Chapter 02
Upon leaving the rockier peak, trudging through knee-high snow on his way down to the base of the mountain, he realized that the descent toward the civilization he imagined below wouldn't be such a smooth one.
"Should have—No," he quickly gathered himself, "there was no alternative to this, meaning this was the best move for later."
A couple of kilometers further down, boredom assaulted him again, and he chose to soothe it with a song, inventing the lyrics as he went. It calmed him down for another couple of kilometers, but as he passed the cloud that had looked like the floor from up above, he fell on his knee.
The first thing he noticed was that this mountain was surrounded by several lesser peaks, apparently part of the same chain. The second thing he noticed was what lay ahead: a verdant plain where, squinting hard, he could make out a small smudge on the horizon.
Squinting even harder, he believed it to be what he was looking for, a sign of civilization.
It should have been a hopeful sight, so why did he feel hopeless?
Well, it was because of the distance between him and that beautiful smudge.
It was significant, and there were already a good dozen kilometers between where he stood now and the base of the mountain alone.
Why so dramatic? It's just over a dozen kilometers, and it's a downhill incline, one might say.
And yeah, it was, but there was a major detail easy to forget.
It was an incline covered in snow that easily buried a leg up to the knee, and he could tell it would only get worse the further down he went.
I wish I could snowboard my way down there, he thought, pushing himself to get moving again, seeking a path toward an area with less snow buildup. He stopped half a kilometer further when he heard a strange noise.
The snow in this section came up about halfway to the shin, so easily, he turned toward the source of that goat-like voice, and it led him to a goat he at first mistook for a normal one, given the distance.
But it quickly dawned on him that the creature was at least as large and tall as a horse.
That wasn't all that was strange about it either.
It had glowing red eyes, and with the three pairs of horns it boasted, the beast looked like something out of satanic worship.
The beast emitted a "Mwaaah-eh!" which he could tell meant it had chosen violence. It delivered that cry the moment the giant goat jumped. The massive creature floated through the air, majestic and terrifying, silhouetted against the sky.
From his point of view, it looked as though it had calculated the trajectory perfectly, about to land the jump right where he stood. So he backed away without taking his eyes off it, which let him witness the impact firsthand.
He winced.
Buried under the shin-deep snow, the hard ground was still there, much to the goat's misfortune. What he witnessed sounded like a four-ton sack of wet cement dropped from a third-story window, combined with the simultaneous snapping of ten thousand dry celery stalks.
Upon contact, the creature's four legs shattered instantly into a chaotic slurry of bone fragments and pulverized cartilage. Propelled by its own immense momentum, the torso plowed downward, pancaking itself against its own destroyed limbs in an anatomical folding job of unprecedented violence.
A geyser of steaming black blood erupted from the creature's nostrils, spraying a crimson arc across the white snow and reaching his feet.
Silence returned, broken only by the whistling wind and the gurgle of a pool of gore melting the ice.
The shifting mass slid backward down the slope, its head rolling toward him to reveal a fractured skull with dangling, glowing red eyes staring blankly back.
The mangled carcass slid into the white distance, painting a wide, steaming red highway down the mountain.
"What the fuck was that?" he wondered.
He stared at the crimson streak left by the creature and noticed that, oddly, despite the sight, his heart wasn't hammering against his ribs.
Not now. Not earlier. Logically, he acknowledged that what he had just witnessed was a high level of violence, a grotesque, horrifying explosion of anatomy.
Yet he wasn't truly horrified. It was the exact same eerie calm he had felt when he first crawled out of that place, the evil lair or whatever dark hole he had escaped from.
What kind of person was he before he lost his memory? Amnesia had wiped his name, but his instincts left him entirely unbothered by a stallion-sized, multi-horned demon goat exploding into wet cement in front of him. Clearly, he had seen some serious shit in his past life.
"Past life? No, that's wrong, it's not like I died or something."
Still, he couldn't help but shake his head. "That explosion, though... that was something. Woah."
Turning his back on the red trail, he continued his descent down the mountain. As he navigated the shifting terrain, he soon realized the monster wasn't a solitary freak of nature. The mountain was crawling with them.
He encountered dozens of goats perched across the cliffs, and they apparently came in a bizarre hierarchy of mutations. He spotted one-horned variants, classic two-horned ones, three-horned ones, and stocky four-horned beasts.
Compared to the demonic juggernaut that had just pancaked itself, these smaller variants looked vastly less impressive.
They lacked the terrifying, impossible scale of the first beast, and crucially, none of them charged or tried to replicate the suicidal leap.
Instead, they just stood like silent gargoyles atop icy rocky ledges and jagged outcrops, watching him pass with unsettling, passive judgment.
That passive peace shattered when he met the next alpha. About thirty meters ahead, standing like an executioner on a high stone outcrop, was another six-horned titan. Its red eyes locked onto him with a pure, murderous death stare.
The beast didn't hesitate. It executed the exact same aerial maneuver as the first one, launching its massive body into the air. But this one was different. The creature descended like a falling anvil and landed the jump with absolute dignity.
THOOM.
The impact was seismic. When the goat's heavy hooves struck the ground, the solid rock and packed ice beneath them visibly buckled and cracked. The shockwave vibrated straight through the soles of his boots.
