Chapter 38: Tundra Biome

  The waterfall’s roar dimmed as they hauled themselves over the cliff’s lip, leaving the spray and moss behind. The climb up the cliffside wasn’t too hard,they’d had practice such things by now, and the remaining, very angry, corcodilian chimeras in the lake were great motivators. They crested the cliff after an hour, and walked into another world.

  Sheer whiteness swallowed everything. A tundra sprawled out in every direction in front of them, with ice and snow stretching endlessly. The wind cut sharp enough to burn against any exposed skin, the cold crawling under armor plates and gnawing straight at bones underneath. The horizon was just… more of it. More snow, more ice, a void pretending to be a landscape.

  “Perfect,” Alex said. He pulled his hood tighter around his face in a futile attempt at blocking out the whipping cold air. It was as if a blizzard had suddenly kicked up from nothingness, a haze of white shifting in his vision from the snowfall. “We go from drowning, to freezing. What's the next stop after this, lava bath?”

  Garret’s teeth were already beginning to chatter. “On the bright side, no mosquitoes.”

  Allie shot him a look sharp enough to cut diamond. “On the bright side? I can’t see anything past five feet. This is not my idea of fun and games when everything in here wants us dead.”

  “Then stick close. Everyone... be ready. Tom-Tom, use Henry.” Alex said.

  The little lizard let out a yelp and scampered his way on to Henry’s shoulders. The small kobold sat across his broad frame, looking like a toddler being held up by their parent. Tom-Tom being, in this case, a very, very ugly toddler.

  They moved out in a wedge formation, crunching through crusted snow. Every step felt too loud despite the sound vanishing into the white with nothing to bounce back from. All around them was a flat expanse, there was no cover and nowhere to hide behind. Just exposure, and the feeling that something was waiting for them to let their guard down.

  Alex kept his [Aether Sight] open, the wisps of air and water aether glowing faint silver and blue across the tundra. The storm was alive with it, currents of frozen breath, streams of ice-bound essence curling around them as they marched through the snow.

  But then… he caught it.

  It was a ripple, a curl of energy that didn’t belong. Not the chaotic blue and silver aether of the wind and ice, and cold, nor the frozen rigidity of the earth aether buried far beneath the white. It was something else. Something that was following them.

  His throat tightened as he watched the flicker of energy disappear. “Something’s here.”

  Eric edged closer to him, Alex could see concern written plainly across his face. “Define something.”

  Alex’s eyes tracked back and forth, finding and losing the distortion that weaved in and out the blizzard, like something poking in and out of the darkness of a doorway. Each time it vanished it was swallowed by the ambient water and air energy that swam in the storm, the aether folding around it like a cloak. Invisibility skill? Is it just watching? It must have been nearby the moment we first got up here, and it hasn’t let us go since we left the cliff.

  Snow hissed sideways at them, a white curtain in motion, and every direction looked the same. But Alex could feel it, stalking their footsteps, its presence written in the unnatural drag of aether across the storm.

  “Guys…” His breath fogged in the cold. “We’re the only ones making tracks out here. But we’re not the only ones moving around.”

  “Square up,” Thompson ordered. The team shifted automatically at his demand, backs angled, weapons at the ready, each of them with eyes sweeping in large pie slices.

  The snowstorm made a liar out of distance. A sudden gust could smother sight to nothing, then peel back to show thirty feet of featureless white. It was like trying to walk through a storm of TV static. Yet, Alex trudged forward with the others, powdered ice sinking past the crust into loose powder that clung to at the calves of his pants. His teeth ached from the cold, and his ears burned. His fingers stung even inside his gloves, his nerves fired off like chewed up wires.

  He hadn’t exactly thought about the lack of heat when he’d volunteered the team for this biome. Brilliant choice on his part, really. Alex was quite the leader, marching them out of the lake’s cave-like sauna, and straight into Antarctica’s evil fantasy twin.

  Sure, their Vitality attributes were higher now. Yet that didn’t mean a damn thing when the wind gnawed on his ears like piranhas with bad dental plans. His face burned, every inhale was a knife dragged across the lungs.

  And the squad’s grim silence said he wasn’t the only one suffering.

  Allie’s shoulders hunched against the gusts, each of her steps stiff. Garret muttered a stream of complaints that froze halfway into the air, little crystallized ghosts of sarcasm lost in the storm. Even Henry—mountain man that he was, indomitable as granite—had frost edging his beard, his breath coming harder than usual.

  And just behind them out of sight, Alex still felt it. The swirl of aether, a shadow in the storm’s current. Never close enough to see. Never far enough to be forgotten. Still following them.

  Alex’s body hummed with prepared aether, [Aether Sight] acting like a torch in the bleak surroundings, nerves tensed for the stalker’s potential sudden strike.

  Then he froze.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Something loomed out of the white ahead, a shape half-buried in snow, it was round and bulky, taller than a man and broad enough to block the wind’s path in a scant area. For a moment his chest went tight, every instinct screamed chimera, and that they were about be thrown into another fight. The storm seemed to hush for a moment as he looked at the figure.

  Aether erupted hot in his veins. His hands came up, fingers curling into fists in preparation. Garret slid his shield into place without a word, the plates of his armor grinding into position with a reassuring shlunk. Lance stepped forward at the same moment, his sword angled low, his boots digging into the powder. Alex wasn’t the only one to see it.

  But when the storm peeled back for a clearer look, his stomach dropped for a different reason.

  The figure… it wasn’t moving.

  It was not a beast at all. Just a… rock. It was carved, weather-worn, sitting stubbornly in the snow as if it had been waiting there for centuries. They shuffled closer, the formation collapsing into a cautious cluster that ringed the curious item. Alex knelt in front of it, sinking knee-deep into loose powder, and brushed frost from its surface with a shaky hand.

