Ember Wind: Corrupted

Chasing Tails

The snow near the mountains was deep and heavy with moisture. Jogging became walking which quickly degraded into trudging and dragging. Falcher painstakingly trudged through the thigh deep snow drifts. The damp and cold snow made him shiver frequently, his body vulnerable to the colder elements due to the lack of insulation in his leather armor. "You just had to go by yourself, Tang... if I die out here, it's your fault..." Falcher grumbled to himself. "The next zone better be warm... I want the Bahamas warm..."

The blue sky quickly became covered in white-ish clouds. Snow began to fall again in the mountain area. The wind picked up speed and howled through the passages between the mountains. The wind kicked up the loose snow atop the drifts creating a thick haze. Nonetheless, Falcher kept moving.

Another hour passed and the haze became a total white-out. He could barely see his hand in front of him. The wind whipped around him causing him to sway. The air was cold and it froze him internally. Even so, it didn't stop him.

For brief moments, he saw another set of trudging tracks next to him. Then the wind filled them in with snow. Another set appeared on his left. "Two?" he mumbled through his frozen lips. Falcher quickened his pace with newfound fear and determination. He tried calling out into the void of white but couldn't get the words he wanted to out him.

Then the white-out began to break up into a thin haze. As it faded away, something in the distance came into view. It was large, open and circular. It had no roof and no walls but a dozen pillars encircled something atop of bluff. Falcher saw a pathway up the backside of the hill, made by something else that had come here before him, and followed it.

Pyroholiday turned to Creoft and asked him a question, "Is this something that he does normally?"

Creoft snapped back into reality and blinked a few times before responding, "Who? Tang or Falcher?"

"Both I guess."

"Falcher doesn't run off on his own, but for Tang, solo adventures have always seemed to be his thing. Those two are usually inseparable."

"You never did tell me why he ran off."

"I thought I did, huh. To put it simply, he's hunting for the cure to Vampirism to save his in-game wife. Or he's got some secret suicide pact that involves running off into the freezing mountains..."

"I highly doubt the latter."

"It's more common a thing than you probably think. Y'know how many people I've watched scream Leeroy Jenkins before getting slaughtered in normal PVE? Too many..."

"The copycats are real then..." Pyro's voice trailed off. He continued following his HUD which highlighted Tangurple's footprints. Some prints didn't highlight due to an overlap of his and something else's. "The tracks are gone... the prints are mixing, the system isn't reading it."

"The hunter is covering its tracks by walking in Tangurple's path? That's interesting, my dev's never even thought that to be possible."