Two hundred miles north of the Military Safe Zone, the world was nothing but a desolate expanse of ice and jagged rock.
A military transport helicopter hovered fifty feet above the frozen tundra, its rotors kicking up a blinding storm of white powder. Below it, standing completely alone in the middle of the wasteland, was the Gate.
It wasn't a standard blue or green portal. It looked like a jagged, bleeding wound slashed directly into the fabric of reality. The edges of the vortex dripped with a viscous red light, casting a sickly crimson glow over the snow.
Elias and Aria stood at the edge of the drop zone. Aria was clad in high-tech, thermal-insulated stealth gear provided by the Aegis Guild, her breath fogging the air in front of her mask. Elias wore his usual black trench coat, entirely unaffected by the sub-zero temperatures. His Epic-tier mana pool naturally circulated heat through his veins, rendering the cold completely obsolete.
"Military barricades are set up a mile back," Aria yelled over the roar of the helicopter blades. "They refused to get any closer. A Red Gate absorbs ambient mana. If you stand too close for too long, it literally sucks the life out of you."
Elias stared into the bleeding vortex. "Good. That means no drones, no cameras, and no witnesses. Let's go."
They stepped forward, letting the crimson light swallow them whole.
The transition was violent. It felt as though they had been submerged in a bath of liquid nitrogen.
[You have entered an A-Rank Red Gate: The Howling Glacier.] [Warning: The spatial exit has been sealed. The Gate cannot be exited until the Dungeon Master is slain.] [Environmental Hazard: Extreme Cold. Stamina drain increased by 200%.]
Aria hit the ground in a defensive crouch, shivering violently despite her thermal suit. The landscape inside the Gate was a nightmare of endless, towering glaciers and deep, bottomless crevasses. A perpetual, howling blizzard whipped through the air, reducing visibility to less than ten feet.
"I can't see anything," Aria grunted, squinting through the driving snow. "And my stealth is useless. The snow immediately covers my tracks, but it also reveals my exact position the moment I step in it."
"Then don't step," Elias said calmly.
He didn't activate his Domain. Doing so in an open environment would drain his mana unnecessarily. Instead, his eyes darted through the blinding whiteout, his S-Rank combat instincts picking up on a subtle shift in the wind.
Crunch. Crunch.
The sound of heavy, deliberate footsteps echoed through the howling wind, but they weren't coming from one direction. They were coming from all around them.
Through the whiteout, towering silhouettes began to emerge. They were massive, standing over eight feet tall, with elongated, skeletal limbs wrapped in thick, matted white fur. Their faces were terrifying—bare animal skulls with jagged ice crystals growing out of their eye sockets.
[Enemy Spotted: Frostborn Wendigo (Lv. 38)] [Enemy Spotted: Frostborn Wendigo (Lv. 38)] [Enemy Spotted: Frostborn Wendigo (Lv. 38)]
"Level 38 pack hunters," Aria whispered, drawing her daggers, though her hands were visibly shaking from the supernatural cold. "They blend perfectly into the blizzard. They're going to hit us from the blind spots."
"They think they have the environmental advantage," Elias smirked, a dark mist beginning to leak from his boots, melting the snow instantly wherever it touched. "Let's change the weather."
Elias raised his right hand.
"Seraph."
The space above them warped, and the blinding white blizzard was instantly eclipsed by absolute darkness.
The six-winged Fallen Seraph materialized, hovering ten feet in the air. Its wings of starry, pitch-black plasma beat once, and a shockwave of abyssal gravity blasted the snowstorm away in a fifty-meter radius. The bone-white mask of the Commander-grade shadow looked down upon the Frostborn Wendigos with silent, divine contempt.
The Wendigos shrieked, their primitive instincts realizing that the creature floating above them was an apex predator of the highest order.
Two of the beasts lunged at Elias, their icy claws extended to tear his throat out.
Elias didn't even put his hands up.
Seraph raised its massive, black-glowing spear. It didn't strike the Wendigos directly. Instead, it tapped the butt of the spear against the glacial ice.
[Skill: Abyssal Light activated.]
A blinding flash of dark, corrupted holy energy erupted from the spear. The light didn't burn with heat; it burned with pure, unadulterated annihilation. The two lunging Wendigos were caught mid-air. The Abyssal Light instantly disintegrated their thick fur, shattered their icy armor, and turned their bones to ash before they even hit the ground.
Aria shielded her eyes, completely awestruck. "It wiped out two Level 38 monsters with a passive skill..."
The remaining Wendigos panicked. Their pack mentality broke, and they turned to flee back into the safety of the blizzard.
"No survivors," Elias commanded coldly.
Seraph spread its six wings wide.
[Skill: Wings of the Void activated.]
Hundreds of pitch-black, glowing feathers detached from the Seraph's wings and shot into the blizzard like homing missiles. A series of muffled, devastating explosions echoed through the glacier. The shrieks of the fleeing Wendigos were abruptly cut short as the dark plasma feathers tracked and detonated upon every single living entity within a half-mile radius.
[You have slain a Frostborn Wendigo.] [You have slain a Frostborn Wendigo...] [You have leveled up!] [You have reached Level 28.]
The blizzard around them had completely stopped, suppressed by the sheer, overwhelming pressure of the Seraph's aura. The glacial valley was painted in scorch marks and black ash.
Elias walked forward, breathing in the cold air. "Extract."
From the scorched ash, twenty massive, lanky figures rose from the ground. They were pitch-black, their animal skull faces glowing with that familiar electric-blue light.
[Extraction Successful!] [Shadow Wendigo (Lv. 35) has joined your legion.] x 20 [Special Trait: Glacial Camouflage - Shadows can become entirely invisible in snowy or cold environments.]
"Invisible assassins," Elias noted, glancing at Aria. "Looks like you have some competition."
Aria scoffed, though she was still staring warily at the hovering Seraph. "Mine don't leave a trail of black smoke."
Before Elias could recall his new troops, the glacier beneath their feet let out a terrifying, deep groan. The ice began to fracture, massive fissures spider-webbing across the frozen valley.
The temperature, which had been stabilized by Elias's mana, suddenly plummeted to a degree that even Elias could feel stinging his cheeks.
[Warning: The Ruler of the Glacier has awakened from its slumber.] [A massive mana signature is approaching from below!]
Aria stumbled as the ground shook violently. "Elias! Something is coming up through the ice!"
Elias looked down at the fracturing glacier, his eyes narrowing. The shadow of something unfathomably massive was moving beneath the thick, transparent ice, swimming upward toward the surface.
"Iron. Blood. Eclipse," Elias commanded, his voice dropping into a deadly, serious register. "Everyone out. Now."
The ice exploded.