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I just stood there in a daze.

It was a complete victory—and also a perfect defeat.

(No… I don’t have time to think right now.)

I started running for town.

Betting on the slim possibility that “I might still make it,” I chased the remaining four with everything I had.

Even the clear evidence of footprints I had finally found had been washed by the rain and distorted, telling me a fair amount of time had already passed since they came through here.

Following the tracks, the road that cut through the forest came into view—and then I saw the town.

The gate was tightly shut, and there wasn’t a single person anywhere in sight.

“I didn’t make it,” I said, tilting my head back into the rain.

I sensed faint commotion beyond the gate and remembered my fight with that old mage.

“If I could’ve ended it faster…”

I muttered that, then immediately shook my head and rejected it.

The moment I’d fallen into his scheme in the first place, that possibility had already been crushed.

Attacking the town was not completely off the table.

But if I did that, I would be labeled an enemy of the human species.

Right now, I still hadn’t crossed the line beyond “a merely extraordinary monster.”

I had been careful not to cross it.

I had even restricted my actions so I wouldn’t hand them an excuse.

(I want the spirit sword… but if I act on that here, I’ll be seen as a monster attacking a town and become humanity’s enemy. That’s too soon!)

A town existed so people could live safely.

It went without saying what would happen if I attacked it.

(If they wanted a forward base for development, they should’ve made it a fortress…)

Then I could’ve handled it.

For example, literally wipe everyone out to prevent information leaks, or lure in a mass of monsters so it wouldn’t look like a single culprit—there were ways to stage it.

But with a town, the number of humans was on a completely different scale.

Let even one escape and it was over—and the risk of failure was far too enormous.

“There’s nothing to do but give up,” I reached the most reasonable conclusion.

But it was also true I couldn’t truly give it up.

The bait dangling in front of me was just that tempting.

I stood there for a while, growling, “Isn’t there some way?”—but every idea that came out was unrealistic.

(Since they clearly targeted me… there’s a high chance another extermination party will be formed. If so, do I prepare for next time?)

At minimum, the Kingdom of Canaan now saw me as something it could no longer ignore.

That was why they had sent a party after me.

The question was: how deeply was Seizeria involved?

Historically, these two nations did not get along.

(Did that old mage just happen to be there? No—Seizeria wouldn’t casually let go of someone that skilled.)

Was there some reason?

That doubt made me remember one incident.

(Come to think of it… was the human who suddenly appeared that night maybe the work of that mage’s magic?)

If I assumed that was true, only one answer surfaced.

That old mage would have been clearly betraying Seizeria.

(Would a mage betray a nation of magic?)

Honestly, “He was a hunter, so he came all the way to a neighboring country just to hunt me” made more sense.

If so, then that night had been the work of a different mage—meaning there were others who could do the same thing.

Of course, it might be neither, and frankly, I didn’t even trust my own hypotheses at this point.

“Thinking won’t get me anywhere,” I decided to return to the temporary base for now.

Ah—how enormous the prey I let slip was.

My steps were heavy.

Still, I soothed myself with the thought that I’d gained plenty of experience, and headed back.

Back at the temporary base, I groaned, squeezing every last drop out of a brain that hadn’t grown one bit despite my massive body.

If I had to summarize this incident, it was this: “Knowledge alone isn’t enough to deal with magic.”

There were many things you only understood by experiencing them.

On top of that, I had gained a general grasp of how weather affected things, too.

“Should I be glad I learned early that rain is more troublesome than I expected? If that’s the case, what happens with snow… snow?”

Something in my casual mutter caught, and I looked up at the rain that still hadn’t changed.

“…Oh. Come to think of it, there are less than three months until winter.”

It had already been about three months since I woke up.

In the Empire, winter began after the New Year, so these mild days were nearing their end.

(So it’s already that time, huh…)

Soon the temperature would begin to drop little by little.

I drifted into nostalgia—“Yeah, things like that happened”—then snapped back to reality.

“Huh? How am I supposed to survive winter?”

I had no heating—no house at all.

It was obvious food would also become harder to secure in winter, and I could easily picture myself desperately hunting every day out in the cold.

It didn’t take long to reach the conclusion of “This is bad,” and I finally began to recognize the problem that had been right in front of me all along and yet left untouched.

If I trusted the Empire’s science, it would be “Cold doesn’t bother me at all—worrying was pointless!” but this was my beloved homeland.

I could easily imagine them solving the problem from some completely different angle, like: “Oops! We made it resistant to heat, so it got weak to cold! It’s fine—wars slow down in winter anyway! Worst case, we’ll just put it to sleep!”

As someone who had been snoozing for about two hundred years, I wouldn’t even be surprised if they said, “Actually, you hibernate.”

