Jung Ha-neul was laboring to breathe long before his ten minutes were up. The cold was burning his lungs, and the shock from the pain made his whole world spin. However, he was no stranger to cold and pain. You don't make it ten years being homeless without being able to survive a little cold, and he wasn't even wet right now. He almost smiled.
'Maybe splattering into the ground wasn't such a bad way to go.'
He updated grievance eight to say 'died too young, and in horrible pain.' All the cool tricks he had done in the air had gotten to his head. He had known how to slow his descent a bit and figured he might live if he landed somewhere soft. But being buried alive? The thought hadn't occurred to him! What a wild ride this was. He had never heard of someone who survived The Great Dying and didn't have an interesting life story. Whatever today was though, it was something else. He could probably have made a living recounting this adventure, except, you know, there was no way to tell it without him sounding like a bumbling moron. Also, he was going to die here.He started to laugh.
'Ain't no way I'm dying in this stupid hole on the side of a mountain. I'm going to live, no matter what.'
All his life he had no conviction besides not dying immediately. Somehow, in the army, at some point he had started waiting for death. He had spent precious minutes of air just now, being confused why he wanted to live while falling? Death could wait. Jung Ha-neul was going to live.
And then, for some reason beyond him, he figured out how to move. It was just his right pinky finger and he was only able to wiggle it a little bit. But it took him only a moment to figure out how to move in a way that shifted the chaotic crystalline structure of snow away and made a tiny pocket. But then, his ring finger was free to do the same. And soon his whole arm was moving. It took him a minute to push enough snow to bring his arm, which had been elbow out and facing down, up to his face. It was not near fast enough though. He was going to run out of air long before he could escape. So he started moving his whole body. He also intuitively knew how to move without hurting his broken legs more. It looked like he was performing some horrible macabre dance. They say dance like no one's watching, "they" have never seen what Ha-neul was doing right now. He was slowly corkscrewing upwards, moving small layers of snow from in front of him into the cavity he was previously in. It was like he was playing a sliding puzzle, except there was no open tile.
The excess movement he was doing had consequences he hadn't expected. All the exertion was keeping him warm and slowing down his rate of freezing. At the same time his increased heart rate was making his oxygen supply shorter and meant he was pumping more blood out of the open wound on his right leg. In other words, it was fixing his least pressing issue, while making the other ones much worse. He also couldn't keep up the physical strain for very long. He could feel lactic acid building up, and he was desperately gasping for air and getting less and less oxygen by the second.
His vision was starting to get black around the edges and a wave of static was washing through his consciousness. The timer until he passed out was down to single digits and then oxygen deprivation made it go away. He was still buried! As his vision went dark he used the very last of his strength to jerk his head up and slam into the layer of ice on the surface that had snapped his legs. The ice gave and a rush of fresh icy air poured through.
Ha-neul woke up several seconds later. He could still only see white, but now there was a slim crack of daylight above him. He stared at it in reverence for a long time, as his breathing slowed. He laughed.
"I told you I wouldn't die in this hole!"
He could hear his voice echoing off the mountains around him. And then with one final crescendo of seizure like dance, he was laying flat on the mountainside looking down at the castle.
It was a beautiful white complex with its roofs covered in thick sheets of snow. It had long ago fallen into disrepair. There was what had once been a missive tower that had fallen over and smashed through the center of a great hall. And every single window in the whole thing was dark and foreboding. He sighed and looked away from the ruin. There were no humans there now. Still, he was going to freeze to death if he stayed here. And long before then, he was going to bleed out. He had only twelve minutes before then.
He looked down at his legs. His right ankle was twisted and at an odd angle, but the cold had stolen the sharp pain it had been irradiating when he first landed. His left leg was much worse. He cringed and looked away unconsciously at the second bend added to the middle of his calf. Even through his pant leg he could see the bone.
He swallowed his nausea and forced himself into a sitting position. Then he unrolled his pants leg to look at the damage. The mix of freezing temperatures and blood loss made for a shocking sight. Ha-neul had never received an injury this bad, but at the same time he had seen and treated much worse. Ever since he had gotten home, he had been revisited by the war. It came in after him. He had learned that he could not fight it, and to just find a safe place to let the storm pass. The war was now seeping into his twisted flesh.
