Becoming the Dark Lord

Behind Luke, there was only forest. Snow-covered trees stretched endlessly in every direction. No roads, no smoke, no signs of life.

In a way, he was grateful. Nothing had tried to kill him while he slept—not a beast, not another player. Even with the fire burning, nothing had wandered close.

“Charlie, did you see or hear anyone?” he asked.

The skeletal warrior shook her head.

He didn’t know how long he’d slept—maybe a few hours at most. Which meant he had probably arrived sometime before dawn. The system message had congratulated him on surviving his first night. Now the sky was growing brighter, and he could finally see the terrain better.

“Midnight Terror, huh?” Luke murmured. “So that’s the name of this tutorial. But what does it mean?”

Tutorials always had a central event or structure—an internal logic that governed the challenge. Some lasted a week. Some, a month. There were rumors of rare ones that stretched across an entire year.

Luke opened his system log and reread the notification.

Find the city.

That was the first step.

He pulled up his inventory and tapped on the crocodile chestplate. The armor materialized over his torso—light, flexible, and surprisingly durable. Then he equipped the gloves taken from the Crypt Guardian. Anything that could shield him from the cold, even a little, was worth using.

One kukri in hand. The other, he passed to Princess Charlie.

Even though he’d survived hypothermia, the cold still bit at his skin. Moving away from the fire felt like punishment. His breath left his lips in thick clouds.

He looked down at the fire ring on his finger.

If it weren’t for this, I’d be dead.

The faint warmth radiating from it pulsed against his skin like a heartbeat—just enough to remind him that he wasn’t alone in the cold. He clenched his fist around it.

“The weather here… it’s just as deadly as any monster.”

If he’d had to make a fire manually, rubbing sticks or striking flint, he’d already be a corpse.

Staying put too long was dangerous, though. He was exposed, vulnerable. Anyone or anything could come by at any moment. He scanned his surroundings again.

Where to go?

To one side, a dense stretch of snowy forest. In the distance, the foothills of a mountain range. That must’ve been where he’d first fallen from—his long, chaotic descent through the snow starting high above.

Ahead of him, a wide, frozen lake. Its surface glazed over in solid ice. And in the center, a small island.

He stared out over the water and remembered what he’d seen beneath it—the bodies. Dozens of them.

“People like me,” he muttered, his voice low. “They came through the portal… and ended right here.”

Cold. Forgotten. And drowned in silence.

Luke scanned the area around the lake.

Was a tutorial supposed to be this difficult from the start? Wasn’t I supposed to wake up near other survivors? Some kind of safe zone?

Something about this didn’t sit right.

Those bodies beneath the ice… they weren’t ancient. The way they were preserved—perfect, untouched by decay—it didn’t feel like time had passed at all. And the lake had been frozen when he arrived, yes, but only just. The surface was thin, fragile. It had refrozen recently.

That meant one thing: those people had fallen in hours before him.

Not days. Not weeks. Hours. ℯℯ𝘭.

They were part of the same wave. The same tutorial. The same batch of victims.

They hadn’t even made it to the first trap.

They’d just… died early.

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He pushed the thought aside. Lingering on it wouldn’t help.

“I’m going to scout the area,” Luke said, glancing at Princess Charlie.

She nodded as he turned toward the nearest tree.

He climbed with difficulty, occasionally using a knife from his holster to help. The wood was cold and icy, but Luke had equipped the gloves he got from the dungeon. At least his hands weren’t touching the freezing bark directly.

He hauled himself upward. The tree wasn’t tall by any means, but the elevation gave him a clearer view.

What he saw stopped him.

In the distance was a massive forest. The trees were towering and white, but it wasn’t just snow. Their leaves shimmered with a strange, unnatural blue—almost crystalline, like sheets of ice swaying in the wind.

“What the hell is that…”

He tried to see beyond them, but the height of the trees blocked his vision entirely. Looking back down, he noted his surroundings again.

Two options. Cross the frozen lake, risking another plunge into death, or head toward the strange forest, risking whatever unnatural things lived beneath those icy leaves.

Neither was ideal, but standing still wasn’t an option.

Fear began to creep in again, but Luke smothered it.

“I just need to keep going,” he whispered. “Keep surviving. One minute at a time.”

He dropped from the tree, rolled to his feet, and pulsed mana into his fire ring. The warmth flared faintly around his hand, and he began to walk, Charlie close beside him.

***

Hours later, Luke was shivering violently. The cold wasn’t fading. If anything, it was getting worse.

Each gust of wind that swept through the skeletal trees was like a blade, slicing across his body with ruthless precision. The air itself seemed to bite him, freezing his breath mid-exhale.

