To put it bluntly, Frusen thought Reoloy was a fraud.
He survived the harsh southern seas and, apparently, got "chosen" by the Great Guardian. Managed to win favour from the chieftain and Master Marnsteil within a matter of days. Then walked into a forest trial that escalated into the most severe incident Cardana had seen in recent memory—and supposedly ended it.
It was too clean. Overly convenient, even.
If anything, Frusen suspected the boy wasn't some prodigy at all, but someone feeding on the hopes and expectations of dreamers. It wouldn't even surprise him if the entire incident had been engineered by his own hands.
His grey eyes sharpened, dragging like a blade across Reoloy's back.
The boy noticed. Of course he did. He just didn't react.
"How far are we from where things get rough?"
Frusen blinked, pulled out of his suspicion by the question.
"...The path narrows soon," he said plainly. "We could climb more easily if you had hovers."
Reoloy shook his head, a faint smile forming as he adjusted his restored deep black jumpsuit.
He felt natural again.
"I was offered the same grade of equipment you militia guys use, but it's handcrafted by Gordoi to the exact specifications of the wearer. It would take too long to get them ready."
And beyond that, there were the immediate issues—no one in town wore hovers his size, so he couldn't borrow any. Even if they did, learning to manoeuvre them properly right before the journey was just asking for a broken neck.
Frusen sighed. "I'm obligated to follow you on the path you take."
The blue-black-haired teen raised a brow, a faintly amused smile forming.
"You could just hover next to me," he suggested. "I wouldn't tell anyone."
Frusen didn't even respond. He simply kept walking behind him.
'My people luck is back in the negatives I see...' Reoloy mused.
Ahead, the trail had already begun to thin. The wide, forgiving path from earlier had tightened into narrow ledges carved into the mountainside. Each step would soon demand precision rather than comfort.
He glanced down once.
Far below, the terrain dropped away in a sheer, unforgiving fall. From a distance, the winding lower paths looked almost harmless—like something one might survive with a bad landing.
Up close, that illusion vanished completely.
Even enhanced bodies wouldn't survive that drop.
'I'm not even enhanced,' Reoloy thought. 'My mana's sealed… so that technically makes me normal...'
The idea didn't exactly make the situation more comforting, but he didn't linger on it.
"You've been told why I can't carry you up?"
Reoloy side-eyed the brunet, rolling his neck in a deliberately careless motion that only seemed to irritate the man further.
"The blade kite's supposed to be up there," Reoloy said flatly. "If it detects signs of life from a being it classifies as too large, it'll attack. That's why we can't huddle up."
"Correct," Frusen replied, eyes already scanning the ledges for structural weakness. "There are three rules for this climb."
"Don't get too close to each other."
"Don't cause unnecessary commotion."
"And don't lose your way once we reach the deeper mountain range."
Reoloy nodded. "Sounds simple enough."
Frusen looked at him for a long moment before snorting.
"That careless attitude of yours is going to get you killed."
"You aren't the first person to tell me that," Reoloy replied casually. "Let's go."
Without waiting for a response, he stepped onto the ledge.
His back pressed against the mountainside as he began shuffling sideways along the narrow strip of stone. The path was just wide enough to stand on comfortably if one ignored the several-hundred-metre drop waiting beyond its edge.
Frusen followed a short distance behind.
The wind whistled through the cliffs, carrying a faint chill that grew sharper with every metre they climbed.
It served as a constant reminder of just how high they were—far higher than Reoloy could accurately judge by sight alone.
The incline only made matters worse.
The ledge slanted upward at an awkward angle, forcing each careful shuffle to fight against both gravity and instinct. Every step felt subtly wrong, as though the mountain were trying to convince him his footing was failing.
More than once, he found himself glancing down at his boots.
He almost felt like they were sliding backwards beneath him.
The sensation wasn't real—or at least not entirely—but it made maintaining traction far more difficult than it should have been. Each movement demanded conscious effort, his legs constantly tensing to keep him anchored against the slope.
"Keep overthinking, and you'll fall."
Reoloy frowned. "I'm fin—"
A powerful gust slammed into him.
The interruption lasted less than a second.
One moment, he was talking, and the next, his balance was gone.
His body pitched forward instinctively, weight shifting toward empty air before his mind had even processed what was happening.
His heart dropped.
Then a hand yanked him backwards.
Reoloy stumbled against the mountainside as a hand released his shoulder. Fursen immediately moved away again, restoring the distance between them.
Silence.
