As far as car wrecks go, this one isn’t particularly dramatic. They had driven over a thick sheet of ice, slid five rotations, slammed into a birch tree and subsequently got one wheel stuck into a giant ice hole. The impact could’ve been worse. Jae, the ever-optimist, tells them, “we could’ve rammed into the tree headfirst and skyrocketed all the way to the ocean, where we’d sink and instantly freeze to death.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be navigating?” Yang Rong blames him anyway. “How did you think it was a good idea to go full speed on an ice lake?”
“Yoo Seok-hyung was driving,” Jae insists as he crouches down, squinting at the front wheel like it can magically free itself. “I didn’t say we go full speed.”
“I didn’t go full speed,” Yoo Seok denies as he tries to force the vehicle upright, both of his hands straining on the hood of the vehicle. It does lift a bit. His strength is not to be reckoned with, but it’s hardly enough to save them from the situation. “Ice isn’t exactly easy to drive on. Why didn’t you warn me beforehand?”
“I tried!” Jae waves his hands around like a madman. “I did! You weren’t listening! You fell asleep at the wheel and then you—”
“Your false accusations—"
“Cut the chatter,” orders the colonel as he makes his way forward. “We just need to lift the car. Simple.”
And so, Yang Rong and Yoo Seok combine forces to easily lift three tons of aluminum and promptly save the day – or is the ideal, but common sense holds that if two grown men can accomplish such a feat, they’d be immediately hauled off and dissected in a research lab.
“Old Hannes!” Yang Rong shouts, his face more fierce than usual. “Get your ass over here!”
“I’m coming, baby,” comes the quick reply as Hannes channels his inner super strength and takes position on the other end, his forearm muscles bulging for display. “I’ve trained my whole life for this.”
His whole life isn’t enough. On the other side, Noah leans against the birch tree and breathes softly into his hands, trying his best to keep warm. He’s acclimated to cold temperatures but even negative forty Celcius in the dead of the night proves to be too much. His senses are all numb and tingly, and the same goes for the three alphas who are struggling to lift two thousand pounds each. Jae and Li Jiayun are trying their best to help as well.
They are now in a territory of frozen freshwater, all Arctic biome and nothing else – just white snow, dark branches, mosses and shrubs. A little further and they’d be in the tundra. The wind chill is exceedingly lethal, so severe it can freeze all the liquid in his body. He sneezes miserably.
“Noah,” comes Yang Rong’s voice, lowered to scold, “you may be having the time of your life, but how about you help out? Would be good to bulk up that frail body of yours and the exercise will keep you warm, hm?”
“I may have considered it if you hadn’t insulted me,” Noah responds. “You’re on your own, Colonel Yang.”
“Don’t be like that.” Yang Rong is at a loss. “What part of what I said was insulting?”
“My body is not frail,” he replies, kicking at a small branch as distraction.
“Mm, alright,” the colonel tries to coax, “you can strip for me next time. Now come here. We’re on the same boat – or truck, whichever you prefer. Ride or die.”
A howling gale passes through and the entire squad groans out loud, turning their bodies to block the brunt of it. All of them are wearing helmets except for Noah who is dressed too dangerously little for the weather. It is with sheer willpower that he makes it through, his face frighteningly pale yet pink under his eyes. The trees around them sway from the intense wind, sending cascades of snow their way.
Through the blinding white, a small, hunched figure waddles in the near distance. Noah’s eyes zero in on the prowler, about a hundred feet away, hidden well in the dark. He’s able to contrast its shape from the moss – not tall but bulky, large nose, even larger claws on its feet. His visual acuity picks up the instant it burrows itself under a thick layer of snow, tunneling in on them like a ground beaver.
No one from the group has seen it yet. He immediately stalks over to them, snatches up a rifle on the ground – it’s Jae’s, temporarily discarded when he got to work lifting the vehicle. Yang Rong notices him first, sends over a questioning look, then gathers the pieces and immediately stops to arm his rifle. Hannes hadn’t caught up to the agenda.
“Pretty boy, you—"
“Penguin,” Noah says, cutting off all other dialogue.
The penguin, or rather, a strange mix of one, springs up from the ground the second he called it. The terrain seems to quake when it reveals itself. Glowing, beady eyes, webbed feet and an ugly, whiskered nose. The anomalies here have very similar characteristics due to how confined the terrain is. They’re often mixes of birds or sea creatures, bears and the like. The Arctic ecosystem is relatively small in comparison to the tropics that pack the most of biodiversity, but the less complex the mutation, the more adept the anomaly is in certain things.
