Ice Vapor Goddess

Chapter 7 Wolf

With snow boots, the group moved much faster, but the terrible blizzard seemed determined not to let them off the hook. In the blink of an eye, darkness fell, and the white snowscape disappeared, leaving only an endless, howling storm in the dim world.

A black iron glass kerosene lamp hung from the sled handle, swaying back and forth, providing a meager light, but it struck the sled in the wind and snow, making a terrible clattering sound.

Aldridge took it off and held it in his arms to prevent the fragile glass from breaking. Sheren and Mathilde untied carpenter Sam from the sled, and the six of them squatted together beside the sled.

The snowstorm made walking impossible; every step seemed to threaten to blow them away. They could only sit together in the dim light, guarding a small lamp and their sled.

Siren summoned the sacred fire, and Mathilde, holding a cross, led everyone in silent prayer in the darkness.

For a moment, the world seemed to be filled only with howling blizzards, but they could hear each other's heartbeats.

On the sled, the alcohol thermometer showed a temperature of -12°C, while in the blizzard, the perceived temperature dropped to below -20°C, and there was still room for it to drop further.

The snowflakes, fine and dry powder, drifted into the nose and mouth hidden by the coat; the sky was filled with a white, ethereal spectacle of death.

"Ouch——"

Suddenly, a wolf howl came from somewhere.

The six people were startled and looked up at each other's faces, which were covered with ice crystals and frost flowers.

How could there be wolves in this kind of weather?
But they could not ignore the possibility of danger, and they all stood up and took out their armor and weapons from their sleds.

There was a carriage on the train specifically for transporting these items, but to reduce the load, they only brought enough for five people.

Xiren strapped some plate armor to his body, the water-powered plates engraved with runes, and fastened it with leather buckles. Then he drew a double-barreled shotgun and held it in his hand, with a runic short sword and a box of shotgun shells hanging from his belt.

The equipment was so heavy that even wearing snow boots, I sank quite a bit into it.

They looked around warily, but the heavy, dark snow reduced visibility to less than a meter.

The wolf howl rang out only once, and then silence fell. But no one was careless. They even felt that those creatures with green eyes were lurking in the snow a meter away, waiting for them to show a weakness or get tired. It seemed that every place in this blizzard was a greedy hunter.

Time passed second by second, and people's concentration gradually dissipated after a long period of focus. Xilun's mouth and nose were covered with white frost, but he dared not wipe it off.

Suddenly, a white shadow flashed by, and a painful scream came from beside the sled: "Ah!!!"

It was a guard named Kyle, who had been grieving the loss of his brother and had been depressed all along, but now he became the breakthrough point.

Xilun quickly chanted "Stop!" At the same moment, another guard, Logan, pierced the pure white wolf with his sword.

He was panting heavily when he chopped off the wolf's head with a single stroke of his sword, then grabbed Kyle by the collar.

His face was full of anger, as if he was blaming Kyle for being distracted, but he only glared at him hatefully before squatting down to bandage his wounds.

Xiren saw it all. He knew that Kyle had been absent-minded and silent ever since he lost his brother. He would do whatever he was asked to do in silence.

Logan's sword arrived almost simultaneously with Siren's, indicating that he had also been paying attention to Kyle for some time. "He's a wary person, but seems too repressed..." This thought flashed through Siren's mind, but was quickly shattered by a series of wolf howls.

The expressions on everyone's faces instantly turned grim.

Siren quickly cast Holy Light on the injured Kael, then aimed at the blurry white figure and fired a shot!
"Bang!!" The massive recoil forced Xiren, who was handling a gun for the first time, to take a step back. The shotgun shells created a death zone, exploding in the air with a spray of blood!
The others also joined the fight. Kyle and Logan fought the wolves with their swords, while Aldridge, with his muscular build and heavy armor, ignored the wolves' bites and took them down one by one with his hand axe.

Mathilde held a pair of revolvers. Although her aim wasn't great, her handling and reloading were very skillful. Her eyes burned with excitement. Her dark nun's robes and white headscarf fluttered in the storm, and her overcoat was stained with the blood of wolves. She looked like a little madwoman.

A few minutes later, more than a dozen wolf carcasses lay on the ground, and a low wolf howl came from afar. The surviving wolves then slowly retreated.

Xilun breathed a sigh of relief.

Wild beasts are indeed no match for humans equipped with armor and weapons. People in primitive times could hunt with spears, let alone these fully armed modern humans.

“Something’s not right.” Aldridge crouched down, slipping his leather gloves inside the wolf’s belly, getting himself covered in dark red blood and biological tissue.

Xilun leaned closer: "What's wrong?"

The scene was rather disgusting, but Mathilde joined in, which surprised Siron.

“Normal wolves wouldn’t be able to operate in this kind of weather, and the wolves of Albion went extinct fifty years ago,” Aldridge said, glancing at Sam.

Sam nodded quickly: "Yes, actually we haven't seen wolves for seventy or eighty years. I've only ever heard old people describe wolves in my life."

Aldridge then captured a few more wolves: "Caldan white wolves, Rosa forest wolves... all of them escaped from the nearby zoo, wolf species from all over the world, yet they obey the commands of a single alpha wolf."

Xilun's expression was not good. Not only that, he also saw ice crystals growing on the wolf corpses, and the blood was glowing with a faint blue light.

“They’ve been corrupted,” Mathilde said.

Xilun nodded. "Demonization" refers to the mutation of matter in a high-energy environment. Generally speaking, animals in high-magic environments such as mage towers and holy sites will be demonized.

He had spent four years in Florence, a city permeated with a sacred atmosphere, where horses could be transformed into unicorns and kingfishers into fairies. This was a kind of demonization, albeit a precisely controlled and manipulated one.

“It’s only been a day since the snowstorm started…” Xilun muttered to himself. “Although there’s only been a slight change, I’ve never heard of such a short period of demonic transformation.”

To use energy fields to corrupt beasts would require decades of painstaking effort. The unicorn herd in Florence was the result of the Papacy's accumulation over hundreds of years, but the wolf in front of them grew ice crystals on its body, changed the color of its blood, and could move around in blizzards in just one day.

“This snowstorm must be a massive magical field,” Aldridge said gravely. “We don’t know its size yet, but if it covers the entire world… then I can’t understand who created it. Perhaps only…”

Xilun understood that he wanted to say "God," but he was afraid of blasphemy if he said it, so he didn't finish.

“We must get to Speyside as soon as possible.” Celen placed the ice crystals from several corpses onto the sled. “We can study these matters there.”

(End of this chapter)