I always figured death would come with judgment. Pearly gates, fire and brimstone, at least some kind of explanation. Not this. Not ending up in a cave made of ice hearing nothing but the howl of wind and the chattering of my teeth. Is this some messed up version of hell?
I'm startled awake by a sharp pain in my lungs. Every breath feels like I'm inhaling glass. My fingers are numb, my toes are numb, and every bone in my body feels brittle and sore.
I attempt to open my eyes but they feel welded shut. After putting my hands up to my face and trying to rub away the top layer, it feels like I am trying to defrost a windshield. After a minute of heating up and blinking profusely, the frost seemed to melt away and when my vision clears, I immediately wish it hadn't.
Ice. I'm surrounded by ice.
I look down at myself. I'm wearing my hoodie: the black one I bought at the gaming convention 2 months ago. I also have on jeans and my work sneakers, the ones with the hole in the left sole I meant to replace this weekend. These aren't my winter clothes, this is a normal work outfit.
Where the hell am I?
I force myself to sit up and every movement is like forcing my body through electric molasses. My muscles are stiff, reluctant, like they've been in a freezer for hours. I manage to prop myself up on my elbows, and that's when it all comes rushing back to me.
I was on my way home from a late night at the office. It was the end of a long project and the team went out to celebrate the final push to production without me. The product had been sold to some big corporate buyers and they rushed the date we had to complete it. I was so happy to get the first weekend off in months, there was a new Gundam set out that I had saved up for and was delivered earlier that night.
Around 11pm I was walking from my favorite convenience store with some soju and microwave dinner when I heard somebody running out of the store behind me. I turned to look, I saw a face, I know I did, but the details are fuzzy. Like my mind is still trying to render the details.
The bag of alcahol hits the pavement first. Then I did. I remember lying there, staring up at the moon, feeling weirdly calm. My hand found one of the drinks that had rolled out of the bag. I cracked it open, muscle memory I guess, and took a sip. The last thing i tasted was cheap soju and copper.
I died.
Holy shit, I died.
I died outside of a convenience store 50 meters away from my apartment for nothing. And now I'm here. Wherever here is exactly.
The realization hit my like a truck. I'm not at a hospital, this doesn't seem to be exactly the pearly gates, and I assume hell hasn't frozen over quite yet. This is somewhere else entirely and somewhere cold enough that I can see my breath actively crystallizing in the air. It doesn't seem like I am dead, maybe reincarnated? That would be pretty cool, I've read enough light novels to any divine library to shame, but I wouldn't be that lucky.
This is so insane I almost laugh, except every exhale hurts more than chewing on a cactus. I've read this situation before: Truk-kun hits you, or your save a kid from a bus, or piss off a god, and BOOM! New world, cheat skills, a system, maybe even a goddess who could explain the rules or some divine quest. Wait, maybe I do have a system!
"System!"
"..."
"Status?"
"..."
"...Info? Inventory? Anything?"
"..."
Great. I got the budget isekai huh? No goddess, no harem, no cheat skills. Just frostbite and the chill of jack frost for company.
My teeth are chattering now. The cold is getting worse, or maybe I'm just noticing it more now that the adrenaline is wearing down. I need to move, find some shelter, or maybe a blanket or two. I need to figure out where I am and what I'm supposed to do here.
I force myself to stand and while my legs shake trying to give out, I lock my knees and lean against the wall for support.
What do I have?
- The clothes on my back
- My half-frozen body
- My brain, which remembers everything. My name is Ethan Kang, 24, single, loves to take long walks on the beach, and I was a Jr DevOps engineer at SungSoft. I live alone in a studio apartment, living off of cup noodles and instant coffee.
What do I not have?
- My phone, keys, or wallet
- Any winter gear whatsoever
- Any idea where the hell I am
What do I need?
- Warmth. Immediately.
- Information. Shortly after.
- A plan, because I don't see any chance of me surviving at this point.
The sulfur smell is stronger now that I'm standing. It's coming from deeper inside the cave. I can see melted Ice and actually some rock back there. I can see a faint shimmer in the air back there, like heat waves over asphalt in the summer.
I can only hope that this is some sort of geothermal vent keeping some area warm in the slightest.
I stumble toward it, with my legs giving way a couple of times but after catching myself I finally feel the heat from a 30cm hole in the ground outputting enough heat the thaw my frozen limbs.
I crouch over the vent, extending my hands toward the warmth. The relief is immediate and overwhelming. My fingers start to ache as blood flow returns, the pins-and-needles situation means they were closer to frostbite than I want to think about.
