Chapter 179: The Condition for Going Home (Patreon)

"No matter how many times I see it, this gorgeous view still takes my breath away," Yukinoshita Yukino said, standing by the window. She wiped the glass in front of her with a pale, slender hand, watching through it as countless threads of light converged in the night sky, lighting up the land like broad daylight.

"All right, stop gawking and get to work." Kaguya's gaze didn't linger on the sky for long. She picked up her weapon and cinched her cuffs tighter, making sure the cold air wouldn't slip through any gaps in her clothes and steal away her precious body heat.

If they wanted to hunt aurora creatures, staying inside obviously wasn't an option. For warmth's sake, the cabin Isac and the others were holed up in did have windows, but they were pitifully small and barely opened at all — nowhere near wide enough to poke a gun barrel through.

If they insisted on firing from inside, they'd end up shattering the glass right along with everything else.

Hearing Kaguya's words, Yukinoshita Yukino pulled her eyes away from the dazzling aurora and bent down to start sorting through their gear.

Although they called it going out to hunt, the truth was that back when this spot had been designated the hunting outpost for this Aurora Week, the survival squad had already given it a full wartime makeover.

Calling it a proper bunker would be a stretch, but at the very least they'd managed to stack ice bricks into a rough wall of cover around the outpost.

Bzzt...

Static crackled. Aside from the electronics Isac and the others had brought with them, the only electrical fixture in the whole outpost was one old, battered ceiling lamp.

While Yukinoshita Yukino and Kaguya prepped their gear, Isac, unhurried, flipped open his laptop. He'd even thought to bring along the mouse from the desktop back home this time.

A laptop's trackpad was just too unnatural to use — nowhere near as smooth as a proper mouse.

Especially on an aurora night, when every second counted.

The aurora night had only just begun, and going by past experience, the aurora creatures wouldn't show up for a while yet. So Isac still had plenty of time to check the survival points they'd earned last time, and take a look at whatever pie-in-the-sky promise the survival Terminal was dangling about getting home.

Now, some of you might be wondering — Isac, Kaguya, and Yukinoshita Yukino have all shown up, so where's Hayasaka Ai?

Where did Hayasaka Ai go?

The moment the aurora arrived, Hayasaka Ai had already headed outside to set up her rifle.

With a bit of time to spare, Kaguya and Yukinoshita Yukino both crowded around Isac, curious to see what new tricks the survival Terminal had cooked up for them this time.

The boot-up took a full minute, which felt as long as an era. Back before the plane crash, Isac would've shoved a laptop this slow straight into a ditch. Now, though, even if he threw himself into a ditch, he wouldn't let this laptop take so much as a scratch.

Scarcity really does make things precious, he supposed.

"Let's check the survival points first."

Looking at the familiar survival Terminal UI on the screen, Isac dragged the mouse and used his squad-leader privileges to pull up the squad account.

"Squad account" was really just a fancy name for a list of everyone's individual survival point totals, with a grand total tallied at the bottom.

Oddly enough, even though it was just an ordinary computer, it seemed to recognize whoever was using it. When Isac was at the controls, the Terminal logged in under his personal account; the moment he handed the mouse to Kaguya, it instantly switched to the main interface, with the personal account field updating to show hers instead.

From this, Isac guessed that the survival Terminal was actually bound to each person individually, and that the computer or phone was just a vessel.

How to put it... it felt a little cheap.

Isac had wanted to complain about this before. Other people's systems either projected straight onto the retina or opened up some kind of independent pocket dimension. Theirs needed a physical device — fine, whatever, he could live with that — but it was also, for God's sake, time-limited.

Like a college dorm cutting the power and internet at curfew — the survival Terminal only ran on aurora nights.

Even a rehab program for internet addiction wasn't this strict.

Of course, restrictions aside, the rewards it handed out were still pretty solid.

"The survival points from last time's settlement came out higher than expected — enough for two rounds of physical enhancement." Yukinoshita Yukino glanced at the point total. "If we push a little tonight, we might scrape together enough for a third."

"Let's set the enhancement idea aside for now," Kaguya said. "Even if we could afford it, we're in no position to actually do it. Don't forget, last time Isac went through an enhancement, he was bedridden for days afterward."

