三河マルシェ【MARCHE】三河エリアのコミュニティポータルサイト

SHADOW SLAVE Chapter 11 Crossroads

The three of them stood motionless, looking down in uneasy silence. What happened to Shifty didn't come as a shock, but it was still a hard thing to digest. An ominous feeling settled in their hearts — seeing the broken body of their companion, it was too easy to imagine one of them sharing the same fate.To get more news about Shadow Slave, you can visit innread.com official website.

Actually, Sunny had not believed in his benevolent act for a second. Every kid from the outskirts knew that people who acted kind for no reason were the ones to be most wary of. They were either fools or monsters. Scholar didn't seem like a fool, so Sunny became cautious of him from the moment they met.

At this altitude, traversing the mountain was getting harder and harder. The wind was slamming into them with enough force to throw a person off-balance if they were not careful, making every step seem like a gamble. The air was becoming too thin to breathe. Due to the lack of oxygen, Sunny was starting to feel dizzy and nauseated.

Altitude sickness was not something one could overcome with effort. It was subtle and overbearing at the same time, affecting the strong and the weak with no regard to their fitness and endurance. If his luck was bad, an elite athlete could succumb to it faster than a random passerby.
It was just a question of your body's innate aptitude and adaptability. Lucky ones were able to get over it after experiencing mild symptoms. The others were sometimes crippled for days or weeks, suffering from all kinds of torturous side effects. Some even died.
As though all that wasn't bad enough, it was getting colder, too. The warm clothes and fur weren't enough to keep the chill at bay anymore. Sunny felt simultaneously feverish and freezing, cursing every decision he had made in his life to end up here, on the endless icy slope.
This mountain was not a place for humans.
And yet they had to go on.

A few hours passed. Despite everything, the three survivors continued to struggle forward, slowly moving higher and higher. Wherever that old path Scholar had talked about was, by now, it couldn't have been far. At least that's what Sunny was hoping for.

But at some point, he started to doubt if the path even existed. Maybe the older slave lied. Maybe the path was long ago destroyed by ravages of time. Maybe they had already missed it without even noticing.

Just as he was about to fall into despair, they finally found it.

It was weathered and narrow, barely enough for two people to walk side by side. The path wasn't paved, but rather cut from the black rock by some unknown tool or magic, winding its way up the mountain like a tail of a sleeping dragon. Here and there, it was hidden beneath the snow. But most importantly, it was flat. Sunny had never been that happy to see something flat in his life.

Without saying a word, Scholar dropped his rucksack and sat down. He was deathly pale, gasping for air like a fish out of water. Despite that, there was a slight grin on his face.