Lea's head slowly lowered. In the silence, I could faintly hear the grinding of her teeth.
"Then, this is it. We're completely done. No matter how terrible your condition is when you return, I won't help you. But there's just one thing I'm curious about."
Her voice was calm, but it contained deep sorrow and a sense of disbelief.
"What is it?"
"Why do you want to go to that mountain so badly?"
I hesitated for a moment, then answered with sincerity drawn from the depths of my heart.
"It just kept flowing."
"What?"
Lea asked back, as if she couldn't understand.
"My life, I mean. It just kept flowing by without any real meaning. But my body's all grown up, and I won't get any taller now. So, do you know what's left? Just getting old. If my life were a book, it would be the most boring book I've ever seen. Don't you think? I want to pour everything I've built up until now into that mountain. And…"
My voice trembling, I finally **poured out** the desperate yearning I had kept buried in my heart for so long.
"I want to see the end."
It wasn't just simple curiosity. It was a cry to find something, anything, even at the very end of everything I had done so far.
"Can you just close a book without reading the last part if it was really interesting?"
Lea's trembling voice drifted out from behind her deeply bowed head. One hand was already covering her face.
"Alright, then get lost. Don't ever come back to me."
She turned away coldly. I could only blankly watch her retreating figure as she walked away without hesitation.
Then, after only a few steps, Lea stopped abruptly. Like the last remaining fragment of emotion, her gaze sharply pierced me.
"I have one last thing to say."
"?" I barely managed to reply in the suffocating silence.
"The reason you're considered the best mountain climber in our village isn't because you're truly the best."
Her voice was low and trembling, but it contained the full weight of her suppressed emotions.
"Then what is it?"
"It's because everyone who was more skilled than you challenged the Devil's Fangs and never returned."
For the first time, Lea spoke words that belittled me, the person she cherished so much. That single sentence, therefore, hurt as if it had pierced my heart.
She left behind that cruel truth I had been avoiding and turned away again. This time, without hesitation, she resolutely walked away from me.
I, too, gathered my dazed senses and turned around. As I was about to take a step towards the rugged mountain, I suddenly felt my body sway weakly.
The violent waves of emotion surging from the depths of my heart made it feel like I would stumble even on flat ground. In the end, I changed direction and headed home.
As soon as I arrived at the empty house, I pressed myself as close to the wall as possible. Fighting the overwhelming sense of loss that weighed down on me, I desperately tried to hold on. But the more I did, the more the precious memories I had shared with Lea flashed through my mind like a panorama.
With each moment I savored those memories, a faint smile would appear on my face, only to soon be distorted by despair and sadness.
"Heuheu heuheuk! Haa…"
The house, now that I was alone, felt unfamiliar and cold. I suddenly turned my head to look out the window. Tonight, the night sky was pitch-black, and nothing was visible.
"Father, where on earth did you go? Are you perhaps at that Devil's Fangs?"
Huddled in the darkness, I whispered incessantly. The voice, a mixture of longing and resentment rising from the depths of my heart, lingered in the empty room before fading away.
'Why was I born so kind and ordinary? I should have been callous and strong like the Lea next door. Could it be that the children were really switched at birth?'
Suddenly, the cold curse my father had uttered just once in his entire life, when I was seven years old, flashed through my mind.
'Ah, this is making me feel even worse. I can't stay by your side any longer.'
Leaving those words as his last, my father had vanished without a trace like smoke.
The ticking of the clock continued to sound. Like nights plagued by nightmares and insomnia, this time felt like it would never end.
The next day, barely managing to lift my heavy eyelids, I shouldered my backpack again and trudged towards the Devil's Fangs.
The clock inside the house still pointed to the early hours of dawn, but the long days of summer had already begun to faintly illuminate the surroundings.
Fortunately, Lea hadn't said anything to the villagers, it seemed, as no one had come to stop me so far.
The reality that Lea had truly given up on me struck my heart. But she had at least protected my pride.
"Thank you... Lea."
Not long after leaving home, I was able to reach the foot of the Devil's Fangs.
The massive and majestic form of the mountain was too grand to take in at a single glance. I slowly looked up from the base, where I stood, to the sharply rising summit.
'It's been so long since I've seen it this close.'
Compared to ordinary mountains, it looked somewhat rugged, but the starting point didn't seem much different from any other mountain's base.
