It took a few days, but Serenity was able to convince Andarit to hand the letters over to Ceney to deliver, except for the two intended for Margrave Iron Mountain and Duke Lowpeak. Ceney was already planning how to convince the various country nobles to help, so it only made sense to give her the letters. The only reason they didn’t hand them all over was that they were headed to Lowpeak and that required going through the Mountain Crest Estate.

The only passable land route to Lowpeak required crossing Iron Mountain, since no one wanted to go through the Dead Swamp. Serenity still wasn’t entirely certain what the Dead Swamp was, but apparently it was nasty enough to make going over a mountain easier. Serenity suspected it didn’t require going all the way to the crest of the mountain, but if they were already on the mountain it probably wasn’t too much of a detour as long as the flyer kept working.

He was only bothered by the detour because he still hadn’t been able to get word to Rissa that he was delayed or where to meet him.

If they followed the roads, they’d also pass through Heavenfall, but that was quite a ways out of the way. If they traveled by wagon it would be the better route; even on foot, it might be worthwhile. With a flyer that they could hopefully use for most of the day, it was completely unnecessary.

The only advantage the roads gave was in navigation, and Serenity had now been on Zon long enough that Aide was quite confident in its ability to determine direction using Serenity’s geomagnetic sensors and accelerometers. Serenity still felt a bit odd about having hardware inside himself that really belonged in a phone, but it was hard to argue with Aide’s success and usefulness even without the GPS satellites that Aide often used on Earth.

It also felt a little strange to always know which direction he was facing and how fast he was moving, but Serenity had more or less gotten used to that. It was like always knowing the time; he didn’t pay attention to it most of the time.

It turned out that Serenity could power the flyer for about six hours and only expend about half his mana and essence pools, after his normal regeneration was taken into account. That was as low as he wanted to go, in case they ran into a fight; he didn’t want to have to worry about knocking himself out by pulling his mana too low or being unable to cast spells or Skills.

After a very long break for lunch, rest, and meditation, Serenity was able to manage another four hours of flight that day. It wasn’t nearly as long as they’d be managing if he used some of his monster cores, but it also didn’t use up anything that he couldn’t replace with rest and food.

It was also good to know what his limits were.

The following day, they took a far shorter lunch break and Serenity simply spent the monster cores and let Andarit handle the flying for a couple of hours while he recovered. It was ridiculously expensive in cores for how valuable they were on Zon, but it wasn’t really that bad a rate overall; even with a second recovery time before he did a third flight period, he only spent six tiny monster cores that day.

The third day they actually ran into a ley line shortly before they would have taken the first stop. Serenity stopped early, which confused Andarit. Serenity had to explain that he had “a Skill” that would let him recover his mana at a ley line, then explain what a ley line was.

He’d never tried recovering essence from a ley line, but fortunately it also worked. Serenity was pretty confident that was because he wasn’t just moving the mana from the ley line to his own mana pool; instead, he was consuming it and generating mana and essence at a vastly increased rate.

Not that he’d mentioned essence to Andarit yet. She seemed to think that he was using some sort of odd Skill to replace the mana-converting plate to run the flyer instead of direct mana and essence control. It wasn’t worth disabusing her of the notion. It was likely that such Skills existed, after all, and it was certainly less dangerous than trying to learn to directly use essence. Serenity still didn’t know how to teach that.

One of these days he really needed to ask Russ how he did it.

The end of the fourth day brought them to the base of the Iron Mountain. It was a giant mountain, clearly dominating the countryside. The sides were surprisingly straight, even though they weren’t vertical. They rose at somewhere around a sixty-degree angle from the ground.

The mountain was strange, as there was very little plant life growing on it. Serenity expected horizontal lines in the rock and he found them, but the biggest noticeable feature was that the rock often changed color at the more or less horizontal lines. While much of Iron Mountain was red, the color of rust, there were patches of yellow, green, brown, and black. There were even some patches that were a shiny silver-gray.

All in all, it looked like a mountain made of iron, which had to be where the name came from.

Unfortunately, they’d arrived at a point on the mountain’s side where there simply wasn’t a path up the mountain. That was probably the answer to why the route went through the Mountain’s Crest Estate as well, when Serenity thought about it: the path was the only way that was passable if the mountain was this steep all over.

