Episode 31
“Are you the Dark Lord?”
Kyle looked at the fox and asked in astonishment.
Then the fox, which had been lying on the ground catching his breath, slowly got up and greeted Kyle and Brody brightly.
“Hello, friends?”
Hearing his cheerful and innocent voice, Brody shouted, angry at his carefree tone after being deceived.
“Friends? What the hell!”
Brody, who was furious at having been deceived so far, growled and stamped her hind legs on the ground.
If it were just the two of them, she wouldn’t have been able to point her front paws at the fox, but now that she had Kyle as her strong supporter, she could act without worry.
Of course, with that backing, who would fear a fox that could be caught and killed at any time?
“I thought something was strange about you ever since you said you were the Dark Lord.”
Kyle’s eyes looked pitiful as he watched Brody not admitting what she had believed in not so long ago.
But Brody tried hard to ignore the gaze and kept her head upright.
The reason she was so angry now was because she truly believed the fox to be the ‘Lord of Darkness’.
Whether he knew Brody’s feelings or not, the fox looked at Kyle, the wolf, and muttered with a pitiful expression.
“I couldn’t help it. Unidentified people had entered the whale’s stomach where nothing could be seen, it would be too dangerous to reveal my identity.”
That was true. Even if he was a fox, his position in the wild was not very safe.
Brody, caught up in the bold fox’s words, couldn’t find an excuse to refute, so she just asked,
“Then how did you manage to manipulate space as you pleased while we were inside the sea monster?”
“Oh, it’s simple. I just hit the sensitive part of the stomach with this fishbone head.”
Brody clenched her teeth in shame as she looked at the fishbone head he was wearing.
She was angry to death from being fooled by such a simple trick and screamed.
“This swindler!”
“I’m sorry I lied to you.”
She didn’t know if it was sincere or made up, but it was a really frustrating and simplistic apology.
Still, Brody glared at the fox, her arms crossed and her mouth twitching.
But this was just how the relationship between Brody and the fox was.
Kyle, who had been quietly mulling over what the fox had just said, suddenly raised his head.
“Wait a minute. What did you say just now?”
“I apologized.”
“Before you apologize, didn’t you clearly say we were inside a whale’s stomach?”
“That’s right.”
The fox shrugged his shoulders with a look of asking why.
Then, Kyle and Brody, who had been off doing something else nearby, upon hearing those words, met each other’s eyes.
“Inside a whale’s belly?”
“So we’ve been in the belly of a whale and not a sea monster all this time?”
It was unbelievable.
Apparently the moose called the monster that had devoured them a sea monster.
As they were thinking that, out of nowhere, an eerie sound came from the sea.
It was that strange sound they had heard in the middle of the deep night storm, when it was raining and thundering.
The shock of that night came back to Kyle and Brody, who turned their stiff necks and looked out at the sea.
At that moment, a giant creature rose from the blue sea bathed in dazzling sunlight.
The oval-shaped body with armor-like skin leaped into the air and then went back into the sea.
And again, with an ear-piercing howl, it leaped nimbly out of the sea, performing acrobatic movements.
It still had a scary size, so much so that it was natural to mistake it for a reef……
At night, it looked like just a strange creature with a pitch-black body, but in the light they could see that attached to it on both sides, there were long fins that looked like a fish’s.
Not only that, but at the end of its body there was a tail fin that was widely split on both sides.
“……”
It really wasn’t a sea monster, it was a whale. Kyle and Brody were shocked when they realized the truth.
They jumped into the sea, held a ceremony, and watched the whale leisurely sail away.
A fox’s voice was heard from behind the two people who were standing there in a daze.
“You guys, at your age, have you never heard of the Wishing Whale?”
“The Wishing Whale?”
The two looked back at the fox. The impact of the words ‘Wish Whale’ was different for each of them.
Kyle, who once spoke of it, had eyes filled with interest, but Brody still reacted as if she had heard a fairy tale.
“A Wishing Whale?”
“It’s in the folktale. It’s the story that when people are in danger at sea, a whale appears, helps them, and grants their wishes.”
“But that’s just a legend. How can you be sure that that whale is the wishing whale?”
The fox laughed at the words of Brody, the legendary Clock Rabbit.
“Hey, Miss Rabbit. The fact that we survived inside that whale’s belly already proves that it’s not your typical whale. Isn’t that so?”
“Ah…”
Brody opened her mouth dumbly after hearing the fox’s words. When she thought about it, it was true.
If they had been in the stomach of a normal whale, they would have suffocated as soon as they entered the stomach, which was full of gastric juice and gas and had no oxygen.
It was indeed funny how she believed in sea monsters but not in Wishing Whales.