I close my eyes and just breathe for a moment. In and out. Slowly, as the warm air feels like heaven on my face. I open my eyes after a large sigh of relief when I see something in the back of the cave, hidden in a shadow.
Is that... a person?
There's a dark figure on the ground on the other side of the vent, partially hidden. I'd missed it at first because I was so focused on the heat, but now that I'm looking, it's impossible to miss.
There's a corpse.
I scramble backward, heart hammering. For a second I think it's going to get up, and that this is some zombie horror scenario on top of everything else. But it doesn't move. It's frozen solid, half buried in ice.
I force myself to look closer. To really look.
Male, probably middle-aged, though it's hard to tell with the frost covering his face. He's wearing what used to be a cold-weather outfit: heavy jacket, insulated pants, and thick boots. The jacket is shredded on one side, torn open like something with very large claws went to town on it. his lower half is just gone. Not cut off cleanly but torn away, leaving ragged edges of frozen flesh and fabric.
He died horrifically. And something ate him.
My stomach lurches. I turn away, fighting the urge to throw up. There's nothing in my stomach anyway, which is probably for the best, but the dry heaving hurts.
Get it together, Ethan. This guy's dead, you're not. Lets try to keep it that way.
After taking a few deep breaths, forcing myself to calm down, I realize that this is information. Horrible information, but important nonetheless.
Someone was here before me. Someone with actual winter gear, unlike my hoodie and jeans. They still somehow died though, meaning that his place has larger dangers than just the cold.
I need that gear, this guy doesn't. Simple math.
I edge around the vent, keeping as much distance from the corpse as possible while still getting close enough to assess what I can salvage. The jacket is shredded on one side but mostly intact on the other. There's a thermal poncho underneath, also damaged but usable. Gloves, one of which is missing the fingers but its better than nothing. Boots that are definitely too big for me but better than my sneakers with a hole in the sole.
There's also an ID. A badge clipped to his jacket, partially covered in frost. I can make out a logo: A Hexagonal symbol and below it, text nearly frosted over displaying "PARALLAX INDUSTRIES". In the jacket pocket, I can see the corner of something rectangular. Electronic. A tablet? Datapad? Did they never shrink think to shrink smartphones?
I'm about to reach for the person to drag them towards the vent and a gut wrenching feeling washes over me: I am going to have to touch him, thaw him out, and strip him to take his stuff. A shudder ripples up from the base of my spine and I can't help but feel like I am loosing a bit of my dignity by looting this man like a loot goblin.
But the alternative is freezing to death in an ice cave on an alien plant, soooooooo I don't really have a choice do I?
I grab the corpse by the shoulders and drag it closer to the vent. He's stiff and heavy, frozen solid. It takes all my strength to move him even a few feet. Once he's positioned over the heat, I step back and wait.
The ice on his face starts to melt first. Water drips down his cheeks, collecting in his beard. His expression is one of absolute terror, eyes wide, mouth open in a perpetual scream.
I can't help but turn away. I have to look around while this happens and try to find clues to try and help figure out where I am.
Looking around, I notice claw marks on cave walls, deep gouges in the ice. They're big, like the claw mark is wider than my forearm. Whatever did this was strong and large.
And then I see tracks.
They lead from deeper in the cave toward the entrance, paw prints that seem a little too shallow. They look four-toed, with each toe ending in what must have been a massive claw,. The prints are easily forty centimeters across.
Its weird because of how shallow they are, barely any depression in the snow and ice. Like whatever made them weighs almost nothing, despite being large enough to leave prints that big.
Now, I'm not a zoologist, but unless the thing can fly, levitate, or is a weird centipede, there's no way that a beast that large makes shallow prints. I just hope that whatever it is, it finds the cold more comfortable long enough for me to get the hell out of here.
I look back to the corpse, and the jacket has been thawed out enough for me to work with. I cant look at his face as I start wrenching the jacket off of the body. The fabric is stiff and resists, but after working with the heat a bit, it comes off. Underneath is the thermal poncho, a ripped shirt and an undershirt. I take the poncho and leave the shirts and they are too ripped or thin to really be usable.
The boots are harder. They still have the ankles in them and have been putting off a smell, since they were probably the first to thaw out. I have to use a sharp piece of ice to pry the ankles out of the boots. After dumping out some water from the boots, they feel heavy and insulated. Putting them on they feel like 3 sizes too big. I'll have to stuff them with fabric to make them fit better. After cutting away the shirt and undershirt the shoes fit alright. The gloves are next, one is shredded and basically useless. The other is intact. I take both anyway and maybe I can use the ruined one for something.
