Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL)-Chapter 374 - The Numb Approach To A Fierce... End?

Chapter 374: Chapter 374 - The Numb Approach To A Fierce... End?

A/N: If you are squeamish to descriptions of the labor, then beware the point after the snowflake! As werewolf as it may be~

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Two weeks of existing as a ghost in a cave with nothing but the foxfire blue countdown in my peripheral vision. Almost nothing but numb routines that kept my body functional.

Eating rations from the air filtering container. Sleeping in irregular cycles. Whenever exhaustion overwhelmed the anxieties for what was coming.

Checking through all the system parts obsessively even though I knew what it would say. The timer moved, the values in the stockpile moved as I consumed, but nothing else did.

Reading the few books I bought that felt increasingly irrelevant. Plodding to the surface to just get some sun was rote. Just going through the motions.

All while Vrika threaded carefully through a figuratively eggshell-strewn space in my mindscape. The spirit understood I didn’t... *actually* want this isolation - just felt it was needed.

That its whining would only stress me further. Being too distant would compound the loneliness I already felt.

So it stayed quietly present. Moving closer only when I felt particularly dim and alone, or when brief sparks of brightness broke through the numbness.

Those sparks came exclusively during archery practice. The only physical activity that made me feel somewhat alive. Somewhat... Citra. Though the depression was definitely *all* me.

Drawing the compound bow, feeling muscles engage, watching arrows strike true against the ever decreasing content of foam within the targets I’d bought. Kicking myself for not opting for the ’self healing’ kind.

Vrika would pad closer during these moments, tail swishing with cautious approval that I was feeling something. Even annoyance. But when those moments fled, they felt even more hollow in memory.

Because they were temporary distractions from the reality I’d chosen.

Then I heard them. Voices echoing through limestone passages, distorted by distance and acoustics but triggering a fear I’d had when I really, really looked at where the system map places this location compared to where I entered.

I wasn’t sure where it was being held before, exactly. But the conclave was within the Silvertrap’s passages. And the sounds I was hearing told me that they do in fact connect to the ones I’d chosen.

Omegas would gather tonight for the lunar rite, nervous and encouraged. Seeking a wolf from the goddess. And all I was... is resigned that I’d miscalculated.

Chosen my den thinking these caves were vast enough, isolated enough. That I hadn’t meandered so much closer to Vossden from where I entered. That they didn’t need to travel in this particular direction.

It didn’t matter now.

I held no optimistic hope that a werewolf wouldn’t notice something. That I wouldn’t make a noise, release a scent... that they wouldn’t find me.

Just numb acceptance that I’d made yet another mistake in a long string of them as I checked the countdown one more time.

| TIME UNTIL APOCALYPSE COMMENCEMENT: 3 HOURS, 7 MINUTES |

Something in my gut told me it would happen soon. As if my body had been waiting for some cosmic alignment just like this implies. And now it sensed the moment approaching.

> So much for us not being the cause. I know some mothers hope their child would wait for the perfect birthday. Have any of them ever begged the universe for it not to be the very minute, very second that an apocalypse begins? <

I gradually moved deeper into the cave system after quite possibly the first bit of snark I’d spoken to my wolf in these fourteen days. Away from where I’d stored my containers, the only thing I have confidence in helping me survive after this.

Along the way I set hunter traps along the path - silver caltrops, tripwires to aerosolized wolfsbane dispersal units... anything that would slow pursuit as I retreated back. Not to stop all of them, just to buy time.

Each glowed helpfully with red warning, even in the dark. The system seemed willing to help me protect what I owned if I needed to retreat.

And I would, until I could put the pup behind reinforced steel doors. If they came, I wanted a deathtrap corridor between them and everything I owned. And I would use the bow, guns, and anything else I’d looted from that hunter to make sure nothing got to it.

That work took two whole hours.

By the time I finished, settling down in the small cavern I’d picked with only two good entrances and one crevice blocked by limestone growths... my back ached fiercely as I shifted to my hybrid form.

