Chapter 50: The Night Guest
The trail finally ended. As they got past a mound, they saw the spirit wolf lying on the ground. Leon stared at the corpse lying beneath the snow; the spirit wolf was dead.
For several seconds, nobody spoke. Maya slowly lowered her head, her voice quiet under the wind. "All that way..."
Adrian let out a long, heavy sigh. "And we can't even absorb its spirit blood now."
Leon was about to answer when Lyra suddenly froze. "Wait," she muttered, stepping closer to the remains.
Something was wrong with the corpse. A pale purple light seeped through its body, not from open wounds, but from within, as though something beneath the flesh was illuminating the wolf's remains from the inside out. Leon narrowed his eyes as the purple traces spread through the creature's limbs like veins of dying light.
Then he saw it. At the center of the corpse, where the heart should have been, the glowing energy had manifested into the distinct shape of a skull—a dark, ominous mark surrounded by the same unnatural purple glow.
Lyra's face completely drained of color as she gasped. "Night Guest."
Leon looked at her sharply.
Lyra's voice trembled violently. "We have to leave. Now." She aggressively grabbed the reins, driving her mount forward into a dead sprint. "Run!"
The two mounts surged through the deep drifts. Leon didn't question her command, as the sheer terror on her face made a tactical retreat entirely necessary. As they fled, Leon reached out toward the abandoned corpse with his senses. The spirit wolf's origin energy was still present, and the moment he willed it, the power flowed toward him.
Leon noticed a discrepancy immediately. He hadn't touched the corpse to extract the energy. That hadn't always been possible; when he had killed his first eye monster, he had required direct physical contact to absorb its origin. Later, as he killed more beasts, the operational range had gradually expanded, allowing him to absorb creatures he killed from a distance. Then, during the confrontation against the adult Gazer Crabs, he had discovered something else: he could absorb the origin of beasts killed entirely by others. At the time, he had wondered whether that was simply because the Gazer Crabs were a structurally connected species, but now he had his answer. Anything dead within his active radius could now feed his soul.
The origin energy disappeared into the core of the Universal Vessel, and Leon felt it stir. Another portion of the incoming energy was consumed immediately as the Vessel grew. Every beast, every origin, and everything he had absorbed since arriving here had been actively feeding its development.
Leon turned his attention back to the route ahead. The mounts were running at maximum velocity, and Lyra's voice cut sharply through the wind. "That's why!"
Leon looked over toward her saddle.
"The adult stargazers were too close to the border." she kept her eyes glued to the path ahead. "Their normal territory is much deeper inside the Frost Expanse. They need a far denser concentration of Qi than what's available near the frontier."
Leon remembered the adult Gazer Crabs they had just retreated from. "The only reason they'd come this far... they were fleeing something."
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Lyra swallowed hard, nodding. "Exactly. And the spirit wolf," she glanced back briefly at the storm behind them. "It wasn't behaving normally either."
Leon understood the behavioral math. "The calling."
"Spirit-based lifeforms can be influenced by it," Lyra explained. "The Night Guest can draw them toward itself. It's like a siren's call."
Leon went silent. Something had been bothering his hyper-intuition since they first entered the Frost Expanse, and now he understood why. He replayed their original journey through the region after their arrival from Earth. On that first trip, there had been a single pair of juvenile Gazer Crabs, and after that, absolute emptiness. They had traveled for days before reaching the frontier fortress with no dense beast territory, no herds, and no adult stargazer colonies. Yet this time, they had encountered beasts almost immediately, followed by an entire pack of Grade One monsters.
'If that had been their normal territory, we wouldn't have survived the first trip,' Leon thought, his frown deepening into a hard scowl. He looked at Lyra. "How did you not notice?"
She looked confused, shouting over the wind. "Notice what?"
"This," he gestured toward the shifting environment. "The beast density. The uncharacteristic locations."
Lyra hesitated, looking mildly embarrassed. "I've never actually been into the Frost Expanse before."
Leon blinked in surprise. "I thought you were familiar with it."
"I studied it," she defensive lines buckling. "But I usually took other missions."
"Not a single mission in the Frost Expanse... How?" Leon asked, entirely incredulous. "You would have to be actively avoiding it. Why?"
"Because I hate the cold."
Leon stared at her, deadpan. Lyra shrugged helplessly. "Studying a place isn't the same as walking through it."
Leon turned his focus forward again as Lyra's expression suddenly tightened, her gaze locking onto the three of them.
"There's something else," she said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, sharp register. "If it really is the Night Guest, then you all should have felt it."
Maya looked confused, her posture turning rigid.
Lyra's grip tightened around her reins until her knuckles turned white. "Anyone who has encountered it develops an extreme sensitivity to its presence. Goosebumps. Instinctive fear. You can sense the distortion from an enormous distance. You've all supposedly been touched by it." The words carried a subtle, heavy accusation across the snow. "So why didn't any of you react?"
Leon's analytical mind immediately understood where her logic was going. Either they had deliberately concealed the Night Guest's presence from her right now, or they had never encountered the entity in their lives. If the latter was true, then the three people she had been living and traveling with were complete strangers who had hidden their identities and fabricated their entire background.
Lyra's expression hardened into a military scowl. "Did you know?"
Leon carefully considered his answer, mapping out the error in her calculations. She made the wrong judgement and arrived the wrong conclusions so far because she was using the wrong data; they had never encountered the Night Guest, having simply accepted the cover story because it was a convenient way to gain a legal identity at the fortress.
Leon turned toward her calmly. "We're not completely sure."
Lyra's eyes narrowed. "You said you were touched."
"We said the Night Guest sounded familiar," Leon paused, letting his clinical sanity take over. "Maybe it was something similar."
"Similar?"
"A Night Visitor."
Lyra stared at him, utterly dumbfounded.
"Or a Day Resident," Leon added, his voice entirely flat.
Adrian looked away to hide his face, while Maya instantly covered her mouth to suppress a laugh.
Lyra's eye twitched violently. "You're joking."
"What do you want me to say, Lyra? From the beginning, I said the Night Guest sounds familiar. I never explicitly said we got touched by it."
Before she could scream a reply, Leon's amber eyes caught a sudden movement through the whiteout ahead. His expression sharpened instantly. The mounts were still running at full speed, and the swirling snow obscured the direct line of sight, but there were human figures materialized directly on the path ahead. Several of them. And they were coming straight toward their position.
At the same time, the running figures caught sight of the two incoming mounts. They stopped. For one suspended, breathless moment, neither group moved under the blood-red sky. Then, both sides realized the exact same thing: their paths had finally crossed.