Melina stood beside Lucian, her gaze lingering on the wounds across his face as they slowly knit themselves closed.
The moment she had spoken, she already regretted it. She shouldn't have scolded him for how he fought.
For Lucian, such shallow cuts weren't even worth drinking medicine over.
But when she saw him bleeding, her heart had tightened before she could think.
Lucian hadn't expected her to speak, either. She had been too shy to appear, hiding herself most of the time.
He had intended to brush it off—say the wounds were nothing, prove his resilience in front of the girl he liked. After all, even a schoolboy with no sense of romance would try to look tough before his crush.
But then he realized: such bravado would only worry her more.
So instead, he simply nodded.
"…Mm. I'll be more careful in the future."
He lowered his voice, so Selyra wouldn't hear.
"Ah! Someone else is near," Melina blurted, flustered. "Did we not agree you needn't answer me aloud at times like this?"
She still wasn't ready to be so open.
"It doesn't matter," Lucian murmured with a faint smile. "I wanted to speak with you."
This time, no reply came.
Perhaps she had chosen silence as the only way to make him stop.
Or perhaps, embarrassed again, she had fled somewhere unseen.
'Honestly… what's there to be so shy about?'
Lucian chuckled. His days were beginning to feel brighter, little by little.
Selyra, stationed further back, had overheard his low murmur.
But she knew well enough it wasn't directed at her.
She glanced around him—no other soul nearby, no hidden presence she could detect. From the moment they had set out together, it had only been the two of them.
Then who was he speaking to?
Her curiosity stirred, but as a hired blade she knew better than to pry.
She had already overheard part of his strange exchange with Ranni once. That had been enough to warn her: Lucian was not someone to meddle with.
Her role was simple—follow orders, do her work, and live another day.
Lucian turned over the corpse of the crystal lizard.
Up close, the resemblance to Dark Souls' crystal lizards was uncanny. Those creatures, praised by players as the "Bugatti Veyrons" of loot, could even be found at the very start of Dark Souls III.
Of course, this one hadn't wandered in from another 'set'. It wasn't Patches pulling one of his tricks.
It only looked similar.
This beast bore short, spiraled horns atop its skull—not dragon horns, but furnace-like spirals, proof that it truly belonged to the Lands Between.
It must have been some ancient species, born long ago and fused with crystal as part of its nature.
After all, the world of the game had shown only fragments of the ecosystem. Bears, dogs, crayfish… reskinned crows and bloodhounds. Hardly representative of a true world's breadth.
Reality held far more.
Even so, this was Lucian's first time seeing a creature absent from the game entirely.
And it was not weak.
Its advantage came from fighting on home ground, in a terrain filled with crystals, and from its peculiar abilities. Compared to an ordinary Rune Bear, it was physically less robust, but the sharpness and density of its crystal armor more than compensated.
That rolling attack alone had made it nearly unstoppable.
Not to mention the icy breath it had unleashed.
That, in particular, caught Lucian's attention.
It wasn't as though a lizard simply looked like a crystal beast and gained frost breath by default. This was an adaptation born of environment.
Which raised the question: where exactly had the portal brought him?
The unnatural cold of this cavern, the creature's icebound breath…
'Could it be—the snowfields?'
He nudged the corpse with his boot, but found nothing valuable upon it.
So he asked Selyra, "Have you ever seen a creature like this?"
"In the Lands Between? Never." She tilted her head. "Perhaps, as you say, it is an ancient species."
Even her long-lived eyes, touched by the blood of the Numen, had no answer.
Lucian sighed and stowed the body into his storage disk. It would be worth dissecting back at Stormveil.
Together they pressed on, passing through the chamber where the lizard had lurked. Broken cuckoo armor, bones, and even foul piles of waste marked the place as its lair.
The Cuckoos had clearly scavenged something here once, then withdrawn without avenging their dead. Perhaps they had judged the soldiers' lives too cheap to justify the trouble.
At least that meant the path ahead remained unexplored.
The cavern beyond grew broader, then split into twisting tunnels.
Strange markings—ancient script—were carved above certain passages, as though to guide travelers. Lucian couldn't read them.
He no longer risked splitting from Selyra. With so many diverging paths, they might never find each other again.
Instead, he summoned a steady current of wind.