Brody, who was flustered and wagging her front paws, soon looked around and asked.
“But where is this place? If the wishing whale had granted our wish, this should be Winkel Bay.”
“I don’t know if this is Winkel Bay, but if this coast is in the continent of Knohen, then it seems like a good landing.”
Kyle, who had the highest point of vision of the three, looked into the distance and said.
Brody looked at where he was looking, stretching her body and standing up on her tiptoes.
“Where? Can you see the coast? Is it this way? Or over there?”
Even though she was jumping around on tiptoe, her vision was still poor, so Kyle bit her neck and lifted her to show her where he had been looking.
Brody’s ears perked up as her vision cleared with Kyle’s help.
She confirmed that Kyle had indeed seen the frozen ground in the distance.
The problem, however, was that the land they were standing on was not attached to that land.
“…Oh my god. It’s an ice floe.”
The place they were standing was literally a block of ice floating in the sea.
This huge floe, which broke off from the ice covering the continent’s coast, could almost be considered an island.
This was not the only floe like this. There were floes of various sizes like this floating near the shore.
Normally, in places like this, the only way out would be to use an icebreaker to break through the ice and anchor on the shore, but unfortunately, they didn’t have an icebreaker.
Brody asked Kyle in an effort to sound calm.
“Kyle, would you happen to have an icebreaker?”
“How would I have it?”
Brody rubbed her butt as Kyle opened his mouth, carelessly throwing her on the floor.
Without an icebreaker, there was only one way out: to hope that the ice they were standing on would be swept away by the waves and reach the shore.
Of course, this method was also a gamble.
The moment the ice floes were swept away by the waves heading out to sea, they would then become helpless drifters.
Brody said with a sigh.
“It would be best to go to the end of the ice floe first. If we’re lucky, we can cross right away when the ice floe reaches the shore.”
Kyle agreed with that statement.
But then, behind the two people preparing to move, a slurping sound of something being eaten could be heard.
When they turned their head, they saw the fox eating the krill and fish that had fallen on the ground.
These were the things that poured out together with them the moment they came out of the whale’s belly.
The fox pointed to the fish that had fallen next to him and spoke kindly to Kyle and Brody who were looking at him.
“You guys eat too. Wherever you go, you have to fill your stomach. It’s disgusting because of the stomach acid smell, but if you wash it in the snow and eat it, it’s edible.”
“…I’m fine.”
Brody was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat disgusting, rancid raw food, so she declined.
But Kyle, unlike her, was an omnivore who would eat anything.
Brody asked Kyle if he was hungry and wanted to eat some fish from the whale’s stomach.
“Kyle, aren’t you eating? Should I wash some and bring them to you?”
“it’s okay.”
Kyle shook his head. He seemed reluctant to eat the whale’s vomit.
Brody felt sorry though and pointed to the fish again.
“There are some that look fine and not rotten. Why don’t you eat them? If you don’t eat them quickly, that fox might eat them all.”
“He should eat a lot.”
Brody looked up at Kyle, tilting her head at his unexpectedly generous expression.
Then Kyle looked at the fox quietly, and then he smiled in a strange manner and said.
“Anything that is fat is easier to catch and eat.”
“……”
After hearing Kyle’s words, the fox dropped the fish he was holding in his mouth.
In short, he meant that if he gets hungry, he will catch the fox and eat it, so he should eat a lot and gain some weight.
Brody, who did not understand this, told the fox that he had dropped the fish.
But the fox, who suddenly realized that he had become the wolf’s emergency food source, quickly lost his appetite and with a gaunt face, did not pick up the fish again.
***
The sea was calm, without waves.
A wolf, a rabbit, and even a fox who happened to be a member of the group, walked together, leaving long footprints on the snowfield covered with ice.
At first, Brody went wild at the fox, accusing him of deceiving them, but then she struck up a conversation with the fox and they became close, and before she knew it, they were sharing stories with each other.
“So you’re saying that you boarded a small boat to go to the continent of Asgar and encountered the whale while adrift?”
“That’s right.”
The fox, who introduced himself as Shiloh, nodded.
He had a gentle and kind personality, so he became close with Brody in a short period of time.
For Brody, who had only dealt with the silent Kyle, having someone who answered her every question brought her great joy.
Brody asked him.
“But why did you want to go to Asgar? Was there a reason you had to risk your life to cross the Angevin Sea in a small boat?”
“That…”
Shiloh, who had been answering fluently until now, seemed to be momentarily stumbled by that question and could not continue speaking.
When Brody looked at him with wide eyes from the side, he finally erased his uneasy expression and smiled.
“I just went there for the sake of travel. For the people of Knohen Continent, the Asgar Continent is the number one place to visit before you die.”
