Chapter 180: Live in the Moment (Patreon)

The emerald curtain of light in the sky had faded to almost nothing, leaving only a lingering ripple of pink and violet echoing across the horizon — a sign that tonight's aurora was finally winding down.

This was actually the first time Isac had watched an aurora fade out with his own eyes. On previous occasions, they'd either been racing to copy data off some computer or locked in a fight with aurora creatures. Never before had they been able to finish off everything nearby and then simply stand back, at their leisure, admiring the strange beauty of the sky.

He hadn't kept an exact count, but tonight's kill total definitely outpaced what they'd taken down at the dam. And beyond the usual Aurora wolves, an Aurora grizzly had shown up as well.

Compared to a normal grizzly, one steeped in aurora energy was clearly a notch faster and stronger. What made it almost comical was that on its charge in, it had barreled straight through two Aurora wolves along the way — one tried to fight back and got its throat bitten out on the spot, while the other had its spine snapped and could only drag its ruined body forward, whimpering, still trying to attack.

So the aurora creatures weren't some unified front after all — the old law of the jungle still applied among them. All the aurora seemed to do was crank up their aggression.

In the end, that grizzly soaked up a full rifle round and two revolver rounds before it finally dropped, less than ten meters from the outpost's ice wall. Its will to keep going was tougher than expected — but that was as far as it got.

After finishing off the Aurora grizzly, Isac made a point of checking the task panel, and found the bear hadn't been logged as a special aurora creature. It was probably like the wolves that had swarmed in with it — just an ordinary animal that got infected on the spot and tagged along for the ride.

"With this many aurora creatures to tally up, the survival points should be enough for a full round of enhancement for all of you," Isac said, looking at the pile of fallen creatures outside the ice wall — so dense and unbroken it looked like the floor of a small slaughterhouse.

Isac alone had fired off more than a dozen rounds tonight, not even counting what Yukinoshita Yukino and the others had fired. Add theirs in, and the total for the night was probably north of forty shots.

Worth noting: Hayasaka Ai had fired exactly once tonight, and that single shot had landed square on the Aurora grizzly. After that, the number of creatures nearby had dropped off sharply, leaving her with enough downtime to pull out her phone and check the game terminal.

The outside temperature was low enough that her military-grade phone held up fine, but her hands couldn't stay exposed to the cold for long, so she kept swapping which glove she pulled off to use it.

It was a bit of a hassle, but as the squad's watch, she could hardly go back inside to play on her phone — that would've been a little too unprofessional.

"Right, we can talk about body enhancement later. Wasn't there an Aurora wolf that fell into the trap earlier? The aurora's mostly cleared out now — should we go take a look?" Hayasaka Ai asked.

Even as Isac had been talking, the last traces of pink-violet afterglow had drained from the sky. The heavens returned to their normal color, and darkness settled back over the land.

"Yeah, let's go check now, before things get complicated. Still, we should be careful," Isac said.

By rights, after killing that many aurora creatures, there shouldn't be much left in the area capable of threatening them — but there was no guarantee something hadn't slipped through. Better safe than sorry.

With that, the four of them headed back inside, and when they came back out, each was carrying a kerosene lamp.

The flame under each glass shade lit up a five-meter radius around them. Isac walked point, lamp in his left hand and gun in his right; Kaguya and Yukinoshita Yukino walked in the middle, with Hayasaka Ai bringing up the rear. From above, this long-silent snowfield lit up once more with the glow of human civilization.

Even if it was only four people's worth.

The trap Isac had dug wasn't more than twenty or thirty meters from the outpost, so it didn't take them long to reach its edge.

The corpses of the aurora creatures that had littered the path were gone now, leaving nothing but a scatter of empty snow-pits.

The moment they reached the edge of the trap, Isac heard a faint, grating noise from below — like a knife scraping cardboard. As it turned out, that wasn't far off. He leaned the kerosene lamp forward, and the light spilled down into the pit, revealing a fairly small adult Timberwolf standing up on its hind legs, its front paws scrabbling desperately at the walls, trying to claw its way out.

At the sight of terrifying, upright two-legged apes closing in with a lantern, the Timberwolf's movements turned even more frantic. Desperate to put distance between itself and the group, it let out a stream of unstoppable whimpers, tail clamped tight beneath its haunches — the picture of pure terror.

