Chapter 36

Chapter 36

I Installed a Dating App and Girls from Another World Became Obsessed with Me.

Episode 36: Gate

Humans died endlessly, day after day.

The property damage was beyond estimation.

It was a disaster caused by the existence of mana beasts.

So, where did these mana beasts come from?

“Haa…”

Pushing aside my dizzy head, I looked around.

Cold breaths escaped my lips.

The sky was filled with gray clouds, and the surroundings were an endless field of pure white snow.

It was the first time in my life seeing a snowfield landscape.

“Ugh…”

Just in time, Choi Hye-na regained her senses, complaining of a headache.

She was late to wake up too.

She was late for the appointment earlier too.

Of course, she wasn’t actually late for the appointment, but once you got a bad impression, you wanted to nitpick at everything.

“Wh-where is this…?”

Having been in a concrete jungle, Choi Hye-na seemed stunned by the grandeur of the snowfield, where cold breaths and snowstorms swirled.

“Where else could it be?”

At this point, I couldn’t deny or pretend not to know what was happening.

“It’s inside a gate.”

Gates, along with mana beasts, were one of the disasters that had threatened humanity since ancient times.

Before the invention of detectors, it was impossible to even predict when and where a gate would appear.

On top of that, they even spewed out monsters called mana beasts after a certain period of time.

It was a damn nuisance.

Moreover, if you asked whether there were no casualties from gates just because detectors were invented, that was not the case.

Even in modern times, the casualties caused by mana beasts were too significant to ignore.

Even with detectors, they couldn’t cover the entire globe, and it was quite common for mana beasts from countries already destroyed by gates to attack nearby villages.

Special cases like undiscovered gates were also a major factor threatening the lives of ordinary people.

And there was another special type of gate like the undiscovered gates.

“…An isolated gate, huh.”

Known as the worst disaster for ordinary people, isolated gates sucked in surrounding life forms as soon as they appeared.

What was even more vicious was that after sucking in life forms, the gate locked itself, preventing external rescue and internal escape.

Isolated gates opened approximately a week later.

During that time, the probability of an ordinary person surviving the harsh environment and ferocious mana beasts inside the gate was close to zero.

Of course, you could escape if you destroyed the core inside the gate, but you were better off digging a hole and hiding underneath. The gate’s core was guarded by a boss, after all.

“A gate… That’s impossible…”

“Stop denying reality and get up already.”

Leaving Choi Hye-na, who seemed to be in denial or despair, I surveyed the surroundings again.

‘Hoo…’

It was cold.

It was unbelievably cold.

It must be well below -30 degrees Celsius.

Moreover, the snowstorm, which felt like a knife-sharp wind, lowered the perceived temperature even further.

It was even colder because I was wearing relatively thin clothes like a short-sleeved shirt and jeans.

‘Putting the cold aside, what’s the gate’s grade?’

Unfortunately, in this terrible environment, it couldn’t be a low grade. But if it were C-grade, there would be some hope of escape.

But if it’s higher than that…

“…Damn it.”

First, I had to find a place to use as a hideout to avoid encountering mana beasts as much as possible.

The direction didn’t matter.

I had seen in textbooks that the inside of a gate wasn’t a vast planet like Earth but a place where only a part of another dimension was cut off.

Since the starting point was a snowfield, no matter where I went, it would only be a snowfield with snowstorms. But if I was lucky, I might find a forest or cave to avoid the snowstorm.

A place that fit the snowfield theme would appear.

‘…It’s better to turn my back to the snowstorm for now.’

If I went in the direction the snowstorm was blowing, the cold, knife-like wind would tear my face skin apart.

Of course, turning my back to the snowstorm didn’t mean it wasn’t cold. It was just as cold.

The only good thing was that I had a fur coat in my inventory, and if I circulated the fire element in my mana circuit, it wouldn’t be cold enough to die.

“Wa-wait a minute!”

“?”

Looking back, Choi Hye-na was standing there, shivering.

She looked like a rabbit.

“Wh-where are you going? If this is a gate, we should wait for rescue!”

“…Did you sleep during the gate lecture at school?”

“I, I… H-hachoo! I didn’t go to school…?”

Ah.

I thought she was rude because she didn’t get proper family education, but she didn’t get school education either.

I suddenly felt sorry for Choi Hye-na.

“Wh-what’s with that look! H-hachoo!!”

“Never mind.”

In fact, Choi Hye-na didn’t go to school because of magic education, but she was a prodigy who had already finished high school education at the age of 14.

“This is an isolated gate. We can’t escape or wait for rescue right now.”

I didn’t have good feelings for Choi Hye-na, but I couldn’t leave a poor kid who didn’t go to school.

“What…?”

“There are only two ways to escape from here. Either endure until the gate opens, or break the gate’s core yourself.”

As I said before, if the gate’s grade exceeded C, it was impossible for just the two of us to break the core.

“…A week.”

“Let me tell you in advance, you know we can’t defeat the gate boss by ourselves, right?”

“I know that too!”

The boss was the one who guarded the core, the source of the gate.

The boss, who has a strength that’s on a different level from the elite individual I defeated before, was an opponent that two magicians, who were backline classes, could never defeat.

