He could not believe what he was seeing. A sea of small flames born in the middle of a snowstorm.
The urge to approach was firmly barred by the fear of a looming threat.
'Is this some kind of trap?'
He imagined a profane beast pretending to be light to devour adventurers. However, the irregular quantity of flames suggested more than one creature.
Between hiding and running into the arms of the unknown, he chose neither.
Using his ability to sense terrain at long distances, he expanded his senses toward the nearest and brightest flame in the blizzard.
Total focus on a single area granted a clear and unexpected vision. He had been right in guessing it was a living being, but he was terribly wrong about its size.
Being some kind of elongated worm or maggot, most of its body was submerged in the sand, which allowed Giovanni to gauge its danger. The answer was: very little.
He must have been going mad, but to the starving, even something grotesque and repulsive seemed tempting.
Deciding it was worth the risk, he left his hiding place and advanced slowly toward the flame, wanting to understand why a worm would expose itself like that in such a hostile environment.
That was when he saw it happen in real time. Amid the snow, almost perfectly camouflaged, small white insects danced and floated, carried by the wind.
The moment they drifted close enough to the ground, the glow of the flame seemed to draw them instinctively. The worm remained completely still as the insect advanced toward the light.
When they were about to touch, the flame went out, and small teeth sank into the prey's flesh. The worm vanished into the ground, its hunt successful.
Giovanni, impressed by the sight, made a sudden move to approach other worms in the area. The result was several of them disappearing into the earth in the blink of an eye.
'Trying to run or sneak up on them won't work.'
Satisfied with the first interaction, he retreated to the crevice, shielding himself from the soul-freezing cold. The first thing he needed was a weapon.
Picking up one of the loose stones small enough to fit in his hand, he began carefully chipping it, repeatedly striking the nearby wall, always at specific points, to form a sharp tip.
His plan was simple, yet effective. The worms depended on the soil to hide, so he only needed to turn their shelter against them.
He had no confidence in trapping even the Ruffian with just sand, but against such small creatures, as long as he manipulated the sand to crush their bodies while sealing the tunnel, it was possible.
He went outside once more, his mind focused on hunting his first prey. The lights were still numerous, but they were rapidly diminishing as the worms secured their meals.
One flame glowed at least ten meters from the entrance and was his best opportunity at the moment. He walked crouched, reducing noise as much as possible. One meter, two meters, with each step, Giovanni grew more nervous.
Just a few seconds outside was a unique form of suffering. The cold air burned his nostrils, and the warm breath leaving his mouth condensed in the air. He would freeze within minutes, without a doubt.
When he reached five meters from the worm, he stopped completely. At that point, trying to be silent would be useless. The creature did not seem to have eyes, so vibrations in the ground would give away his position.
His eyes closed. His mind traveled through the soil, sinking into the earth. He could feel the thin tunnel and the creature's body.
"Bind!"
His transmission felt like an invisible hand moving the sand. In a single second, the tunnel below sealed shut, the sand pressing against the worm's body, trying to crush it.
The creature thrashed, resisting his meager power, but it was already too late. A thin layer of snow flew as Giovanni lunged with the stone in hand, crashing down upon the prey with violent force.
The first blow struck the head hard, piercing the skin but failing to kill. The beast became even more erratic, desperately trying to escape its death. The stone came down again and again, tearing flesh and turning vital organs into pulp.
[You have slain a dormant beast, Wretched Sand Fisher]
The prey was dead. He had truly hunted something. His heart pounded wildly.
[You have received a memory: Vermin Head]
He shoved his hand into the sand, pulling out the worm's entire body, and ran back to the crevice, eager to eat something and discover what reward the spell had granted him.
He thought of his runes, and there the item was. He focused on its description, searching for its use.
[Vermin Head: the deadly lure of a miserable creature that once hunted insects. Its flame remains lit even after death.]
He summoned the memory in a small, harmless burst of golden sparks. It was a circular, bloated object made of living flesh, with a mouth full of small, sharp teeth.
With a gentle squeeze, a flame escaped its mouth, the very same one he had seen outside. His eyes shone with excitement, his hand trembled with happiness.
Since arriving there, he felt he could survive.
"I have fire! Yes! Yes!"
He jumped in excitement and punched the air repeatedly, quickly collapsing to the ground as he remembered he was still hungry and exhausted.
It was impossible to build a campfire there. With only rocks and sand, there was no fuel to feed a flame.
Giovanni was willing to swallow that filth raw as a last resort, but he felt it would not be much different from death. Using the stone, he tore the worm's body into pieces small enough to fit into the fire.
Some of them burned too much, but he preferred excess over insufficiency.
When he finished preparing his meal, he knelt before the flame and touched his neck, searching for his necklace, but found only cloth. That was not his body, he remembered bitterly.
