In the tent there were a set of warm clothes, shoes with crampons attached to them, and two ice picks nothing else and I didn't even need the guide to clarify the mission.

I was supposed to climb something in the freezing cold with no safety equipment.

I hadn't eaten in a while, and it was important to make it through this while I still had enough energy, so there was no time to waste. But I did waste some time after I woke up and discovered that I had 10 fingers again.

I struggled to understand the situation for a few seconds, but then it clicked, and I realized something that brought a smile to my face. I could now regenerate after going through my second evolution. My ankle was also healed, so I was almost completely fresh going into the next challenge.

Nevertheless, I was still nervous. I had never done anything like what I was going to do now, and one mistake could cost me my life.

***

After doing a couple of tests on my dagger and my body, it was time to exit the tent. I had on heavy clothing that added a few kilos, and there were ice picks tightly wrapped around my hands. I gathered myself and stepped outside, and ice-cold wind hit my face immediately, causing my nostrils to sting.

I tried my best to ignore the snow the was hitting my face and clothes, and directed my attention to the ice wall.

The ice wall was a steep, gigantic and unforgiving block of ice that made me question all my life choices thus far, but I kept going approaching it, unwavering faced with the danger it posed. Overcoming it was something I had to do, and there was nothing else I could do or even thought about doing than climbing it.

Everywhere I looked, there was only flat snow. The only things that stood out were the tent and the huge ice wall that I continued into the foggy sky, and I wasn't going back into the tent. There was nowhere else to go but forwards.

The prints left by my shoes were quickly getting covered up by the snowfall, and by the time I was close enough to touch the ice wall, most of my tracks were nowhere to be found.

'Here we go,' I thought as I stabbed my ice pick into the ice wall.

I stuck one of my feet to the ice wall with the help of the crampon and placed my weight on it, after which I stabbed my other ice pick higher up into the ice before sticking my other foot to the wall too. Now I just had to repeat the same thing hundreds of times. And that is exactly what I did.

After getting higher up, I started to be more and more careful with where I placed my feet. My fingers and toes were starting to feel strained, but it was nothing I couldn't handle.

What surprised me was how silent the guide was. He hadn't said pretty much anything after telling me to go sleep. I didn't mind it, though. It was better this way. I had to focus on the climb, and he probably didn't have any valuable advice for me.

There was something that bothered me, however, and that was my own thoughts. No matter how I tried silencing them, they came back and disrupted my focus.

I felt more nervous than I usually felt when fighting a life and death battle, and that was because in a fight, one wrong move could be made up for with one outstanding one or the opponent making a mistake. However, the ice wall made no mistakes and if I made one, I couldn't make up for it with a good move since making a mistake meant falling and falling meant death.

As I climbed further and further, I was starting to realize. The cold wind, the snow, the constant uncomfortability, and the immenseness of the ice wall all made me realize one thing. That I was small. I was so small. Like a grain of rice. I was completely dependent on the ice wall, but the ice wall didn't care about me. For something so enormous, I was utterly insignificant.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I already knew that nobody on earth cared about me. I knew I didn't matter to anyone else but myself, and knowing that had helped me get this far, but I was starting to think that even I didn't care about myself.

I wanted to live. Well, at least I thought I did. I had yet to experience something that would make me want to keep living. All I ever had was hope. But as my fingers grew colder and colder, my doubt was starting to grow.

I paused for a second with my ice picks deep inside the ice wall and looked down, 'What is there at the top that I'm trying to get?'

All I could see down there was the ice wall I had already climbed up and thick gray fog. Nothing else. The ice wall was now everything that existed for me. All other things were out of sight, completely insignificant in this current moment. In this space, me and the ice wall were together, almost like we were one and the same.

I reminded myself of Amelia's words, but they still meant nothing to me. I wasn't sure what she was referring to, and even if I did, I didn't know if her words were worth listening to.

'Nothing at the top.'

Nothing at the end of the tunnel? A complete disappointment at the end of the journey? I didn't want to believe such a thing. I may be small, but even insects get happy moments. The mosquitos get to suck blood and the ants get to build something together, so surely there was something there. What would I do if there was nothing at the end? Such a thought by itself almost made me let go.

***

It had been hours since I started climbing, and I had now gotten completely used to not being able to see anything around me but the ice wall. Everything else was foggy. I was all alone in the middle of an ice wall that seemed to stretch limitlessly.

The guide hadn't said a word either. He seemed void of purpose, completely lost in this world. He was now just wordlessly floating beside me. I wasn't sure if he had abandoned his intentions on getting revenge or if he just couldn't bear watching me die when he could save me, but either way, he seemed to no longer have any interest in me.

My fingers were cold and stiff, but since the ice picks were tightly tied onto my hands, I wasn't concerned and kept climbing.

It couldn't be that long until I was at the top. The challenge couldn't surpass my abilities after all, could it?

"Hey, guide, how much longer until we reach the top?" I asked, a little worried about the length of the climb.

"I'm not sure, but it won't be long until you reach that spot," the guide answered grimly after a bit of silence.

"What spot?"

"The one where I fell."

My mouth opened as I stopped and looked at the guide, "What? You fell? How?"

"There was an overhang. I tried my best to climb it, but my ice picks couldn't even scratch the abnormally dense ice and there was nothing I could grab, so I ended up falling while trying to dig my ice picks into the ice."

'An overhang you can't get your ice picks into? How am I supposed to survive that?'

"Did you try going around it?"

"I did, but there's no avoiding it. You have to face it head on."

After the guide said that, no words were spoken. And after I kept climbing for about half an hour, I found myself right below an icy overhang that aimed to take away my future.

Curiously, I climbed a bit more and went to test if the guide was just being dramatic, and came to discover that he wasn't. The ice picks couldn't do anything to the ice.

I looked around, and noticed that the wind and snowfall had lessened, but that didn't matter. Right now, the only thing that matter was that I was completely stuck.