Skymint's POV

  We were supposed to attack tomorrow. Glacia. The Wolfmen. That was Frazilo's plan. Three days, he'd said, and this was only day two. They are an urgent threat.

  Either way, they would still kill us if we were not to fight. Vampires are hostile creatures.

  We moved through the swarm of vampires under the navy-blue sky. I struck a vampire on his shoulder and pulled it down along with the roar. His arm fell to the snow-covered ground.

  His other hand held a knife, and I immediately shot a blast of ice to dismantle it from him.

  I used my bare fists to fight back instead of a sword, as I'm no swordsman. I kept on swinging ice blades that formed from my palms, tearing off his flesh, but the bastard kept on reproducing its mutilated limbs.

  May Megaverse give me the strength to win this battle.

  I lunged at him like a vampire and gripped nothing. He disappeared.

  I felt a cold body strike my back and a sharp pain in my neck.

  I spun and drove my elbow back hard into its jaw. It dissolved on impact, which meant the ice in my bones had made contact with something vital, or I'd gotten lucky. I'd stopped distinguishing between the two.

  The East Island of the Polarmen Islands has always been my safe haven.

  Now it's a nightmare. The white snow had turned red. The houses were all ruined. The Polarmen will end up dead.

  I roared in fury and ran through the surge of vampires, swinging my arms with ice blasts. Only some were caught in frost.

  On the ground, an injured Polarman crawled. He smiled with those bear fangs and closed his eyes.

  The wind whispered behind my back, and a knife came flying. I froze it in time. Footsteps scattered on the snow.

  An igloo went outstretched in the air with vines around it and landed on a group of vampires.

  Suddenly, magma erupted ahead of me. The lava crept into the snow and exploded.

  The magma user had wiped out our poison-plant users.

  A wave of overwhelm washed over my face. I can't save everyone.

  I could feel Shadowolf watching the battle with delight.

  As I battled vampires with frost and claws, a thought came into my mind: What are we fighting for?

  We're supposed to fight the Wolfmen. This is all a trap.

  We won't be able to fight anymore by the time we finish the vampires.

  There were more up there, hanging back, watching. Waiting for us to tire.

  They're conserving themselves. They're going to outnumber us.

  I looked toward the ocean. Toward the Central Island sitting across the water in the dark, where the drought had been sitting for days on poisoned ground and contaminated runoff and rain that tasted of metal.

  That knowledge was all I had.

  I started moving.

  Not running nor retreating. Moving with purpose, fists raised, hitting anything that came at me on the way through. The Polarmen closest to me saw the direction and fell in without question, signaling others to follow.

  But the vampires hanging back in the sky followed us.

  I almost forgot that I had a target on my head.

  "Dive!" I yelled to the Polarmen.

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  "But we are wearing armor," one of them said.

  The shore came up fast. Black ocean, dark sky, Central Island a gray shape across the water.

  I hit the waterline and slammed both palms down.

  Ice spread outward from my hands across the ocean surface, thick and fast, a bridge forming in real time. It groaned under the pressure of what I was asking it to hold.

  "Go!" I shouted. "Don't stop!"

  They ran. The ice held. Behind us the vampires hit the shore and kept coming, and I kept the bridge solid through sheer concentration, backing across it last while the horde followed onto the ice behind us.

  The crossing felt like it took an hour. My heartbeat was constantly racing against the time, afraid of sending the battalion to their deaths.

  A vampire had bit me.

  So I bit it back.

  A groan tore from its throat. It tasted disgusting, far worse than spoiled fish.

  We rolled onto the frozen ocean, and it smashed the ice beneath me. I felt my back touched by the dark waters, waiting to swallow me.

  "You are dumb. Why would you do that?" the vampire asked.

  I knew it wouldn't turn me. And it didn't become a Polarman.

  I opened my mouth and breathed. The vampire turned its head away from me, likely disgusted by its own smell too, or somehow a cold, icy breath existed within me.

  I touched where I had bitten the vampire and summoned freezing ice onto his skin. Its eyes widened, and the body paralyzed.

