Another year passed, and I still hadn't been able to kill him. Pen ~ fun ~ Ge www.biquge.info The letter left to me by my mother has been eroded and yellowed by the years in my pocket, and he still doesn't know the truth, not even my name, but keeps calling me "little ghost".

One day, while working on a farm on the east side of Winter's Castle, I was surprised to find him on his own initiative, the first time in four years since I began attacking him so frequently. I used to ask around for news about him and then challenge him, and although it ended in failure every time, I have to say that I have started to get used to these kinds of days. It's been four years, and it's rare that I don't always think about killing him to avenge my mother, and the competition with him is less murderous than before, and I think maybe it's not bad to live like this. But that day I saw that his eyes were full of thoughts, and his face was serious, and he must have just come out of the palace.

"Why, you are impatient to wait today, and you have come to me to challenge?" I smiled at him, putting down the hoe in my hand.

He didn't respond to my jokes, still with a straight face, he walked up to me, sighed, and said, "Maybe there will be a war soon, you might as well go to the southern city for a while!"

"What do you mean by that? Want to find an excuse to get rid of me? Don't forget that I'm the one who wants to kill you. ”

"No, I'm serious. He looked down at me earnestly, his face expressionless, "I'm about to go on a reconnaissance mission to the east, maybe this will be the prelude to a war, or maybe nothing will happen...... In short, it's better to avoid it. Although you never told me about your background, you must be an orphan all these years when you wander around alone......

"I don't need you to take care of my business!"

"I know that there is a city called Genna in the south, which has a warm climate and a pleasant scenery, and it is a good place to go and stay there for a while, and then come back when everything settles down. I've got some money here, and you can take it and wrap it around ......," he said, pulling out a few ingots of gold and handing them over.

I didn't have the same hatred for him as I had at the beginning, but when he mentioned my hometown in front of me, the humiliation and suffering that my mother and I had suffered came back to me, and he didn't know anything, but he still had to pretend to be kind in front of me. I raised my hand and knocked down his gold, and shouted at him, "Don't give me false mercy here, I don't want your charity!"

"Well, you take care of yourselves, I'm gone, and I'll have to pick up the little girl I mentioned to you in Cardo. ”

"Yes, go find her, find the precious girl you picked up who can't let me move half a hair!"

"Actually, it's only my mission to protect her, but you, but you make me feel more like a son, if only I could have a child like you. With that, he left in the direction of the harbor, leaving behind the two pieces of gold in the snow and me in the same place.

I was so touched by his last words that I didn't think that I would kill him so often for four years, and that he had been treating me like a son, even though he didn't know who I was. But what I would never have imagined was that the burly figure with the big sword on his back that day that I saw slowly disappearing from my vision would be the last time I saw him, and that figure became an imprint in my mind and will be remembered forever.

Half a month later, I saw his body.

Once again, I returned to the Winter Residency to go to Braider to forge a new weapon. I had him forge me a great sword similar to the black sword he had on his back, and he had only drawn it once in my four years of fighting with him. It was because I was aggressive that he was willing to show a little bit of his true strength, and he had just taken the sword off his back when I was so shocked by the momentum he exuded that I fell to my knees - the gap between me and him was too great. I asked Brad to make a sword this time so that I could better compete with him when he returned, so that he could teach me true swordsmanship in battle. In addition to the greatsword, I forged two daggers and a new hand axe myself, and pocketed my leather armor for each weapon. To the east of the Winter Station, there is a river that stretches for several miles, which flows in from the mouth of the sea northeast of Oden, passes through several cities in the east, and continues south through the Winter Station. That day, I went to the river to try my hand after I got the great sword, and it was then that I saw his body floating downstream.

At that moment, I froze in place, the hand wielding the sword suddenly became numb and unconscious, and the great sword that I had just acquired from Brad also sank into the river with a thud, and was washed away along the turbulent river, but now I have no heart to worry about the existence of the sword. Everything in front of me seemed to be spinning around me at high speed, I couldn't see the sky, the earth, everything around me, I just felt a wave of vertigo coming at me. I fell to my knees, and I couldn't even feel the pain in my knee from the heavy kneeling, or even my presence. When I saw that his body was drifting farther and farther away with the current, about to disappear from my sight, I threw myself into the river like crazy, I didn't care how fast the river was, I didn't care about the whole person who was about to be submerged, I just knew that I couldn't let him just disappear from my vision, from my life. After struggling in the water for a while, I finally dragged him to the shore, and in the face of his cold body, I felt as if a piece of my heart had been dug out, leaving a blank space in human form.

