The girl could feel her heart racing. Even so, she drew a deep breath and forced herself to calm down.
"Ahhh, it really is cold," she whispered, watching her breath crystallize between her hands.
Her current situation?
A prisoner, she thought.
Before being captured, she had fought back as best she could, but once her strength ran out, she had been locked inside a luxurious room. Both the floor and the ceiling were white.
At only eleven years old, she was now completely alone.
She had been chained on top of a sandbox, which restricted her movements; however, because she was still small, she could at least sit somewhat comfortably.
"To be honest, this is pretty uncomfortable... Ah! Come on, Ingrid, this is no time to get worked up!"
She slapped her cheeks several times before taking another series of deep breaths.
The girl was named Ingrid. She had long, cream-colored hair that had once been straight but was now hopelessly disheveled. Her cold amber eyes flashed with a faint trace of anger. She wore a dirty dress that faded through shades of red, leaving both her arms and legs exposed, while long, dark stockings—now torn—covered her thighs. Her clothing was somewhat luxurious, befitting the daughter of merchants.
Her village had been attacked by the Fallen not long ago. They were humanlike beings distinguished by two unique traits.
First: they had horns.
Second: every one of them bore a red mark resembling two wings somewhere on their body.
Anyone who came face-to-face with one of them would be paralyzed with fear, and the effect on children hardly needed to be explained. Ingrid, however, discarded all those unnecessary feelings: fear, hunger, uncertainty, pain...
With a single breath, she buried them all and set the gears in her head turning.
It wasn't that Ingrid felt no fear or pain, nor was she some kind of machine. She had simply decided to ignore them because they were unnecessary at the moment.
And anything unnecessary had to be discarded.
After all, Ingrid was a citizen of Longer too.
"Metal box..."
Her eyes opened.
When she had been captured, Ingrid had remained conscious, so she remembered being locked inside a metal box during the journey. Taking that small clue, she murmured:
"Putting a child inside a metal box isn't particularly clever. Using this kind of prison instead of one with simple bars is... stupid."
If all they wanted was to kidnap children, a wooden box would have been enough. A child simply didn't have the strength to break a thick stick with their bare hands, let alone escape a proper wooden enclosure.
Using steel was excessive.
"But it'll work in my favor."
Carefully, she placed a finger against the sand inside her box. She didn't move it yet.
"Time, distance..."
Her eyes narrowed slightly, as though she were whispering to herself.
"And direction. If I know those three things, I can figure out where I ended up."
Three variables that would lead her to an answer.
A plan had begun taking shape inside her small head.
From the very beginning, Ingrid had refused to die—or even spend much time locked inside this room.
"Let's begin."
Getting out of the room was the least of her concerns. After all, handcuffs had keys, and so did the lock on the door. If she could find a way to replicate them, anything secured by a lock could be opened. And as for avoiding detection, all she needed to do was hide and remain quiet.
The real problem is what I'll do once I'm outside. Direction, specifically. Am I in hostile territory? Was I taken out of the country? Or even off the continent? Once my foot is outside this room, which direction should I run?
There could be no mistakes.
She needed to know everything beforehand.
That was why determining her exact location was so important.
But first, she needed to determine the time.
"Time, huh?"
Calculating time mentally was foolish. There were alternatives, of course, and methods for doing it, but from the moment she had entered the box, Ingrid had discarded every inaccurate method and chosen one of her own.
"The Epic of the White Knights..."
The epic was a chant.
And because it was a chant, it had to be recited precisely, at a predetermined tone and rhythm. Like a synchronized dance, neither too slow nor too fast.
And that synchronization came with a considerable advantage...
It could be measured.
"The Epic of the White Knights lasts exactly ten minutes. Not a second more, not a second less."
One of the few things Ingrid was grateful to her parents for was that they had always forced her to keep its rhythm perfectly.
"I worked incredibly hard to learn it without making a single mistake. Ten minutes... exactly ten minutes."
Then Ingrid remembered a woman's voice echoing inside her head.
"A girl must be perfect. Not a single note more or less than necessary. And just as you control what you eat, you must control your singing. Exactly ten minutes: take away a second and it means you're too fat; add a second and it means you're anemic. Be perfect!"
"Exactly ten minutes. From the moment the carriage started moving, I repeated the Epic of the White Knights without stopping."
Her finger began moving across the wood, writing in the sand as she spoke. The words came out monotonously, without the slightest pause for thought.
"I repeated the song about 144 times. Without interruption. If I'm not mistaken, judging by the tears in my stockings..."
Of course, Ingrid wasn't a genius.
She couldn't keep track of the count while simultaneously repeating the song in her head. For that, she had used her stockings.
Every time she counted, she made a tiny hole in them with her fingernail.
Systematically, in order, along her right leg, she had recorded the length of the journey.
Then...
"144 times. That's 1,440 minutes. In other words, one full day of travel."
The time had been recorded.
Now came the direction.
"Direction... north, south, east, and west."
That, too, she had accounted for.
"I already said that using a metal box was a stupid idea. First..."
Her finger began moving across the sand again, recording each detail.
"The sun rises in the east. And the metal they used heats up very quickly. Naturally, whichever side was exposed directly to the sun became hotter when it faced it. I never moved while inside the box. I repeatedly placed my hand against each side and felt the temperature at every stop."
"When we started moving, the right side of the box began heating up more than the others. That meant it was the east—the direction from which the sun rises."
Right was east.
Left was west.
Forward was north.
Behind Ingrid was south.
"Besides, if I take the song's recitation into account, that gives me the following results."
With all the information assembled, Ingrid began scribbling in the sand.
Then...
