The Extra is a Hero?-Chapter 279: THE INVENTORY CHECK
Chapter 274: The Inventory Check
The metal roof groaned.
It wasn’t the screech of tearing steel, nor the rhythmic clatter of the tracks we had grown used to. It was a slow, deliberate depression of the hull, as if something incredibly heavy was testing the integrity of the rivets above our heads.
Thump.
Dust motes danced in the beams of the chemical glow-sticks I had cracked open.
"What is that?" Aiden whispered, his voice so thin it barely registered. He was clutching his staff like a lifeline, but without mana, it was just a stick of wood.
"Wind," I lied. My voice was flat, devoid of the tremor that shook everyone else. "The thermal currents are shifting. The metal is contracting from the cold. It happens."
It was a bold-faced lie. Wind didn’t have footsteps. Wind didn’t weigh three hundred pounds. But panic was a contagion, and right now, we were in a sealed petri dish. If one of them screamed, the sound would vibrate through the hull, and whatever was prowling up there would stop testing and start digging.
I held up a hand, signaling for absolute silence.
Ten seconds passed. Then twenty.
The weight above us shifted again, a dragging sound that moved from the center of the car toward the rear coupling. Then, silence returned. Not the peaceful silence of a library, but the predatory silence of a deep ocean trench.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. It hadn’t breached. Not yet.
"Listen to me," I said, keeping my volume low. "We are stationary. We are isolated. And as you’ve noticed, the heating is gone."
I gestured to the windows. The frost was no longer just a haze; it was a crystalline web spreading across the glass, opaque and thick. The temperature inside the carriage had plummeted. I could already feel the bite of it in my fingertips.
"We need to take stock," I announced, stepping into the center of the aisle. "Everyone, check your gear. If you have physical rations in your pockets or bags, put them on the table. If you have warm clothes, put them on. If you have weapons that don’t require mana to function, draw them."
"My spatial ring..." Lyra stammered, twisting the gold band on her finger. Her lips were turning a shade of violet. "It won’t open. My coat is in there. My potions..."
"Spatial rings require a mana pulse to activate the dimensional gate," I explained, channeling the dry, academic tone of a professor. "No mana, no gate. Your ring is just jewelry now."
"That’s impossible," Eric William snapped, though he remained seated, his arms wrapped around himself. "My father paid five thousand gold for this! It has a passive enchantment!"
"Enchantments feed on ambient mana," I retorted. "Look around you, Eric. The ambient mana is zero. Your ring is dead. You are destitute."
I turned away from his horrified expression and looked at Leon. "Leon, sitrep on the rear compartment."
Leon was standing by the door to the medical bay, his face grim. He looked like a statue of a knight that had been left out in the rain—stoic, but eroding.
"Bad," Leon said. "Maria... she collapsed a moment ago. The cold hit her system and the Curse flared up. I put her in the second stasis pod next to Selena."
I nodded. Maria Frostheart. The irony of her name wasn’t lost on me. An Ice Mage dying of cold because her internal mana regulation had shattered.
"The pods?" I asked.
"Running," Leon said, but he hesitated. "The magi-tech interface is down. They switched to chemical battery backup automatically, but... Michael, the indicator lights are orange."
Orange.
In The Extra is a Hero, magi-tech color coding was universal. Blue was stable. Red was critical. Orange was ’Power Saving Mode’. It meant the life support was prioritizing the brain and heart, shutting down peripheral preservation.
"How long?" I asked.
"Hard to say without the digital display," Leon admitted, running a hand through his hair. "But the hum is getting weaker."
"We’ll figure it out," I said. "Stay here. Watch the door."
I walked to the galley at the front of the car. The heavy steel door was jammed with ice, but my Strength stat—still hovering around A-rank thanks to my physical body conditioning—allowed me to wrench it open with a screech of protesting metal. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮
The pantry was sparse.
The Iron-Horse was a luxury transport, meant to be restocked at every station. We weren’t supposed to be stuck in the wilderness.
I pulled out boxes of dry crackers, a few tins of preserved meat, and a crate of wine. No water. The water filtration system was magic-based.
I carried the supplies back to the main cabin and dumped them on the central table.
"Is that it?" Chris asked, staring at the meager pile.
"There are twelve of us," I said, doing the math aloud. "Plus the conductor. Plus two patients who might need liquid nutrition if they wake up."
I picked up a tin of meat. "Three days. Maybe four if we starve ourselves. We have plenty of water outside—" I gestured to the blizzard—"but eating snow lowers your core body temperature. It creates hypothermia faster than dehydration does. We need heat to melt it."
"Heat..." Leon muttered. He stared at the unlit chemical lamp on the table.
"Don’t," I warned him.
I saw the look in his eyes. The Hero’s look. The self-sacrificial glint that usually preceded a miracle in the novel. But this wasn’t the novel. The physics here had changed.