"No! no, you should have been killed by me, how could you just die......" I began to pound his chest more frantically, but there was no response other than the sound of the hammer, "Wake me up! Wake me up! You are the strongest man in the kingdom, death should not be on you!"

I knew that beating him was no longer enough to bring him back, that all the hatred and anger I had had for him was gone, and all I could feel now was despair. I knelt on the spot, numbly looking at his corpse with a serene face and even a smile, I didn't understand why he was like this when he died, I no longer had the ability to think, let the water dripping from my body solidify into ice in the snow, watching the droplets of water condense into icicles at the tips of my hair, I couldn't feel the cold, maybe no matter how low the temperature was, it couldn't compare to the chill in my heart. I pulled out from my soaked pocket a yellowed, water-soaked envelope that had never been opened by my mother four years earlier. I slowly tore open the envelope, and when I tried to unfold the letterhead, it shattered in my hand, and the words inside were annihilated, just as he had vanished from my life. I threw myself on top of him and cried out loudly, "Father, come back...... I'm your son...... Come back...... I don't want to kill you anymore, I won't attack you anymore, please come back......" This is the first time I have called him father.

But it was too late.

I couldn't bring him back to my hometown of Genna, so I buried him in the outskirts of the winter station, and erected an unmarked tombstone. I selfishly thought that he didn't need to be remembered, that he just needed to be remembered by me. Just like the surname "Snow" I inherited from him, he is a warrior incarnated in snow, and perhaps sleeping under the snow with snow is his destiny.

After burying him, I vowed to find out the truth about his death, and I returned to Winterin City. The news of the total destruction of the troops that went to the east to reconnoiter has returned, and people have dubbed this event "Oden Mustry", the death of the eldest prince Lancer Arryn and the strongest man in the kingdom, Krud Snow, has brought a huge blow to the entire kingdom, and Oden has also fallen into the lowest period in history for a short time. The war didn't happen, and maybe he had a premonition of what was going to happen to him, so he came to me and said that. The only survivor of the battle that cost him his life caught my attention, and I heard that the survivor was a little girl, and I knew that it was the girl he mentioned that his mission was to protect. He had been with her for three years, and I knew she must know the truth about his death.

I didn't want to have anything to do with that girl, but now I wanted to ask her about it. But when she returned, she was immediately admitted by the royal guard, and lived in the palace day and night, unable to approach her at all. Every time she goes out and goes on a mission, she is surrounded by a group of royal guard soldiers. I can only travel to all corners of the kingdom to inquire about the truth about Oden's mutation, and wait for an opportunity to get close to her.

I waited three years for my chance. When I was seventeen years old, the kingdom finally recovered from the blow it had suffered three years earlier and began to prepare for the war against Miller for conscription. At the time, I was investigating the Fort of Sighs, which was closest to the location of the Oden mutation, and when I heard the news of the kingdom's conscription, I joined the army as soon as possible, with the goal of entering the Royal Guard in order to get close to the only survivor of the Oden mutation and the backbone of the Royal Guard, the girl named Koyales.

I spent two years in the army, and finally joined the Royal Guard a month before Auden's crusade against Miller. Before the expedition, on the school field of Winter Rin City, after five years, I finally met the girl who he had to protect with his life, she had become the captain of the royal guard, and she was the strongest woman in the kingdom. There are many titles about her among the people, such as "Snow Girl", "Bow Saint", "Strongest Daughter", etc., I am very dissatisfied with her title of "strongest", because the strongest is the title that belongs to him, and she, although she is very strong, is far less than one-tenth of him in my opinion.

Since she was a captain and I wasn't on the same ship as her, I didn't have the opportunity to talk to her privately after the voyage. She was a cold person, and that was the impression she had made on me in a few brief encounters, and I could no longer see in her the girl I had seen talking and laughing with him and adventuring everywhere, and after landing in Miller, she made me feel even colder. In the rumors about Oden's mutation that I have investigated in the past few years, some people suspect that she is the culprit of the total destruction of the army, and I certainly do not subjectively choose to believe all kinds of rumors, how could she kill her mentor? I think that only what comes from the mouth of the person who witnessed the incident can be the truth. So when she chose to break away from the group after attacking the Allied warriors, I was the first to stand up and offer to act with them, and finally had a chance to ask her for the truth.