The Extra is a Hero?-Chapter 283: THE DETERIORATION
Chapter 278: The Deterioration
The pocket watch in my hand was the loudest thing in the world.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Three hours had passed since I established Martial Law. The carriage was silent, save for the shallow, ragged breathing of the sleeping students and the occasional shifting of the barricade as the wind battered the train. The Snow Stalkers were still out there—I could hear them pacing, their claws clicking against the steel hull like tap shoes on a chalkboard—but they hadn’t tried to breach again. They were patient. They knew we were freezing.
They were waiting for us to turn into popsicles.
I put the watch away and looked toward the rear of the carriage. The door to the medical bay was shut tight. Behind it, Leon was sitting his vigil.
I rubbed my eyes behind my cracked glasses. Fatigue was setting in. My [Stamina] stat was high, but mental exhaustion was a different beast. It was a debuff that no status window tracked, but it hit harder than a physical blow.
Beep.
A faint, electronic chirp sounded from the medical bay.
It wasn’t the rhythmic pulse of a heart monitor. It was a flat, discordant tone. A warning.
I was on my feet before the second beep sounded.
(POV: Leon)
The cold in the medical bay was different.
In the main carriage, the cold was sharp and biting, a physical intruder that tried to get under your clothes. Here, the cold was heavy. It felt like walking into a crypt.
I sat on a metal stool between the two stasis pods, my greatsword resting against my knee. My breath misted in the air, creating little clouds that lingered in the red emergency light.
To my left lay Selena.
She looked small. The bandages wrapped around her chest and shoulder were stark white against her graying skin. The internal injuries she’d sustained during the Tournament finals were severe—shattered ribs, punctured lung, mana burn. The stasis pod was supposed to suspend her biological time, freezing her condition until we reached the Elven healers.
To my right lay Maria.
Maria Frostheart. The Ice Queen of Arcadia. She wasn’t injured in the battle, but she was fighting a war inside her own body. Her unique constitution, the [Cursed Ice Body], generated an infinite amount of freezing mana. Usually, she suppressed it with her own will and artifacts. But in the Zone of Silence, her control was gone.
I stared at the glass of Maria’s pod.
"Hold on," I whispered, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears. "Just hold on, Maria. We’ll figure this out."
I felt useless.
I was the Hero. I was the one who was supposed to stand at the front, to shine the light, to burn away the darkness. But here? My light was dead. My sword was just a heavy club. I couldn’t even keep them warm.
I looked at the control panel between the pods.
The display was a simple analog gauge, since the digital interface had died with the mana engine. The needle was hovering in the yellow zone.
Yellow means caution, I told myself. Yellow means we have time.
Then, I saw it.
A snowflake.
Not on the outside of the pod. Inside.
It formed on Maria’s eyelashes, delicate and crystalline. Then another on her cheek. Then a thin layer of frost began to creep across the inside of the glass, obscuring her face.
Beep.
The needle on the gauge twitched. It dropped from yellow to orange.
Beep. Beep.
"No," I whispered. I stood up, my hands hovering over the controls. "No, no, don’t do that."
The frost wasn’t stopping. It was growing, spreading like a fungus. It was creeping out of the seams of the pod. The metal casing groaned as the temperature inside plummeted far below what the machine was designed to handle.
Maria was freezing herself to death. Her curse was reacting to the ambient cold of the Zone of Silence, creating a resonance loop.
CRACK.
A hairline fracture appeared on the glass of Maria’s pod.
"Michael!" I screamed.
The door burst open instantly.
Michael didn’t look like a student. With his unkempt hair, the blood splatter on his shirt, and the cold, dead look in his eyes, he looked like a veteran of a war we hadn’t even started fighting yet.
He didn’t ask what was wrong. He saw the frost. He saw the crack.
He moved past me, shoving me aside with a strength that surprised me. He dropped to his knees in front of the maintenance panel below the pods and ripped the cover off.
"Flashlight," he barked.
I fumbled for the chemical glow-stick on the table and shone it into the dark machinery.
Michael was working fast, his hands moving with the precision of a surgeon. He was rerouting wires, bypassing safety protocols.
"The chemical battery is dying," Michael said, his voice flat. "It can’t handle the thermal load. Maria’s body is actively fighting the stasis field. It’s draining the power intended for both pods just to keep her from turning into an ice sculpture."
"Fix it!" I pleaded. "You know machines. You know everything. Reroute the power from the train!"
"The train is dead, Leon!" Michael snapped, not looking up. "There is no power to reroute. We are running on a glorified car battery."
He pulled a lever. A spark flew, and the humming of the pods changed pitch. It became louder, more strained.
The frost on Maria’s glass stopped spreading. It didn’t recede, but it stopped.
The beeping ceased.
Michael slumped back against the wall, wiping grease and sweat from his forehead. He stared at the gauge.
The needle was now firmly in the red.
"Status?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Michael stood up and tapped the glass of Selena’s pod.
"I shunted the remaining power from the life-support reserves to the thermal regulators," he said. "It bought us stability. But at a cost."
"What cost?"
"Time," Michael said.
He turned to me. "I calculated for two weeks of standby time. That was based on normal battery drain."
He pointed to the red needle.
"With Maria’s curse fighting the system, and the ambient temperature dropping... the drain has increased by 400%."
