Horn awoke from his unconsciousness, finding himself lying on the ice surface, his left cheek pressed against it as the warm breath from his frostbitten lips formed a thin layer of frost.
A broken ice spike lay awkwardly beside him, with its tip stained by blood that had frozen to a dark red.
It took him about three seconds to remember who he was, a Level 3 High Stage mage specializing in Ice Rules, the leader of the Frost Plane exploration team hired by the Giant Rock Commerce Association.
Then it took him another three seconds to recall that his right hand was tightly gripping a Constant Temperature Sealing Box.
The sealing box was still there.
He felt his fingers had turned purple from the cold, knuckles so stiff from gripping for so long they could hardly straighten, but the box had been wrapped with three rounds of bandages and tied in his palm, the bandage knot soaked with blood and frozen solid, keeping the box in place.
Horn breathed a sigh of relief, only then did he feel the pain.
It wasn’t pain in one specific part; it was a bone-deep agony spreading through every muscle, bone, and joint, as if countless ice hammers repeatedly pounded him from every direction.
The wound on his left shoulder was the deepest, something sharp had pierced through his shoulder blade from behind, he remembered that moment, remembered the sensation as if a spear made from ice blocks had penetrated him, the extreme cold creating an illusion of burning.
A large piece of muscle on his right calf was torn away, and the blood had soaked his pants leg which then froze to form a stiff dark red ice shell, cracking into new fissures with each movement, then filled with new blood.
Perhaps two ribs were broken, maybe three; each breath brought a slight sound of bone fragments rubbing inside his chest.
He tried to move his fingers; they could still move, but his left arm below the shoulder had mostly lost sensation.
Horn used his still functioning right hand to support himself on the ice, pushing his upper body up from the ice surface bit by bit, the wound on his back tearing open again with the movement, warm blood running down his spine, instantly freezing into icy strands in the sub-minus 200-degree air, sticking firmly to his skin.
He made no sound, having led exploration teams for nearly twenty years, collected samples beneath the eternal ice of the Frost Plane over twenty times, having seen colleagues frozen into statues within the ice, teammates shattered into pieces by a swipe of a Frost Giant Beast’s paw, seen apprentices lost in blizzards found with ice crystal-covered smiles frozen on their faces.
He was no stranger to pain, but never like today, so close to death, forcibly crawling back.
Horn knelt on the ice, bowed his head, panting for a long while before slowly turning to look behind him.
He had taken a team of over a dozen into the eternal ice, eight combat mages, two dedicated collectors, one Wizard Array specialist, one healer, and himself.
Before setting out in the canteen of the Frost Plane’s outpost, he stood in front of the team calling names one by one, each person standing to respond when hearing their name.
The Wizard Array master was a young man just promoted to Level 2, with not yet dense facial hair, so nervous standing up he knocked over his chair, provoking laughter.
The healer was a witch in her early thirties, arranging bandages and potion bottles in her first aid kit from the start, told not to bother preparing for casualties before even setting out, she replied better safe than sorry, prompting laughter from all.
There were two collectors, one a veteran, managing tools with two of his fingers missing, never making mistakes.
The other a rookie, his first time under eternal ice, so excited the night before departing he couldn’t sleep, boarding the snow car the next dawn with dark circles.
Now they were all gone.
Horn’s gaze swept over the ice behind him, the nearest body lay more than ten meters away, a combat mage still in the spell-casting stance, arms outstretched, fingers splayed, palms forward.
But his head was gone, the cut clean as if made by a sharp scalpel along the jaw and neck, the wound’s flesh turned gray-white in the extreme cold, no blood, no sign of struggle, simply frozen standing, just missing a head.
Further away was the Wizard Array master, the young man with incomplete facial hair, his defensive witch array blocked two attacks before being breached, the broken array disk embedded in his chest, his body split in half from the ice, lower half angled into an ice pit, upper half thrown more than ten meters to the ice wall, leaning against it, head tilted, expression still in terror from the moment the array was breached.
The veteran collector died the farthest away, presumably trying to escape by detouring around an ice pillar upon hearing Horn’s retreat command, not getting far before being caught.
The two collectors, both old and new, now lay quietly on the ice, their long robes torn to shreds, collection tools scattered, those precise scraping blades and small hammers frozen with blood and ice chips, indistinguishable from one another.
Out of over a dozen, he was the only one standing.
Oh no, there was someone else.
Horn heard footsteps, faint, coming from deeper behind in the ice crevice, a figure shuffled out of the fissure, tumbling onto the ice then struggling back up.
It was Ivan, the vice-captain of the combat squad, a Level 3 Middle Stage Earth Element mage, a stout middle-aged man like a tree stump.
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