"First, we traveled north for forty-five minutes. Then west for ten. South for twelve minutes. West for thirty-four... We stopped for fifteen minutes. South for twenty-two..."
And so it continued until the entire day had been accounted for.
The cardinal directions were, of course, also recorded on Ingrid's clothing, this time on her right stocking. She had used one of her earrings to scratch the directions into it. She had also added time markers, assigning a number to each interval according to the chants or verses she had recited.
With that, she had determined both the cardinal direction in which the carriage had traveled and the estimated duration of every change.
"I should be grateful that I was captured in the morning, right as the sun was rising. Now, distance."
She had the direction.
She had the time.
But how could she calculate distance?
Calculating speed while trapped inside a box was impossible.
So how could distance be calculated without knowing speed?
"Simple. I have something better..."
Her eyes sharpened.
"Geography!"
If a vehicle climbed a slope, the body could sense it, but sensing wasn't the same as knowing. There was, however, something that could tell her for certain.
Water.
"If you put it in a container, you can see how it levels itself because of gravity. And from the angle it forms, we can tell whether we're going uphill, downhill, or traveling along level ground."
Of course, Ingrid didn't have any water.
The only thing she had managed to recover from her pockets was a small artifact-like vial that glowed whenever it was shaken.
But what good was an empty vial for determining the slope of a road?
Well...
"There is another solution... Although it's a little denser than water."
The answer was obvious.
"Saliva..."
Ingrid had filled the vial with saliva.
Whenever they climbed a slope, the saliva indicated the incline by its angle; the same applied whenever they descended. And thanks to the bumps along the road shaking the carriage, Ingrid didn't need to shake the vial herself to make it glow.
It did that on its own.
In fact, whenever it went dark, the vial told her they had stopped.
That was why Ingrid could now examine the marks on her skirt—marks she had made by fraying some of its threads—and determine whether the carriage had climbed or descended.
Of course, she had also made several marks that could be cross-referenced against the time.
There was no need to compare them against direction.
Time was the common denominator between the two.
Then...
"First, we traveled in a straight line for thirty minutes while heading west. Then I went north along a steep road for about ten minutes. Five-minute stop. Southwest for forty-five minutes along level ground. Then another fifteen minutes in the same direction, but uphill... Two hours climbing north, followed by fifteen minutes in a straight line toward the south. We descended for at least three hours: south first, then east."
She spoke without stopping, comparing the frayed threads of her skirt with one hand while writing in the sand with the other, all while her mind pieced together the information.
Before long, she had created the image of a road in the sand, complete with possible stops and detours.
The next part was something else she had to thank her parents for.
Apparently, today she had quite a lot to thank them for.
Using a mental map, she plotted a possible change in terrain and compared it with a map drawn in the sand, doing her best to maintain the proper scale. She matched the recorded times against the possible routes.
And the truth revealed itself.
They had taken the main road until reaching an alternate route, climbed the great mountain, and descended through its ravines. Eventually, they had returned to two or three main roads for short stretches before finally descending into a vast valley.
The conclusion was clear.
"I'm about 150 kilometers inside the Valley of Wolves, near the border with the Kingdom of Beltras... My calculation could be off by four or five kilometers, but considering there are no structures of any significant size in that area except Duke Monacar's estate and two nearby cabins..."
She paused.
"Judging by the construction and the walls, even without a crest, I can be certain that I'm in the main mansion. Besides, the nearest cabin to the main house is fifteen kilometers away."
At this point, she had even been able to calculate their speed.
Through a combination of calculation and intuition, Ingrid had worked it out with almost absurd precision.
And, naturally, she had already formulated her escape plan: the most efficient route, the possible escape paths, the roads and detours, and the amount of time each would take.
Besides, it was the rainy season.
She couldn't rush things.
Everything had to be done in its own time.
Slowly.
Precisely.
"And now I know how to get out and where to go. More importantly, I know the safest place nearby. Good."
Ingrid spoke to no one in particular.
"Looks like I'm winning this one."
With that, Ingrid finished mapping her exact location.
Her problem had never been freeing herself from the chains or escaping the room.
Her real concern had always been what came afterward.
Without knowing where she was, there was no way to know where she should go. And considering she was only a child, she couldn't simply run indefinitely in some random direction and hope nobody caught her.
Nor was she some prodigy capable of identifying her location simply by stepping outside and looking at the scenery.
"The safest option is to run farther west. That will take me toward the wall. And then..."
From the very beginning, Ingrid had firmly rejected the idea of dying.
"All right. Now I can worry about getting out of these chains. First, breathe..."
As long as she hadn't been taken off the central continent, her only option was to escape and seek refuge among the soldiers stationed throughout the area due to its proximity to the Wall of the Races.
There wasn't a single point within five kilometers of the valley where she couldn't find some kind of racial checkpoint.
Once she escaped, reaching one of them would be easy.
Ingrid believed this plan, impractical as it might be, was her best option.
She clenched her fist and convinced herself of it.
But then a tiny light flickered behind her closed eyelids, and Ingrid's gears ground to a halt once again.
"I wonder how the others are doing. Ahgg! It's annoying to be treated like this just because I'm a girl! Ahhh... No, I need to calm down."
She shook her head.
Once she finished sorting through her thoughts, another concern flooded her heart.
That was simply how she was.
When she wasn't busy thinking, she was busy worrying.
Her friends.
She had no idea what had happened to them.
Ingrid hated having no clues whatsoever—not even enough to form a theory.
"I'm sure Grandpa and those two little ones are fine. As always, Mom and Dad weren't in the village, so I don't have to worry about them. Come on, calm down and think about something else."