Chapter 210: Glimpses from the Shadows (Patreon)

The next morning, just as the sky began to lighten, Isac surfaced from a deep sleep. When he opened his eyes, the room was dim, and the dull red glow of the charcoal in the wood stove smudged across the ceiling.

With some effort, Isac slid his hand out of Kaguya's soft embrace and held it outside the blanket to test the temperature. It was a little chilly.

He turned his head toward the window. The sky outside wasn't fully bright yet, just a misty gray, but he could already make out the scenery around the lakeside cabin.

Better get up and put some wood in the stove, Isac thought, and he did exactly that.

The charcoal in the stove had burned down to almost nothing, a wide bed of gray ash with a few dull red embers scattered through it. Isac raked the ash aside with the fire tongs so the remaining coals could get more air, then tossed in a few pieces of dry firewood.

The spots where the wood touched the coals blackened quickly, then started throwing off sparks, and finally caught in a bright flame with the faint crackle of splitting fibers.

Once he saw the wood had caught, Isac stopped paying attention to the stove and turned to pull on his clothes and gear. Meanwhile, Yukinoshita Yukino and the others woke one after another, crawled out of their blankets one by one, and groggily tugged their clothes on.

"I'm going to the door to dig up some snow," Isac said.

"I'll come with you." Hayasaka Ai zipped up her jacket and wound a scarf around her neck, then wrapped one around Isac's while she was at it. She picked up her rifle and followed him to the door.

They shoved aside the table and supplies they'd used to barricade the door, then pulled the wooden door open. The wind wobbled in with a few wisps of fine snow.

Isac first looked toward the spot where something like a wild animal had seemed to be lurking the night before. Just as he'd expected, there was nothing: only snow, shrubs, and conifers. There was barely even a sound, all of it swallowed by the thick layer of snow underfoot.

He dug up a basin of fresh snow and headed back inside.

Yukinoshita Yukino and Kaguya were already fully dressed and getting the washing supplies ready.

Isac set the pot of snow on the wood stove and heard a hiss. That was the snow clinging to the bottom of the pot hitting the heat and evaporating instantly.

The snow in the pot soon melted into clear water. White steam began rising from the surface, fine bubbles gathered along the bottom, and before long the bubbles grew bigger and the water started to gurgle.

Once the water boiled, everyone did a quick wash-up with it. Then they went out to dig more fresh snow to start breakfast and top off their thermoses with hot water.

"It's snowing lightly out there. Today's goal is to find the railway. Once we do, we can look for a place to spend the night," Isac said.

This was their third day since leaving Mountain Town. After two straight days of hard marching, Isac and the girls were all bound to feel worn out.

And it wasn't just physical exhaustion. It weighed on their minds even more.

After all, once they hit the road, their three meals a day had shrunk to two, with long gaps in between, and the places they slept weren't exactly comfortable either. Yesterday, Isac could only sleep curled up, or his feet would have stuck out past the end of the bed.

With light snow falling today, Isac figured they might be able to stop early and use the chance to properly recover.

Of course, all of that depended on finding the railway without trouble.

That shouldn't be hard, though. According to the map, the railway ran just east of the lakeside cabin. All they had to do was keep heading east through a stretch of dense forest.

Better yet, the railway was very long, running south to north and not turning until it reached the far north. So even if they drifted off course in the forest, as long as it wasn't something drastic like a 180-degree U-turn, they'd still hit it. It would just cost them more or less time.

There were also scattered buildings along the railway, so they didn't need to worry about failing to find a place to stay halfway through.

It was fair to say that once Isac's group found the railway, they'd already have one foot in the coastal town.

It was the same principle as when they'd searched for Mountain Town: find the road, and you've basically found the town.

Yukinoshita Yukino naturally understood this. But more than finding the railway, she was still bothered by the pair of eyes from the dark last night.

"I doubt this forest will be as easy to cross as we hoped."

"Easy or not, we have to cross it," Kaguya said calmly, taking a sip of tea. Rather than worrying about this and that, they should get themselves into the best shape possible to meet whatever challenges might come.

Yukinoshita Yukino glanced at Kaguya and, unusually, didn't snap back. She just ladled her another bowl of oatmeal, loaded with plenty of venison.

Just chow down.

After breakfast, they put the pots, bowls, and utensils back on the sleds and lashed them down. Every thermos was filled with freshly boiled water. The four of them hauled their sleds outside together and set off to cross the forest.

"Dense forest" was a generous description. The trees were still spaced pretty far apart, usually around two meters. But compared with the seven, eight, even ten-plus meters they'd been seeing, two meters did count as crowded.

Even at two-meter gaps, a sled could get through just fine.

The real obstacles for Isac and the others were the clumps of shrubs or rocks that sometimes sat between trees.

Isac's fix was simple: as long as they kept their overall heading, pick the routes with the fewest shrubs, and when there was no avoiding one, cut a path with the axe.

Even so, their pace refused to pick up. And that wasn't their only problem. With light snow falling and the sky a dull gray, there was no sun to be seen, so they couldn't tell direction accurately. To keep from drifting too far off course, they had to stop and correct their heading every so often.

They'd been going for about two hours and had probably covered less than three kilometers. Compared with the past two days, it was a snail's crawl.

On top of that, whether it was psychological or not, the whole group kept feeling like something nearby was watching them. The problem was that even Hayasaka Ai couldn't detect any sound from it.

Either it was far away from them, or they were spooking themselves and playing mind games with thin air.

But it was most likely the former.

