The man put the pellet away and stared down the tree-lined road. “I see that you’re heading North. I assume that you’re following after that girl?”

“What girl—Nyla? You know where my friend is?”

“Not here, I’m afraid. I happen to live a couple hundred leagues to the north. About a week ago I recognized her aura passing through the area around the Red Mountain, but by now she has likely reached the Northern Wilderness.”

Frightened as he was at the sudden appearance of this dangerous acquaintance, Nolan enjoyed an immense sense of elation that quickly eased the frantic beating of his turbid heart. Although he had no way of knowing whether or not the man was telling the truth, for some reason he felt completely reassured as to the legitimacy of his claim. Whether it was this mountain range or the lands that lie beyond, Nyla was out there and she was waiting for him.

“I happen to be heading in the same direction. Let me assist you.” Before they could utter a word of protest the ground was swept away from underneath their feet, their balance suddenly stolen by a net of projected inner essence that followed the strange man skyward. The trees on either side were quickly replaced with open air and an increasingly generous view of the valley that they had been traversing. “I can take you as far as Smolen.” He smiled at Nolan’s expression. “Don’t worry. You need not repay me for this.”

He travelled at four times the speed that their group had maintained all throughout their journey, the area within his loose net of projected inner essence completely unfettered by the ferocious wind resistance. A sea of trees spread out before them with walls of snow-peaked mountains as far as the eye could see, though those closest to them blocked most of the rest from sight.

Nolan had mixed feelings about the unexpected development. Incurring further debt with this person was the last thing on his mind as he watched the landscape rush past from several hundred metres above the ground.

He better not drop us. While he and Ian would likely survive a fall from this height, he was uncertain if their friends would. He could always rely on his spiritual energy to safely retrieve his friends before they fell too far, but if the man decided to drop them then he definitely wouldn’t let them salvage the situation.

“Must you be so fearful? If I wanted you dead it would already be so.”

“Okay… Well, could you tell us your name then? This is the second time you’ve helped me out and I don’t even know what to call you.”

“I won’t tell you my name just yet, but you can call me…hmm, why not Black Cloak?”

“I definitely won’t call you creative.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I said Black Cloak sounds great.” What’s with his naming sense? He’s not even wearing a cloak.

“Medicines aside, you’ve grown much since last I saw you. I can’t help but raise my expectations of you.”

Great.

The conversation was replaced by the whistling winds around them, though Nolan and his friends welcomed the social silence. They spent the next several hours admiring the natural beauty of the northeastern regions of the Dragon’s Tail, which were filled with thick forests of towering conifers and countless meadows and glades.

Black Cloak eventually cast Nolan a sideways glance. “We’ll be there shortly.”

“Okay. Uh, I’ve been wondering, where is Smolen exactly?”

“It is the third last community before the Northern Wilderness. Unfortunately I have to meet some old friends, so I won’t be able to escort you all of the way.”

“Just this much is way more than enough.”

The group maintained a constant quiet throughout the majority of the flight, for what was there to say to a man as mysterious and intimidating as this? Tension aside this was the first time that everybody save for Nolan had experienced the sensation of flying through the sky. Their current situation was eye-opening even for him, who had followed Uncle Grey’s line of sight back when the old ghost had possessed him and flown far away from the chaos-ridden kingdom of Hauss. Although Black Cloak was only moving at half of the speed, the brilliant scenery coupled with the abject weightlessness provided a certain sense of exhilaration that was hard to match despite all of the amazing things that Nolan had seen and done since donning the identity of an Otherworlder.

They touched down several hours after the last bit of hesitant conversation, in a treeless valley less than a kilometre wide but a dozen times as long.

“Smolen lies just beyond this pass.”

Ian stepped forward and gave a deep bow. “Thank you, Elder.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you, Mister Black Cloak.”

Nolan also thanked the man.

“Don’t mention it.” Black Cloak’s wide smile revealed a set of perfect teeth, a rare sight in a world almost completely devoid of the art of dentistry. “I must be off. Take care now.”

“Wait! My friend, you said she passed through this area a while back. You…are you able to sense her aura right now?”

Black Cloak maintained his cunning smile and took off into the sky with an explosion of wind before vanishing into a low-riding cumulus cloud. Even so, his voice resonated throughout Nolan’s mind as if he were speaking directly into both of his ears at once.

Don’t forget about that sound transference talisman that I gave you. An amused smirk. There might be a need for it in your future.

“Hey, you alright Nolan?”

He sighed and waved Sean off. “I’m fine, man. I wasn’t expecting all that so it kind of tripped me out.”

“That was fun,” Esteban smiled. His cheeks were still rosy with excitement, his eyes wide and full of wonder. “I can’t wait to tell my parents about this when I find them!”

The mood became sombre as Sean and Nolan exchanged saddened glances.

“There will be plenty of stories to tell when you find your family.” Ian ruffled the boy’s frizzled hair and turned to give Nolan a serious stare. “Finding our friends and family, we can’t give up on something like that, right?”