The ID badge comes off easily once I clear the frost. I can read it now:
"Dr. Marcus Vey
Dimensional Physics
PARALLAX INDUSTRIES"
Dimensional physics. Of course. Because why couldn't this be a fun fantasy world of might and magic?
The datapad is in an inner pocket, protected from the worst of the cold. It's a flat rectangle, about the size of an old tablet with a cracked screen. I look at the power button, praying for it to work and after the pressing it hard enough to shatter the the ice on top of it.
And it posts!
The screen lights up with a line tracing a hexagram in white and the words PARALLAX INDUSTRIES showing up below before booting to a login screen prompting for either biometric or badge authentication.
"How the hell does this thing even have battery?"
The top of the screen shows "PARALLAX INDUSTRIES - ZMKV-1877 FACILITY ACCESS"
I look at the badge in my other hand. Worth a shot.
I press the badge against the datapad's sensor. It beeps. and the screen changes and I hear a feminine voice chime, "Dr. Vey authenticated. Welcome back, Marcus."
I'm in.
The main screen is cluttered with files and logs, way too much to process right now, but one file catches my eye: "FINAL_MESSAGE.txt"
I tap it.
The message is short:
"If anyone finds this, the experiment failed. DEMIURGE breached containment. The facility is lost. Do NOT enter sub-levels. I'm heading to the surface entrance. If I make it, I'll trigger the distress beacon. If you're reading this and I'm not there, I didn't make it. God help anyone who comes here. -Marcus Vey"
The timestamp is seventy years, three months, and seventeen days ago.
I stare at the message for a long moment. Then I look at Marcus's frozen corpse, half-eaten and terrified.
He didn't make it.
Whatever DEMIURGE is, it's still here.
And I'm about to go looking for that facility.
I start layering on the salvaged gear. The poncho first, thermal and bulky but warm. Then Marcus's jacket over it, torn side in the back where I won't see it. The scarf wrapped around my face and neck. The intact glove on my right hand, the damaged one solved on my pocket as a backup. The boots with extra fabric stuffed into it are decently warm.
I look ridiculous, I feel ridiculous. But I'm warmer than I've been since I woke up.
The ID badge goes on my chest, clipped where I can reach it easily. The datapad goes in my jacket pocket, wrapped in fabric to protect it from the cold.
I take one last look at Marcus Vey. At what's left of him.
"Thanks for the gear," I say quietly. "I'll try to make it mean something."
He doesn't answer. Obviously.
I turn toward the cave entrance and the red glow beyond. Time to see what kind of world I've been dropped into.
The wind hits me like a physical thing when I step outside. It's howling, a constant roar that drowns out everything else. Snow pelts my face despite the scarf, tiny needles of ice that sting any exposed skin. I have to squint just to see.
The sky is wrong. That's the first thing that I notice stepping out of the cave. It's not blue or even gray. It's a sickly grayish-green, like a bruise. There's no sun, just a diffuse twilight that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
And above me, hanging in the sky like a broken promise, is a ring of debris. Massive chunks of rock and ice, frozen in orbit, glowing faintly red where they catch the light. It takes me a moment realize what I'm looking at.
Part of the planet. A quarter of it, maybe more, just shattered and floating in space. The chunks range from house-sized to mountain-sized, a graveyard of a world that tore itself apart.
This is where the red light is coming from. Reflected off the ice and stone, diffused through the atmosphere giving the world a hellish tint.
I'm standing on a dead world.
The landscape stretches out before me in endless white. A tundra of ice and snow, carved into knife-edge drifts by the wind.
The snow isn't just white. There's something else mixed in, red glitter? Everywhere? Was this world was a glitter bomb to a god? The particles look crystalline in nature and it catches the light and refracts it immensely. It coats everything here.
The temperature has to be seventy below, maybe worse. Even with Marcus's gear, I can feel the cold creeping in at the edges, looking for gaps.
And there, maybe two kilometers away across the frozen waste, I can see it.
The facility.
It's massive. A brutalist nightmare of concrete and metal, multiple towers and structures jutting up from the ice like broken teeth. Several buildings have collapsed or are half-buried in snow. It looks like the compound died screaming. All this, and the central structure is still standing, a dark silhouette against the gray-green sky.
I can see lights in a few windows. Dim, barely visible, but there. Emergency power, maybe.
Something is still running in that facility.
Between here and there, scattered across the ice, I can see shapes. Dark spots against the white. It takes a second for me to realize what they are.
Bodies.
Dozens of them. Maybe more. Frozen mid-flight, running away from the facility. Some are piled against what look like sealed doors. Others collapsed in the snow, half-buried.