A cool air began to circulate, marking the point just below the midsection that was entirely covered in ice and snow.
The death line, the halfway point beyond which not a single person had returned alive.
The area below the summit, where ice particles constantly scattered on the fierce wind.
And the summit, shrouded in thick clouds and fog, its depths easily unfathomable.
All those landscapes unfolded before my eyes with a strange yet intense familiarity.
"Father's last seen direction was towards the Devil's Fangs... Back then, he was a better climber than I was."
This place was an unknown world where traces of my lost father might remain, and at the same time, a place imbued with my long-held yearning.
The Devil's Fangs, viewed from directly below, were incredibly high, as if piercing the sky.
As I stood there, mesmerized by its majestic appearance, a strange feeling washed over me. Along with a sense of haziness, an irresistible awe enveloped my entire being.
I couldn't tell if I was standing on solid ground, floating in the air, or even if I had become part of the massive mountain itself.
As my sense of balance grew increasingly blurred, a cool breeze suddenly brushed past my cheek. The refreshing sensation jolted me awake. I slowly lifted my heavily weighted left foot.
Just before taking my first step onto the mountain, Lea's face flashed momentarily in my mind like an afterimage.
"Ugh."
A short groan escaped my lips, and my face contorted strangely for a moment. But I soon pressed my cheeks with both hands, feeling the contours of my teeth through my skin, and lifted the corners of my mouth.
"This is what I've decided."
Without hesitation, I lifted my foot and stepped lightly onto the mountain.
The path was rugged, so I leaned my upper body slightly forward and began to climb, taking large strides.
There were slippery sections due to the steep terrain and the thin layer of ice on the ground, but I didn't feel any significant difficulty.
I had climbed mountains with my father since I was a child. After growing up a bit, I made a living by carrying the luggage of people passing through our village, which was surrounded by rough terrain, and guiding their way.
'When the terrain was steep or the weather was bad, there was actually more work.'
Moreover, now that I didn't have the heavy burden of carrying multiple people's loads on my shoulders, my body felt as light as a feather.
Just like an ordinary person walking on flat ground, I didn't even feel the need to catch my breath, smoothly ascending the mountain in a single, unbroken stride.
"They said this is one of the hottest summers in years, but it's surprisingly cool up here."
Climbing the formidable Devil's Fangs, considered the final gateway of the village, so effortlessly filled me with a strange sense of novelty.
Memories of my clumsy first mountain climbs as a child flashed through my mind like an old film. Back then, everything was unfamiliar and awkward, and I knew almost nothing about the world.
'Perhaps that's why I could purely enjoy the mountains and see everything in its entirety.'
I would stroke the damp earth with my hands, feeling its soft texture, carefully pick a dew-kissed leaf in the early morning, and experience its freshness and vitality with my whole being.
But at some point, the thought suddenly crossed my mind that I had become too focused solely on the act of 'climbing' the mountain.
From some point onward, I had stopped noticing the trivial beauty and joy around me.
"All of this was the mountain itself. Yes, I am now…"
Perhaps my life or death would be decided here. This might be my last climb as a mountaineer.
If I died, everything would end just like that, but if I survived, how would I, the me of that time, look at the world again?
I slowly exhaled a deep breath. My hazy breath, like cigarette smoke, seeped into the cold air before instantly disappearing.
As the altitude increased, the biting wind pierced my collar, and the landscape beneath my feet became entirely covered in white.
When a pure white silence swallowed the entire world, a faint unease began to creep into a corner of my heart.
This irresistible place was a land where the shadow of death loomed. The trembling voice of a survivor I had heard before climbing the mountain echoed in my ears once more.
"It was a white monster. They called it a Mutant. Those things hide in the snow and lie dormant, and when prey gets close, they tear it to shreds in an instant with their sharp claws and teeth. There are two reasons why Mutants are truly terrifying."
*Crunch, crunch.* The familiar sound of stepping on snow beneath my feet changed strangely. Along with a dull *thud*, a chilling foreign sensation was felt on the sole of my foot.
"This is fur?"
Amidst the confusion, my brain, sensing danger, rapidly recalled past information. A monster hiding in the snow.
My heart began to pound violently. A faint line appeared on the white snowfield.
The line slowly split open, and a moist eyeball suddenly popped out and stared at me.