As I kept advancing with my group toward the snowy mountains in the north, we passed by a half-destroyed abandoned village.
The small town didn’t have a single corpse or blood stains anywhere, only torn-down houses that seed to have been sliced by a giant blade, so the warriors concluded that the people were probably sent to the capital to work as slaves.
Since the Northern Empire didn’t have a large population like other countries, Baelzor was against killing everyone, as it would leave him with no manpower to work as slaves for him.
While we were looking around the abandoned hos, I kept using my "search" spell to sense the environnt around a large radius of the small town, and I felt a bit of demonic energy entering my threshold.
"Everyone, hide!" I shouted.
Vespera and Yoru jumped inside my shadow while Gina and the warriors hid behind the walls of the broken hos.
A few seconds later, one of Baelzor’s eyes arrived at the abandoned town and started scouting around as if it were searching for survivors.
The eye looked exactly the sa as the one we saw in the sky when we were flying. The only difference was that this one covered the ground area.
As it kept inspecting every single abandoned ho, and my team kept moving around his blind spot, trying not to get spotted by the eyeball monster.
I wasn’t sure if it could also listen to its surroundings, but seeing that the two warriors were keeping silent made believe they could.
Suddenly, I felt a second eye entering the threshold, and it was coming from a direction where it could easily spot us as soon as it arrived.
Without thinking about it twice, my entire team chugged on the invisibility potions I gave them as an ergency and emptied the bottles in a few seconds, right before the second eyeball got to the town.
Seeing that the spot was under too much surveillance, we left the town and kept flying while invisible, leaving the two scouting eyeballs behind.
Coincidentally, we saw another eye monster flying high up in the air, but our invisibility had us covered, so we ignored it and kept moving at high speeds toward the mountain.
By the ti our potion’s effect ran out, we were flying right above the foot of the mountain, and the temperature dropped even more.
The warriors called it Splitrock Mountain, as it literally cut the snowy forest area from the glacial zone behind it.
"Behind Splitrock Mountain, the ground is mostly ice, so it makes everything feel much colder..." Magnus explained.
We still had a good amount of daylight, so we decided to carefully fly up the mountain—staying alert for any potential eye monster around.
Luckily, we didn’t co across any scouts and managed to cross Splitrock Moutain pretty quickly, arriving at the glacial area before nightti.
Just like Magnus said, the ground was mostly ice, and there weren’t any trees or vegetation that we could use to hide from monsters.
Everything felt very open, and it was such a clear day that the visibility was surprisingly excellent. Nonetheless, that wasn’t good for us.
"We need to be careful. We don’t have any potions until tomorrow..." I said to my group.
Bjorn told us that there weren’t many scouts that ca to the glacial area. The Northen Empire already had a low population, so the amount of people who lived in the coldest zone barely reached the thousands.
It was much easier to live in bigger towns or in the capital. However, those were also the places that were completely conquered by the devil.
For that sa reason, Baelzor didn’t send as many monsters to this area, as he knew that it was mostly abandoned and unlivable.
We flew north for a bit longer after the warriors said that there was a small settlent, and even though nightti fell upon us, we kept moving since we didn’t want to camp in the middle of an icy field.
When we saw a few lights flicker in the distance, we got closer and saw tiny hos that were made with ice blocks, similar to an igloo.
Honestly, the structures looked pretty nice for sothing they made out of pure ice, and the light that flickered was a humble firepit right in the center of the settlent.
There were only six of these igloos, and a lone man wearing a fur jacket was fishing from a small hole in the ice.
As we slowly descended to the center of the settlent, the man was not even aware of our arrival until Magnus and Bjorn spoke up.
"Osvif!" exclaid the warriors in unison, making the man turn his head slightly to see us.
He stared for a few seconds before widening his eyes with shock. "Magnus, Bjorn!?" he said, standing up from his ice block with haste.
"I can’t believe it. How are you guys here!?" the man continued.
Still, before anyone could respond, his fishing rod started to get pulled as an animal caught the bait. Nonetheless, the man simply grabbed it and reeled it back with one hard tug, pulling out a fish that looked like a small shark.
I could tell that the man was a professional when it ca to ice fishing, as he did all of that without truly paying attention.
The commotion made the others inside the igloos poke out their heads with curiosity and join us after seeing both Magnus and Bjorn there.
Osvif was an old man who had been living in the glacial zone his entire life, and while he had traveled all over the Northern Empire, his ho was there, on that unnad settlent in the middle of nowhere.
The warriors introduced to him, and Osvif was incredibly friendly towards , even though we had just t—not that I disliked that, though.
"After I heard that you two were taken... I didn’t think I would see you boys again," he said with a sad tone, patting the two warriors on the back.
Osvif wasn’t as tall as Magnus and Bjorn, but the man seed to treat them like a father, which I thought was pretty heartwarming.
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