing weakly, Hwipone approached and crouched beside my head.

“Insane? How hurtful.”

“You do not even look after your body, so how are you going to face the next one? You need at least three days of recovery right now.”

“Mm…… that should be fine.”

Hwipone had grown impatient because we needed to deal with them quickly in order to have enough time once we reached the destination.

If pain delayed us and the knockoff cat revived, that would be a problem.

“Fine? In three or four days, this thing revives.”

“It probably will not.”

When I said it lightly, as though it were nothing, Hwipone’s face twisted while he was groaning and pushing the knockoff cat off me.

“Push a little more. I am almost out.”

“Hey, you know something I do not.”

“I do not. Ah, near the ankle there…… wah?!”

I had almost pushed free, but Hwipone stopped pushing and leaned against the fluffy creature, glaring down at me.

Naturally, I sank back in up to my waist.

“……What could it be?”

“What indeed?”

Hwipone even folded his arms, demanding an explanation with half-lidded eyes.

Had I judged a creature he had caught over and over as unable to revive too easily?

Still, I did not have the energy to drag my injured body along and face the next Phantasmal Species.

I would either get hit somewhere badly and step onto the threshold of the afterlife, or fail to come back from it.

A fast clear would be nice, but safety came first above all else.

Our party did not even have a healer right now.

I checked my stinging palm, still dripping blood, and let out a sigh.

“I saw its weak point. I attacked it. I destroyed the core. The end.”

At that compressed string of words, Hwipone’s eyebrow twitched.

Even with that much, Hwipone was the sort who would understand perfectly.

His eyes gradually widened, trembling finely, and a dumbfounded lament escaped him.

“Huh……? Fraud?”

“Would you please move this now? My three-day injury is going to turn into two weeks.”

At my indifferent urging, Hwipone blew the knockoff cat away in one strike.

I feel like I am the one being scammed here.

Now that I had regained my freedom, I stood up, rotated my ankle a few times, and confirmed that it was fine.

This much was a bruise that would be all right if I buried it in the snow for a day or so to cool the heat.

The bigger problem was my palm. After checking the cleanly split laceration, I took out the medicine bottle I had extorted from Pan in advance. It was only about enough to stop the bleeding, but this much should not cause a problem while moving.

“What?”

Hwipone standing quietly in front of me with sparkling eyes while I finished emergency treatment was burdensome.

“If destroying the core means it cannot revive anymore, does that mean I have not been killing them properly until now?”

“Roughly.”

“And Riwin can see that.”

“Um…… not all of it.”

I instinctively reduced the range of what I could do, but even that much was enough to awaken Hwipone.