Leon closed his eyes. He clenched his fists so hard his leather gloves creaked.
"I can do it," he whispered. "The Holy Flame... it doesn’t come from the atmosphere. It comes from the soul. The Paladin’s Oath says the light shines brightest in the dark."
"Leon—"
"I just need to focus," he insisted. He stepped forward, raising his right hand. "I just need a spark. To warm the room. To melt the snow."
The air around him seemed to shiver. Not with mana, but with sheer force of will. A faint, golden glimmer flickered on his palm—a pathetic, trembling candlelight compared to the blazing suns he usually summoned.
The students gasped, hope flashing in their eyes. "He’s doing it!" Lyra cried. "Leon!"
For a second, I thought the plot armor might actually kick in. I thought, Maybe he is the protagonist after all.
Then Leon’s chest hitched.
The golden light sputtered and died instantly.
HURK.
Leon doubled over, clutching his chest. A wet, hacking cough tore from his throat, and when he pulled his hand away from his mouth, his glove was stained with bright, crimson blood.
"Leon!" I moved instantly, grabbing his shoulder to steady him. He was trembling violently, sweat beading on his forehead despite the freezing air.
"I... I had it..." he wheezed, blood dripping from his lip. "Why...?"
"You’re trying to light a match in a vacuum, Leon," I said harshly, lowering him into a seat. "You drew directly from your life force. Your mana core tried to pump energy that wasn’t there and cannibalized your own blood vessels instead. Do that again, and you won’t pass out. You’ll die."
Silence descended on the carriage again, heavier than before. The hope that had flared for a second was extinguished, replaced by a darker, colder reality. The strongest among us had just coughed up blood trying to light a candle.
"So we’re trapped," Eric whispered, staring at Leon’s blood. "We have no food. No heat. No magic. We’re going to die here. We’re actually going to die."
"Stop it," I commanded.
I stood up and looked at them. They were terrified. They were kids who had been given godlike powers and told they were the saviors of the world. Now, stripped of those powers, they were realizing just how small they actually were.
I, on the other hand, had always been small. I knew how to survive being small.
I opened my System Interface.
[Inventory]
Potion of Greater Healing (x2)
Elixir of Mana (x1)
Dried Ration Pack (x5)
Thermal Stone (Grade C) - 1 Use
Steel Sword (Common)
Dagger (Uncommon)
My inventory worked because it was part of the System, an external authority higher than the world’s laws. But I closed the window without withdrawing anything.
I had a Thermal Stone. It could heat this carriage for six hours.
But I didn’t take it out.
If I used it now, they would relax. They would think I had a solution for everything. They would rely on me to pull rabbits out of hats until I ran out of rabbits. And when the stone died in six hours, the despair would be twice as deadly.
No. I needed to save the stone for the critical moment. For the girls in the pods. Or for the moment we had to leave this train.
"We do this the old-fashioned way," I said, my voice cutting through their panic. "Body heat. Huddle up. Two groups. Rotate the people on the outside to the inside every twenty minutes. Keep moving your toes and fingers."
"And the food?" Kaelen asked, looking at the meager pile.
"Rationed," I said. "One cracker, one slice of meat per person, per day."
"That’s starvation!" Eric shouted.
"That’s survival," I corrected. "Unless you want to go outside and hunt?"
I pointed a thumb at the frosted window.
As if on cue, the world outside answered.
THUMP.
The sound came again. But this time, it wasn’t a tentative test. It was a heavy, confident impact.
And it wasn’t alone.
THUMP. THUMP. SCRAAAAPE.
The roof of the carriage sounded like a drum being beaten by hammers. There were three... no, four of them. The metal ceiling groaned, bowing inward in the center of the car, the rivets popping with sharp pings that sounded like gunshots.
Everyone froze. Leon tried to stand up, wiping the blood from his mouth, but I pushed him back down.
"Don’t move," I hissed. "They’re blind."
"Blind?" Lyra whimpered.
"Snow Stalkers," I whispered, the knowledge from the wiki flooding my mind. Level 45. Evolved for the Silence. No eyes. sonar-sensitive hearing. "They hunt by sound. If you scream, they will pinpoint you. If you run, they will chase the vibration."
The screeching of metal on metal grew louder. Long, deep gouges appeared on the ceiling, tearing through the mahogany paneling. A dusting of snow fell from the cracks, drifting down onto the table like sugar.
They were digging.
I looked at the twelve students. They were paralyzed.
I slowly, silently, reached for the steel sword I had placed on the table. My hand wrapped around the leather hilt. It was cold, simple, and heavy.
I looked at the ceiling, right at the spot where the metal was buckling inward, turning into a jagged crater.
The inventory check was over. We had food for three days. We had heat for zero.
But we had plenty of trouble.
CRUNCH.
A black claw, the size of a sickle, punched through the roof, shredding the steel like wet cardboard.
The Silence was broken.
(To be Continued)