He kept pumping mana into the ring on his finger, using it as a makeshift heat source—a flickering ember he clung to near his core. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Every thirty minutes, like clockwork, he would unequip and re-equip his outfit through the system menu, using the brief warmth from inventory storage to chase away the worst of the chill, even if just for a moment.

It was grueling. Tedious. Miserable.

But it kept him alive.

Along the way, he tested Princess Charlie’s range—returning her to his soul, then summoning her again at various distances.

He learned something that worried him. If she got too far, he couldn’t pull her back.

What would happen if she died while outside that range?

Was it permanent? The system hadn’t said. It was just another unknown Luke had to deal with.

For now, Charlie was adapting. She had a pile of sticks and branches stuffed between her ribs, tucked into the cavity of her torso like a skeletal backpack. Earlier, they’d knocked over a tree and salvaged what they could. Now she carried a chunk of burning wood in one hand—like a makeshift torch—and one of his kukris in the other. It was their way of fighting the cold together.

A strange, haunting sight. An undead woman with burning wood in her ribs, guarding her master with a flaming club and a knife.

But Luke wasn’t in a position to judge aesthetics. Every half hour, he repeated the cycle—cycling clothes through the inventory to stave off the worst of the frost.

Survival wasn’t pretty.

Even with a kukri in hand, Luke hadn’t seen or heard a single soul. Nothing. Just him. A few ordinary trees still surrounded him, their trunks dark and gnarled, but in the distance, he could see them—the massive, white-wood trees with glimmering blue leaves. Silent. Ominous. Watching.

“I swear, I’ll burn this whole forest down if a snowstorm hits,” he muttered to himself.

He hadn’t found a single sign of civilization. And yet the tutorial description had been clear:

“Beyond its walls lies nothing but frostbitten wastelands—a frozen desert where life cannot thrive.”

So then... was he inside the kingdom? Had the snow overrun it too?

Or worse—was he outside?

The darker possibility began to eat at him. Maybe he had been dropped somewhere far beyond the kingdom’s walls. Somewhere random. Isolated. An endless white desert. Like being born on the wrong continent. A place where he would never reach the objective. Where he’d die long before ever glimpsing the kingdom.

***

Luke trudged through the snow, limbs heavy. His mana was running dangerously low. That was bad. If it dropped to zero, he wouldn’t be able to channel warmth through his fire ring. Wouldn’t be able to light torches. Wouldn’t be able to keep moving. He’d freeze where he stood.

The only option would be to stop and make a fire. But that came with a new threat.

Because when he glanced behind him, he saw it.

A curtain of white loomed on the horizon, vast and unbroken.

A blizzard.

Still distant—but closing in fast. Like a tidal wave of ice and wind, it rolled silently toward him, unstoppable. Tiny flakes had already begun to drift through the air around him, delicate at first. They spiraled gently, almost peacefully, settling on his shoulders and lashes.

But he knew better. It wouldn’t stay soft for long.

Luke started running. Hard.

His breath came out in ragged gasps as he sprinted, snow crunching beneath his feet. Princess Charlie was behind him, slower—but not far. He glanced back and saw her skeletal frame bounding after him, kukri in one hand, torch in the other, flames dancing against the pale wind.

“I’m gonna die to snow!” he shouted through clenched teeth.

Ahead, he saw the blue-leaved forest—but it was still too far. He might make it in an hour, maybe, but the storm would reach him far sooner.

And then he saw it.

A shadow in the snow. An opening in a rock wall.

A cave.

He veered toward it, cautious. Dropped into a crouch. He pulled a burning branch from Charlie’s stockpile and tossed it inside. The flame hit stone and rolled.

Nothing moved.

The light flickered across stone and ice.

“Empty,” he whispered. “It’s a shelter.”

And not just one. Far in the distance, scattered across the terrain, he could now make out more openings. Caves. Old, hollowed dens.

He stepped inside, sighing in bitter relief.

But then—

“Awoo...”

The sound froze him in place. The first sound—besides the wind or Charlie’s rattling bones—since he got here.

“Awoo.” Another. Soft at first. Then louder. Moving.

Luke squinted toward the white hills and saw the snow move.

No. Not snow.

Something within it.

Pale fur. Low profiles. Bodies that blended seamlessly into the frost.

“AWOO!!” The howl was guttural.

Four forms burst forward, barreling through the snow. Wolves. But not normal wolves. Their frames were oversized—long, skeletal limbs, muscles thick beneath shaggy coats of pale ice. Their eyes burned blue. Their breath steamed in the cold.

They were hunting.

And Luke had just been spotted.