Cael was pushing back with all the strength he had, grunting with desperate effort as the gaping mouth of the monster only got closer and closer to his face. The teeth were mere inches away now, promising a gruesome death.
'No!' he thought desperately as his teeth ground together hard enough to hurt. 'Not like this! I can't die yet! Not until I get my revenge! I won't die!'
He steeled himself, every vein in his body popping out with fierce determination. A blood vessel burst in his left eye from the strain, causing the bottom part of his eye whites to turn bright red with spreading blood. He pushed even harder than before, screaming out a desperate war cry that echoed across the empty salt flats.
"I WON'T DIE!"
In that moment, he felt the cold, felt it in the air around him, felt it flowing through his body like ice water in his veins. Almost instinctively, through his burning rage and overwhelming desire to live, he shot all of that power, all of that cold, directly toward the monster pinning him down.
Suddenly, massive spears of ice launched upward from the ground in perfect unison, eight at least, maybe more lodging themselves through the creature's body and bursting out the other end. The ice skewered it completely, lifting the monster off the ground and into the air where it hung suspended, killed instantly by the devastating attack.
The crushing pressure was immediately taken off Cael's body as the monster was lifted away from him by his own ice. Cael let his trembling arms fall to his sides as he dragged in ragged, intense breaths. Covered in sweat and with his hands soaked in his own blood, he simply lay there staring up at the corpse of the monster suspended above him, held aloft by the crystalline spears. He felt a strange mixture of relief and awe at what his powers had done.
'H-How did I do that?' he thought with growing frustration, his mind struggling to understand. 'I don't understand these stupid powers at all! Why can't I control them when I want to, but they work perfectly when I'm about to die?'
He laid there grimacing at the ice he had made, studying the perfectly formed spears that had saved his life. They were far more advanced than anything he'd managed to create consciously. He remained on the ground for a long while, catching his breath and letting his racing heart slow down, before finally forcing himself to get up.
As he rose unsteadily to his feet, he realized quickly what needed to happen next, but the thought made him feel immediately queasy. Nevertheless, he steeled himself for the unpleasant task ahead. Soon he found himself kneeling beside the cut-open remains of the creature, carefully pulling out internal organs, things like bone marrow and liver that he vaguely remembered from lessons were safer to eat raw than other parts.
He almost puked multiple times as he choked the disgusting meat down, gagging with each bite, but he knew he desperately needed to eat. He didn't know if he would find anything better than this dead monster anytime soon, and starvation was a very real threat. So he continued to choke down the repulsive nutrients, forcing himself to swallow despite every instinct telling him to stop, and filled his belly to the best of his abilities.
After that grim meal, he began the laborious process of carving the hide off the deer-like creature, using a piece of the sharp ice still skewered through its body as a makeshift knife. While he might not get very cold anymore thanks to his ice powers, he would still prefer something a bit more comfortable to sleep on than the hard, grainy ground. The salt was already irritating his burned skin.
So he carefully carved off the hide, working slowly to preserve as much of it as possible, and fashioned a simple blanket and cloak of sorts that he could drape around himself. The work was messy and difficult, but eventually he had something usable. After completing his crude craftsmanship, he decided to get some much-needed shut-eye, being utterly exhausted from the intense fight and the heavy feeling of food in his stomach.
He laid down on his newly made blanket, pulling part of it over himself, and tried to sleep. But the task proved much harder than expected. His mind was alive with racing thoughts and troubling questions that refused to quiet down.
'If my ice has no problem being used and made here, why has Eve's snow not touched this salty land yet?' he wondered, still deeply unsure of why this vast plain of salt remained untouched by the merciless winter that plagued the entire world. Nothing he'd learned in school explained it. The Goddess's snow was supposed to be absolute, eternal, covering everything. Yet here was a place it couldn't reach.
Then, as those curious thoughts began to drift away and his mind became too quiet, his consciousness began to turn toward something he couldn't allow himself to linger on—not yet, not when he was this vulnerable. His sadness. His parents. His distress. His overwhelming fear of being alone.
Images of his mother's face flashed through his mind, her gentle smile, her final words, the moment the bullet had torn through her skull. His father's bone armor cracking under endless gunfire, his final collapse. The eyeless man's smile.
But as these painful thoughts began invading his mind like unwanted intruders, he fought them back viciously, refusing to let them take hold. He honed in on one emotion out of the chaotic lot, the one emotion he could use, could channel into something productive.
His anger.
He focused intensely on his anger, on his burning hatred for Eve and the system that had killed his parents, on his desperate need for revenge that gave his life purpose. He let that rage fill him completely, pushing out everything else. Soon, everything except that cold fury faded into the background, and finally, mercifully, he was able to fall into an exhausted, dreamless sleep on the endless white expanse of the salt flats.