The winds howled across the Arctic Continent. The Laboratory's research institute, nestled deep within it, resembled an enormous steel monster lying dormant.
At first, no one believed anyone could invade the Laboratory so openly, not even its senior management.
To them, this alarm was like a top student having to sit a joint exam without time to revise. It was urgent and posed some difficulty, but it should never have left that student so thoroughly out of their depth.
Yet that was exactly what had happened.
The wind grew stronger. A blizzard had arrived.
"Orion! Have you found him?! We can't see anything now!" In the Laboratory's marine facility in the Arctic Ocean, Mena stared at the surveillance feeds and kept shouting into her communicator. "Is anyone still on this channel? Please respond if you can hear me!"
"Not dead yet."
Orion's voice came through, as flippant as ever, though his heavy breathing was obvious.
Mena said expressionlessly, "You sound like you're about to be."
"Could you not jinx me?"
Mena frowned and launched into another tirade. "Then get out of there! You're right in the center of the blizzard! Get in a snowmobile and leave, right now! Otherwise, I really will have jinxed you."
The communicator went silent for a while before Orion's voice came through again.
"I'm already in a snowmobile. Where's Silas?"
Mena sighed. "We've lost contact with him."
The Laboratory's Arctic Continent base was now in utter chaos. What should have been an exceptionally quiet, remote place was shrouded in a dim whiteness. Before nature, all those brilliant people were no more than specks of dust swept along by the wind and snow.
A few gunshots and bursts of cannon fire could faintly be heard amid it all.
Only a polar bear atop a high glacier