"Shut it! Shut the door!"

A chorus of shouts erupted from inside the hut.

"Let's just chop up this furniture for the fire. It's not our place anyway."

So the men set to work, quickly splitting the furniture into firewood. As a fire crackled to life, they finally started to feel some warmth. Kiusa assigned men to stand watch, and then lay down with the others.

An unknown amount of time passed. It could have been seconds, or it could have been hours.

Cold, trembling.

Kiusa was awakened by a panicked shout.

"Captain! Captain, wake up, wake up!"

"Roy," Kiusa said, recognizing the name of the man who had been on watch. His eyes groggily opened. "What's wrong? Why are you so panicked?"

"Captain Kiusa, the others are gone."

"What do you mean, 'gone'?"

Kiusa rubbed his eyes and sat up, his mind foggy. When he noticed that it was just him and Roy in the room, his mind snapped to attention.

"Roy, where are the others? Why are we the only two here?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? You were on watch last night, and you don't know? I'll ask you this: when did you fall asleep?"

"I…"

Roy was dumbfounded. He couldn't recall a single thing about his shift handover.

He could only answer honestly. "I can't remember."

But he quickly added, "Captain Kiusa, maybe they went out hunting this morning?"

Kiusa responded, "There are no footprints outside the hut. That means they never left."

Roy's heart leaped. He rushed to the window and looked out. There were indeed no tracks in the snow.

"Captain Kiusa, maybe the heavy snow buried their footprints?"

Kiusa's instinct was to object. If they had gone out hunting this morning, even with a massive snowfall, there was no way all of their tracks would have been completely covered.

But a hopeful thought took over.

"That… that is possible."

Roy, clinging to the same hope, said, "Then we just have to wait here."

Kiusa instinctively felt it couldn't be that simple. But they waited in the hut for about an hour or two. No one returned.

Even Roy couldn't help but grumble, "Even if they went far to hunt, they should be back by now."

Kiusa couldn't wait any longer.

"Roy, get the horses ready. We're leaving this place and going back to Kaedwen. Let's get out of this cursed hellhole."

Roy instinctively stood up. But after two steps, he paused. "What about the others?"

"Stop talking nonsense, just do what I tell you."

Roy answered with a nod, finally feeling a sense of fear. He pushed open the door and walked toward the stable on the left.

Kiusa waited in the hut for a few minutes but heard no movement from outside.

"Roy? Roy!"

He called out loudly as he walked out of the hut. But there was no reply from the direction of the stable.

The hut was not far from the stable. And the snow had stopped, and the wind had died down considerably. There was no way he couldn't have heard something.

Kiusa drew his longsword and slowly walked toward the stable, his steps sinking into the snow.

Inside the stable, the horses they had ridden were still there. But Roy was gone. Kiusa frantically searched all around, but just like the other missing men from that morning, Roy had vanished without a trace. There weren't even any footprints.

"He should have left a trail of footprints on the path between the hut and the stable," Kiusa muttered to himself.

Suddenly, he seemed to remember something. He rushed to the open-air bonfire on the other side of the hut. This was the fire he had ordered his men to build to burn the corpse they had found.

Overnight, the fire had long since gone out, and it was covered with snow. Kiusa used his sword to dig at the snow covering the pyre, but he soon grew impatient, throwing the sword on the ground and using his bare hands. He frantically cleared the snow away and then tore at the firewood.

Then, he saw what looked like a ghost. He fell onto his backside in terror, his face as white as the snow itself.

There was nothing in the firepit.

The weather was so cold, and it had snowed overnight. It was impossible for the corpse to have been completely cremated. Even if it had, there should have been some bone fragments left. But there was truly nothing in the firepit. Only a pile of unburned firewood remained.

Terrified, Kiusa scrambled toward the stable. He didn't even bother to pick up his sword. He grabbed a horse and galloped away in the direction they had come from.

Kiusa didn't dare to stop. The thought of riding at night was suicidal, but he wished he could spend the night on horseback too. This was an era of gods, monsters, and evil spirits. He himself had never seen one, but he had heard enough stories of specters claiming lives. The events since yesterday had been too bizarre. He couldn't find any other reasonable explanation besides an evil spirit.

All he wanted now was to return to civilization as quickly as possible. Even without being a sorcerer or a witcher, he knew one common fact: evil spirits don't appear in places where many people are gathered.

After several days, he followed the trail markers they had left behind and finally made it out of the Blue Mountains, reaching a village just outside the range. Kiusa didn't care about the village's conditions. He immediately knocked on the door of the village elder.

The elder, disturbed from his rest, was initially annoyed. But when he saw Kiusa standing outside, dressed in chainmail and leading a horse, his anger instantly vanished. Having seen more of the world than a simple farmer, he knew that a person dressed like this was not someone a commoner could afford to provoke.

Indeed, even if the village elder was the most important person in this village, in the presence of a truly important figure, he was no different from a commoner. Moreover, the chainmail Kiusa wore was embroidered with the crest of Kaedwen. He must be a noble knight.

"My lord, you..."

The village elder quickly put on a smile.

But before he could utter a single word of flattery, Kiusa pulled out a few coins from his clothes and threw them at him. "I'm commandeering your house. Get me a bath and some food. I'm starving."

Kiusa's condescending attitude didn't bother the village elder. What could he do? This was how all these people acted. He could only forgive him like a father would his child.

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