The Sansame continent, if viewed from sufficient altitude, looked like a chicken leg turned upside down. Liam had learned this from the research packet Ickshonpe Katocha had sent, which had also contained topographic surveys, incident reports, missing-persons statistics organized by year, and a wildlife study conducted by a Hunter named Kite who apparently made a habit of going places where sensible people didn't.
The northernmost tip of that chicken leg was where Freier Mountain sat, which put it firmly in the northwest corner of the known world. On a map, the mountain range looked unremarkable. Up close, according to everything Ickshonpe Katocha had compiled, it was considerably more interesting.
Liam and Shizuku read through the files in the airship's lounge while Akane and Aoi had apparently decided that impending danger was no reason to skip dessert and were somewhere in the direction of the buffet car.
The mountain was geologically deranged. Active volcanoes on one flank. Ice fields on the north face, year-round, somehow not melting. Severe desertification on the southern approach. The three conditions coexisted in the same mountain range with complete indifference to each other, like housemates who had agreed not to discuss the arrangement.
This made it a tourist destination.
Liam accepted this about the world. The Zoldyck family estate, a literal assassination compound, ran a tourist entrance route. A mountain range with active volcanoes, glaciers, and desert was, by comparison, practically a wellness retreat.
The strange stories had accumulated over years of tourism. Hikers straying into the desert and falling into sand whirlpools, only for their intact skeletons to surface elsewhere days later. Climbers on the ice fields who vanished without trace. Groups of skeletons observed moving through the deep mountain forest under their own power. Trees that relocated between visits.
The online forums had settled on "Freier Mountain is a living mountain" as their working theory. This had not reduced the number of tourists. If anything, the opposite.
Liam skimmed Kite's wildlife survey. There were notes on a species found nowhere else on the continent: a wolf-like creature with a skeletal structure unlike any known biological template, all white bone and hollow joints, fast and apparently territorial. Kite had categorized it, noted its habitat range, and moved on. No mention of what happened when you broke one into pieces.
He filed this away for later.
The airship docked at a landing platform near the southern foothills. Most passengers filed off in cheerful clusters, comparing tour guide brochures and taking photographs of the mountain's dramatic silhouette. The off-road vehicles waiting to carry them to the main attraction were painted in four different colors, the guides shouting over each other about scenic overlooks and thermal vent selfie spots.
Liam bought a map from the nearest stall. The topographic detail extended to about ten kilometers inward from the southern perimeter. Everything beyond that point was marked with skull icons.
"Okay," Akane said, reading over his shoulder. "And we're going past the skulls."
"Probably." He handed the map to Shizuku. "Netero pointed us somewhere. It's not going to be in the souvenir zone."
Aoi had already volunteered to carry the supply pack, which she was now wearing with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had not yet done ten kilometers of desert on foot. They bought water and rations, redistributed the weight, and headed into the sand.
The southern approach was pure desert: rolling dunes, loose surface, deep pockets of unstable ground concealed under a convincing crust. Liam's first several steps introduced him personally to this feature. One foot sank to the ankle immediately. The other found solid footing. He adjusted.
From the tourist group ahead of them came a series of shouts and one genuine scream, followed by the sound of a tour guide explaining, in the patient tone of someone who had explained this exact thing four hundred times, that guests were requested to stay on the marked trail.
Liam and Shizuku picked up the cadence of the terrain within a few minutes: test the surface with intent, commit through the balls of the feet, transfer weight smoothly. The sand read differently under someone who was paying attention. They moved steadily.
Beside them, Akane's Nimbus drifted a meter off the ground in a relaxed figure-eight, golden and unhurried. She and Aoi had boarded it shortly after leaving the dock, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the cloud could sense weight and they were going to let it do its job.
Aoi, for reasons she had not fully explained even to herself, had decided to walk instead.
She made it to roughly the seven-kilometer mark.
The dune she was descending had a false edge. Her foot went through the crust, then her leg, then she was sliding, and the slope was feeding her directly into a quicksand basin that was doing something no natural quicksand was supposed to do: rotating. A proper spiral, slow and methodical, pulling inward from the perimeter.
"Ah!"
Akane was already moving before the second syllable. Nimbus dropped fast and low, angling under Aoi's trajectory. She caught her sister's wrist and the cloud absorbed the momentum, holding altitude.
Something exploded out of the quicksand below.
A wolf, if you used the term loosely. All bone and no tissue: white ribs curved around nothing, articulated spine, hollow sockets where eyes would have been. It came up at speed, aimed directly at Aoi still dangling under the cloud, jaw open. It did not look like something that had died and left its skeleton behind. It looked like something that had never been anything else.
Shizuku's chainsaw materialized in a horizontal arc. Twelve meters of serrated chain hit the wolf across the midsection and broke it into four separate sections, which fell back into the sand.
They heard clicking.
The sections assembled themselves. Joint by joint, rib to rib, vertebrae reconnecting in sequence. The wolf reformed, shook its skull once, and looked up at Shizuku with the patient expression of something that had done this before.
Then it turned and dropped back into the sand, moving fast, the bones rippling through the surface like a fish through water.
Liam watched it go.
"Kite's notes didn't mention the reforming," he said.
"No," Shizuku agreed.
"Or the quicksand control."
"Also no."
The sand around them shifted. Not randomly: in a pattern, a deliberate surge moving toward them from multiple directions simultaneously. Several other sand basins in the area were rotating now, and more skeleton wolves were rising at the perimeter, hanging back, watching.
The ground under Liam and Shizuku tilted and then dropped. A vortex opened directly beneath them.
Liam pulled Shizuku's hand, let his aura out as a current, pushed it under his feet, and went up. Not flight, exactly. A sustained launch, wind transmutation pressing from below, carrying them clear of the basin's reach as the sand folded inward where they'd been standing.
Shizuku threw chainsaw after chainsaw into the wolves coming up at them, crushing them piecemeal, buying altitude. They broke and reformed and broke again, relentless.
"They're herding us," Liam said.
Aoi reached down from Nimbus, arm extended. Akane had already expanded the cloud as far as she could manage, but it was still too small for four, and the wolves were closing the gap below.
Liam reached into his aura and brought out the Yin Nen Sword, which was less a physical object than a coherent intention that had chosen to exist as a blade. He pressed it once against Akane's sternum, gently, and began pushing aura through the connection.
The feedback was immediate. Nimbus responded to the additional input the way a fire responds to fresh wood: expansion, acceleration, stabilization. The cloud grew outward from its center, smoothing and widening, until it had enough surface area for all four of them to stand on with room to spare, roughly the size of a picnic blanket hung from the sky.
The skeleton wolves below looked up at them from the sand.
Liam pulled the sword back and looked down at the desert.
"Right," he said. "So they can do that."