6 A Strange Igloo

The igloo wasn't an igloo in the traditional sense it wasn't even made of ice bricks and instead of looking like an igloo, it looked more like a rounded sheet of ice. Actually, there were only 2 reasons I knew it was an igloo.

Number 1, The footsteps from the 2 men came from it. and Number 2, I could clearly hear someone crying in it. The crying sounded like the sniffles of a little kid.

Unable to hold back my curiosity, I trotted up to the igloo. There wasn't any opening. Did the 2 men bury a kid in ice? Why do something so horrible? I used the sword I got to break the ice. The ice wasn't very thick and was very fragile.

There in the middle of the igloo was a small girl maybe only 8 or 9 curled into a ball shaking and crying with hands and feet tied. Then I realized the coat that the men were carrying must've belonged to her. It's not like that revelation brings some sense of clarity.

In fact who the fuck leaves a kid in the wilderness to die of hypothermia all the while tying them up. What a miserable way to die. To do that to a little kid is really just... I don't even know glad I could kill them. Honestly cannibalizing them was probably the best thing I could do to disrespect such horrible people. It's kinda unfortunate that one of them died so quickly.

I should at least help this kid. I cut off the bindings around her hands and feet. Her left hand was blue and the tips of her pinky and ring finger were the color of bluish charcoal, and the skin on the rest of her fingers and her knuckles looked like the color of a pencil. Signs of deep tissue damage and a possible loss of her fingers. However, cutting the bindings only caused her to ball up harder in fear and cry harder.

It's hard to put what I felt into words so much rage was in me that it wasn't an emotional thing but a physical sensation of something burning in my stomach. If I had to do it I would say that I was impossibly happy to not be human, not because being an animal is cool or because humans are that bad. So terrible as to kill a child in such a horrible way like this, leaving them to die. Sure, some people are good but most are only active in improving their own lives just like the animals that many people would profess to be better than.

I even felt guilt remembering when I was asked to help provide aid to poor countries from Red Cross out of high school and I turned them down. By 2030 the population in poor countries was way too high and global warming contributing to climate change gave less area to farm in. It got so bad that Richer governments were pouring lots of money into their own aid services and trying to recover after the effects of climate change could no longer be ignored.

All that for me to decide I didn't want to finish college. So in reality I'm also somewhere on the bad side of karma as a human anyway. Still, the governments that provided aid were more concerned with keeping people in the countries and preventing immigration than actually helping.

The people actually volunteering to dedicate their lives to helping someone was the only truly large group of people that I can even remember that sacrificed themselves to help another. That shows the beauty of humanity.

I turned them down too I don't believe anything silly like "you can't judge anyone because you're not good" either. But I truly regret not helping them. Now someone can always choose to be good to CHOOSE to be better but real impactful chances don't come that often.

Which is why I had the crazy idea to take care of the girl here. Well, maybe not crazy. If I left her here I wouldn't be all that much better than the 2 men. Sure I didn't put her here but I can't pretend like I'd still be a good person after this.

An 8-year-old is not surviving in the Arctic tundra alone no matter how you slice it. Therefore I made the decision in my life to help one person. It felt like a moment that I would regret for the rest of my life always remembering this day and regretting it for as long as I lived.

So I used my tails to pick her up and put her on my back. I put the coat that I got and folded her arms under her so that they would stay warm. I used the belt that I got from one of the fallen soldiers to secure her to my back.

She stopped crying when I put her on my back but didn't move she might've still been in shock from what happened with the men abandoning her. It could've been her brothers worried about too many mouths to feed or anything really. No wonder she is in shock.

I still needed to use my prehensile tails to keep her on my back though, so I decided to head back to the men I killed.

I moved slower due to the added weight but at least I wasn't hungry anymore. Only 10 minutes walking and she fell asleep.

In her sleep, she talked a lot I couldn't understand most of it I tried copying some of the sounds myself and found that I was able to sort of get some of them. I knew I could articulate sound a little better than foxes in our world but since most of Earth's languages had sounds that were still impossible for me to pronounce I assumed that it didn't matter. However, from her sleeptalking, I could pronounce like 80 something percent. Maybe the language they speak has demihuman foxes or something. Or it just be a coincidence, hell maybe the girl is just mumbling.

Arriving at the place where the bodies still laid I picked up the other coat and belt and wrapped them both around her.

I had a few extra bites of food to really stock up but I continued on south. I figured I kinda needed fire for her making fire isn't really even possible for me though so I just tried to put that thought out of my mind and move to warmer weather.

It was another few hours when I found a small cave on my journey I found a stream only partially frozen over and I drank from it. I didn't hear anything in the cave despite waiting outside it for 5 minutes. I then made ice spears just in case but still prayed that I wouldn't have to use them. Entering the cave I used shadow magic. there wasn't much time to think about if it could cover her or not. I went in on high alert.

It was relatively spacious 6 meters long and 3 meters wide but it was only like a meter and a half high so it was a bit short. Luckily though there were no animals in and no smell of any either.

I untied the girl from my back and laid her on the ground while still wrapping her hands with my fluffy tail. they weren't getting worse or better and I decided to wait here for at least a couple of hours for her to wake up.