Even so, he gave thanks in silence. He knew Omar was still taking care of him in the real world and that his sister Margaret awaited him at home. The situation was terrible, but it could be worse.
Just having what was necessary to survive one more day meant there was still hope.
The taste of the worm's meat was dreadful, its texture equally strange. If before he wanted to cry from emotion, now his tears were from longing for the ham and cheese he once ate.
Because of this experience, he would make sure the Ruffian enjoyed a delicious piece of meat as well. Giovanni would never see him eating insects the same way.
And so his first night in that nightmare ended, nestled beside the flame, still hungry, still thirsty… but alive.
The arrival of the next day was quickly noticed by the rise in temperature. Looking outside, the same question from yesterday remained.
"What do I do to move forward?"
He was no worm to go digging beneath the ground. Running under the sun like the previous day was a risky gamble that he would find another crevice along the way before being cooked alive.
Going out at night was even more dangerous, as the cold was as deadly as the heat, and he would be accompanied by many creatures in the darkness.
Unless he pulled a PTV out of his pockets to drive across the sands, it seemed like a dead end. As he contemplated in silence, his eyes focused on the sand and on what he had learned the following day… perhaps, just perhaps, an idea was possible.
Instead of trying to leave during the day, Giovanni decided to spend one more day in the crevice, both to recover his strength by resting and to further practice his control over sand.
He needed to master the ability to do two different things at the same time with his power, even if only at the most basic level, for his plan to work.
This time, he would not have only the afternoon to practice, but the entire morning as well. With no time to waste, he focused on the ground beneath his body and connected it to his senses.
Hours slipped by like sand through an hourglass. The sun came and went while a single silent child repeated the same process endlessly.
Giovanni did not need much, so he completely abandoned the attempt to learn multiple techniques, focusing on a single trick.
He made the sand rise like a small wave, starting with just a few centimeters, but slowly developing into something larger. Ten centimeters, twenty centimeters. By the end of the afternoon, he had successfully reached a full meter.
Still not satisfied, he focused on increasing its thickness, wanting to turn the thin rising layer of sand into something a bit sturdier and more solid.
It was not a defensive trick, since even a child could easily push an arm through the sand. He only needed it to have no gaps or openings in his wave.
'My head feels like it's going to explode… I miss my math notebook.'
He had always struggled with calculations, but this was proving to be a challenge worthy of him. When he needed to maintain a consistent, moving shape, he had to divide his focus into different sections with varying thicknesses and heights.
He only paused his intense training to hunt at night, catching a pair of worms and drinking more melted snow to hydrate himself. He gained no other memories, but he was satisfied nonetheless.
It was only on the morning of the third day that Giovanni felt ready to execute his plan.
"If I can't have a PTV, I just need to make one!"
He did not even need to close his eyes. Looking directly at the sand in front of the crevice, it moved according to his will. Rising into the air, it reached a maximum height of a little over a meter and curved downward like a wave in all directions, forming a thick roof.
Giovanni crouched as low as he could and tucked himself inside. The shade it generated was a great relief compared to being directly exposed to the sunlight.
But this was only part of the plan; otherwise, he would have merely traded one shelter for a worse one. The sand beneath the wave began to move rapidly forward, pushing the boy along.
It was slower than his previous method of running alongside accelerated sand, but it would conserve his strength. Without the sun burning him, he only needed to worry about enduring the heat.
'Faster!'
After a few seconds getting used to it in practice, his sandy "vehicle" sped up a bit more, gliding across the dunes like never before.
He did not dare say he was having fun, but now, looking at the breathtaking horizon, feeling the pure, natural breeze of the world as he advanced with magical power, he could not deny it felt like an adventure straight out of Michel's comic books.
When he closed his eyes, he saw the light calling to him again, pleading for his presence. He was closer, closer and closer.
His eyes burned with an intense feeling, but he remained silent, focused on keeping his sand construct functioning. Hours and hours of travel were required, advancing without pause until signs of change in the environment became noticeable.
The pure white sand took on a more reddish hue, and the sky itself grew darker, stripped of beauty. Giovanni climbed one last colossal dune and finally saw what awaited him in the landscape.
Within a dry canyon, where no river flowed anymore, a city built of red and golden bricks stood. Surrounded by thick, imposing walls, it was like an impenetrable bastion of power, or at least it should have been.
Its massive main gate stood open, reduced to unrecognizable fragments, and the tower rising at its center, which once seemed tall enough to dwarf even the surrounding canyon, was split in half.
Its debris had fallen upon houses and structures like rain, crushing everything in their path, while other fragments were flung even farther, landing on the canyon's edges above houses pressed against the rock wall.
"No...way...right?"
Others were thrown far away, scattered across the crimson desert ahead. In that sandy hell...awaited the end of his nightmare.