As they moved along the mountainside the following day, Serenity could see that the mountain wasn’t the same steepness. That particular slope was one of the steepest. Unfortunately, while they were able to cross some spots that were piles of loose rock that had clearly fallen from the mountain, nothing actually let them make real progress up the mountainside until the end of the fifth day when they found the road. It had to be the one that led from Heavenfall to the Mountain’s Crest Estate; there was simply no other major road that went up Iron Mountain.

By Serenity’s reckoning, even with the single day’s delay to find the road, they’d saved more than a week of travel time by going directly towards the mountain. It would be more than that if he assumed they were walking or riding in a wagon instead of using the flyer.

Serenity was happy with his (and Aide’s) navigation. For all that he’d aimed at the point where the road entered the mountain and missed it by quite some distance, he was fairly confident that the problem wasn’t his navigation; instead, the problem was the map. He knew it wasn’t really to scale, since it was really more about the distances on the road, but he’d done the best he could to cope with that. He was even confident about which direction to head to get to the road, because if he’d been off in the other direction they’d have found the road early. If they somehow missed that it was a road, they’d have run into the Dead Swamp, and Serenity was certain that would be obvious.

Missing by a day’s travel and being correct about the direction to head to fix it wasn’t bad given the map quality.

They hadn’t passed any people or anything hostile as they traveled cross-country, so naturally they broke both streaks right before they actually reached the road.

It started with shouting in the distance, away from the mountain. It quickly turned to screaming and Serenity turned the flyer towards whatever was happening. Serenity had been considering finding a place to rest for the night, but he didn’t want it to be near anything that would cause screaming. He needed to either run away immediately or investigate.

The problem with running away without knowing what you were running from was that you didn’t know if you’d run far enough or not. You didn’t even know if you’d actually needed to run; you might well end up running from something you could have easily killed.

The problem with investigating was that it took time that could have been better used running if it really was something that you needed to run from.

Serenity knew all that, and he knew he needed to protect Andarit, but he also knew that the shouting and screaming he was hearing was the sound of noncombatants under attack. People who were used to fighting simply reacted differently.

Keeping Andarit away from fighting wasn’t his job; that would only harm her future. Finding out what was going on was clearly the right choice, and keeping Andarit on the flyer with him was clearly the better option as well.

It wasn’t long before the first group of people came into view. They were running as fast as they could along the road towards the mountain. If they’d been screaming earlier, they’d long since stopped to save their breath, but there was still shouting coming from farther on.

“What’s chasing you?” Andarit called out, preempting Serenity’s similar question.

Only one of the three people even looked up, and even he didn’t stop running. “Dead … swamp …” He sounded like he could barely spare the breath to speak. None of them said anything more as they ran past the flyer headed in the opposite direction.

Serenity frowned. It still wasn’t clear what the problem was, but it was probably some monster coming out of the Dead Swamp. He really should have asked more questions, even if no one wanted to talk about it at all; for example, was it a swamp that had died or was it a swamp full of the dead?

He kept them moving and it was less than a minute before they were close enough to see the fight in the distance. There was a clear circle of stones just off the road on the side away from the swamp. Several wagons were stopped in the circle; Serenity could see people hiding behind and under the wagons. The remains of what looked like dinner were scattered around a firepit at the center of the circle.

There were no more people running away from the circle; it seemed like only the three they’d already seen had chosen to run.

A handful of people were fighting other people that seemed to be attacking from the road. The attackers weren’t armed, while the defenders were, but there were far fewer defenders and the attackers didn’t seem to care about injuries.

Serenity frowned. They were entirely too close to something with Dead in the name for him to dismiss the idea of undead without checking, so he pushed on his new Magesight the same way he’d once pushed to trigger Vital Sight. For a moment, his eyes glowed with the blue-white fire usually attributed to undead, but the shade quickly changed to be a little more purple and less blue.

Yes, the attackers had a Vital Affinity aligned with either Death or Undeath; both were present.

Serenity carefully remembered to turn off the active portion of his magesight. He didn’t yet know if it made his eyes glow like Vital Sight did, but it was likely and Sillon had thrown things at him too many times for Serenity to forget. This time, at least. He’d be able to feel who was alive and who was undead when he was closer.

He hoped this was as simple as it seemed. Serenity knew the plight of undeath all too well and knew that living people had a tendency to attack undead even without a reason to. On the other hand, the people hiding under the wagons were generally alive; that implied the undead were the attackers.

If he was lucky, the undead wouldn’t be sapient. That was always preferable.