The sound of snow crunching underfoot was deafening, drowning out even the echoes of a marching behind them, the only sound that Primonilise could hear other than the howling winds and the sound of their own heavy breathing.

It had been almost two hours now since they’d departed, their pursuers still faintly visible on the horizon behind them as they kept well ahead of them, pushing forward blindly into the blizzard around them.

“They’re… persistent, huh…?”

“Y-You’d think they’d wanna get back to actually s-scoring at this point…”

“As far as they know, this is the best way for them to get points right now. Chasing after some mystery boss fight for whatever secret reward it must be hiding.”

“I guess it’s not a t-terrible idea…”

“It is, they just don’t know that yet, after our main attraction here has once again slapped a massive, imaginary bounty on her own head.”

“…”

“…no grumpy rebuttal for that?”

The other three chatting amongst themselves looked back at their guild leader in surprise, her total lack of response entirely out of character.

“…oh, hm? Sorry, I… wasn’t really listening…”

The mage was bringing up the rear of their group by a large margin, even with the massive lead in AGI, arms bundled around themselves tightly as they stared at open menus, only barely watching where they went, Silk doing their best to nudge their summoner along with everyone.

“I didn’t mean to… are you okay…?”

“I’m, uh… yeah. Yeah! Never better, promise, just… trying to figure some stuff out.”

“Still… caught up on that skill not working…?”

Her brow furrowed deeply, frustration clearly plastered across her expression.

“Of course I am! It… it has to be something I’m doing wrong with it. I just have no idea what it’s wanting from me here.”

“I-It did look a bit incomplete earlier… it might be bugged, i-is all, it’s still a bit new of a g-game…”

A quiet huff, rejecting the offered explanation outright without a second thought.

“We… can worry about it when we’re safe again… yes?”

“Sure, sure…”

Saying this, she still kept her piled menus open in front of herself as she walked, lost in her own research as her spider continued pushing her forward to keep her along with the rest of her guild.

Prim turned her attention forward once more with a sigh, knowing now wasn’t the time to force the issue.

“So, either of you able to make out anything this far out?”

“Nothing… not so much as a hill to check behind…”

“S-Same… the trees have stopped growing this far out as well.”

The previous tundra landscape had gradually faded out, being replaced with a featureless plain stretching on and on endlessly. The blizzard only grew stronger as well as they trekked on, visibility reduced to the bare minimum as the snow piled on higher and higher, the halfling struggling to stay above it as she dug through.

“We’re… w-we’re not lost, right? There has to be s-something out her… r-right?”

“I bloody well hope so, I’m almost having to swim at this point, ugh.”

“The enemy mob is… still coming, I think… it’s hard to tell…”

“I know, I know, we can’t exactly stop or turn around at this point. Still, I wish we could see anything. I’d even take another one of those awful mansions again at this point… maybe with a few less of the other players, though.”

“I-I’d like something a bit more manageable… my arms are still sore from blocking so many hits at once yesterday…”

Compared to the halfling struggling to clamber through the topmost levels of deeply packed snow, Elise was comparatively getting through much faster, long elf legs striding steadily even as her mountain of armor and shields pulled her twice as deeply down into it with every step she took forward.

“We… assumedly have a decently large points lead over at least some guilds right now… if we just have to wait until our pursuers are shaken… we shouldn’t be too far behind most of them…?”

“We can’t just spend a whole day running away from people, it’s almost the halfway point of the whole event!”

“Our only options are... continuing on like this, or stopping to fight the mob…”

“Maybe we could take them now…? With this much snow, numbers would just slow them down more than anything…”

“T-There’s at least a thousand of them…!”

“But we have the advantage right now! If we take the element of surprise-”

“No no no, w-we’d just be getting ourselves killed-”

“But we have to do something before-”

“Monica is still-”

“Monica would want to-”

“B-But…!-”

Voices raised and progress slowed, the storm no longer the largest obstacle at hand as the members of Primonilise’s raised voices all drowned one another out, indecision and impatience rising to the surface as none of them could agree on a course of action.

Donk.

A loud crashing noise followed by a long string of obscenities stopped the rising argument between the other three, gazes shooting to the kitsune leading up the rear, currently clutching her forehead in pain as she sat in the snow, having been knocked to the ground and awoken from her unfocused stupor.

“M-Monica, are you okay?!”

“Little piece of… guh, yeah yeah, I’m fine. Just hit my head hard on… wait, what did I hit it on?”

She’d mostly gotten back to her feet and dusted herself off by the time the others started making their way back to her, Silk knocking clumps of snow away from her shins as she stood back up.

