Beyond the mountain range where Noel had spent those last months training, Roberto walked at an easy pace as if he had nowhere important to be. The air was colder there, thinner, touched by the same wild mana that had shaped the beasts of the range for centuries, yet he moved through it with the comfort of someone returning to a familiar road.
Behind him, far enough to blur into shifting silhouettes between stone and fog, something vast was moving. Many things, in fact. Heavy bodies. Crawling shapes. Wings passing across broken moonlight. An army, if one insisted on calling it that, though there was nothing human in the rhythm of its advance.
Beside Roberto, a stone golem kept pace with slow, thunderous steps. Its body was rough and asymmetrical, built from dark slabs of mountain rock fused into a crude humanoid shape. It had no face worth naming, only a heavy head with dim light buried in the cracks, yet it turned slightly toward Roberto every so often as if listening.
