Chapter 37: Hunt in Frozen Forest

Luke crouched outside the cave, scraping blood and sinew from the pelt he’d skinned off one of the wolves.

The cold made everything harder, slower, but he kept at it, rubbing the hide clean in the snow. One pelt was already drying near the fire—imperfect, but usable. With a little luck, it wouldn’t freeze solid by morning.

Thank god for survival class.

It had become mandatory in schools across the world after the System appeared. He’d barely passed the practical exams back then. Now? That half-forgotten curriculum was the only reason he wasn’t dead yet.

Nearby, a thick wolf haunch roasted over the flames, sizzling.

Luke finished cleaning the second pelt, gave the frozen trees one last glance, and stepped back into the cave. He placed the second hide near the fire, next to the first. The other, he folded and tucked between Princess Charlie’s ribs—something to keep in reserve, or maybe use later for extra warmth.

If he could cut a few crude slits into the remaining one, maybe he could wear it as a makeshift cloak.

Not much… but enough to keep his blood from freezing.

He sat down and opened her system window.

Name: Princess Charlie
Level: 2
Rank: F
Class: [Warrior – Lvl 5]
Race: Skeleton
Title: [Servant of the Dark Lord]
Health Points (HP): 166/170

Mana Points (MP): 30/30

Stamina: 103/120

Stats:
Strength: 20
Agility: 11
Endurance:12
Vitality: 17
Perception: 5
Intelligence: 3
Free Points: 1

Class Skills: [Basic Weapon Handling (Common)], [Heavy Strike (Common)], [Charge (Common)], [Iron Fist (Uncommon)]

Race Skills: [Demonic Servant Perception (Uncommon)]

Luke studied her frame from across the fire. Her bones glowed faintly in the firelight, the reinforced skeletal structure making her look even more imposing in stillness.

Her stats hadn’t changed, he thought, but her body definitely had.

When he first summoned her, she’d barely been five feet tall—now she towered over him. That evolution after he mutated his class… it didn’t just make her look stronger.

It made her stronger.

He’d read once that racial structure defined a creature’s power baseline. A level 1 dragon wasn’t the same as a level 1 human.

Maybe it was the same principle here.

With that in mind, he’d dumped her final point into Vitality. It would help her recover and endure—especially now that she had Iron Fist as an option for close-range combat.

Stats Updated (Princess Charlie)
Vitality: 17 -> 18
Free Points: 1 -> 0
Health Points (HP): 166/170 -> 176/180

Luke exhaled.

Then, finally, he picked up the cooked meat.

He bit in.

Stopped chewing.

“Is this chicken?”

It tasted like chicken. Like, perfectly. Juicy. Crisped on the outside. Tender inside.

He looked at the wolves. Then the meat again.

“I don’t care what it is. That’s incredible.”

Charlie clacked her teeth in amusement as she watched from the entrance, vigilant as ever.

The fire crackled beside him. The wolf pelts steamed slightly, drying. Luke’s gaze drifted to the treeline. His face hardened. He hadn’t forgotten what he saw.

Earlier, just past the edge of the Whitewood Forest, lit faintly by the moonlight—

He had seen something hanging from the trees.

Large. Pale. Wrongly shaped. By the time he’d focused, it had disappeared.

A gorilla. That was the closest approximation his brain could make. But he knew better. That thing wasn’t natural.

“I need to find the damn wall,” he muttered.

The Tutorial’s briefing had been clear—one kingdom, protected by a great wall, surrounded by a frozen wasteland. That meant he’d been dropped outside the objective zone, on the wrong side. A survival test. Just like everything else.

“Maybe that’s the real first challenge,” he said aloud. “Reach the kingdom.”

But right now, all he had were two options: mountains to the north or the Whitewood Forest to the east. Neither sounded safe.

He pressed two fingers to his temple and sighed.

“Great,” he mumbled. “Strong monsters, no map, and the environment wants me dead just as much as everything else.”

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***

Luke tightened the last knot on the wolf pelt bundle strapped to Princess Charlie’s chest. Inside, tucked among the firewood and fur, were strips of wolf meat and a rolled pelt—an emergency backup.

His own cloak was fashioned from a second wolf pelt, slung over his shoulders with two crudely cut armholes. Not elegant. But warm.

It was the best he could do with what he had.

If a blizzard hit again, Luke had a plan: dig a shallow pit, line it with one pelt, cover himself with the other, and use Charlie as a living barricade to block the wind—her skeletal frame holding the fur taut like a living tent pole. Then he’d huddle inside, using the Fire Ring to survive the night.

Not a perfect shelter.

But it might keep him alive.

With preparations done, the two of them moved out—heading toward the Whitewood Forest.

***

The moment they crossed into the tree line, Luke felt the shift.

The forest was… immense. The trees were towering spires of pale bark, so tall the tops vanished into the sky. Their leaves were a shimmering, icy blue, and though the trees were widely spaced, the sheer height of them made the world feel smaller. Colder.

More oppressive.

Luke kept walking in a straight line, marking the trunks with faint cuts from his kukri every ten trees.

He couldn’t afford to get lost. If he did, he’d never find his way back to the cave.

Then—

A sound shattered the stillness.

A deep, guttural scream, almost like a war horn filtered through a beast’s throat. It echoed between the trees, primal and wild.

Luke dropped low, diving behind a root-twisted trunk. Princess Charlie mirrored his movement with mechanical precision, crouching beside him.

Dozens of thick branches curled around the nearby trees, and for a moment, each twist of bark looked like a silhouette—something watching.

Something moving.

And then he saw it.

High above, perched on a branch, something massive crouched.

Luke froze.

There it is.

The creature from earlier.

It resembled a gorilla—if gorillas had snow-white fur, exposed muscle around the shoulders, and massive boar-like tusks jutting from their lower jaws.

A system ping flickered across his vision.

[Cliff Yeti – Lvl 10]

Luke narrowed his eyes.

Level 10.

That meant nothing definitive.

After what happened in that nightmare of a dungeon, Luke had stopped trusting the Identify skill completely. It wasn’t as precise as he’d once believed. Sure, it showed a creature’s race level—but that was only part of the story.

There was also class level, and maybe even more. The skill didn’t reveal that.

Which meant some monsters might have a high race level but a low class, or the other way around. And Luke still wasn’t sure if monsters leveled up like humans did. From what he’d seen, they often came in groups with identical stats—no variation, no surprises.