Episode 34
“The rabbit has woken up!”
The penguins screamed when they saw Brody open her eyes.
Brody was startled by the sudden encounter with these creatures and tried to get up.
But her body didn’t move.
Now that she thought about it, she had been feeling like she had been weighed down by something for a while now….
Brody quickly examined her still body.
Then she blinked as she noticed a pile of snow piled up above her.
Her body was buried in the snow. She looked around hurriedly, but the others hadn’t come to their senses yet.
The condition of Kyle and Shiloh, who were not conscious, was similar to hers.
Snow was piled high on their bodies like a mound.
It was as if they had been buried alive with only their head exposed. Brody twisted her body in confusion and shouted.
“What the heck are you guys!”
Then one of the penguins answered.
“We are the Gentoo Penguin Tribe.”
His voice was full of pride. But Brody wasn’t asking because she was curious about their species.
“Why did you bury us like this! What did we do!”
Brody screamed angrily.
It was also to wake up Kyle and Shiloh, who were lying like dead next to her.
She planned to wake them up and quickly overcome this situation.
But she soon lost all energy and was panting for breath.
Her physical condition was so bad that she started to feel dizzy after yelling a few times.
The penguins were busy chatting among themselves and muttering at her resentful cries.
“That’s why I said not to bury the rabbit you all.”
“But it was with a wolf and a fox. What if we left it and it turn out to be a big mistake?”
“But since it doesn’t pose a threat to us, let the rabbit go.”
“No. It could be a vicious rabbit hiding its power.”
Their muttering could be heard by Brody. Those penguins really were capable of making a big mistake.
Brody sighed.
The good news, though, is that the penguins, as their conversation indicated, didn’t bury them in the snow out of malice.
Rather, it seems that they were afraid they would harm them, so they restrained them like this.
Well, there was a wolf named Kyle by her side.
Brody, realizing this, changed her mind and decided to try to clear up this huge misunderstanding and convince them.
She said.
“Excuse me for not living up to your expectations. I’m just a helpless rabbit.”
Brody stretched out her front legs to make her weakness seem more dramatic.
But the penguins, smart enough, didn’t believe her right away and looked at her with suspicious eyes and asked,
“But why were you with these scary predators? I’ve never heard of herbivores hanging out with carnivores.”
“That’s…..because all three of us have the same destination and just that we had no choice but to form this group.”
If she wanted to tell the truth, she had to tell the story in detail.
So she deliberately kept it simple, and the penguins whispered among themselves, spreading the story of her circumstances here and there.
First of all, it seemed like everyone was scared and had little courage.
While the meeting was held to decide on their disposal, Brody heard some noise around her and checked on Kyle and Shiloh who were opening their eyes.
They too looked around like Brody and seemed confused when their bodies didn’t move.
Brody looked at them and shouted urgently in a small voice so that only the two of them could hear, instructing the two people who were asking what was going on.
“Both of you stay still! Don’t exert yourself! Pretend you’re weak!”
There was no need to show off their strength and scare the penguins.
Kyle was confused by the situation in front of him and Brody’s urgent cries, but as they had spent more time together, he quickly stopped moving.
However, Shiloh was still flustered and kept moving around wildly, and was eventually caught by the penguins.
“Hey, the wolf has opened his eyes! Everyone, be on guard!”
The penguins quickly backed away, raising their spears as they realised that Kyle and Shiloh woke up.
Even though Kyle acted weakly and limply as Brody had said, the penguins’ wariness did not subside.
They were truly cowards.
Even if it was a wolf, was there a need to be this scared?
There was something strange about their attitude, which was so alert even though they were buried deep in the snow.
Brody raised her head with difficulty and looked around.
And soon she caught sight of the baby penguins that were waddling around on the ice among the hundreds of penguins gathered there.
‘Oh, they are so sensitive because they have babies.’
Brody’s eyes widened when he realized this.
If the reason they were so sensitive was because of the children, there was nothing they could do.
Brody was about to lose her mind because of the penguins who were terrified when they saw the awakened wolf’s fierce blue eyes that could not be hidden.
They turned to Brody and said to each other,
“I guess it would be better to just leave them alone like this.”
“That’s right. What if we let them go and they harm our children for no reason?”
“Vicious carnivores are dangerous even to the most rational of humans.”
It was at this moment that an agreement was reached to leave the three people to be buried alive in the snow.
Brody shouted in a desperate voice one last time, trying to change their minds.
“Penguins! Stop it and look at us. We’ve been drifting on this ice floe for days, starving. How could we harm you? We don’t have the energy to do it!”
However, this statement, which was intended to appeal to their lack of energy, ended up being a slip of the tongue.
The penguins were even more terrified when they learned that the wolf and the fox had been starving for several days.