“Did you s-stub your toe on a rock or something? T-There’s nothing-”

Donk.

Another equally loud crash followed by a yelp of surprise from their Vanguard, a second party member being knocked to the ground as they blindly rushed over to the downed fox’s side.

“O-Ow…”

“Elise too…? What are you both even… hang on.”

Prim avoided the urge to rush towards them both, instead lifting her hammer and gently reaching it in front of and above her.

Clink.

Sure enough, it found purchase some distance above her, a sound like struck glass echoing from where she’d struck.

“Aha, there it is, the… wait, no, there’s still nothing there.”

Glass joined in, reaching up bare-handed to check for the difficult-to-locate culprit, also managing to find something solid overhead, though ‘solid’ was perhaps the only way they could describe it if they tried.

After all, all four of them had now confirmed something was there, and despite that, not one of them could see a thing at all in front of them, other than the raging snowstorm.

“No, something definitely clonked me over the head here!”

“I can tell that much, but I don’t see anything at all…”

“I-I mean, I can’t really see anything a-anywhere around here…”

The guild paused their rush to decide between continuing onwards or confronting their pursuers, their attention now fixed entirely on the conundrum which had dealt two extremely minor but still unforgivable head injuries to their wandering party.

A few long, slow minutes of investigation ensued, the five of them all investigating the strange fixture they’d found, or rather, the seemingly total lack of one.

“Whatever this thing is, it’s… a lot bigger than just this one spot here. I couldn’t find an end at all in that direction.”

“Same over this way…”

The invisible structure stretched on for as far as any of them felt comfortable checking, no signs of it stopping anywhere they could find.

“Elise, you find anything?”

“N-Nothing really… just m-more of the same.”

“Hmm… Monica, what about you-”

The crafter trailed off as she looked around for their fox, catching no sight of her. Even in a storm this harsh, it should’ve been possible to make out a figure entirely in black robes and chitin against the field of unending snow.

“…hells, did either of you see where she wandered off too?”

“Monica? Wasn’t she just… oh, you’re right…”

“I hadn’t even n-noticed she was gone, she’s been so quiet… o-oh no, I hope she’s not too far away…”

“Chk…!”

The distant sound of clinking and tapping was barely audible through the snowstorm, only catching the trio’s attention when it was accompanied by the familiar chittering of an arachnid companion, causing them all to scan for the voice’s owner.

“Silk? Where are you?”

“...chkchk! Chk… chk chkchk…!”

The voice was hard to make out, bleeding in between gales of cold wind, now joined in by muffled grunts and indecipherable words.

“Great, now our spider’s invisible and our guild lead has wandered off.”

“…oh, I think I… may have found them both.”

The other two both turned to Glass as he spoke up, finding him facing away… and upwards. Following his gaze upwards both of them craned their necks back, squinting at whatever it was he’d located. And luckily, it did not take them long to identify it.

Currently almost directly above the rest of them was Silk, waving one limb down at them and calling out to get their attention. Their remaining 7 limbs were split between holding a lit torch tightly as the storm did it’s best to snuff out the meager light source, and clinging to their owner’s back as she slowly scaled up the side of the unseen surface, already about a hundred feet up and grunting at them incomprehensibly past the chitinous staff held tightly between her teeth.

“…oy, Monica, you’re still injured, get back down here!”

A response sounding vaguely close to “I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much!” echoed downwards, the fox not slowing her ascent at all.

“W-We don’t even know what this is, and we need to g-get moving again soon…!”

Once again, something along the lines of “Oh stop worrying so much, we’re supposed to be exploring aren’t we?” returned from her past the staff blocking her speech, still moving further and further upwards as her self-applied pads of spider webbing stuck fast to the sides of the wall in front of her, the only things keeping her from careening back down to the ground below.

“…I suppose it’s not an awful idea to check it out…”

“I d-don’t imagine she’s going to just come back down either…”

“Weren’t you both the ones saying we needed to stay moving?”

Monica spared a moment of her ascent to look back down at the others, taking one hand off of the wall as she pulled the spit-covered staff out of it’s temporary holding spot.

“Oh stop worrying, can’t you trust me to take care of myself for five minutes?”

Not a single word was uttered in response, instead three sets of player eyes and one mass of arachnid eyes staring blankly at her in complete silence.

“…point taken, but assuredly not appreciated.”

With a grunt, the Gloom Mage turned back to her climb, starting to tuck her staff away again and resume ascending.

“Honestly, you all act like all I do is cause problems for you all… I’m not a lost child you know, I’m perfectly capable of... guh-”

She was cutoff immediately as she reached forward to plant her makeshift climbing gear into the wall in front of her… and found nothing but empty air, her own momentum throwing her off balance as she immediately toppled forwards, leaving their sight as she and her familiar were seemingly consumed by whatever they’d decided to start climbing.

