Four or so years ago, a traveling beast trader stopped by Corvalenne for a few days. Frankly, Dain didn’t think the man should’ve been called a ‘beast trader’. There were barely any beasts in the man’s cages that could rip off his face, because 'capacity for wild violence' was his definition of a beast… but there was one little critter in the man’s possession that'd made him come back day after day just to stare at it in its jar.

  I didn’t know they could get this big.

  The giant bilefrost centipede’s carapace was gray-blue and glossy with frost, each segment ending in a hooked claw sharp enough to rend through entire trees. It had to be at least ten meters long, and it was a hideous bug—not only because it was salivating from its mandibles, but also because it was spraying a cloud of frigid mist at the stone wall in front of it.

  If he recalled correctly, these centipedes mixed two gut-chemicals in their bilefrost glands and spat out the mixture as mist. It wasn’t really frigid—gods have mercy if a Common grade beast had the power to instantly freeze anything it wanted—but it was still cold enough to needle nerves, numb fingers, and leave the world muffled. Hit for one second, you’d stagger. Hit for five, you’d start losing your sense of self. Hit for ten, and you’d be meat stored in its nest over the winter.

  By his eye, this one was… Common-4? Common-5 if he wanted to respect its sheer size. It was certainly no Uncommon, but even if it were, that wasn’t a brick wall he couldn’t overcome or merely survive. Commons were capable of beating Uncommons. He’d just have to be smarter, meaner, and luckier about it.

  But they really shouldn’t be this big, right?

  And what snagged him as well was its current location. Bilefrost centipedes typically resided high on the Veil-Twins. They were rock haunters and wind tasters; they didn’t come padding down to the forest like hungry dogs.

  His theory might be correct. The destruction of Corvalenne was making the beasts bolder.

  As the centipede stopped spraying its mist for a moment to rest, he frowned at the fact that it wasn’t just crawling around the stone wall to get its prey. He supposed it didn’t need to. Why would it try to run laps when the people hiding behind it had nowhere to run?

  What're the two of them doing out here, anyways?

  They were either hunters, gatherers, or adventurers from Granamere. Those would be the obvious guesses. Except hunters in these parts should be wearing bells on their boots to spook off pale cats and hanging smoke-charms that kept bugs at a polite distance. Gatherers wouldn’t wander too far off the beaten paths, and adventurers… well, decent ones wouldn’t get cornered by a bilefrost centipede like this.

  Unless they were green, or injured, or out of mana. Or all three.

  But maybe…

  His jaw tightened. In The Tales of Seeker Orland, it was said that adventures typically worked in at least groups of three, so if one were injured, one could carry them away while the other could cover their retreat. Only two girls in a party seemed strange… unless one of them was already dead.

  He also couldn’t help but recall that in the stories, Orland ran across travelers in distress at least one every ten chapters. Two times out of ten, they were assassins on a covert mission who’d later try to stab him in the back. After all, assassins typically traveled in twos, because one might fail to kill themselves and need someone else to help them out.

  These two might very well be Obric assassins on some top-secret mission, and if I try to help them, they’ll kill me so I can’t leak their existence to anyone.

  In that case, maybe I shouldn’t help them.

  But then the giant bilefrost centipede drew in a large breath and began spraying again. This time, the wave of mist was even larger, even stronger. It wasn’t easy to completely freeze over a thick stone wall, but cracks were starting to splinter across the stone from the sheer, constant amount of cold being blasted at it.

  Behind the wall, the two girls started panicking and speaking even faster.

  … Oh, come on.

  Would assassins really struggle with running away from something like this?

  Did Old Hugo raise a coward?

  If he could do something to help, then he might as well, but what could he do against such a large, armored magic beast?

  As he ran a quick inventory and tried to think up a plan, he remembered the freshwater pond he’d just drank from.

  That might work.

  Anisa tried not to let her teeth chatter loud enough for the monster to hear her pain.

  Her left hand had taken the brunt of the centipede’s breath when it first ambushed them. Now her hand burned and froze at once, as if needles of winter had been hammered into her palm.

