Chapter 190: Why Is There a Debuff? (Patreon)

Night fell. Logs blazed in the master bedroom's fireplace, and the crackling white noise was wonderfully soothing.

Isac sat in the chair by the fireplace, turning a palm-length wolf tooth over in his hands.

"You guys said this venison is crazy magical. So what if the wolf tooth, dropped by the same kind of special aurora creature, is hiding some weird power we don't know about?"

Yukinoshita Yukino was propped against the cushions at the head of the bed, a loose strand of hair fallen across her forehead. She tucked it behind her ear, thought for a moment after hearing Isac, and said, "You can't eat a wolf tooth."

"I know you can't eat it."

Isac sighed. Did he look like a complete idiot or something?

"Then let's guess at practical uses," Yukinoshita Yukino suggested. She glanced at the tip of the tooth. "Hmm, maybe it's just really sharp?"

Isac wasn't dumb enough to test the sharpness with his bare hand. He found a block of wood, gripped the base of the tooth, and jabbed hard.

"Thunk."

The tip struck the wood with a dull thud.

Isac picked up the block and looked. The spot he'd stabbed had only the faintest little dent, barely visible. Sharpness test result: a conservative 500 or higher.

That number had nothing to do with "sharp." You could use the thing as a blunt weapon.

"Guess it's not meant to be a weapon," Isac said, crossing weapon-making off the list of options.

"I've heard that in most folk traditions, wolf teeth are used to 'ward off evil' or as protective charms. Maybe that's all this one is?" Kaguya guessed.

"'Ward off evil' and 'protection' are kind of vague. Feels hard to test," Isac said.

Hayasaka Ai offered her own take. "If it's for 'protection,' maybe it lowers the odds of getting attacked by wolves. After all, this tooth fell off that giant wolf, so it should carry a lot of its scent."

"And wolf packs have strict hierarchies. Whoever carries this tooth might get treated as the pack leader. Given what the venison does, commanding a wolf pack isn't out of the question, is it?"

"Lowering the odds of wolf attacks... I think we've already killed off all the wolves around here," Kaguya thought. Even if they could command a pack, they'd need some wolves to command.

"Too bad. If we'd brought it along on our trips outside the last few days, maybe we could've tested it during an aurora night," Isac said with regret.

Easier said than done. Until now they'd treated the tooth as a keepsake. Only after seeing the venison's miraculous effects did it occur to them that the tooth might have special properties too.

"Besides the tooth, don't we have another special material? The hide," Yukinoshita Yukino said.

"I rinsed it with water yesterday. It's hanging in the storage room next door, so it probably isn't dry yet," Hayasaka Ai said.

"We never picked up any materials from that cougar, did we? I wonder if they're still there," Isac said. He was already thinking that once Aurora Week ended, maybe they should go back and look.

"When I went back for the luggage, I didn't see any dropped materials around," Hayasaka Ai said, not entirely sure. "Though they might be buried under the snow."

"We'll go check later. This garbage game doesn't even give you a notification when it hands out materials," Isac grumbled.

Kaguya agreed wholeheartedly. "And there's no tutorial or anything. If we hadn't made it through that first month, we'd never even have found out what an aurora night is."

It was no exaggeration to say she and Yukinoshita Yukino would likely be dead without Isac. Hayasaka Ai, with her physical fitness, might have lasted longer, but nothing could change the fact that this Survival Game was a steaming pile of garbage.

It was even crappier than Earth Online!

Come to think of it, Earth Online, the "game" of real life, had been pretty kind to all four of them. Yukinoshita Yukino came from a lawmaker's family, and Kaguya and Hayasaka Ai hardly needed explaining, since they were direct-line members of the Shinomiya family.

Hayasaka Ai might be Kaguya's maid, but as her personal attendant, her standing in the Shinomiya family was nothing like that of the other employees. Her mother was even a senior executive in the family, and a background like that put her squarely in Nihon's upper class.

As for Isac, his parents were both dead, but the inheritance they left was enough for him to live comfortably for the rest of his life. He was basically a minor trust-fund kid.

If Earth Online were a game, all four of them would count as premium starter accounts.

Thinking about it that way, had this so-called Survival Game shown up because it saw how comfortable their lives were and wanted to rain on their parade?

After Isac laid out his theory, the other three girls fell silent. It really did seem like...

Kaguya and Hayasaka Ai were deeply unhappy with the Shinomiya family's culture of putting profit above everything, but they had to admit the material comforts the family provided sat in the very top sliver of the world's pyramid.

And Yukinoshita Yukino, as a lawmaker's daughter, had never really lacked for anything, aside from getting bullied in elementary school.

She used to think the Yukinoshita family atmosphere was bad, that her mother put too much pressure on her. But next to the Shinomiyas, it somehow felt almost relaxed?

As for Isac, a guy with no one to feed but himself, there was no point talking about family atmosphere at all...

While the four of them sat in silence, a familiar crackle of electricity came from the master bedroom ceiling, and the lights began to flicker.

"Zzzt..."

No need to guess. The third aurora night of the week had arrived.

Without a moment's hesitation, Hayasaka Ai pulled her phone from her pocket, turned it on, opened the Shop, and bought "Low-Tier Physical Enhancement," all in one smooth motion.

With Isac, Kaguya, and Yukinoshita Yukino as examples, they'd more or less worked out how enhancement behaved: the progress bar only advanced once you fell asleep.

So from now until bedtime, Hayasaka Ai could move around normally, with no worry of ending up flat as a board in bed like the other two.

"I'm going downstairs to check that desktop," Isac said, standing up.