  I regained my spot on the ice. When the last of our people hit the Central Island's shore, I let the bridge go.

  It didn't shatter dramatically. It just stopped being maintained, and the ocean animated in waves, and the vampires already on it dropped into the water and didn't come back up. The ones still on the East Island shore pulled back into the sky, circling.

  Then the rain started.

  The Central Island was worse than it ever was before I left to go to my homeland.

  The sky was low and gray, pressing down like a ceiling. Black patches spread across the snow in wide, irregular bruises: soot and chemical runoff and everything the war and the drought had pulled out of the earth and left sitting on the surface. The smell hit before the rain did, metallic and thick, coating the throat. The ground felt wrong underfoot, soft in places it should have been packed, and crunching in others unpredictably.

  When I stepped through the permafrost up to my knee, a vampire was on me before I'd pulled myself out. I shot its head with ice and it smeared my boots.

  The rain came down dark.

  I watched the first vampire catch it full in the face and flinch. Its skin started to melt.

  Poison.

  A vampire lunged at me and my hand immediately slapped it. It collapsed on the wet snow, wading its arms.

  I figured that my passive ability of hardness makes me immune to poison.

  *Wait, not everyone has a melon.* I looked around and was relieved that their iron helmets were still intact. It's not like the poison is acidic.

  "Everyone, stick together!" I yelled. "We're not backing down."

  They all moved toward me, and Taiga looked up with furrowed brows. His eyes... they were gripped with red veins.

  "Skymint... it's all your fault that we're all gonna die," Taiga hissed.

  "Rawr!" The Polarmen roared, and suddenly, fangs erupted from their jaws. Not bear fangs, but vampire fangs.

  "What's going on?" I asked. "What's going on?"

  I let out a scream.

  I was down in the mud, rain pressing down on me. Taiga was on top of me, tapping on my chest.

  It was real. The battle is real.

  "Skymint!" Taiga cried. "The knife vampire was a phantom user! You had been hit by his knife, and your eyes went purple."

  "Hallucinations," I blurted out. "He gave me hallucinations."

  "I'm scared. What do we do now?"

  "Where are the others?" I asked.

  "They ran to Glacia. They thought you were down. But I didn't leave you."

  Terror crossed my face.

  "We must go now."

  "You're bleeding."

  He was wounded from the knives. He's just a child. This is too much for him to handle.

  "There's a nurse in Glacia," he answered.

  I stood up from the slippery snow. We walked together under the rain and passed through a lot of vampire corpses lying down.

  "So many of them. That's... that's more than I expected. I thought we'd only be able to take down a few of them."

  "We are Polarmen. We are strong."

  "Right," I stated. "Do you want to hear something interesting, Taiga?"

  "Hmm." He nodded.

  "I met this girl two weeks ago. She's good, and sometimes she's bad. But I still stayed with her."

  "Whoa. A human. How is she good?"

  "She brought me where I am now. If it weren't for her, I would probably still be fishing on my boat, never discovering that my mother was a part of the Bear Revolution. And there's my sister, whom she protected."

  "You have a sister?" he asked.

  "Yeah. She takes care of polar cubs like you. I bet you would love to meet Tundra, one of the polar cubs."

  We reached the shore and looked toward the distant stars.

  He sat beside me and fell asleep on my shoulder.

  Tomorrow is another day. I would finally get to eat tuna and meet Arie once again. She would find this island and think I made a mess of everything. She would look at the black snow and the collapsed ground and the somber pressing sky, and then she would look at me, and I would have to explain that this was technically a victory. She would make a face. The specific one that meant I believe you but I find this extremely unconvincing. She used it more than she realized.

  I was looking forward to that face considerably more than I could explain.

  She'd be cold when she arrived. She was always cold and always refused to say so. I needed to find something warm before she got here, something to eat too. She forgot about food when she was focused on something, and she had definitely been focused on something somewhere out there. The village stores might have something left. I'd check when I could stand up.

  The drizzle settled on the black and white ground, steady and quiet.

  I watched the direction she'd come from and waited.

  She usually took the long way.

  That was alright. I wasn't going anywhere.