‘…I need to move before the sun goes down.’

If we wanted to survive tonight, we didn’t have time to stay here.

We had to keep moving in the direction we were originally going, without any rest.

“Wh-where are you going?”

Choi Hye-na grabbed me.

“What, are you going to stay here?”

“…”

After that, there was no conversation between us.

We just kept walking forward aimlessly, leaving footprints on the snowfield where our ankles sank deep.

How much time had passed?

Thump, I heard something collapsing behind me.

“…Choi Hye-na?”

Choi Hye-na’s lips, which had fallen on the snowfield, were blue, and her body was as cold as ice.

Wasn’t she a fire mage? The Seongbuk Choi family is famous for handling powerful flames among the elemental types, right?

Considering that, she should be more resistant to the cold than me.

“Damn it.”

Even though she was a rude person with nothing but her face and body to like, I couldn’t just leave her here.

Even if she was rude, it wasn’t bad enough to leave her to freeze to death.

I hurriedly took out a fur coat from my inventory, put it on her, and carried her on my back.

“I need to find a place to rest.”

We couldn’t even start a fire in this snowstorm.

But if we looked for shelter at the same pace as before, Choi Hye-na would die before that.

Whoosh-

In the end, I had no choice but to run.

The reason I hadn’t run until now was to conserve mana and stamina, and to avoid being detected by mana beasts.

But now, there wasn’t enough time to consider those things.

Running on the snowfield wasn’t easy, but I had no choice but to keep running.

While running, I kept looking around.

But it was snow here, snow there. In this all-white world, I couldn’t see a forest with trees.

“Ugh, ugh…”

“Choi Hye-na! Wake up!”

I had no choice but to increase my speed even more.

It was a miracle that we hadn’t seen a single mana beast even though we had been running for quite a while.

It was a miracle.

And as if another miracle was happening, we soon found a small cave under a rather steep cliff.

“There.”

I immediately changed direction and ran towards the cave.

Thanks to it being closer than I thought, we arrived at the cave quickly.

But the inside of the cave was shallower than I expected. Even if I went all the way to the back, the cold air from outside still came in.

Instead, thanks to that, there was no misfortune of another mana beast having taken up residence.

“It seems difficult to find another place now…”

I had no choice but to cut up the tent in my inventory and block the entrance. But I still had to leave a small gap for air to circulate, so it was still cold.

But complaining wouldn’t help right now. I had to be grateful that the snowstorm wasn’t coming in.

Finally, I unfolded the remaining tent and started a fire.

“Choi Hye-na! Hey, wake up!”

I gently patted Choi Hye-na’s cheeks, who I had carefully laid down, but she didn’t respond.

I thought something terrible had happened, but fortunately, she was still breathing. However, her body was too cold.

“I don’t think the tent’s internal temperature control system will work.”

Indeed, the latest tents have a function to automatically adjust the internal temperature.

But that only maintains a moderately comfortable temperature as the upper limit, and it can’t raise the temperature enough to make you sweat.

“…I have no choice.”

Choi Hye-na would throw a fit when she woke up, but there was an emergency evacuation clause in the criminal law.

I was doing this to save her life, so she shouldn’t say anything to me if she had any shame.

I carefully took off the fur coat Choi Hye-na was wearing.

And I even took off her unnecessarily wide-brimmed hat and shoulder cape to prevent her body temperature from being taken away by her wet clothes.

“…”

Unlike her pale face, Choi Hye-na’s upper chest looked warm and soft.

“Let’s get a grip.”

I gently patted her cheeks and focused again.

In fact, the only clothes Choi Hye-na was wearing now were a thin dress and underwear that covered her precious parts.

It was my first time taking off a dress, so it was a bit difficult, but I managed to take it off by recalling my experience with Iris.

“Wow…”

Choi Hye-na’s underwear, color-coordinated in red from top to bottom, was unbelievably sexy.

Come to think of it, neither Iris nor Cheon Yeo-hwa wore modern underwear, so this was my first time seeing women’s underwear.

And it was also my first time taking it off.

As I carefully unfastened the hooks on the back, Choi Hye-na’s large breasts popped out, as if something that had been sealed was being released.

Her adorable nipples were, as expected, light pink.

Her breasts themselves were also very beautiful. Even a master craftsman couldn’t create such beautiful teardrop shapes.

Unconsciously, I fondled Choi Hye-na’s breasts.

The soft and firm texture was superb.

But unlike what I saw from the outside, they were a bit cold.

Only then did I realize the seriousness of the situation again, and I took off her panties as well.

I almost wavered at the sight of her tightly closed, straight-line vagina, but I hurriedly took off my clothes, became naked, and pulled Choi Hye-na into my arms.

As expected, Choi Hye-na’s body was ice cold.

I slowly raised my mana and warmed my body.

And so, I, who had become a human hot pack, spent the night with Choi Hye-na.

Squeeze, squeeze.

Of course, until I fell asleep, I satisfied my selfish desires by fondling Choi Hye-na’s large breasts and her buttocks, which seemed capable of carrying quintuplets.

It was the price she had to pay for cursing at a stranger as a beggar.