Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 82 – An Icy Ordeal (4)

The warm updraft of wind immediately battered my face, and it was a relief from the biting cold even while it tore at my hair and clothing during my freefall.

The wyrm, completely unaware and likely not expecting someone to freefall from above, continued toward the defenseless Unawakened, its mouth open while it screeched and prepared to devour its prey.

‘I’m going to miss it…’

Of course, I hadn’t really expected to be able to land directly atop it through the updraft that battered me during my fall and the height of the jump itself.

I dropped past the wyrm, not even trying to alter my course.

Then, having missed the wyrm by a decent margin and falling still…

‘Now!’

I used the skill I had been waiting for the perfect moment to use.

[«Redirection»]

My trajectory instantly changed and I soared toward the unsuspecting wyrm from below, only meters away from the Unawakened, who still held her arms up in a warding gesture.

[Mana: 100/125]

All of my downward momentum turned into upward momentum, and the wyrm never even saw me coming.

Rather than aiming directly for the wyrm, I aimed slightly to its side and held the blade of my gauntlet out to catch its outward-stretched neck on my flyby.

Skshh–

Metal met flesh met bone met air, and the blade sliced through the wyrm’s neck more effortlessly than a knife cutting paper.

The wyrm’s body, held up by nothing other than its forward momentum, narrowly missed slamming into the Unawakened on the cliffside and crashed into the steep surface.

Its head flew from its body upon impact, and a spray of purplish blood followed the spiraling body all the way down to the ground.

With gravity having not yet fully reclaimed its hold on me and my momentum still carrying me upwards, my eyes locked onto the other wyrm, battling a mage-type Awakener, who was stationary on his rope and casting barrier spells one after the other to protect himself and the Unawakened next to him.

He looked to be almost purely defensive, and the wyrm scratching at the barriers would eventually deplete his mana.

[«Redirection»]

To others, it would probably even look like I was flying.

My trajectory changed again, and the other wyrm saw me coming from its periphery. Before I could catch it unawares, the wyrm spun in midair and propelled itself at me with its jaw open to catch me.

[Mana: 75/125]

If I used «Redirection» to avoid it, I would have to use it at least one more time to go back toward it, leaving me with only one more skill use.

Rather than that, I extended my hands forward and met the screeching wyrm head-on.

The wyrm’s jaws closed in around me, and I stabbed my blade upward, angled into the creature’s skull while forming bits of earthen armor around where its teeth closed in on me.

Its spittle flew out of its mouth and sprayed over my face and skin, and its tongue thrashed about, knocking into my boots and shins.

It flailed its head for a few moments, and its jaw closed even tighter, sending the blade further into its skull, where it must have pierced something vital.

The wyrm suddenly went limp and dropped through the air.

I retracted the wristblade and tried to leave its mouth, but the combined difficulties of it twirling through the air to the ground and the slipperiness of the saliva made it nearly impossible to pull myself to safety before the wyrm slammed into the ground.

‘Shit, shit, shit shit, SHIT!’

Boom–!

I woke up a few minutes later to the faces of the other Awakeners who had made it to the bottom of the cliff already peering down at me.

They’d pulled me from the creature’s mouth, and a line of blood ran along my left arm where I had been pressed against the wyrm’s teeth upon impact.

From the looks of the other wyrm corpses around, it seemed that they’d dealt with things on their end already.

They had been faced with fewer wyrms than those at the top of the cliff, who I could still see battling a few wyrms with barrages of arrows and gouts of fire.

‘Fire against wyrms?’

That was all I could think in my semi-conscious delirium while the others spoke to me through my haze and tried to get me to respond.

‘Everyone knows wyrms are resistant to fire…’

Still, whether they were resistant to the damage or not, the fire still served to obscure their eyesight, so maybe that was the intention.

“Hey! Are you okay?!”

Finally, their voices reached me through the haze. An Awakener with a staff on his back hovered a hand over my head and channeled green energy through my body that tingled over my head and passed through to my toes, leaving a rejuvenated just-woke-up feeling behind.

The man, a healer, looked back at someone out of sight.

“Other than a few cuts along the arm, he doesn’t seem to be injured all that much. Did he hit his head too hard, maybe?”

Healing magic tended to have difficulty healing the mind and mental ailments, so he’d done the best he could with healing me physically, though I hadn’t been injured all that much to begin with.

I raised and half-waved a hand at him. “Ahh… Ish’ll beh gohd”

My voice slurred out of my mouth, and I cleared my throat for a second try after the man turned to give me a concerned look.

“Ahem… Just… need a minute.”

He stopped channeling the healing spell and looked me over again.

“You sure? You fell pretty far… Maybe you should just lay down for a bit.”

It was a tempting offer, but I needed to see how the others were doing.

The haze was already fading, anyway, and I pushed myself up into a sitting position and squinted around.

“Everyone okay?”

The man scratched his head, still giving me a concerned look.

“You shouldn’t be the one asking that… but yeah, everyone down here is fine.”

Things had gone better than with the goblin attack, at least. If those up top fared as well as the people down there, we were looking at maybe one casualty.

Still, it was one too many.

The healer looked up at something.

“Ah… come on, we have to move.”

He half-dragged me to my feet and helped me stumble over the soft dirt at the foot of the cliffside, a welcome relief from the frozen ground above.

Then, after being dragged a few meters…

Boom–!

The body of a wyrm fell from the sky, pierced all over by arrows and raining a light shower of blood behind it.

Dirt flew up into the air at the impact, and a small cloud of dust slowly settled around the dead monster’s body.

“Yeah… that’s been about the most dangerous thing so far. Almost had a few get flattened by the falling bodies already. Hell, even had to heal a broken leg.”

The healer gestured lightly to where another Awakener sat and massaged his leg against a nearby tree.

“I think that might be the end of it, though…”

As if confirming his words…

Ting!

A new System message popped up in a little blue window, signaling the end of the monster attack.

[Monster wave complete!

Calculating rewards based on contribution…]

[+1000 Experience]

[ Experience: 31,500/32,000]

[Quest ‘Guide the Unawakened to Safety’ is underway.

Unawakened: 65/76

Quest Percentage: 51%]

‘Sixty-five…’

That meant that, somehow, none of the Unawakened had died during the monster attack.

Not only that, but my experience reward was significantly higher since I had killed a fifth of the monsters alone.

After a few moments, the people stuck hanging on the side of the cliff face began moving downward again, and my eyes followed the body of the single, limp Awakener all the way down.

Unfortunately, we still lost someone.

***

With the quest over halfway complete and our return to a warmer climate, we were able to conserve the rest of our warmth stones and even have the scouting party hunt for food along the way.

The downside to returning to the warmer climate, however, was that we found ourselves surrounded by trees and shrubbery rather than the flat plains and expansive wastes of the frozen plains.

We ended up divvying the Awakeners up into more scouting parties to properly cover ground in the forest around us, and the scouting parties had to stay closer as well.

Fortunately, save for a few one-off attacks by small bands of monsters that thought us to be raiding their territory, we were left largely unharmed on our journey, and I was able to shed a few layers and relax a bit thanks to the warmth.

It dawned on me that, even though I had thought myself used to the cold, the return to warmer temperatures made me realize just how much I had actually been suffering.

Being able to feel all of my extremities without the chill nipping at me and being able to open my mouth without the cold burning my soft tissue made me want to never return to those frozen lands again.

Still, I knew I would have to.