Given the harsh climate and the sheer cold, these creatures have adapted to the tundra as its hunting ground, and no human can compare. The bird-beaver-sea mix, code name Penguin, coined by Noah, gets pelted by bullets the instant it lunges forward. It’s abnormally quick despite the way it waddles. The safety bolt causes a millisecond hindrance and even that was enough time for it to take a leap forward, chomping at his face.
Thankfully its movements are awkward – a too short body jumping meters high yet unable to stabilize due to its uneven build. The penguin misses him by centimeters as Noah aims and shoots it down the neck. Viscous blood oozes from the injury and he raises his hand to block. The gun recoil surprises him – the rifle is common among troops, but maybe it’s the incendiary bullet that ups the power.
The penguin is resilient enough to jump at him again, letting out a shriek-like cry and raising its fin to scratch at him. Noah is sensitive to movement and his eyes focus even quicker in short distances, allowing him more than enough reaction time to dodge. Thankfully, even with his still-injured ribs, he has affinity to night battles, a competence that few humans have.
Another bullet blasts through the anomaly’s head before Noah deals the finishing blow. Blood and brain matter splatter out, too unsightly against white snow. Thankfully it’s not broad daylight, otherwise he might have gagged.
“A mutated Phocidae, ribbon seal.” Yang Rong’s voice carries faint laughter. “Not a penguin. Those reside in the Southern hemisphere.”
Noah mouths a soft ‘oh’ and filters the trivia information in the back of his mind. “It is dead?”
“Blew its brains out so bad even its mother won’t recognize him,” the colonel tells him with a smirk. He has zero affinity for jokes. “Let me check your body.”
“I didn’t get scratched,” he says.
Yang Rong walks to him and checks anyway – must be protocol. Noah didn’t expect, however, for the colonel to place two fingers on his chin, guiding his head upward gently but not comfortably. Noah freezes in place, both figuratively and literally, considering how freezing cold it is and how the colonel’s other cold hand is cupping his cheek, stopping him from moving.
“—Cold,” he flinches from the contact, “what are you doing?”
“Checking your eyes,” the man says and he does exactly that – even taking the initiative to peer closer, like he’s absorbing every detail from the color down to the limbal ring. Yang Rong sees no problem with this proximity and he takes his sweet time studying Noah like an optometrist would. He lightly rubs the bottom of his puffed-up rim – probably revels in the annoyed face that Noah makes, too – and hums inquisitively before pulling back. “…Hm.”
Noah is left confused, irritated and still cold.
“There is nothing wrong with my eyes,” he mutters strictly to himself to rant. In a different scenario, he might’ve punched the colonel in the face but alas, he had made a deal and he’s abiding to his end of it – don’t cause trouble, else he’d actually be stranded in an iceberg with no food nor weapons. “But there is something wrong with your brain.”
He throws the rifle back to Jae, who receives it with stupefy. He looks almost wronged. “W-What’s wrong with my brain…?”
“Not you,” Noah says as he picks up some fresh snow and covers the coagulated blood on his coat, hoping it’d wipe off.
“Oh,” the young man smiles at him, his radiance not restricted even by the helmet, “the Colonel is not a bad person.”
“Mm,” Noah finds himself agreeing, “he’s terrible.”
“What I mean is—”
“Jae!” shouts Yang Rong on the other side. “Get back to work, you dumb kid! What am I paying you for? You dare to slack off?!”
Noah raises a brow. “He’s paying you?”
Jae says “no,” and then proceeds to run over to help anyway.
---
“Well, shit,” goes Hannes, the dread already molded into his face.
“The diesel fuel’s solidified into gel,” Yoo Seok tells them after inspection, thirty minutes after they’d managed to get the vehicle out and moving. This time, they didn’t crash into any trees but they did get mauled by a polar bear (or some lookalike of one, with the added feature of fangs) and then what followed after they wasted too much ammunition fighting it off was another herd of them.
The entire squad is drained. A shower is long overdue for Noah, too, who is seated in the very back of the vehicle, refusing to come close to any of the filthy soldiers. They’re covered in blood and grime and are left sitting without a better source of heat minus Hannes’ lighter and a few kerosene lamps. They hadn’t prepared any firewood either – a fire would attract every kind of unwanted predator. It’d be better to tough out the cold than to die for some comfort.