  She cradled the hand against her chest and clenched her jaw, but the effort only made her tremble even harder.

  “My lady!” Yasmin rasped beside her. Her steward’s swordstaff was still stabbed into the stone wall, pushing a steady amount of mana into the stone to keep it from shattering. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m..." But saying fine felt like treason against her bones, so she swallowed instead. “Just a little cold.”

  The wall shielding them hissed and spit little shards as another blue wave rolled over it. More frost spidered across the stone, and Yasmin swore under her breath, gripping her swordstaff even tighter to reinforce the wall with more earth from the ground.

  But Yasmin’s forehead was matted with sweat. Of course it was. She’d been protecting Anisa the entire afternoon, and by now, she’d single-handedly fended off at least five other magic beasts. A bilefrost centipede wouldn’t even be a challenge to her if she still had her full store of mana.

  … This was a mistake.

  Anisa gritted her teeth where she knelt, staring at Yasmin’s shaking back with fear in her eyes. When she’d heard this morning that Corvalenne had fallen, she’d realized something massive was going to shake the world again—like a chain of toppling blocks—so she’d insisted Yasmin help her get to Corvalenne for investigation. After all, the usual roads had already been sealed off by the Obric Border Army, which was why they were attempting to reach the border town via the mountain and forest paths, but…

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  She’d underestimated these woods.

  For some reason, there were far more magic beasts in these woods than usual… or maybe this was just the standard fare and she simply didn’t know any better. She was new to adventuring, after all.

  But as Yasmin’s shoulders started sagging—a tiny, tired motion that terrified her more than the next lash of cold—an unnatural clang echoed through the air, like a pebble bouncing off the centipede’s hard chitin.

  The centipede stopped spraying mist at them.

  Yasmin immediately gasped for breath and loosened her grip on her swordstaff. Fatigue, however, didn’t stop the two of them from peeking around the stone wall to see what was going on—and they definitely weren’t expecting to see the centipede had turned around, screeching up at something else.

  At someone else.

  Anisa only caught the shadow of a man hopping away from one of the overhead branches, but the centipede gave chase. It was like it’d forgotten all about the two of them for a tastier, more challenging opponent.

  Naturally, Yasmin tried to immediately pick her up and haul their asses out of the forest, but she was too curious to not give chase as well.

  “My lady! Don’t—”

  “We have to!” she shouted back, scrambling onto her feet and running after the centipede. “What if they need our help as well?”

  Maybe there was something to be said about the fact that she wouldn’t be the one helping—rather, it’d be her trusty steward doing all the fighting—but she knew Yasmin was thinking the same thing. She just made the first move for the both of them.

  There's no way, whoever they are, they're capable of fighting the giant centipede off alone.

  No way.

  Moments later, the two of them were running along the trail of the giant centipede despite their injuries. It was more than easy enough being on the chasing end. The centipede was loud, screeching and bumping into every tree it passed by, but Anisa kept her eyes on the overhead shadow she couldn’t quite see clearly.

  How’s he jumping around like that?

  Is he an elf? A drow? A satyr?

  I heard the Drunai used to live around here. Is he one of them?

  They trailed the tracks of the centipede until the man stopped skipping at last, poised on a thick and heavy branch at the end of what looked like a flat and neat clearing.

  The centipede shrieked up at him. Meanwhile, she and Yasmin crouched behind a split trunk, careful not to draw the bug’s ire again. They watched as the centipede surged forward into the clearing, trying to reach the base of the man’s tree—and then it suddenly fell with a loud splash that made Anisa’s heart leap.

  It wasn’t a clearing at all.

  The ground was a disguise. A layer of enormous floating leaves had been pulled over a deep pond to mimic earth, and now the pond swallowed the centipede whole, making it thrash and writhe just to keep its massive body afloat.

  Her eyes widened.

  It’s a springwater pond.

  There must be an undercurrent dragging it down as well.