I did the math in my head, but I didn’t want to believe the answer.
"How long, Michael?"
Michael looked at the two girls. "Six days."
The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
"Six days?" I choked out. "We can’t... the storm won’t even clear in six days. The border is hundreds of miles away. If the pods fail..."
"If the pods fail," Michael interrupted, "Maria freezes instantly. Her body becomes a epicenter of absolute zero. She dies. And the resulting thermal shockwave will kill everyone in this carriage within seconds. We won’t even feel it."
He looked at Selena. "And Selena... without the stasis field, her internal bleeding resumes. She bleeds out in ten minutes."
I sank back onto the stool. The weight of the Breaker’s Hammer, which I had been so proud to receive, felt like a mockery now.
Six days.
We were trapped in a metal box, surrounded by monsters, with a ticking time bomb ticking down in the next room.
"We have to do something," I said. My voice was trembling, not from fear, but from a deep, crushing frustration. "I can’t just watch them die, Michael. I can’t."
I looked up at him. "You always have a plan. You knew about the Zone of Silence. You knew about the Stalkers. Tell me you have something for this."
Michael was silent. He walked over to the small porthole window in the medical bay. It was completely frosted over, blocking any view of the outside world.
He scraped a small circle of clear glass with his fingernail. He peered out into the swirling darkness.
"There is no plan for this, Leon," Michael said softly. "The script is broken."
"I don’t care about the script!" I shouted, standing up. "I care about them! You’re the smartest person I know. Think! There has to be a way to recharge the batteries, or... or a potion we missed, or something!"
Michael didn’t turn around. He kept staring out into the black blizzard.
"A potion..." he muttered.
"Yes! Like the Elixir of Life, or—"
"No potion can cure a curse like Maria’s," Michael said. "And no potion can regrow a lung instantly."
He paused.
"But..."
My head snapped up. "But what?"
Michael turned away from the window. His expression had changed. The exhaustion was still there, but the defeat was gone. In its place was something sharper. Something calculating.
"There is an item," Michael said slowly. "Not a potion. A material. A natural treasure."
"Where?" I asked, grabbing his arm. "Is it in your inventory?"
"No," Michael said. "It’s not in the game... I mean, it’s not in the Academy archives."
He walked past me, back toward the door to the main carriage.
"Where are you going?"
"To check the map," Michael said. "The real map."
I followed him out. The main carriage was dark, lit only by the dying chemical sticks. The students were asleep, huddled in a pile of coats and blankets in the center aisle.
Michael went to the conductor’s table. He swept the useless navigation charts onto the floor. He tapped his temple, his eyes losing focus as he dove into his [Memory Palace].
I watched him. It was eerie. He wasn’t looking at the table; he was looking at something only he could see. His fingers traced invisible lines on the empty wood.
"North-North-East," Michael mumbled. "Coordinates 45 by 90. The Weeping Willow. No, not a willow. The Root."
He stopped. His finger pressed down on a spot on the empty table.
He looked up at me.
"I know how to save them," Michael said.
Hope, sharp and painful, flared in my chest. "How?" 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮
"We need the Tear of Gaia," he said. "Also known as Life Dew. It’s a condensed droplet of pure vitality found in the deep root systems of the World Tree’s offshoots."
"Life Dew?" I frowned. "I’ve heard of it. The Elves say it’s a myth. A legend from the Age of Gods."
"It’s not a myth," Michael said with absolute certainty. "It’s rare. Extremely rare. But it exists."
"And you know where it is?"
"I know where one drop is," Michael said. "It’s enough. One drop can fully restore the battery’s mana capacity through chemical conversion, and cure Maria’s curse permanently."
"Okay," I said, gripping my sword. "Where? Is it far? We can take the train if we repair the tracks—"
"The train isn’t moving, Leon," Michael cut me off. "The Tear is out there."
He pointed a finger toward the east wall of the train. Toward the blizzard. Toward the howling of the Snow Stalker pack.
"It’s about ten miles East," Michael said. "Deep in the Northern Root System. Underground."
I looked at the window. I could hear the scratching. The yipping of the pack.
Ten miles in a blizzard. Without mana. Through a forest infested with blind, man-eating monsters.
It was suicide.
But then I thought of the frost on Maria’s eyelashes. I thought of the red needle on the gauge.
"Six days," I said.
"Round trip," Michael corrected. "Two days to get there. Two days to find the entrance and navigate the dungeon. Two days back. If we run into delays... they die."
He looked me in the eye.
"We have to leave the train, Leon. We have to go out into the Silence."
I took a deep breath. The air was freezing, but for the first time in hours, I didn’t feel the cold. I felt the heat of purpose.
"Who goes?" I asked.
Michael looked at the sleeping students. He looked at the barricaded door.
"You," Michael said. "Me."
He paused, his gaze drifting to the corner where a small, shadowy figure was curled up—Nox, his Wyrmling, who was currently asleep and useless without mana to grow.
"And we’ll need a scout," he added. "And bait."
"Bait?"
Michael’s lips curled into a grim, humorless smile.
"We aren’t going on a hike, Leon. We’re going on a raid. And in a raid, someone has to pull the aggro."
He turned back to the invisible map on the table.
"Get your gear. We leave at first light."
