Chapter 36
(This episode contains illustrations, so if you do not wish to see them, please use the settings in the upper-right corner to hide illustrations.)
#36. Gate
Humanity keeps dying, day in and day out.
The property damage alone was too extensive to estimate.
It was a calamity brought about by the existence of monsters.
Then where did monsters come from?
“Haa...”
I shook off the dizziness and looked around.
A plume of cold breath escaped my lips.
The sky was filled with gray clouds, and an endless snow-covered plain stretched out all around me.
It was a snowy landscape I was seeing for the first time in my life.
“Ugh...”
Just then, Choi Hye-na complained of a headache and came to her senses.
Even getting up, she was slow.
She had also arrived later than I did for our appointment earlier.
Of course, she hadn't been late, but once you disliked someone, you naturally wanted to find fault with everything they did.
“W-where is this...?”
Having just been in a concrete jungle, Choi Hye-na looked completely dazed before the grandeur of the snowy wilderness, where her breath steamed and blizzards raged.
“Where else would it be?”
By this point, I could neither deny nor pretend not to know what had happened.
“It's inside a Gate.”
***
Gates, along with monsters, were among the disasters that had threatened humanity since time immemorial.
Before detectors were invented, it was impossible to predict when or where a Gate would appear.
As if that weren't bad enough, after a certain amount of time, it would even spit out monsters.
What a fucking mess.
Moreover, even after detectors were invented, it wasn't as though Gates stopped causing casualties.
Even in modern times, the number of people killed by monsters was far too great to ignore.
Even with detectors, it wasn't possible to cover the entire planet, and it was fairly common for monsters flowing out of countries already ruined by Gates to attack residents of nearby villages.
Undiscovered Gates were another major threat to ordinary people's lives.
And there was another special type of Gate besides undiscovered Gates.
“...An isolation-type Gate?”
Known as the worst disaster for ordinary people, an isolation-type Gate absorbed the living creatures around it the moment it appeared.
Even worse, immediately after absorbing those lifeforms, the Gate locked itself, making it impossible to send a rescue team from outside or escape from within.
An isolation-type Gate would open after roughly a week.
Until then, the chances of an ordinary person surviving the harsh environment and savage monsters inside the Gate were virtually zero.
Of course, destroying the Gate's core would allow us to escape, but you'd have a better chance of surviving by digging a hole and hiding underground. The Gate's core was protected by its boss.
“A Gate... No way...”
“Stop denying reality and get up already.”
Leaving Choi Hye-na behind, unable to tell whether she was denying reality or despairing, I looked around once more.
‘Phew...’
It was cold.
It was so cold I could barely speak.
It was probably well below -30 degrees.
On top of that, the blizzard's knife-sharp winds lowered the perceived temperature even further.
The short sleeves and jeans I was wearing made it even worse.
‘Putting the cold aside, what rank is this Gate?’
Unfortunately, an environment this terrible couldn't possibly belong to a low-rank Gate. Still, if it was C-rank, there was at least some hope of escaping.
But if it was higher than that...
“...Fuck.”
First, I needed to find somewhere suitable to use as a shelter so we could avoid encountering monsters as much as possible.
The direction didn't matter.
I had read in a textbook that the inside of a Gate wasn't an enormous, planet-like place as wide as Earth, but a section of another dimension that had simply been cut away and placed there.
Since the starting point was a snowfield, we'd find nothing but snowfields lashed by blizzards wherever we went. Still, if we were lucky, we might find a forest or cave where we could avoid the blizzard.
A place suited to the snowfield theme should appear.
‘...I should probably keep the blizzard behind me for now.’
If I headed into the blizzard, the icy wind would strip the skin from my face.
Of course, keeping the blizzard behind me didn't mean it wouldn't be cold. It was still just as cold.
At least I had a fur coat in my inventory, and channeling the fire element through my mana circuit kept me from freezing to death.
“W-wait!”
“?”
I turned around and saw Choi Hye-na standing there, trembling.
She looked like a rabbit.
“W-where are you going? If this is a Gate, we should wait for rescue!”
“...Did you sleep through the lesson on Gates at school?”
“I-I... A-choo! B-but I didn't go to school...?”
Ah.
I'd assumed she was ill-mannered because she hadn't received a proper upbringing, but apparently she hadn't even gone to school.
I suddenly felt sorry for Choi Hye-na.
“W-what?! Why are you looking at me like that... A-choo!!”
“Never mind.”
In reality, Choi Hye-na hadn't attended school because of her magical education; she was a prodigy who had already completed her higher education at the age of fourteen.
“This is an isolation-type Gate. As things stand, we can neither escape nor wait for a rescue team.”
I didn't have any positive feelings toward Choi Hye-na, but I couldn't exactly leave behind a poor girl who hadn't even gone to school.
"What...?"
“There are only two ways to escape from here. We either hold out until the Gate opens, or we destroy the Gate's core ourselves.”
As I said before, if the Gate was above C-rank, it would be impossible for the two of us to destroy the core by ourselves.
“...One week.”
“I'm telling you in advance, you do know we can't kill the Gate boss by ourselves, right?”
“I know!”
The entity guarding the core, the source of the Gate, was the boss.
Unlike the elite specimen I had defeated before, the boss was on an entirely different level of strength; a pair of backline mages could never defeat it.