Back at the dam, Isac had been short on time and outside a safe zone, so he'd never found the Terminal's exit button, and he hadn't been able to view the data stored on the desktop itself.

He definitely wasn't satisfied with that, so he'd simply packed up the whole computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard and all, and hauled it home.

Now all he had to do was boot it up and go through what was stored inside.

As for Isac's old laptop, he'd decided to hand it over to Kaguya. Yukinoshita Yukino and Hayasaka Ai both had phones, while Kaguya only had her radio, and for the past couple of days she'd been borrowing Hayasaka Ai's phone to use the Terminal...

Pretty pitiful, really.

"Even if you give it to me..." Kaguya looked a little awkward. If Yukinoshita Yukino had no sense of direction, Kaguya was without a doubt an IT idiot.

So even if Isac handed her the laptop, she wouldn't have a clue how to use it.

"Then use my phone."

Seeing this, Yukinoshita Yukino set her smartphone in front of Kaguya and took the laptop for herself.

Well, advanced maneuvers like working a mouse with a touchpad were beyond Kaguya, but tapping a phone screen with a finger she could manage.

Credit to modern phones for lowering the barrier to entry so far. If you can read, you can use one without trouble, and even if you can't, you can mostly work out what each button does from the icons.

Then again, what good was a phone to her?

She'd already gotten her enhancement. There were still some points left in her account, but those were saved for the ticket home and couldn't be touched.

That made the Survival Game Terminal pointless for Kaguya right now, and Yukinoshita Yukino's phone didn't hold much else, so it was basically just a Terminal launcher.

So in the end, wasn't she stuck watching from the sidelines anyway?

Kaguya thought it over for a moment, then scooted next to Yukinoshita Yukino to watch her work the laptop, planning to pick up a few tricks on the sly.

Downstairs, Isac set the iron bucket of charcoal at his feet. The aurora night lasted less than two hours, so lighting the big central fireplace in the first-floor living room for it clearly wasn't worth the trouble. Besides, the desktop was in the study, far from that fireplace, and a bucket of coals by his feet would probably work better anyway.

To avoid carbon dioxide poisoning, Isac left the study door open.

Hayasaka Ai had come down too, for the same reason Kaguya was watching Yukinoshita Yukino at the laptop: her phone was just a Terminal launcher. The only difference was that Hayasaka Ai's phone had the Shinomiya family's offline database built in, so she could look things up.

But the survival squad didn't have anything to look up at the moment, so it was no different from Yukinoshita Yukino's phone.

The computer booted and the screen lit up.

This time it didn't go straight to the Survival Game's Terminal interface. It showed a normal startup screen instead, a vaguely familiar-looking system logo popped up, and after about a minute the regular desktop appeared on the monitor.

There wasn't much software on it. Besides the classic "This PC" and "Recycle Bin," there were only a few icons that were obviously office programs.

Isac skipped the office icons and opened "This PC" to browse the local files directly.

This was probably an office computer from the dam, so it had every flaw an office computer should have. Maybe it was just too old, but it was painfully slow. After clicking a drive, he had to wait a second or two before the file names showed up.

The first drive was the system drive, nothing to see. Isac opened the second one like an old pro, and words like "duty roster" and "attendance records" filled his vision.

Files that obviously held no useful information, so Isac skipped them and opened the third drive. Inside was a pile of folders with garbled names. He tried opening one, and a pop-up appeared at once saying the file contents were corrupted.

Refusing to believe it, Isac clicked through every remaining file on the drive and got the same pop-up each time.

Great. The whole partition was dead.

With no other choice, Isac went back to browsing the second drive.

And you know what? Digging around there actually turned up something different.

It was an internal announcement from the dam about the hydroelectric station suspending operations. Unlike the leave notice posted on the bulletin board at the dam entrance, this file described the reasons for the shutdown in far more detail.

The causes boiled down to two things: abnormal creatures and abnormal weather.

The abnormal creature was easy to understand. It was that bear spirit. Several staff members had seen it prowling around the dam's perimeter, and as expected, its enormous size had caused widespread panic, the most direct trigger for shutting the dam down.

But the description of the abnormal weather, especially certain words in it, sent an inexplicable chill through Isac.

"Nuclear leak." "Nuclear winter." "High-risk zone."

Every one of those words pointed to the same thing: what the survival squad was going through might not be a natural disaster at all. It was very likely man-made.

But natural or man-made, Isac wanted to know just one thing. Was Mountain Town inside the radius of that nuclear leak?

To put it more bluntly, were they at this very moment soaking in radiation without even knowing it?

Damn it. Freezing temperatures weren't enough, so now they had to toss a radiation debuff on top?

Originally, Isac had figured that if the survival points needed for the "boat ticket" turned out to be huge, they could take their time, save up enough, and then head for the coastal town. No rush.

If conditions allowed, they could even wait until next summer to set out, when temperatures should warm up and daytime highs would climb above freezing.

Unlike now. Since late autumn set in, even on nice days the temperature rarely got above freezing, hovering between -1 and -10 degrees Celsius (roughly 14 to 30°F).

Nights were colder still, around -20 to -30 degrees Celsius (about -4 to -22°F).

And it was easy to see that winter would be even worse.

In an environment this brutal, Isac naturally wanted to play it safe: survive past the quest's required time limit first, then slowly make their way to the coastal town.

But now, with this "nuclear leak," he could feel an invisible kill line creeping up behind them.

Who knew whether the system's physical enhancement came with radiation resistance? If it didn't, they'd be completely done for.

Hayasaka Ai was right beside Isac, so of course she'd seen the same passages. They exchanged a look, and both realized how serious this was.