  A face stared back at him.

  The boulder’s front had been worked into crude but determinable lines; a wide nose, heavy cheeks, lips curved just enough to suggest something between a smile and a grimace. There was even a mustache, chipped on one side, but still clinging above the mouth like a hairy awning.

  And the eyes…Large, round and prominent. One was carved with depth and clarity, the other was flat and unfinished, staring out blindly into the storm.

  Alex tilted his head. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  The statue didn’t answer, of course. It just sat there, snow curling into its cracks, blind eye staring past him into nothingness. The team stood around it in silence, the wind hissing through the emptiness. Whatever this thing was, it didn’t feel like it belonged there. And Alex couldn’t shake the feeling that finding it wasn’t a simple accident.

  The storm gnawed at their exposed skin as the squad ringed the statue, each of them staring at the carved face like it might suddenly come to life like a freaky fantasy Frosty the Snowman.

  Peter squinted through the frost gathering on his lashes. “Could just be a relic. Maybe the people who built that ruined city scattered these things out here. Markers, maybe. Waystones?”

  Tom-Tom tilted his head this way and that, nose twitching madly as he sniffed at the chiseled boulder from curious angles before providing his own… insights.

  “Smells old. But also… good. Happy, even.”

  Alex scowled at him. “Happy?”

  “Yes.” Tom-Tom shrugged, utterly unbothered by Alex’s obvious discontent with the lizard’s choice of description. “Like hatchday celebration. Or warm bread.”

  Allie groaned. “You’re deranged.”

  Eric stepped forward, his arms folded into his martial robes and cloak turned up against the cold. His eyes fixed on the blind side of the statue’s face. “Deranged or not, Tom-Tom’s nose usually isn’t wrong. Remember what Celeste said? And... if the system planted this thing, odds are it’s tied to something bigger. The hidden objective, maybe.”

  Alex dragged his fingers across the mustached grin, still kneeling in the snow. He hated how much sense Eric’s suggestion made. This whole dungeon so far had been trial stacked on trial, why wouldn’t there be secret ones tucked into the environment’s cracks?

  “Yeah, could be,” Alex muttered.

  Without giving himself time to overthink, he set his palm flat against the cold stone. Aether rushed from his body, a focused spark channeled into the boulder’s blind eye. For a heartbeat, there was nothing, then light suddenly bloomed.

  The flat eye flashed a soft white glow that pulsed once, twice, then burst from the statue itself. A ripple of energy slammed outward, shoving at the storm with invisible hands. The wind died in an instant, the snow peeled back like a curtain drawn away in a theatre.

  The world around them settled into calm, the air suddenly clear and still, a perfect circle of peace carved into the howling tundra around them. Frost glittered like diamonds at the edges of the clearing, each crystal suspended in air before drifting harmlessly to the ground.

  Suddenly, Alex could breathe without the storm scraping at his throat.

  And then, across his vision:

  Alex huffed out a laugh, and his shoulders sagged in relief. He had taken a risk, activating a magical item just like that, without knowing what it would do. But his gut had told him Eric was correct, and that turned out to be the right choice.

  “Well… that explains that,” he said.

  The statue’s blind eye dimmed again, its face frozen back into its eternal half-smile.

  Garret gave the statue’s mustache a flick with his glove. “So, what’s the play? Just wander into the blizzard like idiots and hope we trip over the next one?”

  “That is the most likely outcome,” Holly flashed a grin.

  Alex stayed crouched in the snow staring at the statue’s flat eye that had glowed a moment ago. He shook his head slowly. “The System doesn’t usually roll dice like that. Its not random chance.”

  Lance perked up. “Right! Patterns. There’s always some logic baked in, even if it’s sadistic logic.”

  Alex nodded and started looking around. The statue had created a calm, storm-free zone around itself for about a hundred feet in all directions. That gave no hint at where to go next, it was all just a uniform circle.

  “Remember the open grave at the mound for the Skeletal Knight in the Dark Den? That wasn’t just decoration, but a hint by the System on how to complete its objective. On the Second floor, every puzzle room was a lesson preparing for the final chamber. The System always gave clues to what it wanted us to do. There has to be a tell here, too.”

  For a moment they all just stood there, silent but for the creak of armor shifting and the faint whistle of wind at the clearing’s edge.

  Peter cleared his throat and stepped closer to the statue, studying it with careful eyes. “Notice how it’s facing?”

  They turned, following his gesture that pointed off into a seemingly random direction. The carved face stared outward, unwavering, its carved eyes fixed in that one direction. He could guess that it looked straight toward the outer mountain wall and away from the city, if Alex had managed to keep his bearing in the storm, that is.

  “If these things are waystones, like I thought,” Peter said slowly, “maybe they don’t just calm the storm. Maybe they point the way to the next statue?”

  “Statues leading to statues. A breadcrumb trail in the snow.” Allie said.

  Tom-Tom sniffed the air, “Happy bread.”

  Alex stood and brushed the frost from his knees, his gaze cast out to the endless white where the statue’s eye pointed. Its one flat eye, its blind eye.

  “Or, the blind leading the blind?” he said.

  Allie snapped her fingers. “Ah! Its blind eyes, yeah, it’s pointing that way. So could be towards the next statue… or… pointing us straight into something that wants to eat us.”

  Garret raised a hand and wavered it back and forth. “Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

  “Either way, looks like we’ve got a heading.” Alex said.

  He began walking in the direction the statue faced. He was already sure of his choice on the matter. He liked the small reprieve the thing had given them from the wind, but he knew they couldn’t stay in there forever.

  The storm howled just beyond the calm circle, as if waiting for them to step back out, urging them onward.