Hayasaka Ai leaned in for a look, eyebrows lifting slightly. "So once the aurora clears out, the Aurora wolves revert back into regular Timberwolves."

"Or maybe Aurora wolves are just Timberwolves that got transformed in the first place?" Kaguya guessed.

Yukinoshita Yukino said thoughtfully, "Maybe afterward we could try penning some wild animals and killing them on aurora nights for the points... though I wonder if grouse or rabbits can even get infected by the aurora."

"We could try it with a rabbit sometime. Forget the grouse — there's barely enough meat on one to bother eating, let alone using it as a test subject. And going by the survival points we've collected so far, it looks like the more dangerous the creature, the more points it's worth. Something low on the food chain like a rabbit or grouse probably wouldn't give much at all," Isac said.

Hayasaka Ai looked down at the wolf, which had stopped struggling and now crouched in the corner, baring its teeth in a show of bravado that didn't quite hide its fear. She turned to Isac. "What do we do with this one — kill it now, or keep it around and kill it during the next aurora night?"

Isac answered without much thought. "Just kill it now. We're heading to the southern hunting outpost tomorrow, and dragging it along would just be a hassle. Bury the body here — no need to bring it back. For one thing, we've got no shortage of meat at home; we can't even finish the near-expired canned goods as it is. For another, since it degraded back from an aurora creature, there's no telling if the meat's even safe to eat."

"Sounds good," Hayasaka Ai said with a nod, unsurprised by his answer.

Both Hayasaka Ai and Kaguya were natural dog people, with an instinctive fondness for canines — but that goodwill didn't extend to a species that had already attacked them once. And this particular Timberwolf wasn't much to look at either; even among its own kind, it would've counted as fairly ugly. So there was even less reason to feel sorry for it.

As for Yukinoshita Yukino, that went without saying — she was a die-hard cat person with an instinctive dislike of anything canine. And she certainly hadn't forgotten how, the very first time she and Isac arrived at the forest cabin, a wolf had blocked the doorway. There was no chance she'd speak up in the Timberwolf's defense now.

In fact, the moment she heard Isac say the wolf was to be killed, she immediately raised her double-barrel shotgun, ready to put it down herself — but Isac stopped her.

"No need to waste a shell on it."

As he said this, Isac handed his kerosene lamp to Yukinoshita Yukino for the moment, then picked a watermelon-sized rock up off the ground. He hefted it in his hand, confirmed it had enough weight behind it, and raised it overhead. Then, driving the swing with his hips and core, he brought it down hard.

There was a dull thud, followed by the crunch of shattering bone, and the Timberwolf slipped into an untroubled sleep, forever.

Once the wolf's body was dealt with, the four of them headed back the way they'd come.

Back inside, they shut the wooden door, sealing out the biting cold.

Isac tossed some charcoal into the wood stove, and before long the cabin had warmed up nicely.

"Let's turn in early tonight. First thing tomorrow, we head for the southern outpost. Yukino, do the shell counts check out?"

"They match up. We went through forty-one rounds tonight total — fifteen rifle rounds, eighteen revolver rounds, and eight rounds of 12-gauge." Yukinoshita Yukino paused, then added, "Of those eight 12-gauge rounds, six were shells I'd reloaded myself. Going by how they performed in the field, the power's roughly eighty percent of the factory-made originals."

"That's already excellent work. Thanks for the effort," Isac said. If anything, the number wasn't disappointing at all — it actually caught him off guard, in a good way.

Eighty percent power out of hand-reloaded shells was no small feat. It just went to show how absurdly overpowered an enhanced Yukinoshita Yukino really was.

Yukinoshita Yukino shook her head. "It's mostly down to the particular nature of 12-gauge shells. Rifle and revolver rounds probably can't be reloaded to anywhere near that level."

After all, a shotgun shell only really has to worry about spread and pattern, while rifle and revolver rounds have a lot more variables — power and range both take a significant hit if you get the reload wrong.

Given that rifle and revolver ammunition far outnumbered their stock of 12-gauge shells, Yukinoshita Yukino would probably keep her reloading efforts focused on 12-gauge shells going forward, leaving the other two calibers off her production list for now.

