From the fog, where no one could see nor sense ahead of them, emanated a low hum. They followed it. In the sourceless, even fog, aside from watching the earth to see how it changed, whether the path was mossy, rocky, or twisted with roots, there was no way to tell whether they were progressing, or walking in loops. The hum gave them something to walk toward, a goal to reach. Even if they didn’t know what caused the hum, or where the hum issued from, at least walking toward it would get them somewhere, even if that ‘somewhere’ was nothing but the source of the hum.

  “I wonder if we should’ve gone around,” Ike commented.

  “Eh. Where’s your sense of adventure?” Wisp replied.

  “I thought we did this because we were too lazy to find another way through.”

  “Well, we did already kill those stone people thingies. Plus, I thought there’d be more of them this way. I couldn’t eat them, but they were fun to punch.”

  “What were they, speaking of? They didn’t seem like puppets or transformed humans,” Ike commented.

  Wisp scoffed. “Typical human, always thinking so human-centric. Why would they be transformed humans? Why not transformed spiders, huh?”

  Ike started to nod, allowing her point. After all, there were thousands of sentient beings in this world. Humans weren’t the only. They were common, but there were plenty of other sentient beings, like Wisp and Mag, and even Palio, the centaur. And then he stopped and narrowed his eyes at Wisp. “They were human-shaped, that’s why!”

  Wisp cackled. “I got you for a second, didn’t I?”

  “They’re not humans, so your point stands, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t transformed spiders,” Ike finished, crossing his arms.

  She chuckled for another few seconds, then shook her head, recovering. “I expect they’re some kind of golem or something. I don’t know. I know I’m a deeply intelligent and wise being simply stuffed full of boundless knowledge and wisdom—”

  “No one ever said that,” Ike interjected.

  “—but I can’t recognize every living creature in this region. And this isn’t even my region, or your region, so it doesn’t count at all.”

  “They didn’t have cores or skills, so who cares,” Ike declared.

  “They were all the same,” Mag suddenly piped up.

  Both of them looked at him.

  He looked up at them, tilting his head in a very birdlike manner. “The same. They were all one being. Pieces of the wall, not people in of themselves. You can’t kill one beast and expect to find a skill every time.”

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  “Oh. So they were all one thing. Like how all the ants make up one mage… but the wall was one thing, that broke into many, rather than many things that combine to make one mage. Backwards from the ants,” Ike concluded, then paused. His thoughts had come out all choppy, in pieces. But he’d gotten the essence across, right?

  “Yes. I think,” Wisp said, squinting at him.

  “Did we kill all of them?” Ike asked, glancing over at Mag.

  Mag bobbed. “It died. But there was no skill.”

  “Nothing shiny that a certain bird might have pilfered for himself?”

  Mag puffed up, instantly infuriated. “I did not! There was no skill. No skill! You’re only doubting me because it’s me! If it was Wisp, you wouldn’t doubt her.”

  “Wisp doesn’t obsess over shiny things,” Ike explained.

  “This is discrimination,” Mag muttered, still puffed up and hopping mad.

  Ike turned away, suppressing a smile. Mag could be very hard to take seriously sometimes. There was too much bird to his gestures, and there was nothing threatening about a big fluffy bird hopping around in harmless anger. In fact, it was actively adorable rather than frightening.

  Wisp grinned at him, all but guessing his thoughts. “But I’m big and scary, aren’t I?”

  “Shut up. You’re a spider. You have a natural advantage at being frightening,” Ike shot back.

  The hum grew louder. Separate tones opened up out of the hum, singing forth one at a time. Ike paused for a moment, listening. The different tones led different ways through the fog, each one drawing them in a different direction.

  “Well, this looks like a puzzle. Or should I say, sounds?” Wisp said.

  “How do you feel about puzzles, Wisp?” Ike asked.

  She scrunched up her nose. “Fuckin’ hate them. They get between me and the fun part. All I wanna do is punch things and eat ‘em, and sometimes there’s a box in between me and the fun, and then they call that box a puzzle.”

  Ike nodded. He activated the King, holding out his scepter. “What if I cleared this puzzle? Made things a little easier for us?”

  Wisp’s eyes widened. She clapped, excited. “I like that.”

  Ike chuckled. Swirling the scepter, he slammed it down and, for the first time, actively threw power into the rod. Mana whirled, rushing into the scepter, and as it whirled, so too, did the fog. Whatever strange form of mana was condensed in the fog was unwound and drawn into the scepter, just the same as mana was.

  The fog spun wildly, whirling into a tornado as it poured into the top of the rod. The area immediately around them cleared out, and the rod kept pulling. From a tornado, into a hurricane, the fog all around them spinning as it drained down into the scepter, and into Ike.

  Whu-oh. Ike’s core rapidly filled. Only a quarter of the fog had vanished, and his core was already trembling, struggling to hold all the mana filling it up. He instinctively pitched forward as though he were about to puke, though there was nothing in his stomach, and that wouldn’t have solved the problem anyways.

  “Bit off more than you can chew?” Wisp asked in a knowing voice, even though she’d been all for this moments ago.

  “Little bit…” Ike focused inward. He pushed the mana down, compressing it tighter into his core. He didn’t really want to start activating techniques here, in case a storm showed up, and then he had the problem of fog all over again. Better to hold on to all of this… but that meant pushing it down, down, down. Holding onto all of it wasn’t going to be easy, not when there was this much.

  Let me help, the Prince whispered.

  Ike eyed him. How could he help? He’d turned into some kind of hideous monster. Ike had no interest in that kind of thing, so he hadn’t tried to use the Prince’s skill yet; he’d planned on saving it for a last-ditch panic moment, when he had nothing else left to turn to.

  The Prince laughed. It’s not like that. Let me show you.

  Ike mentally shrugged, and let the Prince activate his own skill. There was a great surge of mana. Mana drained wildly from his core. In a split second, all the pain was relieved, even as the King’s mana kept pouring in.

  “Whoa…” Wisp muttered.

  Ike stared. Holy shit!

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