“The preheater might have worked before, but the springs are also broken from the impact,” Yoo Seok says again after some time, his head lowered to the hood of the vehicle. “Suspension parts aren’t going to be recovered easily. We might be able to force the vehicle on, but I reckon we have only an hour of mileage. It’d be completely nonfunctional by the time we need to get back.”
“Well, fuck,” goes Hannes, more eloquently, as he sits lazed on his seat, already prepared for the coming of death any time. “Now what?”
In the dimly lit military truck, five soldiers converse on their action plan. They don’t have to speak very loudly with the doors and windows shut tight. Besides the harsh gale that would pass once in a while, everything is muted in the dead of the night. The close proximity allows them to share body heat, no matter how unhygienic they are right now.
“We’re not far from destination, but the problem is getting back. I would rather not overstay our visit to the bank.” Yang Rong cleans the blood off his face with a handkerchief. “Any reports on the 641st Unit?”
“They are coming from Huru,” Li Jiayun answers. “Last coordinates relayed were from three hours ago and communications have been cut since.”
“We will wait,” Yang Rong says. “Get some rest for now.”
Everyone agrees unanimously. While Yoo Seok prefers to close his eyes, Jae and Li Jiayun dive into their food supply, opening up cans of beans and containers of meat. If there’s a positive to the whole Nordak trip, it’d be that the tundra is a giant refrigerator. The beans will be rock hard, but the meat at least is well-preserved.
“Huru, huh?” Hannes leans backward and rests his legs on the opposite chair, rudely taking up a third of the vehicle space. “Pretty boy, have you been to Huru Village?”
Noah, dozing off to sleep, is slightly startled. He raises his head, rubs his eyes and hums noncommittedly. “…Mm.”
“Then have you ever heard of the village tale?” Hannes isn’t looking for a reply. He’d talk even if he has no audience. He lowers his volume as though he’s telling a bedtime story. “There was a book about it – the “Tales of Huru” or was it the “Tears of Huru”? Written by some infamous author in the city, don’t think he revealed his actual name though. Hell, I don’t know the gender either. Anyway, that’s not important.”
Hannes goes on to talk about the circulation of it, how it become widespread but eventually got flagged by the censors. “The same goes for his other works too – ‘Nirvana’, I procured an old copy of it. It was the first of its series, the only book written post-2050 that garnered such fanatic readers. It almost spurred a revolution and the government even had to take action, issuing a statement that said—"
Yang Rong interjects, “’Lucifer’s Nirvana offers an ideology that is too farfetched and naïve. The literature only causes more division and chaos among the people in a brittle time where unity should conquer.’”
Hannes grins at him. “Well, I certainly did not expect for you to know this, Rong Rong. Thought you lived like a caveman.”
Noah is surprised too. Drabbles of such topics do interest him somewhat so he’d been half-listening with his eyes closed. The colonel’s voice drifts closer to him – had Yang Rong changed seats? It’s a tad warmer where he is.
“The first excerpt,” Yang Rong recites, low and soothing near his ears. “’The laws of survival are simple. It is an infinite recycling of resources and in this cycle, you will serve the Nexus as it serves you. A singularity is born. The system is running. Within these walls, you are an artificial cog. Unless it is you, a person of the slums.’”
“You’ve remembered it wrong,” Hannes tells him. “It should be: ‘you are a cog, unless who you are is a person of the slums.’”
Yang Rong shakes his head. “No, that doesn’t sound right. My version was better.”
“It sounds like this,” Hannes insists. “It only doesn’t sound right because Lucifer wrote like a grade-schooler… eh, I forgot you wouldn’t know what grade school is. I meant to say Lucifer was probably really young when they wrote this first book, so they sounded like a justice warrior going through puberty.”
“What is this ‘justice warrior’ you’re referring to?” asks Yang Rong. “Old Hannes, your references are making you sound more and more dated, like you’ve lived in the nineteenth century.”
“It’s based off ‘social justice warrior,’” the man replies heatedly. “It’s a pejorative term back then that was used to describe some rascal rebel who too readily promoted their socially progressive agenda, like that Lucifer kid when they said, ah, something like ‘you idiot of the slums.’”
“’—But who are you? A person of the slums?’” Noah whispers, slowly opening his eyes. “Those are the last lines.”
Yang Rong tilts his head toward him and asks, “Well, Noah, have you also lived in the nineteenth century or have you just about read every book in the world? Your knowledge of such irrelevant things far exceeds mine.”
“Hm…” he murmurs, closing his eyes again, “perhaps you’re simply too much of an idiot.”