Talk of ammo reloading got Kaguya thinking of a question. "Once a shell's already been reloaded and fired, can it be reused again after that?"

"Yes," Yukinoshita Yukino said with a nod, picking up a 12-gauge shell casing as an example. "The casing's made of brass, and brass holds up a lot better than plastic. You can reload one of these five or six times, easy."

"I see," Kaguya said, nodding — she'd learned something new.

With Kaguya's question answered, Yukinoshita Yukino turned to Isac. "About the survival points — should we spend them on body enhancement now, or hold onto them until we see the price on the 'ticket'?"

"Prioritize body enhancement," Isac answered without hesitation.

The most tragic thing in the world isn't losing your life — it's dying with money you worked hard for still sitting unspent.

Compared to waiting on some vague, uncertain 'ticket,' it made far more sense to raise their physical stats now and buy themselves a bigger margin for error in staying alive.

Even with her special training, Yukinoshita Yukino's physical condition had already reached the average level of the pre-enhancement squad — which, before the plane crash, would've put her well above her peers. But out here, in these extreme conditions, that still wasn't quite enough.

Not to mention, when it came to raw physical ability, more was always better.

Isac had considered, at one point, holding one enhancement in reserve — saving it for whenever someone on the squad suffered a serious injury, essentially getting a free heal out of the system.

But he'd dropped that idea quickly enough, for a simple reason: that damned game terminal only ever activated on aurora nights.

Which meant body enhancement wasn't something they could just buy whenever they needed it. If someone got badly hurt just a few days after an aurora night ended, there was no way they could wait three months for the next one to roll around — by the time it came, it'd be far too late to matter.

So forget the future — max out their stats now, first and foremost.

Live in the present.

"Each Aurora Week usually only brings two or three aurora nights. In case this one only ends up with two, unless something unexpected comes up, I'll go ahead and do the enhancement toward the end of the second aurora night of this Aurora Week — meaning once we've cleared out the aurora creatures around the southern hunting outpost, you'll all buy your body enhancements from the shop right away.

"The southern hunting outpost is fairly close to home, and the road's an easy one, so if there's no unusual reaction after the enhancement, we'll push straight through the night and head home. But if the reaction's serious, we'll hole up at the outpost for a few days until you've all recovered before heading back."

Based on what Isac had experienced before, body enhancement usually happened while asleep — meaning there'd be plenty of time to relocate somewhere safer in between before it actually kicked in.

Of course, that wasn't a guarantee, since Isac himself had been asleep the whole time when he got enhanced.

So there was no telling exactly what kind of side effects Yukino and the others might experience after buying the enhancement — they'd just have to take it one step at a time.

Fortunately, Isac had a backup plan either way. Even if they couldn't make it back to the survival home, the supplies stockpiled at the southern hunting outpost would be more than enough to see them through until the enhancement finished.

The only real difference between the two places came down to basics — beds, toilets, heating. The survival home would obviously be more comfortable, but that didn't mean the hunting outpost was unlivable.

Either way, conditions there would still beat the forest cabin by a mile.

...

The night passed without incident.

The next morning, everyone packed up their supplies and ammunition, and pulled the sled toward the southern hunting outpost.

Since the route from the northern outpost to the southern one passed right by the survival home, they stopped there to eat lunch along the way.

And with the possibility of having to push straight through the night back to the survival home after the second aurora night, Isac and the others stacked up a stone cairn as a trail marker every so often along the road, to keep from losing their bearings if they ended up traveling after dark.

Still, the road from the survival home to the southern hunting outpost was just a single stretch of highway the whole way — even Yukinoshita Yukino would have had a hard time getting lost on it.

But as the saying goes, when it comes to safety, there's no such thing as too much preparation — this was just necessary redundancy.

Besides, stacking a few rocks cost them almost no effort at all.

So they went, walking and stopping along the way, and after roughly three hours the survival squad arrived at their destination.

And that was even with the time spent building trail markers along the way. If they'd skipped that and just pushed straight through, they probably could've saved about two-thirds of the time — meaning the actual walk from the survival home to the southern hunting outpost only took about an hour.

All things considered, that counted as pretty close by.