Russians celebrated Christmas just like Europeans and Americans, only on a different date, because Orthodox Christmas followed the Russian calendar and fell on January 7 every year.
Though humans lived in their own corners of the earth and had all sorts of strange customs, some feelings were universal, such as missing loved ones all the more during the holidays.
On New Year's Day, Nick had spent an entire evening out in the wind and snow on the terrace with Dahlia. She had seemed happy, even banging away all day on pots, pans, and trash cans as if they were a drum kit.
But even from too far away to make out the look in her eyes, he could still sense the trace of sadness she was forcibly suppressing deep down.
Perhaps she was homesick? Who didn't miss their family at New Year's? Nick did too. Though he couldn't return to Cyrus, and his home in Portland was just an empty house, at least Aunt Mary came back to spend time with him around Christmas or New Year's every year.
So sometimes, having these movie worlds feel too real wasn't a good thing either. Everyone in them was so flesh and blood, rather than behaving in the rigid, stereotypical ways shown in movies and television.
Once he formed some emotional connection with these people, Nick couldn't help wondering whether this world would keep running after he finished his mission and left, or simply cease to exist.
It was like the first movie world he had experienced, Alien. Although he had gone down right at the start, would that world continue along the original plot afterward, or would the butterfly effect change things?
But whatever happened, that seemed better than the story ending when he left and everything fading into nothingness.
He only hoped the Magic Movie Ticket's missions to save worlds were more than just missions.
Although whether this movie world was destroyed had nothing to do with him, and the so-called success or failure of his mission only meant a difference in how good his reward was, by now Nick still hoped that after he left, Dahlia could go on living safely, and preferably happily.
After more than three months in the gorge, his solitary life had finally turned Nick into a philosopher, or at least a thinker.
His thoughts wandered like that, drifting through all sorts of things as he decorated a Christmas tree with several hundred spare light bulbs in the wind and snow.
That evening, when it was time for their daily chat by holding up boards to each other, Dahlia swirled the little liquor left in her bottle, then glanced at the few bottles remaining on the shelf. She sighed wistfully, took out a glass, carefully poured just enough to cover the bottom, and drank it in one gulp.
Sliding open the door to the terrace, she tightened the blanket wrapped around her and leaned toward the observation binoculars as usual, only to discover that although the opposite watchtower was lit, the familiar figure was nowhere to be seen.
That guy has no sense of time, Teacher Ivanova grumbled inwardly, adjusting the focus to see what Nick was doing in his room.
Her favorite show was spying on someone bathing in his room.
Ever since the temperature had dropped below freezing, the cold-sensitive fellow had made a large wooden tub beside the fireplace to soak in. Just heating the water kept him busy for ages every time.
After his bath, he had to get the water out and dump it off the terrace. Once, the tub had even fallen apart because it wasn't sturdy enough, flooding the room. The sight of him hopping around in a frenzy had nearly made Dahlia die laughing.
But the room was empty now, and the repaired wooden tub wasn't beside the fireplace either.
Dahlia was about to adjust the focus again when she happened to catch sight of a sheet of paper stuck to the window out of the corner of her eye. Written on it in large letters was "Surprise," along with an arrow pointing right and then turning downward.
She hurriedly adjusted the observation binoculars, following the watchtower all the way down, but found nothing.
Just as she was puzzling over it, lights suddenly came on. A tall pine below and to the right of the western watchtower became a radiant Christmas tree on that snowy night of howling, frigid winds.
Bundled up like a dumpling in temperatures more than twenty degrees below zero, Nick stood beneath the Christmas tree holding a large wooden sign, his nose red with cold and his mouth stretched into a foolish grin.
"Merry Christmas, Dasha!"
Dahlia clapped a hand over her mouth, stopping the startled cry in her throat, but she couldn't hold back the tears that spilled from her eyes.
Bang!
A .50-caliber bullet precisely shattered the tip of the liquor bottle perched on the scarecrow's head, continuing on unabated until the hard cliff face stopped it, leaving a tiny white mark amid a shower of sparks.
"Ura!" Dahlia leaped out from behind the watchtower, raising both hands high and cheering nonstop.
In the crown of a spruce almost a kilometer away, Nick watched through his scope as the girl jumped around in delight, and let out a long breath.
Another month had passed in the blink of an eye, bringing them into February, and his shooting had essentially reached the limits of the Barrett M107's accuracy.
Going any further wasn't simply a matter of switching guns. He would need a range of cutting-edge equipment to assist him, such as a ballistic computer running specialized ballistic calculation software and a complete set of precise, expensive sensors.
There were also skills he would need Teacher Ivanova to teach him hands-on, such as handloading high-precision match-grade ammunition.
Spring seemed to come rather early to the area around the gorge. February had barely passed when temperatures rose above freezing, and faint hints of fresh green appeared in the forest and open country seemingly overnight.
Nick slowly climbed down the trunk from the top of the crown, nearly forty meters above the ground. When he reached the ground, he unexpectedly spotted a small, unfamiliar white flower among the shrubs, its delicate petals still dotted with dew.
He crouched beneath the tree and quietly admired it for a while, without any thought of touching it, much less picking it.
This little white flower looked too frail to withstand a breeze, yet after enduring the harsh winter, it had eagerly begun showing its beauty to the world. There was a peculiar contrast to it, just like Dahlia.
Nick still couldn't figure out how this slender Russian girl, who looked better suited to ballet, could handle an AXMC sniper rifle so smoothly. That beast was an anti-materiel sniper rifle of the same caliber and class as the Barrett.
After completing his daily patrol and getting in some shooting practice along the way, Nick didn't hurry back to hole up at the top of the tower. Instead, he entered the armory inside the bunker.
The weather was warming up. It was time to prepare Dahlia's second surprise.
When Nick left the armory, he had an ammunition crate on his shoulder. After riding the elevator to the top of the watchtower, he plunged straight into the workshop.
The ammunition crate contained three high-explosive rockets. Nick took one out and secured it in a vise, carefully unscrewed the piezoelectric fuze at the tip of the warhead, then opened the conical warhead fairing and removed the white, cone-shaped charge inside.
The narrowest gap between the two sides of the gorge was 362 meters, while an ordinary rope launcher generally topped out at a hundred meters or so. Maritime line throwers could only manage a little over two hundred meters, and those things were already almost the size of a small cannon.
So Nick planned to try making a rope launcher himself.
Since the mission required him to save the female lead, he couldn't stay on the western side of the gorge forever, could he? Nearly half a year had already gone by.
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