"Heh!"
The shield warrior on the left roared as the earthy yellow glow on the surface of his tower shield flared, clashing with the cold current.
Crack!
A thick layer of frost instantly condensed on the shield's face, and the warrior let out a muffled grunt as he and the shield were pushed back half a meter.
Meanwhile, the other four snow nightmare wolves lunged at the sled from different directions!
The two assassins moved.
Their figures cut into the wolf pack like ghosts, their short blades tracing lethal arcs.
One snow nightmare wolf's neck was sliced open, blood splashing onto the snow and instantly freezing into dark red ice crystals.
Another was pierced through the chest, collapsing to the ground with a miserable howl.
But the snow nightmare wolves had the advantage in numbers, and the remaining three broke through the assassins' interception, lunging straight for Jiang Lin on the sled!
To these monsters, human adventurers were quite a good tonic.
Especially an adventurer like Jiang Lin, whose internal energy was pure despite his life level not being particularly high.
At that moment, Jiang Lin moved.
There were no dazzling lights or grand displays.
He simply took a step forward, his figure becoming blurred as if merging into the wind and snow.
In the next instant, he appeared beside one of the snow nightmare wolves.
The snow nightmare wolf sensed danger and whipped its head around, frost gathering in its mouth.
But Jiang Lin's right hand was already pressed against its neck.
His five fingers hooked like claws, holy light restrained within them as pure power erupted.
Crack!
The crisp sound of the neck bone snapping was muffled by the howling wind and snow.
The snow nightmare wolf's body went limp, the murderous light in its eyes instantly extinguished.
Without stopping, Jiang Lin tapped his toe on the snow, his body spinning away like the wind, perfectly evading the pounce of another snow nightmare wolf. He twisted his waist in mid-air, his right leg whipping out like a lash to strike the wolf's abdomen with precision.
Bang!
In a dull thud, the snow nightmare wolf was hit as if by a battering ram, its ribs shattering as it flew sideways, plowing a deep trench in the snow before becoming motionless.
The last snow nightmare wolf saw the situation was grim and turned to flee.
Jiang Lin's right hand gripped the air, and light shimmered, converging into an eight-colored longsword. With a flick of his wrist, the eight-colored longsword flew from his hand.
Splat!
The longsword pierced through the back of the snow nightmare wolf's head and emerged from its eye socket, trailing a spray of red and white matter.
These snow nightmare wolves were common monsters ranging from transcendent-tier to elite-tier.
Furthermore, their ranks were between 3rd and 4th-rank, a level that Jiang Lin could easily overcome.
Seeing its subordinates wiped out in an instant, a flash of fear finally appeared in the giant wolf's eerie green eyes.
It let out a low growl, turned, and fled.
"Thinking of leaving?"
Frostblade sneered, and the short blade in his hand flew out, its blade wrapped in ice-blue magic as it traced an arc through the air, pinning itself precisely into the giant wolf's heart.
The giant wolf wailed, collapsing into the snow and twitching a few times before it stopped moving.
From the start of the battle to its end, only a dozen breaths had passed.
The wind and snow continued to howl, but five wolf corpses now lay on the ground.
The way the team members looked at Jiang Lin had completely changed.
Defeating Anvil in the tavern earlier could perhaps be attributed to Anvil's carelessness or lack of skill.
But the killing that just occurred—precise, efficient, and cold, without a single wasted movement—was definitely not something an ordinary 4th-rank adventurer could achieve.
Frostblade walked up to Jiang Lin and solemnly cupped his fists.
"Thank you."
Jiang Lin nodded slightly, but his gaze was fixed on the depths of the wind and snow in the distance.
"Wolves are pack animals. Those few just now were likely just the vanguard."
The superlative perception from 【Phantom Step · Shadow Wind】 allowed Jiang Lin to make a quick judgment.
Frostblade's expression changed.
As if to confirm Jiang Lin's words, the sound of wolf howls rose and fell from the depths of the wind and snow.
The sound was shrill and long, penetrating the snow and coming from all directions.
It was impossible to tell how many there were.
The Old Scholar's face turned pale, and his hand holding the compass trembled slightly.
"It's a pack... judging by the sound, there are at least fifty of them!"
Red Flame retreated from the front, her expression grave.
"Boss, we're surrounded. There are wolf howls in every direction; they are herding us, trying to force us toward a specific direction."
Frostblade quickly assessed the situation and gave a decisive order.
"Abandon the original route! Break through toward the southeast! There is a Jagged Ice Valley there with complex terrain that we can use for defense!"
The team set off again, the sled dogs running with all their might under the driver's urging. But the wolf howls grew closer, and gray-white shadows began to appear on the edge of visibility in the snow.
They were in no hurry to attack, simply following at a distance like intelligent hunters, patiently wearing down their prey's stamina and will.
