Chapter 19. Tracking
The northern continent was divided into the tundra, snowfields, and snowy mountains.
The tundra was relatively close to the central region, so vegetation such as conifers grew naturally there due to its comparatively warm climate.
However, it was only warm in a “relative” sense.
It could never truly be described as warm.
The average temperature ordinarily fluctuated between four and five degrees below freezing.
When the Season of Bitter Cold arrived, the average temperature dropped as low as fifteen degrees below freezing.
And now was precisely when that season began.
Anyone who slept outdoors would freeze to death, and obtaining even water—let alone food—was difficult.
Under the current conditions, merely surviving in the north was a continuous challenge.
Therefore—
“I’ll go look for Brother with the soldiers immediately.”
They needed to find Adrian as quickly as possible.
Seraphia tightly fastened her thick fur clothing. Even so, the cold penetrating it was downright murderous.
Every time she felt that cold, Seraphia found herself unable to shake the sense of foreboding rising within her heart.
It had been two weeks since Adrian disappeared.
Two weeks in this bitter cold was long enough for someone to freeze to death.
It was reasonable to assume that he had absolutely no chance of surviving without proper equipment.
“Sir Kai, please search for Brother with the soldiers as well.”
“.......”
Perhaps because of that, Kai didn’t answer.
His lips remained firmly closed.
However, his troubled expression made it obvious that he had something he wanted to say.
Eventually, Kai slowly opened his mouth.
“....I don’t understand why we must find Lord Adrian.”
Adrian had disappeared of his own accord. For Kai, this was the best possible outcome.
There was neither a need nor a reason to search for Adrian.
Kai honestly confessed his feelings, and Seraphia answered with a single word.
“He’s family.”
It was a relationship formed from the moment someone entered the world.
That was why family could heal one another. Yet it was also a relationship that could never be severed.
That was why family could wound one another.
Perhaps family was a disease. And if that was the case, the disease called family needed to be cured.
That was why the former Count had cast Adrian out.
He had decisively severed the blood relationship between parent and child.
But Seraphia and Adrian weren’t actually related by blood.
“I would do the same thing if it were you, Sir Kai.”
However, the same was true of Kai.
Kai and Seraphia weren’t related by blood either—
“We’re family too.”
Family.
Because they were the closest to one another, the wounds they inflicted upon each other could become more irreversible than those caused by any other relationship.
“Understood.”
Kai nodded.
But that didn’t mean he had accepted Adrian. It was merely an expression of Kai’s loyalty and chivalry.
And Kai’s loyalty and chivalry were devoted to one person alone.
Seraphia.
They were directed solely toward her.
“I will search the snowy mountains this time.”
“Then I’ll search the snowfields and the tundra.”
Seraphia gave him a small, grateful smile.
Then, as though there wasn’t a moment to waste, she immediately departed.
Her silver hair swayed from side to side with every step. Kai watched her for a moment before slowly beginning to walk.
The metal armor saturated with the cold of the snowy mountains pressed against his skin.
Protecting his body with Aura, Kai advanced through the snow with the soldiers.
How long had they been climbing?
They had reached approximately halfway up the mountain when—
“Over there! There’s something in the snow!”
Kai turned toward the soldier’s shout and saw something buried beneath the snow.
They swiftly approached and pulled it free, revealing a massive object approximately four meters long.
“It’s an Alakron’s corpse.”
It was an Alakron, a monster that inhabited the snowy mountains.
Judging by the condition of the frozen corpse, it had been dead for at least a day.
Furthermore, its condition was unusual.
Chunks of flesh had been violently torn from its body, making it appear as though something had eaten it.
“So that’s why the monsters have been so difficult to find lately....”
“The monsters of the snowy mountains must have been fighting over their territories.”
The soldiers quickly reached a conclusion.
They believed that the corpse was the result of a conflict between monsters.
That was understandable.
The missing chunks of flesh were unmistakable signs that something had eaten it.
And only one kind of creature would do such a thing.
A monster.
After all, humans were completely incapable of eating monster flesh.
“It appears Lord Adrian isn’t in the snowy mountains.”
Therefore, their conclusion was perfectly reasonable.
But Kai thought differently.
He closely examined the Alakron’s corpse.
There were marks where something had torn away and eaten its flesh. They were somewhat different from the marks a monster would leave.
Rather than the teeth of a monster, they looked as though human teeth had chewed through the meat.
Some sections had even been cleanly cut, as if sliced with a knife.
Kai quickly reached a conclusion.
‘He ate another monster....’
These were Adrian’s leftovers.
The soldiers had never imagined that Adrian might eat a monster.
More accurately, they were incapable of imagining it.
No matter how hungry someone became, eating monster flesh would drive them insane.
Therefore, deciding to eat monster meat was practically the same as committing suicide.
That was one of the continent’s oldest laws and most fundamental pieces of common knowledge.
But Kai thought differently.
‘Because I saw it.’
He had seen Adrian tearing into Dermexus's heart. Kai himself had witnessed it clearly with his own eyes.
It hadn’t been an illusion.
Adrian had seemed fine at the time.
After eating the Dermexus’s heart, he had briefly succumbed to Madness but quickly returned to normal.
At the time, Kai had wondered how that was possible. But sure enough, the inevitable had happened.
‘Has Madness finally consumed him?’
Adrian had been driven insane by Madness.
In truth, it was an entirely natural and inevitable outcome.
Thinking back, Adrian disappeared shortly after tearing into Dermexus's heart.
‘So that was why....’
Kai immediately understood why Adrian hadn’t appeared for two weeks.
It wasn’t that Adrian had chosen not to reveal himself. He had become “unable” to reveal himself.
Once consumed by Madness, Adrian was no longer human.