  While the centipede’s legs tore the water to ribbons, the man in the shade raised a black arm and fired a blast of wind down at the bug.

  The first blast smacked and dissipated on its armoured head, no more than scratches, but then they kept coming—two blasts, three blasts, four blasts—and they were relentless, turning the centipede’s irritation into fury.

  A wind-type Elementum-Class relic?

  Is he an Obric ‘Mage’?

  The centipede screeched once more, sick of its torment, and spat a cloud of frigid mist up at the man—but he was unbothered. His black arm was already throttling with power, and both she and Yasmin winced as he fired a sphere of wind so powerful it bent the mist back down onto the pond.

  In an instant, the water froze stiff. Ice shot across the entire pond in one long bloom, entombing nine-tenths of the giant centipede. Only its head and the segment after that remained above the surface, snapping and screeching in futile rage.

  Now that the bug was frozen solid, the man dropped from his branch. His landing was clumsy, knees buckling as he suddenly broke into a violent coughing fit, but he eventually straightened and trudged across the steaming ice.

  Is he hurt somehow?

  But he didn't get hit by the centipede all. Why is he limping?

  The centipede’s head, trapped pointing skywards, continued shrieking in helpless rage. The man decided to put it out of its misery by pressing his black palm to the fleshy underside of its head, and with one more windsphere loosed point-blank, a spray of blood sheeted across the ice.

  The shrieks cut short.

  Neither Anisa nor Yasmin said anything.

  They only stared, silent witnesses to a monster slain by means neither of them could’ve imagined, as the man began humming to himself while trying to pry off one of the centipede’s legs.

  “... We should leave,” Yasmin whispered, leaning close. “Now.”

  Anisa tried to agree, but her body was a bit too cold and a bit too tired. She only managed the faintest nod before she took a step back, and her cautiousness simply wasn’t there.

  A brittle branch cracked under her weight, loud as thunder.

  The man whirled at once. His black arm snapped up, aiming at their tree, and a violet eye bloomed in the center of his palm.

  The sight immediately seized Anisa’s heart like a fist. Her breath locked. Her vision swam, and suddenly, she felt like even his face was getting blurred by the eye’s glare.

  “Leave,” he commanded. A young voice. About her age? “Don’t come here if you’re not prepared. There are worse monsters than a bilefrost centipede.”

  Anisa couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk. Yasmin could, though, because she wasn’t peeking out of cover and hadn’t seen the man’s purple eye yet, so she yanked Anisa back behind the tree and shouted.

  “We mean no harm! We’re only adventurers who strayed a few paces too far from our route! We don’t want to fight!”

  “Then leave.”

  “We would!” Yasmin bit her lip. “But my la… but my partner is in cold shock! She took the brunt of the centipede's mist! Do you have anything to spare? Salves, herbs, anything at all?”

  For a long moment, silence.

  Then the two of them flinched as he fired a windsphere above their heads, and a cluster of red-skinned, shimmering berries rained down at their feet.

  “Emberfruits,” he said. “They’ll heat the body and replenish a touch of mana, too. Take them and leave, and don’t turn around to look at me. I'll shoot if you do.”

  Yasmin snatched one of the red fruits up, tested it with a quick bite, and then—without hesitation—urged another into Anisa’s mouth.

  Heat bloomed down her throat at once, thawing her veins. She gasped as strength crawled slowly back into her fingers.

  “Thank you, kind sir!” Yasmin called.

  The man gave no reply.

  With haste, Yasmin hoisted Anisa onto her back, cradling her weight while feeding her more of the fruits. Then they hurried away, leaving the humming man behind.

  Still, Anisa couldn’t help but notice the shimmering reflection of the man on the water-slick bark around her.

  From her angle, with his right hand lined up alongside his face, it was as though he were a monster with three eyes.

  ... There is a Drunai legend, from ages long past.

  When the winter sky weeps and frost beasts grow too numerous for comfort, they blow the Horn of Winter and call upon the forest's guardian spirit.

  They called that spirit...