Panic was building in his chest. It seemed like a roiling sea, threatening to drown him. How arrogant of him to think wouldn't die here. His fate was sealed when he walked into a Gate. Even if he succeeded, he was only prolonging his inevitable death. He closed his eyes. He had actually died a long time ago. Maybe it was even as far back as the great dying. There wasn't even a good reason, as far as he could tell, that he kept going. He began shivering uncontrollably. He gritted his teeth and scowled.
'Keep going. Even if there isn't a clear reason. I've gotten this far. Keep going…"
He forced himself to stare at his wound. With numb hands, he pulled off his belt and wrapped it around his leg right below his knee. Then he used the only thing he had, his phone, as a windlass to tighten his makeshift tourniquet. Even though it was not a real tourniquet it was by far the best one he'd ever done. His mental timer climbed up to several hours. He rolled down his pant leg for the little amount of cold protection it offered, and tucked it into his sock. Now all he needed to do was get to that castle ruin before he froze.
The castle itself was pretty high up, nestled between two peaks. Still he was over a thousand meters up the left mountain. There was only really one way to get down the mountain. He crawled on his hands and knees out of the crater he had made, collapsed into his side, and began sliding down the mountain.
At first it was a very rough descent. But very soon, he learned how to ski. In his condition, though, he wasn't doing tricks, it took everything he had to avoid the clusters of trees that began to grow more frequent as time went on. Plus, the part of the mountain he was on went past the castle. He had to ski onto a different part of the mountain just to get there.
As time went on, his body grew numb, to the point where he couldn't feel his broken leg. By then he was far beyond exhausted, only moving because the mountain was pulling him ever downwards.
The castle felt just as distant as it was at the start. And it was still cold and lifeless. He had dodged the last few trees by mere centimeters. On one of them his coattail had caught on a branch and tore.
He heard a noise somewhere to his side. Even though he was moving quite fast, and the sound was quiet, it stayed right next to him. It took him a moment to realize what it was. Although he could not see them through the trees, someone was skiing next to him.
'I know who it is!'
It was-, it was-, in his current state he couldn't even remember their name. He was too tired to think.
It gave him strength to know he was not alone though. There was someone else alongside him, silently willing him to go on.
He found himself desperately hoping that his friend would make it to- wherever they were going.
There were glimpses of his friend through the trees now. The shape of their black coat. The glimmer in their eyes as they smiled.
He had to stay with them.
He could not let his friend get to the end just to find out that Ha-neul had not made it.
He had to keep going…
Keep going…
Going…
He had to stop! A massive stone wall suddenly loomed through the trees. He threw himself sideways and ground to a stop mere feet from it. He stared at the wall blankly for a moment. He was shivering and for some reason he knew he was going to die in four minutes. What was that about? Had he had a flashback to a time when he had ignored a fortune teller? Why did he know when he would die? He looked up the absolutely ginormous wall again. Suddenly, a wide grin appeared on his face. He had done it, he'd made it to the castle! He needed to get inside and find someplace warm.
He began to desperately crawl along the side of the castle. At some point, his journey would have been doomed. The castle walls were impenetrable from all sides. However, since then, a massive hole had been blown into the wall near Ha-nual. He crawled over a pile of rubble and then tumbled down the other side. His body was now more bruised and battered than it had been before. He lay on the ground at the edge of the ruble, staring at something made of wood planks. It took him a long time to realize that he was looking at a door. He crawled on his belly towards it. He reached and pulled down the door handle. The wind was strong enough to instantly blow it open and send it slamming into the wall.
He crawled in and fought to close the door and drive the wind out. Finally, it was latched again and he was left in silence. Beautiful silence! With the exception of the period where he had been buried alive, the wind had been blowing nonstop since he had fallen into the gate.
He looked around and saw that, fortuitously, the building he had entered had been some sort of kitchen. To his right was a brick kiln and stacks of firewood. There was even a flint steel to start the fire sitting on top of the firewood. He had started many fires before, but all with the help of a lighter. But still, he got the hang of fire starting immediately, even with his frostbitten fingers. Soon he was lying in front of a blazing fire, as strength slowly came back to him.
His legs were still broken and severely frostbitten. All of his fingers were black, but as he warmed himself, the damage looked much less severe.
After a while he turned around to take in his surroundings. He was in a dim room that was long but narrow. However he could not appreciate the room because he was immediately frozen by the sight of a human skeleton. Not just your regular, run of the mill pile of bones. No, this one was sweeping the floors with a broom. As he looked, the skeleton turned its head and saw him. It's jaw dropped, but I caught it. Then it reached for the sword hanging from its hip.