The Winter Wanderer

Matskim

Matt’s dreams never brought peace. They always smelled of burning rubber, ozone, and wet earth mixed with blood.

That night, while the rain fell softly over the tent canvas in France, Matt’s mind slipped back through time. He dreamed of the stories he used to hear as a child on Svetlana’s father’s radio, before Anadyr was wiped off the map. He dreamed of the year that forever changed the fate of humanity: 2015.

In Matt’s dream, the Empire as it was known today did not yet exist. There were no troops dressed in white, no Counts, no Barons, no imposing Floating Island dominating the skies. Back then, only a single being descended.

Bastian.

That man appeared from the heavens and, completely alone, unleashed an unprecedented hell. He did not negotiate. He sent no ambassadors and issued no ultimatums. He directed his devastating power straight at the greatest military power on Earth: the United States.

What humanity believed would be a war of attrition lasted exactly seven days.

Seven days of continuous fire. Seven days in which concrete cities and missile silos were reduced to craters of molten glass by the mere presence of that monster. It took only 168 hours for the most heavily armed nation on the planet to collapse to its foundations.

Because of that absolute massacre, terrified humanity would forever give him a name that inspired nothing but fear:

The Demon King.

To Matt and all the survivors on the outskirts, America simply ceased to exist during that week of horror. In the eyes of the world, the continent had become a ghost land, a burned scar across the ocean that the Demon King had devoured just to prove the absolute insignificance of the human race.

Arthur, who would later become one of the seven Transcendents and the leader of the “Government,” was the only known survivor of that continental slaughter.

It was after that peak of absolute despair—when humanity realized it was cornered and on the brink of total extinction at the hands of the Demon King—that the phenomenon occurred.

A Benevolent God, taking pity on mortal fragility in the face of Bastian’s overwhelming power, gave the Earth a gift:

The Will.

Through the pain, rage, and trauma of the 2015 massacre, the survivors’ Will channels began to open. People began to awaken. Despair itself became the key to breaking through the biological shell; a divine gift that gave them a chance to stand back up and fight.

Over the years, Bastian cemented his dominion by building the Empire, raising the Floating Island, and appointing his nobles. One year after the fall of the United States, that machinery reached Anadyr.

And there, the Will had not been enough to save Svetlana.

It had only been enough to keep Matt from dying in the snow while his heart filled with poison.

Matt’s eyes snapped open.

The ceiling of the medical tent was dark. The rain had stopped, leaving only the constant dripping of water from the leaves onto the canvas. His heart beat slowly and heavily, like a war drum.

He sat up on the cot. He was twenty-one years old.

The memory of 2015 and the supposed destruction of America did not bring him nostalgia. It reminded him of the true scale of the threat the Demon King had brought into the world.

Valentin was only one of the many executioners born from that era of terror.

But Matt did not need to save the planet or overthrow the Demon King.

He only needed Count Valentin to pay his debt.

Matt got up from the cot and walked out of the tent.

After years of surviving in hostile environments, he had kept the habit of sleeping outdoors. Even though he had spent the last two months at Boris’s Guild camp, he preferred sleeping in his own tent, like the true wandering mercenary he was.

Throughout his five years wandering across the continent, he had encountered other survivors and mercenaries. With the indirect guidance of some of them, he had learned to channel the first threads of the Will.

But it had all started much earlier.

To be exact, two months after the fall of Anadyr.

Back then—in early 2017—Matt met Matskim for the first time, a veteran who held the rank of “Master.”

The caravan of survivors from Anadyr had managed to reach Ugolny Air Base. Matskim, a former and experienced soldier, was there.

When the people from the town told him about the sixteen-year-old boy who had decided not to get into the vehicles and instead walk alone into the middle of nowhere, everyone assumed he had committed suicide in the snow.

Matskim, driven by simple curiosity and relying on his status as a Master—whose hardened body allowed him to withstand extreme temperatures without flinching—decided to search for him.

It took him two months of tracking, but he eventually found him on the other side of the correct path.

Matt was on the verge of death.

It was the middle of the Siberian winter. The sun barely appeared at nine in the morning, only to disappear again before three in the afternoon. Temperatures ranged between -6°C and -12°C, dropping as low as -20°C when the wind lashed against the frozen ground above the permafrost.

Matskim found him at the bottom of a small stone cave, curled up beneath what appeared to be the blood-soaked hide of a young polar bear.

Matt was trembling violently in front of the last embers of a small fire, clutching a chipped kitchen knife as if it were his only anchor to life.

“Well, well…” a raspy voice said from the cave entrance, accompanied by the stale smell of cheap alcohol and tobacco. “So the rat from Anadyr is still breathing.”

Matt slowly raised his head.

His eyelashes were covered in frost, and his lips, cracked from the freezing cold, could barely form a word.