Hayasaka Ai trusted her instincts, and Isac and the others trusted her judgment, so they stayed alert the whole way, never letting go of their guns, ready to hit back the moment something happened.

Still, staying on guard like that drains your energy. Maybe the unknown creature trailing behind them was waiting for the moment they ran out of strength and their focus slipped before it attacked.

In truth, an enemy in the dark while you're out in the open is the toughest situation. It's not that you fear the enemy showing itself, it's that you fear it never will. Even with Brother Bear, Isac would've dared to meet it gun in hand. The unknown was the greatest enemy of all.

Isac and the others had no great answer for it. All they could do was speed up and get through this forest as fast as possible to reach the more open stretch along the railway.

After pushing on another two kilometers or so, Isac pulled the map from inside his jacket and checked it. According to the map, even cutting diagonally along the longest route, the forest between the lakeside cabin and the coastal railway was no more than ten kilometers across. If they hadn't strayed, they had five kilometers of mountain trail left at most.

And since they corrected their heading every so often, Isac was sure that even if they had drifted, it couldn't be by much.

With that thought, Isac swung the axe hard. The blade sliced through the air and bit deep into the roots of a shrub blocking the way. Then he gave a hard yank. He didn't pull it out by the roots, since that would take too much effort. He just hauled the clump to one side so it wouldn't get in the way of the sleds behind him.

"Phew..." Isac steadied his breathing. After such a long trek, plus having to watch constantly for a possible attack, his stamina was draining fast.

That wasn't even the worst part. The worst part was that he couldn't breathe too hard either. The air was so cold that gulping it down could frostbite his airway, so all he could do was inhale through his nose and exhale through his mouth.

It wasn't exactly painful. It was just really, really frustrating.

"Is it just me, or is the snow getting heavier?" Isac was speechless. When it rains, it pours. Bad luck really did come in clusters.

Luckily, it had only gone from light snow to moderate snow, and the tree canopy blocked much of it, so not that much actually landed on them. But visibility dropped another notch, which only helped the beast hiding in the dark.

"I'll break trail from here. Take a breather," Hayasaka Ai said when she saw this.

"Okay." Isac didn't try to tough it out. When it was time to rotate, they rotated. In conditions this harsh, every member of the survival squad had to keep from running too low, staying above the baseline at the very least.

Hayasaka Ai took the axe Isac handed over and went ahead to clear the way, while Isac took her place at the very back of the line.

No one knew how long they'd been walking when the trees around them began to thin out and the snowflakes drifting down grew thicker.

Though nobody said it out loud, all four of them knew what the change meant: they had to be getting close to the railway.

Yet the feeling of being watched never left them. If anything, the closer they got to the railway, the stronger it grew.

At last, after passing through a stretch of trees, the view opened up in front of them. A wide road, a dozen-plus meters across, lay stretched out before the group.

And right at that moment, the sense of being stared at on the whole trek peaked, so intense it almost felt solid.

"Bang!"

Isac fired.

He couldn't see a target. He just went on instinct and put a shot where the thing was most likely to appear, not to wound it, only to scare it off.

And after that shot, Isac felt the faint gaze vanish all at once. It seemed the gunshot had startled it, and the effect was striking.

Of course, it was also possible that Isac's group looked harder to deal with than it had expected, and it had given up the hunt for now and gone back into hiding.

Either way, one thing was certain: they were safe. For the time being.

Under the blanket of wind and snow, visibility dropped, and the temperature dropped right along with it.

Isac felt the temperature closing in on minus forty degrees Celsius. Weather like this wasn't fit for traveling anymore. They needed to find a building and get out of the storm, fast.

Maybe it was their luck finally turning. The survival squad, jinxed the whole way, soon spotted a wooden building beside the railway. It wasn't big, about the size of the forest cabin, maybe even a little smaller.

But at a time like this, who could afford to be picky? Having a roof at all was a win.

Once they got close, Isac didn't rush in. He circled the building to make sure the structure was sturdy enough that it wouldn't collapse halfway through the night, and only then pushed open the wooden door and went inside.

Inside, they found the space even smaller than they'd expected. The four sleds alone took up half of it, and the other half held the wood stove and a wooden bed. The floor space they could actually stand on was under three square meters.

And four people had to share it. Stretch a leg even a little and you'd bump into somebody. It was seriously cramped.

Still, small spaces have their perks. Once they lit the stove, the room warmed up to a fairly comfortable level in no time.

The enclosed space gave them a solid sense of security and let everyone's wound-up nerves loosen a little after the long march.

"So, did that shot of yours hit anything?" Kaguya asked.

She'd been right beside Isac at the time, and that sudden shot had made her jump.

"I just took a blind shot, so probably not," Isac said, completely unbothered. "But as long as it worked, who cares? The thing got scared off, didn't it?

"Even if I was just playing mind games with thin air, you can think of it as spending one bullet to buy ourselves some peace of mind. Beats having that thing sneak up from who-knows-where and hurt one of us."

Hearing this, Kaguya decided he had a point.

"It's only a Band-Aid, though. No guarantee that thing won't keep following us later," Isac said with a sigh.

"Once the aurora night comes, it should jump out on its own," Hayasaka Ai said. "Until then, all we need to do is make sure we reach the coastal town."

Yukinoshita Yukino added, "We've found the railway now, so getting to the coastal town is only a matter of time. What I'm afraid of is this snow never letting up."

Even before they came inside, the snow outside had been getting worse and worse, and there was no telling whether it would stop by tomorrow morning.

If it didn't, that would be trouble. They'd be stuck spending a few more days on the road