The mountains no longer felt unfamiliar. When Noel had first arrived, the range had seemed endless and hostile, a maze of cliffs, broken ridges, and unstable mana currents that twisted through the stone like invisible storms.
Now he moved through it with quiet certainty. The slopes, the hunting paths carved by beasts over years of survival, the valleys where mana storms gathered when the weather turned—he knew them all.
He knew which cliffs housed winged predators large enough to hunt armored travelers, which caverns belonged to creatures that only moved at night, which ravines were safe to cross and which ones hid things that should never be disturbed.
The creature in front of him was another example of how far his understanding of the range had grown. It was enormous even by mountain standards, its body resembling a fusion of bear and reptile, thick mineralized plates covering its back like natural armor.