As the breeze brushed stone and crystal, he mapped their contours in his mind, sketching a three-dimensional chart of the maze.
It was a technique born of necessity, after realizing his lack of scouting ability. Still unrefined, costly in focus, but effective.
He pressed onward, gradually mastering it as they traveled.
What had first required halting steps, even stopping altogether to sense the air's feedback, now became a fluid motion. He could map while walking, avoiding dead ends and ambushes.
The deeper they went, the more signs of crystal lizards appeared. But thanks to the wind, they avoided contact, sparing the beasts.
No need to drive them extinct… there might not be many left in this world.
Along the way, Lucian also found primitive crystal-cutting tools, cruder than the Glintstone Carver he wielded. Signs of human habitation lingered as well.
Clearly, this cave had once been a mine. A place where countless laborers had hewn crystal from the walls.
The scale of the cavern suggested immense output—and of fine quality, too.
Then the wind revealed something unusual ahead.
Not stone. Not crystal. Something… immense.
Lucian emerged from the passage—and froze.
Before him lay a corpse.
A dragon.
Its body stretched so far into the cavern's depths that its end could not be seen. Its wings were spread across the stone, its scales buried beneath forests of crystal.
Glintstone had grown over it so thickly that it seemed less a dragon encrusted with crystal, and more a dragon born of crystal itself.
Its head slumped low, jaws open in a silent roar. Enormous fangs, once symbols of ferocity and majesty, now lay broken and twisted, pried apart by the relentless growth of crystal bursting through its mouth.
From above, a shaft of light pierced the cavern. Scattered by countless crystal faces, it illuminated the fallen colossus in an otherworldly glow.
This was a Glintstone Dragon—but not one Lucian knew.
Its size was staggering.
Smaller than Dragonlord Placidusax, perhaps, but compared to ordinary dragons it was overwhelming. Even in this cramped cavern, its body filled every corner of sight.
Lucian had once glimpsed Glintstone Dragon Adula from afar. At the time, the distance had obscured her true scale.
But this corpse… even dead, its presence dwarfed most living wyrms. It might have rivaled half of Adula's size—still titanic by any measure.
Standing before its bowed head, Lucian studied the scene. The dragon seemed to have died peacefully, settling into crystal as centuries passed, its body merging with the cavern floor.
'Crystals. A dragon. Dead, yet eternal. This place deserves a name—the Crystal Dragon's Rest.'
Its massive tail coiled upward into the cavern roof, fused into stone. At the tip, Lucian noticed a faint white glow.
Not crystal light. Daylight.
The tail formed a bridge to a high platform—an exit.
Climbing onto the dragon's back, he followed the tail upward.
At last, an opening.
But it was sealed.
Layers of crystal blocked the cave mouth. Beyond them, through narrow gaps, he glimpsed not the world but another wall of ice. Thick, solid, suffocating.
And cold—so cold that even peering through the cracks burned his eyes with frost.
Lucian's breath caught.
'The snowfields. The portal really did throw me into the mountaintops.'
Until now, the cavern's walls had sheltered him. But the moment he saw that frozen barricade, he realized just how much worse the outside must be.
Was this the Consecrated Snowfield? Or the Mountaintops of the Giants?
Either way, the cold was no trivial matter.
"Selyra," he ordered softly. "Return the way we came. Use the portal back to the Belfries. Wait for me there."
Even she, with her dancer's grace, could not face the storm outside dressed so lightly.
As for himself, he only needed to light a site of grace. Then he could warp back.
Drawing the Glintstone Carver, he tested the barricade. The crystal was too thick, the ice denser still. Even a tool of sorcery struggled.
So he switched weapons.
The Sword of Night and Flame flared, and a torrent of cometlight ripped through the wall.
Crystal and ice shattered.
At once, a flood of snow and wind screamed into the cavern, slashing Lucian's face like blades. The temperature plunged to match the world outside.
He braced against the storm, peering through the breach.
White. Nothing but white.
Endless snow swallowed mountain peaks. Blizzards churned across the land like raging seas.
Only a few withered Roa fruit plants clung to life, bowing under the snow's weight. Nothing else moved.
The blizzard ruled this land, beautiful and merciless.
Lucian pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders.
Then, following the faint light of grace, he stepped into the snowfield.