That time, some of it had been because Isac was already injured, but really, getting swiped by a cougar shouldn't have caused pain wracking his entire body like that — the real culprit had to be the side effects of the physical enhancement itself.

Isac thought back to how it had felt. Even three months later, just remembering it made him wince. Needing someone to help him to the bathroom — that hadn't been fun, to put it mildly.

So he said, "Let's shelve the physical enhancement question for now. There are at least two aurora nights in one Aurora Week — we can decide whether to enhance again once the second one rolls around in a few days."

"And don't forget, besides the survival points, last update also mentioned that a main quest would show up this time. If we meet the conditions, we can actually get back to our own world."

Isac closed the squad account tab and started digging through the main menu for the main quest section. It had been over a month since he'd last opened the survival Terminal, and since that last session had been short, this newly added section came with no prompt or notification at all. He clicked through the entire main interface without finding the main quest, until finally, opening menu after menu, he found it tucked away on a secondary page.

Once opened, the quest name turned out to be almost comically plain — just two words: "The Way Home."

Isac skimmed the quest name, then moved straight to the requirements.

—Quest Requirements—

1. Repair the Radio Tower, establish contact (1/1)

2. Investigate the Carter Dam (1/1)

3. Survive 180 long nights (121/180)

4. Experience at least 3 auroras, hunt three types of special aurora creatures, and obtain the corresponding materials (2/3)

Hidden Quest: Slay the Polar Bear Spirit (0/1) (optional; completing it grants a hidden achievement reward)

—Quest Reward—

Shop unlock: purchase permission for "boat ticket"

Note: The boat ticket must be redeemed at a coastal town.

Honestly, the quest was a bit easier than expected — at least it wasn't forcing them to go pick a fight with the bear spirit. But it still had its fair share of difficulty, and there was clearly a catch buried in there somewhere.

What did it mean, the boat ticket could only be used after reaching a coastal town?

A boat ticket, obviously, meant a ticket home by boat — but why did it have to be a coastal town specifically?

Isac knew Mountain Town wasn't anywhere near the sea, and the only river nearby was frozen solid — there was definitely no boat here. But... why did it have to be a boat ticket at all?

Couldn't it be a plane ticket instead?

He'd fallen out of a plane — wouldn't it make more sense, poetically speaking, to leave by plane too?

And now here they were, being told it had to be a boat. What was that supposed to mean?

If not a boat, even a train would've made more sense.

It wasn't that Isac had anything against boats, specifically — it was the departure point he took issue with.

Coastal town.

He knew the place. It was marked on the map they'd recovered from the abandoned mine. Back during their forest cabin days, Isac and the others had actually debated whether to head for Mountain Town or the coastal town.

Strictly speaking, in terms of raw distance, the coastal town was actually closer to the forest cabin than Mountain Town was. But after talking it over, all four members of the survival squad had unanimously decided on Mountain Town.

The reason was simple: Brother Bear.

Getting from the forest cabin to the coastal town meant passing through the lake cabin — and the lake cabin was exactly where Isac had first laid eyes on the bear spirit.

In fact, a large part of why they'd moved out of the forest cabin in the first place had been to get away from that bear spirit.

So after all that trouble going the long way around, they still couldn't escape it?

With that thought, Isac kept staring at the hidden quest tacked onto the end of the requirements list for a good long while, and then he couldn't help but laugh.

A laugh born purely out of frustration.

Slay the Polar Bear Spirit...

Knowing this Survival Game's rotten habits, wasn't this basically the game telling him: forget it, buddy — you're going to run into the bear spirit on your way to the coastal town no matter what?

Isac took a deep breath and set the boat ticket issue aside, turning instead to the fourth requirement — hunt three types of special aurora creatures and obtain the corresponding materials.

It showed "2/3" next to it, meaning they'd technically already hunted two of the three special aurora creatures.

As for the corresponding materials... Isac thought of the oversized fang the massive, jet-black wolf had left behind after he killed it at the dam. That, presumably, was the material the quest was referring to.

