Chapter 1 : Let me tell you little bit about my story (1)

Let me tell you my story first.

That day, I had met up with my friends after a long time for a drink.

At first, the atmosphere was great, but for some reason, we had a huge fight.

As a result, the drinking session that day was completely ruined.

I was disappointed that the long-anticipated gathering with my friends had ended so early.

So, I bought some beer and snacks from a convenience store and headed home to drink alone.

Suddenly, I started feeling overwhelmingly sleepy.

In the end, I collapsed just like that.

That’s the full story of what I experienced in the past.

No, to be precise, it’s a story from when I was still a “man.”

It’s something anyone who enjoys drinking might experience at least once.

I hadn’t caused much trouble for anyone, and haven’t we all had a fight with a friend while drinking at least once?

It wasn’t a particularly special incident.

Just a trivial quarrel.

At least, I didn’t think it was something sinful enough to send me to hell.

The first thing I noticed in that place was the biting cold.

It was so cold that I momentarily wondered if it was winter.

The piercing cold made me wake up.

But what greeted me as I awoke, rejecting even the sweet comfort of sleep, was a white hell.

Even after opening my eyes, it was still cold.

So cold that I thought I might freeze to death right then and there.

A snowstorm, relentless and constant, swept across the world like a greedy snake, devouring everything.

It was like the end of the Ice Age had come.

At first, I thought it was a dream.

But unfortunately, what spread out before me was cold reality.

The winter of the apocalypse.

A terrible curse where a snowstorm raged every single day.

The apocalyptic winter was a curse that had plagued the empire for 100 years.

And the northern region suffered the most.

The southern regions of the empire were somewhat better off, but…

In the north, snowstorms raged all year round.

No living thing could be born facing those snowstorms head-on.

As a result, the north completely lost its ability to sustain itself and had to rely on supplies like food and clothing, painstakingly brought from the south.

But more than the realization that this white hell was reality…

I was struggling with a sense of emptiness I couldn’t even imagine.

At first, I thought my frozen heart, like the biting wind of midwinter, was due to the cold that made me feel like my limbs were about to fall off.

But soon, I realized the reason for the emptiness.

The absence I felt the moment I opened my eyes.

I tried to turn away from it, but…

The overwhelming sense of loss was impossible to ignore.

My next action was almost instinctive.

Though my life was short, only 27 years, the time I had spent was my entire life.

The time I had spent every single day with my counterpart.

With trembling hands, I reached down to touch my lower body.

…Gone.

Really gone.

Only then did I fully understand how my cat, Baya, must have felt.

When your “peanuts” disappeared, you must have felt like this.

I’m truly sorry I didn’t understand you back then!

Yes, why hide it?

The man I used to be had suddenly turned into a woman overnight.

Not a selectively transgender person, where I’m a man physically but think like a woman.

Biologically and socially, I had become a “woman.”

Men are superior to women.

Women are inferior to men.

I wasn’t particularly a macho man who believed in male superiority, but still…

How could I not be confused, having lived as a man for 27 years, only to suddenly become a woman?

However, I wasn’t even given the time to soothe my mind, torn by emptiness and confusion.

There was a reason I referred to it as a white hell.

Because they had come.

What would it feel like if a man-eating beast suddenly appeared before you?

And what if there was no zookeeper to control it, or even a cage to keep it at bay?

You’d probably be paralyzed with fear.

But they were more than that.

They had horns on their heads, like a deer.

Their faces resembled deer, but their mouths were stretched wide to the sides, with sharp fangs glistening through the dried blood.

What stood out even more were their grotesquely elongated arms and legs, and their ribcages and intestines were fully exposed.

They couldn’t be classified as normal animals, no matter how you looked at them.

Wendigo.

Slaves of winter.

The death that comes with the cold.

The Wendigos that came with the apocalyptic winter were predators and monsters that fed on humans.

If human power could have stopped them, they wouldn’t have been called monsters.

Neither human weapons nor even the much-praised magic worked on the Wendigo.

In the end, people were forced to sacrifice the bodies of their family members who had died from cold and starvation.

If they gave the bodies, at least the living wouldn’t die.

But even then, sometimes the Wendigo, on a whim, would take away living people instead.

All people could do was pray and leave it in the hands of the heavens.

If that had been the extent of it…

If that brutal fact had been all there was to it…

I might have accepted it as just the way things were.

Sure, it was infuriating that monsters were throwing their weight around.

But what could I do to stop a monster that devoured humans?

At least until they started relentlessly targeting me.

At first, I thought it was just a coincidence.

Sometimes they don’t just take corpses but also attack living people.

I thought I was just unlucky enough to be attacked.

But at first, the attacks came at one-month intervals, then every fifteen days, and soon they started happening every week.

Even more disturbing was that only the places where I stayed were attacked.

Anyone with a brain couldn’t just dismiss this as bad luck.