“Monica…! Hells, uh… Glass, can you get up that high? Or, no, Elise try to Bodyguard to her-”

Prim leapt directly into emergency mode, assuming the worst as the two of them vanished into thin air, even their voices cutting off they instant they were gone

“I-I-I can’t see her to target it at all, u-um…”

“It’ll take a while but… I could maybe get up there…”

The trio began planning how to carry out their rescue, no great ideas coming to mind at all as they worried.

Meanwhile, the string of panic served mostly to distract them from a single thread of spider’s silk lowering directly between them all, fluttering in the breeze until it finally got their attention.

At the far end of it, a smug kitsune’s upper body floated in midair, head resting in her own palms as she watched them all worry over her supposed incompetence.

“Now then, as much as I appreciate the lack of faith in me, do you all feel like joining me up here? Or should I just go ahead and do this one all by my lonesome as well?”

----------------------------------------

A flustered Prim, confused Elise, and surprised Glass all eventually managed to follow Monica up into the structure with the help of her makeshift spiderweb ladder, quickly scrambling inside and struggling to ignore how high up they’d been dangling in seemingly open air.

Inside, they found the mage and spider perfectly safe and sound, both investigating the immediate area while they waited for the rest of the party to arrive. Once the final member had managed to climb in, they hastily retracted the webbing they’d climbed up with to leave as little of a trail for their pursuers as possible.

The area they’d stumbled into was assuredly unnatural, even besides their difficulties perceiving it to begin with. Without the cover of the blizzard outside, it was much easier to tell what exactly had hidden it so well in plain sight, Elise gently rapping a knuckle against the wall closest to them.

“It’s… ice? Or w-wait, no, it’s not cold...”

“Seems to be solid glass. Pretty thick as well.”

The interior of the room around them was completely and entirely made of perfect, flawless glass. From the walls to the floors, the ceiling above them, the entranceway behind them, every last detail was carved from glass without so much as a single blemish or impurity in it, sparkling motes of light twinkling softly from inside the material.

“It’s… a bit hard to discern anything here… my head hurts looking at it.”

“I kinda expected someone named Glass to be, well… more into glass stuff.”

“…I just couldn’t think of a better name, is all…”

At the very rear of the small room sat a massive pair of doors, taking up the entirety of the back wall, ornate handles arranged symmetrically and reaching from floor to ceiling, the perfect glass obscuring their view through it just enough to prevent them from seeing what lay beyond it.

Inscribed along the doorways were words, very difficult to read at a glance against the twinkling glass.

“Land’s… End…?”

“Not exactly the most inviting name I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s… almost assuredly a dungeon… with a name like that.”

“I-I’d say so, yeah…”

“And from how hard it was to find, on top of being this far out of the way from everything too, it sounds…”

“Chhhk…”

There was a brief pause amongst them all.

“…what it sounds like is exactly what we’ve been looking for! A way to throw off the pack of hounds gluing themselves to us AND get back into scoring already!”

“I’m glad you seem to be feeling better already. Not grumpy about losing your boss mode anymore…?”

“Well, if I did it once, I’m sure I’ll figure out how to do it again, yeah? No problems I haven’t been able to brute force my way past so far!”

“…your optimism can be scary at times.”

“Better than worrying myself to death over every little thing! Now are you all coming in with me, or would you rather go back to trailblazing out there?”

“W-Well… it can’t really be all that bad… r-right?”

“It’s… worth checking out, I think…”

“Chk… chkchk!”

“…fine, I won’t pretend I’m not interested too. I’d appreciate it if we could all trying sticking together for once, though.”

“If you’re volunteering to be the team meatshield, I certainly won’t refuse~”

“Next time maybe I should just let you keel over.”

“You’re the one getting worried sick the moment anything happens to me~”

A red-faced Prim stomped forward, doing her best to ignore the fox as she already started yanking at the heavy door, the others quickly joining in to pry the dungeon’s entrance open.

No sooner than they’d cracked the door even slightly, a bone-chillingly cold gale rushed out from within, colder even than the winds outside had been.

“…well? After you, Ms. Bad Ideas.”

“Well if you insist.”

Her confidence once more back up to her standard overly-high levels, she puffed her chest out and ventured in, leaving the others to all hesitate nervously, only joining in after seeing the minuscule Silk already scuttling ahead of them inside, the guild Primonilise finally leaving the storm behind them as they ventured into their first proper dungeon as a full party.