Fur rippled over my skin, my jaw elongated into a muzzle, and my fingers curled into claws. And I waited for the next change to my situation. A little less numbly.

And then in a lot more frequent, unavoidable admissions of pain that made me wish for numbness again. Or that thing they called an ’epidural’.

⧖ ☾ ❄ ☽ ⧖

The contractions started hours ago - well before the full zero countdown, thankfully. A tightening in my belly as this body’s cervix was pulled upward... a full body pain that gradually built in intensity as it effaced and dilated the collagen tube for the first time.

At least, that was how the pregnancy books I’d been re-reading described it for humans. I don’t actually think it is so different for werewolves. But there is a sort of sense of... no progress to all this that has me concerned. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

I knew what it meant, even if I’d never given birth before. At least I think I did. The pup isn’t big enough. It doesn’t have the same large, weighty human head this body was designed for.

So it is not aiding as a wedge like the educational material described. All of these contractions are still slowly working the canal open, but each one is less effective for the lack of that aid.

Feeling grateful for the endurance of this form and Vrika’s untiring vigil, I nonetheless wish I could have had a slightly cozier den to pace through. A damp, echoing cave that my claws make too much noise on and I quiet my pain is not... ideal.

My tail swished behind me as my footpads collect dust. As I move between all fours and all sorts of squatting positions hoping to let gravity somehow improve the settled position of the creature in my womb.

I focused on breathing, on letting my body inform me of what it needed to do. Which seemed to mostly be groan and whimper when a contraction comes. And grind claws through hard stone.

Still, the spirit in my soul was a steady presence. Guiding me through the process as best as it could, impressing on me the countless generations of wolves - natural and not - who had birthed and performed first nursing for their young.

I’m not sure how many hours after the apocalypse was supposed to have officially begun that I felt it, but it was sudden. That empty, fruitless pain was instead replaced by a distinct ’drop’.

Low, splitting pressure on my pelvic floor led to an unrelenting urge to *push*. There was no volunteering for it. Only diaphragm and abdominals locking and bearing down that lead to a massive, huffing and growling contraction that lasted more than a minute.

With a bulging, smooth and gelatinous pressure that felt nothing like what the books described. Not tearing pain... because the pup is... a smaller born creature that remains fully in its sac.

And then it stopped.

A void of feeling, a shock of hollowness as the slight gush of liquid that the system’s Tolerance told me was warm... before every part of me shook from the adrenaline of that fetal ejection reflex.

But I knew it wasn’t over, just like I knew the cord that had been growing the pup was attaching me to it still. My instincts as a beast demanded I nip at the birthing sac while carefully securing it from shifting around with my claws.

That I free my child from the confines and lick it clean while making sure it is moving. Breathing. And its gasp and high pitched mewl shake something inside me I wasn’t expecting.

I chewed at the umbilical cord to sever it. Next was to eat all the musky, metallic evidence so that it did not attract predators... and to aid the next unwelcome part.

The very first of a few deep, clamping contractions began as I carefully clutched my warmth seeking child to my chest. My uterus shrunk back from the internal change, shearing off the placenta.

Forming the open, bleeding wound that could only be solved by the natural tourniquet of... even more clamping. More delirium and addling pain that constricted the blood vessels.

Because not every werewolf had a spirit to stop them from dying with that much blood loss. Nor did humans or so many mammals that gave live birth. It’s a cycle no different from my world.

> A beautiful cycle of birth, rebirth, death, and invisible snakes the size of starways that hiss out galactic dust to become our next bodies. <

Vrika whimpers at me, concerned with my *euphoria* after the trauma. Concerned far more that I howled loudly and uninhibited. Because I was proud, like the ancient wolves it had showed me.

And for a stupid, blissful, ignorant to my own utter vulnerability set of few moments?

I was a mother.

One who could boldly dare anyone to test that.