They were trying to evacuate. Seventy years ago. And they didn't make it.
Marcus was one of them. He made it the farthest. All the way to this cave. And whatever was chasing them must've caught up.
I look at the facility again. At the emergency lights still burning after seven decades.
That's where the answers are. That's where I'll find out what DEMIURGE was, what went wrong, and what killed over a thousand people.
That's also where whatever killed them probably still is.
I should turn around. Find another cave. Try to survive on my own. going to that facility is objectively the worst idea possible.
But I kind of have to. So I am going to go anyways.
Because I'm standing on a frozen hellscape in salvaged gear with no food, shelter, and no plan. The facility has power, it might have supplies, and it will definitely have answers.
I'm tired of not knowing what's going on.
I've spent the last six months at SungSoft being pushed around by deadlines and condescending senior devs who treated me like I was stupid because I was new. I died on a sidewalk because some asshole decided it was my day to die, and woke up in an ice cave next to a corpse on an alien planet with a shattered sky. This isn't what I thought "paradise" was going to be like.
I adjust the scarf over my face, check the datapad to make sure its secure, and start walking.
The first hundred meters are manageable. The snow is deep but not impossible, the wind is brutal but I'm angled into it, head down. My boots crunch through the ice crust with each step.
The second hundred meters are harder. The cold is finding gaps in my gear and it gets very chilly very quickly. My fingers are starting to lose feeling again.
At the halfway point, one kilometer in, I stumble. My foot catches on something buried in the snow and I go down hard. Some snow finds its way into my boot and have to use my left hand to stabilize myself. The snow instantly starts soaking through my jeans. The cold is shocking, aggressive, like it's been waiting for this moment.
I push myself up, leg screaming. Actually, everything is screaming at this point but I can't dwell on it.
I want to stop, rest and just get a minute to recover. But I know what that leads to: you sit down, close your eyes for a second, and you never get back up. The only difference between me and what I tripped on will be the look on our faces.
So I keep moving. One step, another, another, another. and I have to count to keep myself focused.
One *crunch*
Two *crunch*
Three *crunch*
Just have to stay focused, don't think about the cold.
Four *crunch*
Five *crunch*
Six *crunch*
Its closer now, I'm sure it's only a couple more steps.
I pass another body around fifteen hundred meters. It's face down in the snow, half buried. I don't stop, because looking ahead, this is only the first of many.
I pass another, and another. They're everywhere as I get closer to the facility. So many that I have to be careful not to trip over them. A trail of the dead, frozen in fear forever.
The facility looms larger now. I can see details. Automated turrets mounted on the walls, dormant and frosted over. Massive bulkhead doors, sealed tight. Shattered windows. Blast damage on one tower.
There's no way in through the front. The doors are sealed with bodies piled in front. It doesn't look like I would be able to force it open either.
But there, on the easter side, I can see a collapsed section of wall. A gap where the structure gave way, partially buried but accessible.
The last 500 meters are pure grit. I can barely see, my thoughts are drifting, and I can barely feel my legs.
246 *crunch*
312 *crunch*
467 *crunch*
I am just counting at this point, not steps, maybe breaths? Anything to stay awake. I am almost there. Almost.
I reach the collapsed wall and dive through the gap without thinking. I roll into the darkness, out of the wind, and finally out of that brutal cold.
Inside.
I lie on the ground for a moment, thankful that I am alive. Every second hurts, I am shivering with a fervor known only to motors. But I'm inside and alive. That's worth something.
The lights flicker on, maybe for the first time in 70 years. Motion sensors mustve turned them on. A dim red illumination bathes the space ina hellish light. I can see I'm in some kind of storage area. Equipment lockers line the walls. Crates are stacked in corners, covered in frost and dust.
It's warmer in here, but not by a lot. I'm out of the lethal cold at least. Maybe 20 below instead of 70? I crawl a little bit further inside and lean against a wall, too exhausted to move further. My hands and legs are so cold they might fall off as I am.
That's when I hear it.
Faint at first. Distant. Coming from somewhere below me, or maybe above? The acoustics in this place make it impossible to tell.
step.
A wet impact. Heavy, wrong.
Draaaaaaaaag...
Something scraping across ice, or metal on stone. The sound sets my teeth on edge.
step-Draaaaaaaaaaag...
Rhytmic. Deliberate. Patient.
step-Draaaaaaaaaaag...
It's not getting closer. Not yet.
But the lights are still on. The motion sensors announced my arrival like a dinner bell.
And whatever's making that sound?
It knows im here.
Welcome to your new life, Ethan Kang.
Try not to die. Again.