The avalanche settled, leaving behind a silence so total that Sunny could hear the rhythmic pulse of blood behind his temples. Mount Mourn held its breath.

Through the haze of powdered frost, a guttural shriek tore the calm to shreds. The mound of ice trembled, then exploded outward in an eruption of frozen shards. From the subterranean crevasse crawled the beast—a centipede-like abomination with carapace as black as basalt, its segmented body bristling with pale human arms in place of legs.

“Of course a fifty-ton rock didn't kill it,” Sunny grumbled, wiping frost from his eyelashes. “Why would the Nightmare ever make my life easy?”

His shadow slid across the snowy bank, darting beneath the monster’s blind side. It pointed at the creature’s underside where the avalanche had cracked its obsidian armor, exposing translucent flesh pulsing with putrid violet ichor.

“Fine,” Sunny muttered, gripping the iron spear until his knuckles turned bloodless. “We do this the ugly way.”

He launched himself from the ledge. As the monster reared back to spit corrosive venom, Sunny’s shadow surged forward, wrapping around the creature’s eyeless head like a veil of living oil. Blinded and thrashing, the beast exposed its throat—and Sunny drove the iron tip deep into the exposed nerve cluster.