[MP: 3/240]

  I stabbed downward with my dagger, the frozen metal shattering easily.

  If I had thought of this earlier, I would have saved both myself and Icarus both energy and MP.

  He didn’t seem to have much of a problem, though. He had been devastatingly effective against the ground troops, turning what had been a battle into a one-sided massacre. I’d barely needed to participate.

  “Are there MP potions?” I asked, checking my balance.

  [Balance: 3,150p]

  Sweet. I had plenty of coins. Unfortunately, health potions did me no good as long as there was still a bullet embedded in my leg, so I did not currently have a use for one.

  “Should be. You might be better off just leveling up the stat, though. You see anything else?” Icarus called.

  “All clear.” I shouted back, scanning the masses of broken machines to check if any were still moving.

  “How’s your leg?” Icarus asked, wrapping an arm around me for support.

  I leaned on him, taking the weight off my injured leg with a sigh of relief. “Painful.”

  “Okay, I’m going to move you to that rock over there, and then we’re both just gonna sit and relax for a moment,” Icarus decided, helping me limp over. “You’re just lucky that bullet didn’t hit anything important.”

  I had been lucky, so far. The wolf bite hadn’t gone through any major arteries, tendons, or nerves, which was nothing short of a miracle. During the second Challenge, I had hardly been injured at all.

  Icarus carefully lowered me onto the rock, then plopped down next to me.

  We were both silent for a moment. It was slightly surreal to be making small talk in the middle of a taiga surrounded by broken down machines that had recently tried to kill us.

  “Should we…try and find more monsters?” Icarus finally suggested.

  “Uh…” I glanced at my leg. “You can.”

  “Are you going to be okay for the whole day?” Icarus asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” I promised. “I still have some leftover food and a bowl, so we don’t really have to try that hard to get anything.”

  “Oh, neat!” Icarus said enthusiastically. “I’m so hungry. I couldn’t find any food during the last day of my Challenge.”

  I winced. “Sorry. Should have offered sooner.”

  Icarus took my offered wolf meat, struggling to rip off a bite. I flurried some snow into the bowl, managing to at least sift out all the dirt particles.

  “What do you think of the whole…gods thing?” Icarus asked randomly once he’d finished off what I had left of the wolf meat. “Makes me…uneasy.”

  I nodded in understanding. Icarus may be drowning in coins, but the attention of someone labeled a god was unnerving, and more so the attention of the dozens and dozens that had been floating around Icarus during the Sponsorship Event.

  Besides, if they were interested in events like these, then they were probably sadistic. Sadistic gods, as proven in various mythologies, were to be avoided at all costs.

  “What did you even do to gain their attention?” I asked curiously.

  Icarus shrugged. “I don’t know. I just ran around hunting the monsters. Barely even managed to feed myself half the time.”

  I had to take a moment to process his statement.

  “Hm. I personally…did not purposely hunt the mobs,” I noted.

  “Really?” Icarus asked, shocked. “Well, how many did you kill?”

  “Three. Did you really kill everything here in three days?” I asked, stunned.

  Icarus scanned the massacre site. “Well, no. I mostly focused on lower level stuff, so I wiped out around eighteen to twenty Lv.1 or 2s, and maybe two or three higher levels. Didn’t exactly have wings to help me out.”

  I shook my head. “That’s insane.”

  Icarus’ eyes widened. “Really? How’d you survive, then?”

  “I don’t think anything was actively tracking me down the way you were.” I noted, kicking one of the remains from a drone away with my good leg. “I was mostly left alone. It’s really more astounding that you survived.”

  “Are you kidding? Look at this place!” Icarus gestured around us, presumably at the snow and ice. “It’s miserable! The terrain alone is horrific.”

  “As long as you keep a fire going, it’s not that bad. The hardest part was getting water,” I admitted, remembering the multiple times I’d thrown up thanks to the pine resin. “I’d rather be in my own shoes than yours…however soaked they ended up gett…”

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  I trailed off as I stared at his duck slippers.

  “…ing…”

  “Yeah,” Icarus said, the corner of his lips turning down. “My poor slippers.”

  “Your poor feet. You were flying with those? Walking in the snow with those?” I asked. Icarus hadn’t exactly been boring in his flight maneuvers. I had seen him drop into terrifying dives and loops earlier.

  “I didn’t do much walking this Challenge. Besides. Better than those poor women in three hundred dollar heels.”

  This was true.

  “Challenge,” Icarus requested, staring at the window. “Kind of shitty of them to not give us a mob counter. How are we supposed to know when we’re done?”

  I shrugged. “You should get some new shoes. There should be some in the Shop.”

  “We’re so fucking rich. We should take another look at it anyways through the eyes of a no longer broke person,” he suggested. “If only I could get money this easily in real life!”

  I wouldn’t call this easy for anyone but him and maybe that woman from earlier, but whatever.

  “I need nothing short of a surgeon,” I noted, staring again at my leg. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, but I suspected that the cold was once again helping numb the pain.

  “I can try digging it out, but…” Icarus offered halfheartedly.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  I glanced down at the bowl sitting between us. There was visibly less snow in it than before, but I did not see any water.

  My brain lagged. Was this perhaps some weird property of physics or chemistry I was not aware of? Or was the System just messing with me?

  “You might just want to eat the snow,” I warned Icarus. “It’s not…melting.”

  “Oh, um…aight.” Icarus shrugged, awkwardly scooping snow out of the bowl with his fingers. “Guh. That’s cold.”

  “Does it taste dirty?” I asked, feeling the dryness of my throat. I hadn’t had much of a break between the second and third Challenges, much less a water break.

  Icarus shook his head. “Tase— bleh, sorry, my tongue’s numb— tastes like that fancy ass spring water that comes in those fourteen dollar bottles.”

