"Should we head straight for the volcano?" Akane asked, pointing at the distant peak.
"No rush," Liam said.
He stepped off the edge of the Nimbus cloud and fell.
Aoi spun around. "What is he—"
"Catching a bone wolf," Shizuku said, without looking up from the Ickshonpe Katocha research files she was still reading.
The wind picked Liam up before he'd fallen twenty meters. Not caught him, exactly. He pushed aura out through his feet and the air responded the way wind responds to anything that gives it a shape: by becoming that shape. His descent slowed, leveled, held. He hung in the air above the desert while the quicksand below began moving toward him from every direction, drawn in by some territorial instinct the bone wolves apparently shared with actual wolves.
Three dark pressure points manifested behind him, one after another, building.
The wind around his body doubled in intensity, then tripled. His hair and clothes went sideways and stayed there. He narrowed the radius of the air he was controlling, compressing it, driving the quicksand back outward into a spreading ring with an empty core. In the empty core, he could hear everything. The sound of sand grains tumbling against each other. The much faster sound beneath that: a rapid, rhythmic scraping, something large moving through the substrate at speed.
He pressed his palms together, edge-forward, and pushed a concentrated blade of transmuted wind downward.
The dune split open along a line ten meters long.
A bone wolf erupted from the sand, severed through the midsection, the two halves separating cleanly and tumbling in different directions. Large, this one. Bigger than the ones Shizuku had cut earlier. Liam went after it.
Four more bone wolves broke the surface around him simultaneously and leapt.
The dark pressure points behind him pulsed and the wind sphere expanded outward in a spinning burst, a wall of constantly cycling blades rotating around his body at arm's length. The bone wolves hit it from four angles and came apart instantly, ribs and vertebrae and skull fragments scattering into the sand below.
The technique was less elegant than Shizuku's chainsaw. Hers was a fixed construct, stable geometry, Transmutation aura channeled through a precisely defined form. That precision was what made it lethal. His version distributed the same property across a moving, formless medium, which meant the cutting power was inconsistent: concentrated in some places, diffuse in others, dependent on which direction the wind happened to be spiraling at the moment of contact.
By his rough estimate, Shizuku's chainsaw could cut through sustained hardening from an opponent with roughly twice her own aura. His wind blades, at the same aura investment, would cut through maybe half that. The gap was real. Her approach was simply better at the specific task of cutting things.
What he had that she didn't was the wind doing other things simultaneously: lifting, misdirecting, listening.
He landed beside the lower half of the large bone wolf, picked it up by one hind leg, and pressed his palm to the femur.
Star Mark. He had no idea whether this would work on something that apparently had no biology in the conventional sense. It was worth finding out.
The pull was immediate. The wolf's upper half, half-buried in sand five meters away, lurched toward him like something had grabbed it from inside and yanked. Joint by joint, the two sections drew together, ribs linking, spine reconnecting, skull settling back onto the cervical vertebrae with a sound like someone cracking their knuckles.
The bone wolf stood up. Approximately the height of Liam's shoulder.
It stared at him with its empty sockets.
He stared back.
"Go tell the sand to settle down," he said.
The wolf continued staring at him.
Around them, the sand had started moving again. The small bone wolves from before were surfacing at the perimeter, keeping distance, watching.
Liam waited another few seconds. The bone wolf did not go tell the sand anything.
"So you don't control the sand," he said.
He jumped back up to the Nimbus cloud.
The bone wolf watched him go for a moment, then, apparently having made some decision, began loping along beneath the cloud. The other wolves at the perimeter watched this, conferred in whatever way bone wolves confer, and one by one dropped back into the quicksand and were gone.
They flew past the desert perimeter and the terrain changed. Cracked rock first, then patches of dry soil, then something that qualified as mud. Scrub grass appeared in the crevices. It spread and thickened and shifted color from yellow to green over the distance of a few hundred meters. By the time they reached the treeline at the base of the nearest peak, the landscape had completed a transition that should have taken a climate zone, not a short walk.
The bone wolf stopped at the edge of the desert. It sat down, looked at the trees, then looked at Liam with its hollow sockets.
"Fair enough," Liam said.
They went into the forest on foot.
The Nimbus drifted along above the canopy. Aoi had opted for ground again, which Liam privately respected as a consistent commitment to a decision that kept producing consequences.
He released his En quietly, without announcing it. Eighty meters in every direction, the aura field moved outward like a slow exhale, settling into the ground, tracing the shapes of root systems and fallen branches and the boundary conditions between things. He didn't mention it. There was no reason to.
Shizuku, who always noticed, gave no visible sign that she'd noticed.
They walked. The light shifted from late afternoon toward evening. Somewhere in the forest, birds were doing bird things at high volume. Aoi was carrying the pack again, apparently undeterred by the earlier quicksand incident, and she and Akane were talking about the trees.
"These ones aren't moving," Akane said.
"I can see that," Aoi said.
"I'm just noting it."
They stopped for a rest when both sisters independently mentioned that they were hungry, which happened within about thirty seconds of each other. Aoi pulled food and water out of the travel pack and distributed it with the methodical efficiency of someone who had grown up in a household where you didn't assume there would be enough.
"Why do you look so delighted about this?" Liam asked, watching Akane eat a rice ball with the focused intensity of someone attending a religious experience.
The sisters exchanged a look and laughed slightly, the private shorthand of people who share a reference.
"We always thought traveling was something other people did," Akane said. "Rich people. People with time."
"Picnics especially," Aoi added.
"Picnics especially." Akane gestured at the forest, the food, the general implausibility of their current situation. "This."
"Shizuku used to travel," Liam said. "Budget travel, but a lot of it."
Shizuku, who was sitting beside him eating with the composed efficiency she applied to most tasks, added: "Liam said he was starting an organization and he needed a second in command. I joined."
Aoi looked up. "Can we join?"
"You're too young," Liam said.
"Is that the only reason?"
"There's also the question of being too weak."
Aoi considered this. Her expression shifted from disappointment to something that looked like relief. Being told you weren't old enough was a fixed barrier. Being told you weren't strong enough was a project.
"Okay," she said, and went back to her rice ball.
They packed up and kept walking.
The trees here were old, widely spaced, the kind that had been standing long enough to develop their own character. Nothing obviously wrong with them. Liam walked and talked with decreasing frequency, which Shizuku eventually noticed because she noticed everything.
She didn't say anything about it.
"This mountain is very tall," Aoi said, looking up through the canopy. "We've been walking a long time."
"We could take the cloud," Akane offered.
"No rush," Liam said. He tilted his head at the sky, already heading toward dark. "Getting late. Let's camp and continue in the morning."
Nobody questioned this. Akane began looking for a flat stretch of ground.
Under the reach of his En, in the growing dark between the trees, Liam registered something that hadn't been there twenty minutes ago. A tree, forty meters to the northeast, was now approximately six meters north of where it had been.
It had moved while they were having the picnic.
He sat down next to Shizuku and said nothing about it.