They said that they might eat them.
Hearing this, Shiloh muttered from next to her as if he felt wronged.
“Penguin meat is so tasteless that I will never looked at it even if I’m going to starve to death.”
***
In the end, persuading the penguins ended in failure.
They left one by one, leaving the three behind. Brody sighed, feeling exhausted at the sight of the penguins’ backs.
Meanwhile, Kyle tried to move his body right after the penguins left, but the snow was so thick and packed so tightly that it was a miracle he was still breathing, and it was difficult for him to even move.
Of course, if he was normal, he would have broken through this snow pile if he tried hard enough….
But now he was so exhausted that he didn’t even have the strength to do anything of that sort.
“What should we do? It seems like asking those penguins to get us out wouldn’t work no matter how much we try.”
Kyle responded to Shiloh’s grumbling.
“First of all, we need to know where we are. We’ve been down since yesterday. We need to check how far the ice has drifted.”
At those words, they tried to raise their head and look at the sea, but it was impossible because their vision was at the same level as the ground and it was too low to reach the sea.
But in the midst of this despair, Brody gave the two some hopeful news.
“Still, it’s certain that we’ve come to the Knohen Continent. There are no penguins on the Asgar Continent.”
“Really?”
A surprised reaction followed from them.
It was a welcomed statement for Kyle’s as his stiff face brightened up.
He looked at the penguins walking around on the snowy ground with their round bodies.
For Kyle Rosser, who lives at the southernmost point of the Knohen Continent, this was his first time seeing a penguin, although he had heard of them before.
He also saw them in a picture book previously, but they seemed a little more ugly and he thought that they looked like they were in a bad mood.
In reality, they looked just like large, short-necked birds. The slightly dull-sounding voice also contributed to their insignificant presence.
The penguin knew how to swim.
Perhaps they stopped by this ice floe to take a break while crossing the sea.
The penguins were feeding their chicks with their beaks. Some chicks were lying on the bottom of the ice floe, rolling around, or climbing onto strange places to play….
“Hmm?”
Kyle squinted his eyes at the massive mass of baby penguins clinging to a strange hill.
Shiloh and Brody, who had seen Kyle’s reaction from the side, also naturally turned their heads to where his gaze was directed.
Soon, they too shared the same expression as Kyle.
There was something hanging on the end of the ice floe, too large to be a simple lump.
“That looks like a whale carcass.”
The first one to recognize its identity was Shiloh.
It seemed like it had been washed ashore by the waves while they were unconscious all night.
Brody also realized that it was a whale and tried to accept it. But Shiloh, who had been looking closely at the corpse, suddenly tilted his head and said.
“But something feels strange. Doesn’t its body seem too swollen?”
“…..That’s true.”
Shiloh was right. The dead whale’s belly was abnormally swollen, just as he had said.
Its skin was also completely cracked and stretched, as if it would burst at any moment.
When Brody realized that, she remembered something she had heard from her father when he traveled to the Southern Continent.
‘Never go near a bloated whale carcass. Never. It becomes filled with gas as it rots, so if you touch it wrong and it explodes, you could get hurt. Its insides will pop out!’
‘Eww, that’s gross!’
Remembering those words, she couldn’t help but frown as she recalled the sound of her sister screaming.
Brody was concerned about her father’s words, ‘If you touch it wrong, it could explode and hurt you.’
It’s a shame the penguins didn’t let them go….
However, she couldn’t turn a blind eye to the fact that innocent baby penguins might get hurt.
“Hey!”
She stopped a penguin passing by her.
The penguin waved his short arms around, as if he thought she would still beg him to let her go, and spoke firmly.
“I’m sorry. Our penguins have decided not to help you.”
Hearing those harsh words, Brody was about to say, “Ugh, that’s too mean,” but quickly came to her senses.
“No, that’s not it. Aside from helping us, don’t you think you should be stopping those baby penguins right now? The ones jumping around on top of the whale.”
She told the penguin not to let them jump on the whale because it might burst.
But the penguin reacted to Brody’s advice as if he had heard something that didn’t make sense.
It was understandable, for in a place so cold that everything froze, whale carcasses rarely rotted and bloated. It was no wonder that they had difficulty paying attention.
While they were arguing for a while about whether it must have washed up from the warmer South Sea in a rotten state, Shiloh suddenly called out to her in a panicked voice.
“Brody, those guys are stabbing the whale in the stomach with ice right now!”
As Shiloh said, the baby penguins were really
poking the whale’s swollen bellies with sharp spikes while playing around.
Brody saw this and was shocked, so she shouted at the penguins.
“You can’t do that! I am telling you it’ll explode if you touch it wrongly! The kids could get hurt!”