Jiang Lin sat on the sled, his golden eyes scanning the surroundings.
In his perception, at least sixty snow nightmare wolves had formed a loose encirclement and were gradually closing in.
Further out, there were several stronger auras roaming—those were the elites of the pack, at least at the peak of the 4th-rank, and perhaps even reaching the 5th-rank.
The team sped through the wind and snow, the sled dogs' breathing becoming heavier, their tongues hanging out further, and the white breath they exhaled condensing into frost mist in the air.
Behind and on both sides, the gray-white shadows flitted through the snow mist like ghosts, and the wolf howls rose and fell as if the Everfrost Wasteland itself was calling out for death.
"Five hundred meters ahead, entering Jagged Ice Valley!"
The Old Scholar's voice was hoarse and urgent, and the magic compass in his hand vibrated violently, the needle pointing toward a jagged area of ice rocks.
Jiang Lin looked up.
A twisted ice-blue color was faintly visible in the wind and snow ahead—a natural maze formed by countless giant ice pillars, ice spikes, and ice rocks, with towering ice peaks stabbing into the lead-gray sky like the fangs of a giant beast.
The terrain was indeed complex, but that also meant more unknown dangers.
"Charge in! Find an ice cave that's easy to defend and hard to attack!" Frostblade shouted.
The sled dogs let out low growls, straining to pull the sleds into the ice valley.
As soon as they entered, the temperature suddenly dropped several more degrees.
The ice walls on both sides were towering, with the narrowest part only allowing two sleds to pass side-by-side.
Millennia-old ice that never melted was condensed on the ice walls, its surface smooth as a mirror, reflecting the group's frantic figures.
The wind twisted and amplified in the narrow passage, turning into countless sharp wails and shrieks.
"Turn left! There's an ice fissure there where we can take temporary shelter!" Red Flame's voice came through the wind and snow as she scouted ahead on the lead dog.
The team followed her guidance and turned into an even narrower ice fissure.
Deep within the ice fissure, there was indeed a naturally formed ice cave. The entrance was about three meters wide, and the interior space was bottomless, enough to accommodate the entire team.
"Quick! Push the sleds in! Shield guards, hold the entrance!" Frostblade commanded.
Everyone scrambled to push the sleds into the ice cave. Two sled dogs that were seriously injured were carried inside.
The two shield warriors quickly set up their tower shields at the entrance, forming a simple barrier. The archer climbed onto a protrusion at the top of the ice cave, steadying his longbow and nocking an arrow.
The two assassins vanished into the shadows on either side of the entrance.
Almost at the exact moment the team finished setting up their defenses, dense clusters of eerie green eyes lit up in the wind and snow at the entrance of the ice fissure.
The wolf pack had arrived.
Leading them was a giant wolf whose size far exceeded its kin. It stood over two meters at the shoulder, its pure white fur streaked with dark blue patterns, and there was a scar like a crack in ice on its forehead.
It stepped slowly out of the wind and snow, its eerie green eyes scanning the ice cave entrance, its gaze finally landing on Frostblade.
"A 5th-rank peak commander-tier... Ice-Scarred Wolf King," the Old Scholar's voice trembled.
"It has already awakened the prototype of a frost domain; its combat power will skyrocket in this environment."
The Ice-Scarred Wolf King let out a low growl, its voice deep and majestic.
Following its roar, more than forty snow nightmare wolves pressed forward together, their fangs bared, saliva dripping onto the snow and instantly freezing.
"Prepare for battle," Frostblade said, gripping his short blade as ice-blue magic flowed through the blade.
However, at that moment, a burst of light erupted from the mouth of the cave where they were.
As if detecting the entry of humans, a layer of magic barrier suddenly rose, completely sealing the ice cave entrance.
The translucent ice-blue light curtain had common defensive array runes flowing across its surface, emitting a soft yet resilient energy fluctuation that resonated with the cold ice on the surrounding walls, looking as if it had always been part of this place.
The wolf pack, which was about to pounce, was caught off guard. The foremost snow nightmare wolves slammed hard into the barrier, letting out a series of dull thuds before being bounced back, rolling several times on the snow before steadying themselves.
"This is..." Frostblade withdrew the short blade he was about to swing, looking at the light curtain in surprise.
"A defensive array set up by other adventurers who came here?!"
The Old Scholar stared at the light curtain and frowned in thought for a moment before saying, "Quickly find its array core; it should be inside this cave! It must have been set up here for some time now, and I estimate the energy inside is about to be exhausted. If we can replenish its energy as soon as possible, it should be able to protect us for a while!"
The interior of the ice cave was much more spacious than the entrance, about five meters high, over ten meters at its widest point, and at least thirty meters deep.
The cave walls were not entirely natural; there were clear marks of manual excavation.