  “Hm.” I tried some myself. It tasted like water, as water should, but in the moment it might as well have been the nectar of the gods. “…refreshing.”

  Once we were watered and fed, it was back to the Challenge.

  “If they’re hunting us, can’t we just broadcast our location?” I suggested. “Fire or something?”

  Icarus considered it for a moment, then discarded it. “No. Bad idea. I don’t want to draw hostiles close to you while you’re injured, but I don’t want to split up for more than a couple hours. That’s bad in horror movies and in real life. We don’t have comms or even working phones. It’s just too risky.”

  “What’s more risky is facing whatever penalty the Challenge chooses to inflict on us,” I reminded him. More often than not, novels with this particular type of premise had the unfortunate tendency to have a failure penalty of death when it came to scenarios, challenges, quests, et cetera. There wasn’t a penalty listed in the Objective, but that certainly didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

  The angel grimaced. “I don’t want you to walk on that, Yule.”

  “I don’t have to exert myself physically, I can use magic. I’ll be fine, " I promised, standing up and immediately sitting back down, hissing in pain as my leg scolded me. I could practically hear Rounin’s voice in my ears, yelling at me.

  “Oh, you will, will you?” Icarus said, unimpressed. “Just sit down. And stay down.”

  “Hm.”

  “I’m going to go over there. I will be close enough that if you call for help, I will hear you, and not close enough for you to get caught up in anything,” He declared, leaving no room for any arguments I might have had.

  “Will you be okay?” I asked, feeling rather useless.

  Icarus knelt in front of me, one knee touching the snow as he placed a hand on my shoulder and shook me hard enough to get the point across, yet not hard enough to jostle my leg. “You have a bullet in your leg. You will stay here. And you will find that healer friend of yours as soon as I finish up this Challenge for us, so he can dig it out of your leg.”

  I nodded reluctantly, and Icarus finished off our bowl of snow before strolling off.

  Just because I was literally stuck sitting on my ass did not mean I had to be metaphorically sitting on my ass.

  “Open Items Shop,” I requested, scrolling through the panel until I found what I was looking for.

  [Cost: 400p

  Are you sure you would like to buy ‘Magic Potion Lv.1’?

  Remaining Balance: 2,750p]

  “Buy,” I confirmed.

  A blue bottle fell into my hand, and I swallowed a mouthful.

  [MP: 24/240]

  My eye twitched staring at the window. The health potion had restored thirty points. However, MP did regenerate naturally much faster than HP did.

  Now it was time for math again. I wanted at least 1,500p left over for things from the Shop in case I needed them, considering my combat skills seemed more or less on par for the tasks at hand at the moment. It wasn’t particularly hard math, but I wasn’t exactly good at math in school.

  That is to say, it is nothing short of a miracle I passed Calculus.

  “Status Window,” I ordered, wincing at my low HP and MP values. That was slightly painful.

  [Challenger Yule

  HP: 19/50

  MP: 24/240

  Title: The Child of Winter

  Skills: Ice Manipulation Lv.3

  Strength: Lv. 5

  Stamina: Lv. 5

  Agility: Lv.5

  Durability: Lv.6

  Magic: Lv.6

  Perception: Lv.5]

  “Level up Ice Manipulation five times.”

  [Cost: 150p

  Are you sure you would like to level up ‘Ice Manipulation’?

  Remaining Balance: 3,000p]

  “Yes.”

  [Ice Manipulation Lv.3 —> Ice Manipulation Lv.8]

  I brought the rest of my skills to Lv.6 for 640p, leaving me with 2,360p remaining. In order to level everything up again, I’d need 1,920p, which would leave me with… fuck it. The amount was less than 1,500p.

  I could level up Ice Manipulation more. If I got it up to level 15, I’d have around the correct amount left.

  “Level up Ice Manipulation seven times.”

  [Error! At your current Title, ‘Ice Manipulation’ can only be leveled up 2 times.]

  [Cost: 190p

  Are you sure you would like to level up ‘Ice Manipulation’?

  Remaining Balance: 2,170p]

  “Sure.”

  [Ice Manipulation Lv.8 —> Ice Manipulation Lv.10]

  Interesting. I wondered if my other stats had a level cap as well. I wasn’t sure how to improve or get a new Title, so I would have to hone my own skill until I could use the power of the System again.

  I could always train my body or start taking self defense classes, but I could always use my stats to improve my strength. I wasn’t doing half bad tactically. I was still alive.

  More importantly, there was almost definitely a better way to utilize my magic. In my dream, I had hurled projectiles and even stepped on platforms of ice. I thought I remembered sending blasts of frost that froze whatever they touched, but I couldn’t remember.

  Earlier, the snow flurries hadn’t taken up any of my MP. There was surely some kind of reason for that. Perhaps snow didn’t take up any MP, but ice did?

  I concentrated on the sheet of ice covering the lake, forcing cracks into it.

  The ice cracked with a sound like a gunshot, but the MP window never popped up.

  “Yule?!” Icarus shouted.

  I waved at him to show him I was fine, offering a thumbs up with my other hand. He returned the gesture and turned back to whatever he was doing.

  That settled it. It wasn’t snow versus ice…which probably didn’t make sense anyways, considering snow was ice.

  This was why I needed Rounin. If we combined our total brainpower, four fifths of it would be his.

  Behind me, the ice cracked again. I didn’t pay it any mind. I had probably weakened it, and now the water was breaking it apart further.

  “Yule!” Icarus shouted again. I turned my head in his direction and saw his wings spreading as he flew towards me. However, he wasn’t looking at me.

  I followed his gaze to the cracking ice, right before its head broke the surface.