With a grunt of exertion, Zi pulled herself through the hatch and brushed the dust from her leggings with a disgusted scoff. Straightening her posture once more, white twirls of snow drifted through the air in front of her and the girl's eyes absently shifted for a moment to track them as they flew past the mask draped over her head. A few of the flakes stuck onto the glass visor, though a quick swipe of her hand sent them back into the scattered piles of snow beneath her boots as she trudged up the slopes of powdery frost and stale clumps of grass, with every other step carrying a satisfying crunch of her weight. Though many would never dare to say it, she found the surface oddly beautiful in a morbid sort of way; it just seemed so... calm.<br/><br/>As she walked past Daniel, she made sure to give him an exaggerated glare through her mask and nodded at his flashlight- as if silently saying that it would be a foolish decision to even think of turning it on outside of the tunnels when light could be seen for<i>miles</i>up here- and quietly hunkered down behind the nearby remnants of what appeared to be the foundation of an old apartment building. The woman propped her rifle up against the nearest wall and shrugged off her satchel with a quiet cough into her mask's rebreather. Once she was free of the backpack's restrictive webbing, she took a moment to make sure her jacket was zipped all of the way up to the neckline of her mask. The snow may have looked harmless, but it had the potential of torching skin with its radiation, and that was far from pleasant.<br/><br/>While not exactly ideal, she noticed that the cover she was hunched behind was actually a dilapidated barrel filled to the brim with packed snow. It wouldn't provide much cover from gunfire if a fight broke out, but it worked well enough to conceal her from view. As the group halted in place for Dominika's report, Zi took a deep breath and held it in, feeling her heart-rate momentarily stall without the necessary oxygen and allowing her just a moment of perfect, serene silence to simply listen to the surroundings.<br/><br/><i>Wind blowing. Metal creaking. Wheezing rasps from her comrades... but no scuffling, and most importantly, no flapping.</i><br/><br/>"<span style="color: Magenta">I hear nothing nearby</span>." she whispered cautiously to try and ease the tension a bit, though she still turned her head towards Dominika regardless of her own certainty as she waited for a confirmation. Between sound and sight, only one was completely effective. The monsters had a tendency to telegraph their movements with loud noises, but showed the occasional capacity for discretion. And that wasn't even considering the possibility of any human threats out there that could be keeping dead-still as they waited in ambush.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>