Even now, Adrian was probably wandering through the snowy mountains without reason.
He was probably slaughtering the monsters inhabiting them.
He was probably tearing into their flesh and continuously accumulating Madness.
Before long, Adrian would undergo “Monsterization”.
If that happened, they couldn’t leave him alone.
Adrian was wandering through the snowy mountains without reason.
They had to kill him.
“What should we do?”
Kai answered the soldiers’ question without hesitation.
From this moment onward, their mission was no longer a “Search Mission” for Adrian.
“Continue tracking him.”
It was now a mission to “track” and “eliminate” Adrian.
There was an extremely high probability that Adrian was somewhere in the snowy mountains.
The environment was so brutally cold that an ordinary person couldn’t survive even a day, let alone two weeks.
Nevertheless, Kai didn’t believe Adrian was dead.
Adrian was unquestionably alive.
But today, Adrian would die.
Following the traces left behind, Kai led the soldiers farther up the snowy mountain.
And at that exact moment—
KABOOOM—!!
A tremendous explosion suddenly erupted from another part of the mountain.
* * *
It had been an unknown entity that suddenly attacked me.
Eventually, the snowstorm completely subsided—
Within it arose fragments of emotions such as hatred, joy, and ecstasy.
It was a brute shrouded in pitch-black hatred and madness, a beast forged from blind murderous intent.
Madness that seemed to have been wrung from every vein erupted from its low growl.
An endless thirst for blood.
The desire born from hunger.
Those impulses seemed ready to tear me apart at any moment.
“A Gelu-Drake....”
Gelu-Drake.
It was a mutation of the monster known as a Drake, and its name carried the prefix “Gelu”, meaning ice.
Translated literally, its name meant “Ice Drake”.
In other words, the Gelu-Drake belonged to the same species as an ordinary Drake.
Taxonomically, it was classified as a “Subspecies”, and the two could interbreed and reproduce.
They simply didn’t mate naturally because they inhabited different environments.
Therefore, whether it was a Gelu-Drake or an ordinary Drake—
All Drakes shared a single common ancestor.
The Dragon.
The name Drake had originally been derived from Dragon.
It wasn’t simply because they looked alike.
The name referred to something similar to a Dragon, yet distinctly different.
In the unimaginably distant past—
Drakes had branched off from Dragons and developed into a separate species.
In other words, Drakes belonged to the Dragon Family.
Tigers and cats belonged to the same feline family.
The difference between Dragons and Drakes was comparable to the difference between tigers and cats.
In other words, the difference was substantial.
The problem was that Dragons were such absurdly powerful creatures to begin with.
Dragon.
The strongest creature on the continent and a living catastrophe. Dragons were called the “Pinnacle of Biological Evolution”.
A living creature could adapt perfectly to one particular environment.
Life could survive even in frozen mountains where the temperature dropped to seventy degrees below freezing.
However, perfect adaptation to a particular environment was a double-edged sword.
If that environment collapsed, the adapted species would become helpless and go extinct.
For example, a monster from the snowy mountains would be cooked alive within a day if thrown into the extreme heat of the south.
Adapting to one specific environment was possible. But adapting to every environment was impossible.
There was only one exception.
The Dragon.
Dragons could adapt to and survive within every environment on the continent.
In freezing winters, blazing heat, salt-saturated oceans, arid deserts, and dense jungles.
Dragons could survive within innumerable natural environments.
And within every one of those environments, Dragons reigned as apex predators.
History recorded an individual Dragon burning an entire kingdom without suffering a single injury.
The Dragon was a living creature that was effectively invincible.
Drakes were a species descended from those Dragons.
The difference between the two might have been as extreme as that between a tiger and a cat, but that didn’t change the fact that Drakes were extraordinarily powerful.
That was why they were known as the Masters of the Snowy Mountains.
Living up to its distant relationship with the Dragon, the Gelu-Drake inhabited the very highest reaches of the snowy mountains and reigned as their apex predator.
The color of its hide alone made that obvious.
Most monsters inhabiting the snowy mountains were “white”. That allowed them to camouflage themselves from predators.
But the Gelu-Drake was different. Its hide was a vivid reddish brown.
The Gelu-Drake had no need for camouflage.
Its very existence proclaimed that it was the “Master of the Snowy Mountains”.
Its wings had degenerated after its species branched away from Dragons.
In exchange, it acquired enough agility to run across the ground at extraordinary speeds.
Its muscular tail not only maintained its balance but also served as a powerful striking weapon.
Despite its appearance, however, it was closer to being herbivorous.
More accurately, it was an omnivore, but the Gelu-Drake had evolved to favor plants.
There was little suitable food in the snowy mountains.
The Gelu-Drake used its powerful claws to dig through the snow and primarily ate the moss and grass growing beneath it.
That was why it lived near the mountain’s summit and rarely descended.
‘Then why in the world is it here….?’
The question arose alongside an overwhelming fear of death.
My instincts continuously sounded the alarm, screaming at me to flee. But my entire body felt frozen and refused to move.
It was as though I had become a statue of ice.
This wasn’t caused by the cold.
It was caused by fear.
And yet, at the same time—
I couldn’t suppress the electrifying exhilaration surging through my entire body.
Drakes had branched away from Dragons in the unimaginably distant past.
Nevertheless, they were still classified as members of the same “Dragon Family”.
In other words, the “Dragon Genetic Factor” was engraved within every Drake.
Even in my previous life, I had never consumed a Dragon through Predation.
It was the strongest living creature on the continent, something that even I—the Coalition’s Predator—had never dared to consume.
And now, that supreme Genetic Factor stood directly before my eyes.
Grrrrr—!
How could my entire body not tremble with exhilaration?
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