‘...I need to get moving before sunset.’
If we wanted to make it through tonight safely, we didn't have time to stand around here.
We had to keep moving in the direction we'd originally chosen without stopping to rest.
“W-where are you going?”
Choi Hye-na grabbed me.
“So, are you planning to stay here?”
“...”
After that, neither of us said another word.
We simply continued onward, leaving footprints as our feet sank up to the ankles in the snowfield.
How long had we been walking like that?
Thud—a sound came from behind me as something collapsed.
“...Choi Hye-na?”
Choi Hye-na was sprawled on the snow, her lips blue and her body cold as ice.
Wasn't she a fire mage? The Seongbuk Choi family was famous for wielding powerful flames even among elemental mages.
If so, she should have been more resistant to the cold than I was.
“Damn it.”
Even if the only appealing things about this ill-mannered woman were her face and figure, I couldn't leave her behind like this.
She might have been rude, but it wasn't as if she had done something bad enough to deserve being left to freeze to death.
I hurriedly took the fur coat from my inventory, put it on her, and carried her on my back.
“I need to find somewhere we can rest.”
I couldn't even light a fire in this blizzard.
But if I searched for shelter at the pace we'd been moving earlier, Choi Hye-na would die before we found one.
Whoosh-
In the end, I had no choice but to run.
I hadn't been running until then to conserve my mana and stamina and avoid being detected by monsters.
But we were too short on time to worry about that now.
Running across the snow wasn't easy, but I had no choice but to keep going.
As I ran, I continued scanning my surroundings.
But there was snow here, snow there—nothing but a white world, with no sign of a forest thick with trees.
“U-ugh...”
“Choi Hye-na! Snap out of it!”
I had no choice but to pick up the pace.
What luck—I'd been running for quite some time without seeing a single monster.
It was a miracle.
And as if one miracle weren't enough, before long I found a small cave beneath a fairly steep cliff.
“There.”
I immediately changed direction and ran toward the cave.
Thanks to it being closer than I'd expected, I reached the cave in no time.
But the inside of the cave was shallower than I'd expected. Even at the very back, the cold air from outside blew in freely.
At least that meant we didn't have the misfortune of finding another monster already occupying the place.
“Finding somewhere else now seems difficult...”
I had no choice but to cut up one of the tents in my inventory to block the entrance. Even so, I had to leave a small gap for air to circulate, so it was still cold.
Still, rather than complain, I had to be grateful that the blizzard wasn't blowing in.
Finally, I unfolded the remaining spare tent and lit a fire.
“Choi Hye-na! Hey, snap out of it!”
I carefully laid Choi Hye-na down and lightly tapped her cheek, but she didn't respond.
I briefly wondered if she'd suffered serious harm, but fortunately, she was still breathing. Her body was simply far too cold.
“I don't think the tent's temperature-control system will be enough.”
The latest-model tent did have a function that automatically adjusted the temperature inside.
But that only kept the temperature within a comfortable range; it couldn't raise it enough to make someone sweat from the heat.
“...It can't be helped.”
Choi Hye-na would throw an absolute fit once she woke up, but the Criminal Act had a provision for necessity in an emergency.
I was doing this to save her life. If she had any decency, she had no right to complain.
I carefully removed the fur coat Choi Hye-na was wearing.
Then I also removed the unnecessarily wide-brimmed hat and the cape covering her shoulders, so her body heat wouldn't be drawn away by her wet clothes.
...
Despite her pale face, the upper part of Choi Hye-na's breasts looked warm and soft.
“Get a grip.”
I lightly tapped her cheek again and refocused.
In fact, the clothes Choi Hye-na was wearing now consisted only of a thin dress and the underwear covering her intimate parts.
Since I'd never undressed someone from a dress before, it took some effort, but by recalling my experience with Iris, I somehow managed to take it off.
“Wow...”
Choi Hye-na's underwear, with the top and bottom matched in red, was outrageously erotic.
Come to think of it, neither Iris nor Cheon Yeo-hwa wore modern-style underwear, so this was my first time seeing women's underwear.
And it was also my first time taking it off.
As I carefully undid the hooks at the back, Choi Hye-na's large breasts sprang out with a bounce, as if something sealed away had been released.
Her adorable nipples were light pink, just as expected.
Her breasts themselves were also incredibly beautiful. Even a craftsman painstakingly sculpting them wouldn't have been able to create such a beautiful teardrop shape.
Before I knew it, I was fondling Choi Hye-na's breasts.
The soft yet resilient sensation was exquisite.
But unlike how they had looked from the outside, they were slightly cold to the touch.
Only then did I once again realize how serious the situation was, and I hurriedly removed her panties as well.
I almost lost my composure at the sight of the straight-line slit between her tightly pressed folds, but I quickly stripped off my clothes, got naked, and pulled Choi Hye-na into my arms.
As expected, Choi Hye-na's body had grown cold.
I slowly drew up my mana and warmed my body.
Thus transformed into a human hot pack, I spent the night with Choi Hye-na.
Squeeze, squeeze.
Of course, until just before falling asleep, I indulged my ulterior motives by fondling Choi Hye-na's enormous breasts and her backside, which looked more than capable of handling five sets of twins.
It was the price she paid for rudely calling a stranger a beggar.