Thomas’s worried gaze and Steph’s pouting face ran through his mind, and he clenched his fists. While there was virtually no chance that anybody from his social sphere had survived the Interspatial Migration, there still existed a chance that he could reunite with Nyla, and Ian his sister. “You’re right.” He turned to face the lengthy open valley. “Alright guys, let’s get a move on. We’ve got some friends to find.”

They reached the end of the valley in a matter of minutes, their eyes widening at the scenery that opened up ahead of them. Spread out before them was a valley so vast that it seemed as if the mountainous region had completely dwindled away, and Nolan would have believed it were so if he couldn’t make out the distant peaks of snow-capped mountains that walled in the unexpected grassland.

“T—that is Smolen? But that’s impossible.”

Ian was the first to express his incredulity at the massive network of roadways that connected dozens of towns and villages like a large spider web of recently plotted pavement. At the centre of it all resided the largest city that Nolan had seen throughout his entire time in the Dragon’s Tail, at least twice the size of Lowen, the capital of the Three-River Valley. Judging by the extensive urban sprawl, the population of this state exceeded two hundred thousand.

“What’s wrong Ian?”

“Back when my father—when the patriarch had tutored me in geography I never bothered remembering where Smolen was because its population was something in the area of two thousand or so. It was also supposed to be the only settlement in the valley that it resided in.”

“Hate to break it to you Ian,” said Sean, “but I think your sources weren’t too reliable.”

"It's not just that. Why weren’t we able to see it from so high up? I only saw forests.”

“Wow! Look at all of those towns.” Esteban looked up at the others with puppy eyes. “Can we go out to eat tonight?”

“Yeah,” Nolan said. “Out into the wilderness. And I sense some kind of spiritual arrayment, so I’m sure that’s got something to do with why we couldn’t see anything.”

“Aw, come on. Please! I’m tired of sleeping in dirt and taking baths in those creaky barrels.”

“Oh, sorry, is my miracle god-water not good enough for you?”

“You know what he means, kid.”

His stomach happened to grumble as he returned his friends’ stares. “Ah, fine. We’ll spend a night here and then leave early tomorrow morning. We’ll eat something nice, ask around to find out if anybody’s seen the girls, restock on some things and then head out for the Northern Wilderness. Sound good?”

Once everybody agreed, they set off into the valley. They were surrounded by several dozen cultivators at the peak of Profound Entry within a minute of their entry, though Nolan had expected this much as he’d noticed the presence of an unknown arrayment just moments before they’d begun their short sprint.

They paid a fee of one spirit stone per person and accepted the tracking talismans that the local soldiers had handed them, a precautionary measure so that the governors of the valley were aware of the location of any visitors or passersby. They would get their spirit stones back upon leaving their territory, at which point they would have to return the tracking talisman’s to the soldiers posted on the outskirts of the valley.

Looking back on the conflicts within the Three-River Valley, weren’t Ian’s countrymen quite amazing for having possessed such an advanced barrier arrayment when a much larger community like this only had a sensory one that blocked its lands from sight? They had also possessed many more Integration-staged cultivators than any of the communities that he’d visited since embarking on his journey. Such thoughts filled Nolan’s mind as they wandered into a fancy restaurant in Smolen’s central district.

After they had enjoyed a hearty feast the group set off to locate all of the alchemy shops within the city where they emptied them of any ingredients that Nolan deemed necessary. He then had the others help create fifteen more barrels of gunpowder and just as many poisonous smoke bombs. In an area so saturated with mountain caves, the communities within the Dragon’s Tail were in no short supply of cave dust and sun powder, or saltpeter and sulphur respectively. As for charcoal, he was currently in an area that supported many forests much larger than the Amazon back on Earth.

They spent the rest of the evening asking around the city for sightings of the girls, making use of the abundant stock of silver and golden cards that they had saved up throughout all of their hardships until they finally met an old man that claimed to have met them just three days ago. He told them that he’d never forget the sight of the golden-haired girl as she broke a man’s jaw and both of his arms for groping her butt as she stood patiently in line at the Caravan Registration Office. The man worked there throughout the early hours of the day and had personally processed and approved their application. If this man was telling the truth then the two of them had joined a caravan that would travel all the way from Smolen to the garrison town of Tallwood, which resided in a forest of dead trees midway through the northern wilderness.

“Golden hair and golden eyes, black hair and black eyes, both of them young women. It has to be them, Nolan.” Ian lay in his bed on the other side of the room that he and Nolan shared at a large inn within the city’s central district. “What she did to that guy—that sounds just like Lyra. Barton, one of the young masters of the Towering Eaves clan that used to be our friend, once made a move on her. He didn’t wake up for a week.”

"Barton…didn’t I kill that guy?” Come to think of it he’d also obtained a mysterious amulet from the young man’s accomplice during the martial gathering, one said to have been obtained from a Vespasian tomb. He’d have to ask Uncle Grey about it in the future.

“Yeah, you did.”

A brief silence followed, though Nolan eventually broke it. “Whether it’s them or not, this is the best lead we’ve got. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Sleep came and went. Before long the group had exchanged the tracking talismans for their spirit stones and had resumed their sprint northward.

Strong wind resistance whipping at his face, Nolan ignored the tree-filled landscape as it blurred past him on either side. Just a bit longer, Nyla. Just a bit longer and I can finally see you again.