Echo Islands, east of Celine.
Listening to the guide while looking through the brochure.
As the tour group made their way through the volcano's ruins, Eleazar was filled with contemplation.
It seems like it would be more difficult to awaken a volcanic island, would there be seawater in the rock formations?
Halfway through the tour, Eleazar, who had fallen behind the group, quietly turned on his senses.
The sight around him was suddenly darkened, and the voices of the party ahead of him sounded as if they were walking through a layer of seawater, inside the spacious body of the volcano, and in a crevice of the rock at a great distance he saw a faint reddish light dispersing and overflowing.
It's very faint and dim, and it's assumed that in a few hundred years, or with a crustal tremor, these fissures will be able to pour out molten lava and rejuvenate this volcano.
Fooled you. It's a dormant volcano!
Discovering this fact, Eleazar nearly spat out a mouthful of old blood.
This place was still introduced by a teacher, who came with a guarantee that there was no chance of an eruption.
Having no interest in continuing the tour, he then returned alone to the island's harbor and hired a small ship to return to land, amidst repeated warnings from his guide that he would not get a refund.
For some time thereafter, his trail drifted through Celine's country.
Thanks to the construction of a fairly accessible railroad, he fulfilled his dream of being a traveler ahead of schedule.
Finally, Witcher's trail vanishes in the great snowy mountains at the end of the North.
The clergyman stationed at the church in Northwind Ridge, after completing his daily prayers, turns an hourglass on a stone table upside down.
"Well, the guy's been in there for three days..."
The trainee acolyte beside the old cleric asked curiously:
"What's that guy's story, the division requires us to report back every three days."
"It's one of the more important first-class people..."
"Then I'll go into the mountains and look for it, in case I freeze to death in the snowy mountains."
The acolyte leaped to his feet and ran to the storeroom to put on his gear.
The old clergyman could see that the young person was bored with being here, and didn't break her mind to run out and move around.
"Be careful, we haven't found that yeti that attacked the village."
"Don't worry, Uncle Lance, I've been practicing Holy Light and Swordsmanship for five years at the headquarters, if it dares to appear in front of me, I'll immediately clean it up!"
After waving a showy fist, the holy warrior gleefully stepped out of the church and slowly disappeared into the wind and snow.
...
...
"More than a hundred years ago, the Tianshan Mountain side also experienced a volcanic eruption, I heard my grandfather say that on that day the entire mountain range experienced an avalanche, uncountable rocks, and volcanic ash roiled down from the sky, and that scene was said to be spectacular!"
Walking down the snowy mountain trail, Eleazar wiped the wind and snow from his face and looked down again at the simple map that had cost an entire village of elders their best efforts to depict.
"Well, it seems to be in this area."
After three days of searching through the icy mountains, I finally found a little trace.
The map he had prepared before he set out had long since been thrown away.
Those dead volcanoes outside are either tourist attractions scientific research bases, or gathering grounds, and some gatherings are simply built at the foot of the mountain, sustaining the livelihoods of an unknown number of people, and if he rashly goes to inspire, he doesn't know how many people will be forced to relocate their homes, and the impact will be too great.
After all, he was now under the Church as a parasite, and if he disrupted people's order, he didn't know what he would have to suffer when the time came.
Contemplating this, he repeatedly climbed back and forth between several snow-covered mountains in an attempt to be able to spot the dead volcano.
After searching for a long time to no avail, he turned on his perception sight to sweep through again, but only saw a white blanket.
"It's also true, it's been dormant for more than a hundred years and covered in snow, if this can even be seen as a flame, it means it's also a dormant volcano..."
"Hm? Demon!?"
Eleazar's gaze froze, his transcendent vision instantly locking onto the azure blur of a figure on the mountainside.
Close to 3 meters tall humanoid creature, with a stout outline like a large ape, covered in whitish fur identical to the surrounding tones, it would probably be hard to spot the trail if it wasn't for the aura of frost overflowing from its body.
"Nature's protective color?"
Eleazar whispered to himself, his pace growing faster and faster, and soon the figure was rolling larger and larger like a mountain falling rock, with an aura as amazing as an avalanche had been.
With so much commotion coming from overhead, of course, the Wendigo was quickly alerted.
It quickly avoided the imposing front but realized that the thing was still charging towards it.
"ROAR!!!"
With a roar that shook the mountains, the Wendigo pounded its chest, feet firmly planted in the snow, arms raised in preparation for the onslaught head-on.
Soon an avalanche of white wave lines overwhelmed it, and when the white mist cleared, it realized it had lost an arm.
The cuts were smooth and even as if they had been made by a human blade.
"Ow!"
The snow monster let out a whimper of severe pain, but looking back, he couldn't spot his enemy.
There was no one to chase after it, so it quickly scattered.
The Witcher, hidden in the snow, watches silently as it escapes.
Inside a mountain that looked like a glacier, the snow monster covered its wounds with white snow and let out an angry low roar.
"So it's been at my feet for a long time? It's hidden so deeply, no wonder I couldn't find it..."
A voice sounded like a ghost in the cave, and the snow monster twisted its head in horror.
A human, moving away from the boulder that hid its cave, his figure stretched by the sunlight outside.
--The Wendigo took a deep breath.
Eleazar had just finished probing the interior when he saw the creature, covered in white fur, spewing a roiling white mist at him.
"So it's a snow monster, what's wrong with the church that it let the snow apes eat the transcendental material and mutate."
Bearing the baptism of the deep cold and piercing frost storm, he slowly walked forward, a drop of silver liquid first dangling from his finger, then more and more, and finally converging into a silver sword that emitted a hazy white light.
Realizing that the Frost Spit was ineffective, the Wendigo took a step back in horror, then stomped his foot heavily with a scowl on his face again.
"Crack!!!"
Around the walls of the passageway, countless lurid ice spikes suddenly protruded, densely packed with cold light that drowned out the figure that slowly walked up.
"The quantity is enough, but the intensity is a little less interesting."
In the snow monster's unbelieving eyes, the ice spikes all collapsed the moment they touched the figure!
"Well, don't waste your Transcendental Activity, it's precious."
The voice of the human, who was still in front of him, suddenly appeared behind him, and without waiting for it to twist its head, its vision suddenly skyward.
Loading the demon's head with a single stroke of his sword, Eleazar shook the blood from the blade and looked down again at the skeletons littering the cavern, his voice indifferent:
"Death is not enough..."