But that raised another question — aside from that black wolf, what was the other special aurora creature they'd killed?

That cougar?

Isac racked his brain for a while, and in the end, the cougar was the only candidate he could land on — since aside from the cougar, the only aurora creatures that had attacked them that time were ordinary Aurora wolf.

But... what material had the cougar left behind?

"Yukino, Kaguya, after we killed that cougar, did either of you see it drop any material?" Isac asked.

After the fight with the cougar, Isac had passed out on the spot, and by the time he woke up again, he was already back home in the big bed. The job of recovering their gear afterward had fallen entirely to Yukinoshita Yukino and the others — at the time, Isac hadn't even been able to get out of bed, so he genuinely had no idea what, if anything, the cougar had left behind.

"Material it dropped..." Yukinoshita Yukino thought about it for a moment, head bowed, then shook her head, looking a little lost.

Isac glanced over at Kaguya and found the same blank expression on her face.

"Let's ask Hayasaka Ai once things settle down," Kaguya said. "Though I'm guessing she probably doesn't know either."

"I see..." Isac wasn't too disappointed. Even without a matching material, the quest tracker already showed "2/3" — so presumably it had already been counted. Maybe not having a matching material wasn't a big deal... probably?

"It's also possible the material was already picked up, and we just don't know it," Yukinoshita Yukino offered after some thought.

No sooner had she finished speaking than a long, drawn-out wolf howl rolled in from the distance. The three of them exchanged a glance, dropped the matter of the game Terminal entirely, and grabbed their weapons, ready to hunt.

The moment Isac stepped out the door, he spotted several faintly greenish shapes closing in fast from roughly two hundred meters out.

The howl a moment ago had already told them who it was — their old friends, the Aurora wolf.

Besides the ones out front, more Aurora wolf were closing in from both the left and right flanks. As for the rear, there was a two-meter ice wall back there, so no real need to worry — any aurora wolf coming from behind would have to swing all the way around to reach them from the front anyway.

"Roughly five Aurora wolf up front, three on the left, two on the right," Hayasaka Ai called out the moment she saw her teammates emerge, relaying the situation at once.

Isac's mind clicked into gear the instant he heard it. "Yukino, take the two on the right. Kaguya, the three on the left are yours. I'll take the five up front. Ai, cover us from the side."

"Copy that." (x3)

Under the system they'd unlocked last time, taking the right actions earned corresponding experience — and since Hayasaka Ai's marksmanship skill had already hit its cap, they'd agreed before the aurora night even started that this time, the aurora creatures would mainly be handled by the other three, with Hayasaka Ai holding back as backup.

Before long, the Aurora wolf had closed the distance. With their cover and the experience built up from previous aurora-night hunts, none of them — not Isac, not Kaguya, not Yukinoshita Yukino — felt so much as a flicker of alarm.

As far as they were concerned, as long as the wolves didn't breach the stacked ice wall, this was just target practice.

In truth, even if the wolves had broken through, the axe Isac carried on him would have taught them exactly why humans standing upright were something to fear.

Across the aurora-lit snowfield, gunfire rang out again and again — with every shot, another aurora wolf dropped, and their cold carcasses would, once the aurora faded, turn into warm, usable survival points.

Since Isac and the others had prepared so thoroughly beforehand, the charging wolf pack barely gave the squad any trouble at all. During the wipe-out of the first wave, Hayasaka Ai didn't even need to fire a shot.

On top of that, one of the five Aurora wolf charging in from the front stumbled straight into a trap they'd set up earlier. The trap wasn't lethal — its main purpose was just to pin the creature down.

Isac had dug the pit deep, and given how frozen the polar snowfield was, forget an aurora wolf — even a person who fell in wouldn't be climbing back out anytime soon.

His real goal was to see whether a live aurora wolf, once the aurora ended, would revert back into an ordinary wolf.

If it did revert into an ordinary wolf, that would strongly suggest Aurora wolf were just regular wolves mutated by aurora exposure — which, in turn, might mean they could catch a few wolves, or some other creature, ahead of the next aurora night, keep them penned up, and kill them once the aurora arrived, as a way to rapidly stockpile survival points.

Farming mobs, basically.