I thought seriously for a bit.

Just how close to a “monster” had my ecology become?

And did the creature this body was based on actually hibernate?

Unfortunately, I had no idea what that original creature was.

But if I had to say what impression I had when I first saw this body—reptile.

(I should’ve explored that research facility properly! Not even knowing the catalog specs is coming back to bite me in the dumbest possible way!)

Clutching my head, I pictured a forum thread in my mind titled “Bad news: genetically enhanced soldier loses to nature,” along with the game-over music from some famous RPG and an image of my body collapsed on the screen.

I spent my days imagining, “If it comes to the worst, I’ll die in a cool way,” and yet dying like that was unacceptable.

“…Calm down. Nothing’s decided yet.”

First, a calm winter simulation.

Obviously, edible plants would almost completely disappear.

Don’t point out that I didn’t collect them in the first place—that’s irrelevant.

The important part was “they will stop being available.”

Naturally, if plants vanished, the animals that fed on them would vanish too.

No matter how I struggled, food scarcity was guaranteed.

My body didn’t seem to feel hunger easily, but considering the nutrition required to maintain this massive frame, I couldn’t afford to be optimistic.

Then there was the climate—hibernation seemed possible at the worst, but this body had never felt sleepy except in special cases, raising a very reasonable question: could hibernation even work? That let me shelve that worry for now.

And how much would falling temperatures affect my abilities? Even humans suffered changes from cold, so some change was inevitable.

The question was how severe—but I wouldn’t know without actually chilling my body and feeling it firsthand.

Depending on the result, I might need countermeasures like “wearing clothes.”

The more I thought, the more necessary preparations piled up.

If I went into winter unprepared, I could only see a future where I said, “Yeah… I still couldn’t beat winter.”

And then an important matter stabbed in like a finishing blow.

“…Wait. Does that mean my elf surveillance mission gets suspended too?”

The painfully obvious answer to my own mutter was this:

In winter, when the river froze—would elves still bathe naked?

(Of course not!)

After that internal Q&A, I slammed my fist into the ground.

I nearly crushed this shabby hut, but that didn’t matter—one of humanity’s hopes was about to disappear.

“So you bare your fangs… General Winter!”

If I were in the southernmost former Imperial territories, I might have more time, but unfortunately, the elven lands weren’t like that.

At this rate, the surveillance mission would not hold.

(Think! In what situation would someone take off their clothes in freezing winter cold!?)

Before I could even fully rev up this allegedly “mediocre” brain, the answer came immediately.

A bath.

But even before asking whether I could prepare such a thing—who would ever come bathe in a bath prepared by a monster?

Number Six might be possible, and I did have someone else in mind who I could probably talk into it.

But think about it.

Where would I even set it up?

If the distance was far, it was pointless.

So the answer I reached was: a hot spring.

In the southwest of the Empire, there was definitely a leisure-focused district with hot spring inns, and it was obvious the source was somewhere in the nearby mountain range.

But again, the problem was distance.

If I followed the river, I could get there in under half a day—but could an elf do that? Unless they were extremely trained, probably not.

Then I needed another candidate location.

Sadly, my knowledge didn’t contain any other place where I could find a hot spring.

More precisely, “within the former Imperial territories”—and mountains on the Canaan–Seizeria border in the opposite direction were out of the question.

(Do I take the risk and enter elven territory? No. I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of magical alarm system that would give me away.)

There simply wasn’t any suitable location.

Just as I slumped, thinking, “This plan is dead,” a revelation descended.

“Right. New development.”

I had been too obsessed because she was such an exceptional “resource.”

To solve the distance problem, I would change my target to elves closer by.

Scoffing at myself—“How did I not realize this?”—I slowly stood up.

I damaged the hut’s ceiling a bit, but I didn’t need this place anymore.

The spirit sword was a shame, but there was no need to take unnecessary risk—and I should prioritize preparing for a winter I’d never experienced in this form.

Part of that was because I’d forgotten the possibility that I might be weak to cold, but this was an action prioritizing survival.

If I wanted to prepare for the worst, it was never “too early” to start moving now.

Because I didn’t know what would happen, I needed to aim for a fully prepared state.

…And while saying all that, I finished packing with a spring in my step, thinking, “A new encounter is waiting for me.”

Without noticing that my premise was wildly mistaken, I slung my gear over my back and ran through the forest.

Thanks to the muddy ground, I couldn’t move as fast as usual.

I noted that as yet another point to watch—and my thoughts wandered.

And since I was heading into an unexplored region, I also realized there was a chance of finding a research facility, or buildings and underground spaces usable as a main base. I started praising myself so hard that I’ll add this too: once that started, I couldn’t even correct my course properly.