"There are bloodstains here!" a voice came from the left side of the cave.
He was squatting in a hollow of the ice wall, his fingertip brushing over a thin layer of frost on the ground, revealing dark brown stains underneath. The blood had dried and turned black, frozen together with the ice, clearly from some time ago.
The Old Scholar walked over quickly, took a single-lens crystal from his pocket, and leaned in to observe for a moment, his expression grave.
"It's human blood, left at least half a month ago. Judging from the splash marks, the injured person was moving very fast at the time, possibly while being pursued."
He stood up and cast his gaze toward the darker areas deeper in the cave.
"This place might have been a temporary shelter before."
Before he could finish, a suppressed cry of surprise came from the depths of the cave; it was the voice of one of the assassins.
"Boss! There's a corpse here!"
Everyone immediately gathered toward the source of the sound.
At the innermost part of the cave, behind a naturally formed ice platform, curled a corpse almost completely covered in frost.
The deceased was a middle-aged male wearing tattered gray-white winter clothes, with a rusted chainmail vest over them and a broken two-handed greatsword slung across his back.
His face was distorted from the severe cold and dehydration, his skin a waxy yellow, his eye sockets sunken, and his mouth slightly open, as if he were still silently screaming before death.
The most shocking thing was his chest—a hole the size of a bowl pierced through from front to back, the surrounding clothing and flesh showing an unnatural charred black color, as if they had been instantly frozen by some extremely cold energy and then shattered.
The Old Scholar knelt down and carefully pulled a frozen bronze badge from the deceased's bosom, which was engraved with a standing ice bear.
"Someone from the Ice Bear Mercenary Group... A few months ago, a team that went to the Northern Ice Field to explore ruins went missing, and it included people from the Ice Bear. I didn't expect them to be here..."
Frostblade frowned deeply.
"How did he die? Who killed him? And who set up the defensive array in this cave?"
No one could answer.
Jiang Lin's gaze fell on an inconspicuous ice fissure beside the deceased.
There, a deep blue crystal about the size of a fist with irregular facets was half-embedded in the ice, emitting a weak but stable energy fluctuation.
The surface of the crystal was engraved with dense micro-runes that faintly resonated with the patterns on the light curtain at the entrance.
"The array core is there," Jiang Lin pointed at the crystal.
The Old Scholar immediately went over, carefully chipped away the surrounding ice, and took out the crystal.
The crystal was cold to the touch, with liquid-like blue light slowly flowing inside, but its brightness was clearly dim, its energy nearly depleted.
"It's an ice-attribute magic crystal!" the Old Scholar shouted.
"But the energy is almost gone; it can only last one or two more minutes at most!"
Frostblade glanced outside the cave entrance—the Ice-Scarred Wolf King had already stepped back a few paces, its eerie green eyes staring intently at the barrier, seemingly evaluating it.
The rest of the snow nightmare wolves had spread out, faintly sealing off the exit of the ice fissure, clearly having no intention of giving up on this group of prey.
More than ten 4th-rank human adventurers, and the food that could be looted from their storage spaces, would be quite a good meal for them.
"Do we have spare magic crystals?" Frostblade asked.
The two shield warriors and the archer in the team hurriedly searched their bags and pulled out several 2nd and 3rd-rank ice-attribute magic crystals of average quality.
The Old Scholar stepped forward, took the magic crystals, and quickly compared them with the slots on the crystal base.
"No problem, these can be used! However, the rank of these magic crystals is relatively low, so I estimate they won't last very long. Do you have any other ice-attribute magic crystals? If you do, try to bring them all out!"
Hearing this, Red Flame quickly pulled out two 4th-rank magic crystals emanating cold air and handed them over.
The Old Scholar took them and embedded them along with the low-rank magic crystals provided by the team members into several secondary energy nodes reserved around the array core.
As the magic crystals were set in place, the light of the core crystal became visibly stable and brightened, and the light curtain at the cave entrance solidified accordingly.
"It's done! The energy is stable! With these magic crystals, it can last at least two hours!" The Old Scholar breathed a sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Outside the cave, the Ice-Scarred Wolf King had clearly also noticed the change in the barrier.
It let out a low growl, and an ice-blue breath erupted from its mouth, slamming hard against the light curtain.
The light curtain fluctuated violently, ripples spreading across it, yet it did not break.
A flash of human-like annoyance appeared in the wolf king's eerie green eyes.
Temporarily safe, the atmosphere inside the cave eased slightly, but no one dared to truly relax.
Frostblade assigned Red Flame and an assassin to take turns standing guard at the entrance, while the rest took the time to tend to the wounded, feed the sled dogs, and replenish their strength.
Meanwhile, under Little Black's guidance, Jiang Lin walked toward the corpse of the Ice Bear Mercenary Group member in the corner.
Rate on N.U.