Instantly, before his conscious mind could even process the threat, his body moved on autopilot. His feet shifted, his center of gravity dropped, and his hands came up into a flawless, rigid combat stance. His muscle memory knew exactly how to fight.
Then he looked at the beast. It was a stallion-sized, multi-ton mass of muscle, horns, and glowing red malice, and it was already lowering its head to charge him with explicit killing intent.
He looked down at his empty, raised hands. How the hell is a martial arts stance going to help against a biological monster truck? he wondered bitterly.
But before he could even attempt to adjust his strategy or run, the creature lunged, and it happened.
One moment, it was an unstoppable, physics-defying force of nature, executing a charge that should have obliterated the mountainside. The next, a sound like a small explosive charge detonated from within the beast. A brutal, sickening CRACK-THUMP echoed across the snowy expanse.
The titan's front legs buckled at a bizarre, unnatural angle, completely giving out beneath its massive weight, like some novice engineer's miniature that had structurally failed.
The tremendous forward momentum didn't vanish, though.
The stallion-sized torso slammed into the earth with the terrifying force of a dropped boulder, instantly transforming the majestic horror into a sliding, roaring avalanche of flesh and horns.
It plowed a deep, violent trench through the snow, screaming directly toward his position like a rogue freight train.
His muscle memory, still operating entirely on autopilot, saved his life. Before his conscious mind could even react, his feet shifted. His body executed a flawless, explosive side-step, a precise, low-profile evasion that minimized his silhouette while keeping his eyes locked on the oncoming mass.
The mangled, sliding wreckage roared past him, missing him by mere inches. The sudden rush of wind nearly took his breath away, spraying his face with a freezing mixture of displaced snow, gravel, and sizzling, super-heated blood.
He watched in detached fascination as the giant carcass tore through the exact spot where he had been standing a fraction of a second prior, its six massive horns spinning like a broken blender as the torso flipped over itself.
The sheer kinetic energy finally spent itself another twenty meters down the slope, leaving the creature a tangled, static pile of anatomy resting at the edge of a steep drop-off.
Silence reclaimed the mountain, save for the heavy, rhythmic ticking of cooling meat.
He slowly lowered his empty, rigid hands, staring down at his palms before looking back at the fresh, gory trench carved into the snow. He blinked, trying to reconcile the terrifying speed of the approach with the sudden, catastrophic collapse.
"Okay," he muttered, brushing a stray droplet of black blood off his cheek. "So the stance didn't do shit, but the dodge was a ten out of ten."
He looked back up at the cliffs. A few of the smaller, passive variants were still watching, though a couple of the two-horned ones seemed to lean forward slightly, as if trying to comprehend how their glorious leader had just suddenly turned itself into a four-ton slip-and-slide.
And speaking of "slide," it began sliding down the slope too, like the first one.
The sight brought an idea to him—one answering his earlier wish for something to conveniently slide down the base of this mountain peak. This thing looked like it would do the job; it would slide well, despite its size.
"Nah," he said, looking away from the temptation. "It would be safer to just make my way down there on foot. Though admittedly, it'd be a lot faster for—no. Don't do that, me. This is definitely a bad idea."
He paused, thinking it over again. He looked back down the slope and noticed the creature was still sliding, gaining momentum. Acting entirely on impulse, he rushed toward it like someone sprinting to catch a bus about to leave.
Except instead of a reasonable vehicle, what he caught and mounted was a mangled, six-horned giant goat, currently functioning as a high-speed organic bobsled down the mountainside.
This was a stupid idea, he thought, the exact moment the beast picked up a speed that quickly spiraled beyond any possibility of backing out.
"Fuuuuuuuuckkkkkk yeah!"
He had passed the point of no return, so he leaned into the chaos.
He accepted the ride and actually started enjoying it.
There was genuinely something exhilarating about this madness.
Holding onto whatever horn was available like one would the handlebars of a motorcycle, he braced himself.
Beneath him, the poor beast let out a wet, gurgling noise that suggested it was somehow still alive, acting as a buffer between him and the freezing snow.
They tore through distances that he estimated would have taken him ages to trek down on foot. The wind screamed in his ears as the mountain blurred past in a flash of white and sometimes crimson.
The chaotic joyride finally came to a halt some twelve minutes later, when the steep, snowy region of the mountain aggressively met a jagged, rocky area. The rough terrain tore brutally through his now definitely dead ride, bringing the slide to a grinding, bone-rattling stop.
Clambering down from the shredded carcass, he jumped around to shake off the adrenaline, a manic grin splitting his face.
"Woooooooohoooooouh, that was what I was talking about! Fuck yeah, that had to be the best thing ever!"
He looked back up the slope. A massive, steaming trail of red led all the way up into the high peaks of the mountain, a stark monument to his impossible descent.
Turning to look ahead, the terrain had drastically changed.
Because of how flat the immediate area was and how the view was obstructed by rolling hills, he couldn't tell if he had officially made it to the absolute base of the mountain.
However, he was certain he couldn't be that far away anymore.
With a happy, adrenaline-fueled gait, he headed forward toward the hills, leaving the wreckage behind, hoping to reach civilization as soon as possible.
That hope was realized sooner than expected, as further ahead, tucked against the side of a hill, was something no one would expect to find in these parts: a shop.