It was clear that the Wendigos were targeting me.

Normally, when Wendigos attack living people, even in the worst cases, there’s a gap of two months between attacks.

And people are not so stupid as to not notice something’s wrong.

“She’s a witch! She must be a witch!”

“If you stay with her, you’ll definitely die!”

“She’s the Winter Witch who controls the Wendigos!”

Before I knew it, people had started calling me the witch who controls the Wendigos.

In front of me were the Wendigos, and behind me were people with stakes waiting to skewer me.

What was I supposed to do?

“Are you really going to join the army as a woman?”

“In my heart, I’m still a man.”

“Now that I see, you’re a madwoman. But we welcome you anyway, especially since deserters are increasing.”

Choosing the lesser of two evils is better than facing the worst.

There’s a joke that says you’d rather die than re-enlist in the military.

As a veteran of the South Korean military, I could relate to that sentiment so well.

But when that choice becomes reality, it’s not quite the same.

Especially when dying doesn’t mean dying cleanly but being eaten alive.

If that same choice were in front of you, most people would probably choose to re-enlist.

I made the same choice.

At least I didn’t want to be eaten alive like a snack.

Fortunately, the military that fought against the mysterious Wendigos was always short on manpower.

And so, like a hippo, they would drag in any resource they could use.

Even if that resource was a woman.

Luckily, once I entered the fortress, the Wendigos stopped chasing me.

But if I were to go outside again, it was clear I’d be tormented by the Wendigos once more.

The imperial army might be different from the South Korean army, but…

In the end, an army is still an army.

As soon as I enlisted, I wanted to discharge immediately.

But if I left, I’d become the Wendigos’ meal that very day.

If not, I’d be captured by the people with stakes and burned alive.

I needed a way to kill the Wendigos.

Or, at the very least, protect myself.

With that mindset, I trained in martial arts under the instructors of the estate.

And then, I discovered something no one had expected.

I had the ability to summon flames.

“This isn’t magic. It’s more akin to the power of the Sun God.”

“What do you mean? Explain yourself properly, lieutenant.”

“It means it’s the only flame that can stand against the Winter of the Apocalypse.”

The reason the apocalyptic winter is so terrifying isn’t just because winter continues endlessly.

Of course, that alone is enough to feel like the apocalypse to most people, but…

The reason no one could stop the apocalyptic winter is simple.

It’s because it’s more of a curse.

In the lands cursed by the apocalyptic winter, no fire is allowed.

Even indoors, where the snowstorm can’t reach, you can barely light a lantern that’s coated with protective magic.

And even then, the flame looks like it could flicker out any moment, consuming enormous resources and magical power.

But my flame completely defied conventional wisdom.

It burned brighter, not just indoors, but even more fiercely outdoors, without the need for any protective magic.

Now I understood why the Wendigos had been so persistent in targeting me.

In short, I was their only hard counter, wasn’t I?

“You guys are as good as dead now.”

I don’t blame the people who shunned me.

In such a harsh environment, they had at least tried to help me in the beginning.

But to solve the situation, I needed to take down the real culprit.

There’s no point in taking it out on innocent people.

“In the end, this is your fault. Bear your suffering.”

I gritted my teeth and mastered the Imperial Martial Arts, which had been passed down for hundreds of years, from veteran instructors who had been through real battles.

I also learned how to handle the Sun’s Flame from skilled wizards.

Thankfully, it wasn’t too different from magic, so I mastered it quickly.

From that moment, the counterattack began.

Wendigos were essentially immortal beings.

Not only cold weapons but even magic didn’t work on them.

But once I entered the battlefield, the story changed completely.

My flame could pierce through the apocalyptic winter and kill the Wendigos.

Even steel refined with my flame could kill the otherwise immortal Wendigos.

“This must be the grace of the Sun God!”

“I will call this steel ‘Sun Steel’!”

“Oh, avatar of the Sun God! May glory be upon you!”

I took that as an opportunity.

My standing in the empire has greatly increased now.

And what does that mean?

It means the empire would listen to almost anything I asked for.

That was my chance.

Why did I enlist in the army in the first place?

To survive those damned Wendigos.

And I wasn’t about to let anything get in my way.

If it could help kill Wendigos, I took anyone, even criminals and rebels.

There were those who opposed me, but once I held up the cause, they quieted down.

“This is the perfect chance to end the apocalyptic winter. Are you just going to throw it away?”

The apocalyptic winter had tormented the empire for over 100 years.

Now, we had a chance to uproot it completely.

How could we miss that opportunity?

And so, my own unit was created to hunt the Wendigos, and my war to survive began.

People called that war the Winter War.

And now, 10 years after the war began, the Winter War has ended with the empire’s victory.

I became the war hero who saved the empire.

And the first thing I said as a hero was,

“I want to be discharged.”

Any man who has served in the South Korean military could relate to that.