The wind continued to howl through the cliffs.
Reoloy stared ahead blankly, forcing his pulse to settle while his expression remained impressively neutral.
Internally, however, he was very aware that he had almost just died... again.
"Don't think at all and you'll fall too," Frusen said.
The reincarnator's frown deepened.
"That's not helpful."
The older man shrugged, not even attempting to hide the small amount of amusement creeping into his expression.
They continued shuffling upward.
"The mountain isn't trying to kill me," Reoloy muttered.
It sounded less like a statement and more like a mantra—something meant to keep his nerves steady and his thoughts from spiralling.
"The mountain is absolutely trying to kill you," Frusen replied immediately.
The look he gave him suggested he had just revised his estimate of the boy's intelligence downward.
Reoloy turned his head as much as he felt comfortable to allow.
"Are you trying to antagonise me?"
"…Maybe."
"Why?"
Frusen scoffed, adjusting his footing against the narrowing ledge with masterful precision.
"If I told you, I'd be dumber than my current estimation of you."
That sealed the deal.
Reoloy didn't like this man all that much.
Not that it mattered enough to change anything.
He adjusted his footing and kept moving, letting the wind batter against him as the ledge narrowed further. The conversation—if it could still be called that—fell into another brief silence.
The shifting path didn't just narrow—it broke into uneven segments, forcing small jumps between stable points. Each gap was only a step or two, but the timing mattered. Hesitation meant slipping. Overcommitment meant falling.
Frusen motioned for him to cross the first gap without slowing.
Reoloy glanced at it, exhaled once, and jumped.
Mid-air, the wind surged.
His landing foot hit slightly off-centre.
For a fraction of a second, his weight tilted outward, then he corrected it, catching himself with a sharp shift of his hips and slamming his shoulder against the rock wall to stabilise.
"Good recovery." Frusen applauded. "Now move over. Just a couple more steps, and then we'll have to start climbing the rock face by hand."
Reoloy blinked. "What?"
The ledge up ahead didn't look any different from the previous stretches—still narrow, still unstable, still very much a death trap—but the implication of no more walking path landed a bit harder than expected.
"You're saying there's just… no trail after that?"
"It's only the start," Frusen said, strapping some gear around his waist. "When we make it to this peak, we'll have to cross over to the next... and then the next... before we finally arrive at our destination."
"Who designed this dumb thing?"
Frusen lowered his evaluation once more as he adjusted his grip on the rock face.
"Nature… clearly," he replied flatly. "Move already."
They jumped across the remaining broken ledges, and just as Frusen had said, the path finally ended.
Reoloy rotated to face the mountainside, pressing himself close to the rock in preparation for the ascent. Only then did he notice a vivid green thread now wrapped securely around his waist.
It extended back to the device Frusen had strapped on earlier—something he immediately recognised.
"Mana cable."
"I'll be right below you," Frusen said. "When you fall, this will make sure you don't end up splat, then I can pull you back up."
Reoloy didn't miss the wording.
When.
Not if.
He glanced down briefly at the drop beneath them, then back at the cliff face ahead. He couldn't even make out the details below anymore. Though he was certain they weren't above the clouds just yet.
"…Thanks," he muttered.
Extending a hand, he reached for a jagged outcrop and pulled himself upward. Stone scraped against his palm. His fingers found leverage, and then he immediately had to search for the next hold while minding his footing as well.
The mountain hadn't changed, but the resistance it presented had.
Each movement demanded more precision than the last. The rock face wasn't uniform; it shifted subtly, refusing to offer consistent holds. What looked solid from below often crumbled under weight, forcing Reoloy to adjust mid-motion, catching himself on instinct more than thought.
Below him, Frusen stayed silent.
The mana cable remained taut, occasionally shifting with small corrections from the man's end—subtle stabilisation whenever Reoloy overcommitted or drifted too far outward.
The guide didn't offer encouragement, nor commentary, nor even insults.
He simply adjusted.
Which made the boy realise something.
In a way, the man was leading him. He didn't fully understand how, but with each pull and twitch of the cable, he noticed it was subtly shaping his decisions on where to go next.
Reoloy exhaled slowly through his nose as he reached for the next hold.
His body was already screaming, but his persistence was another confirmation of the results from his earlier endurance and durability training.
They continued.
Higher and higher.
Time lost meaning in the repetition. There was only movement and breath—short, controlled inhales that barely kept pace with the strain in his arms and legs. The air thinned gradually, not sharply enough to mark a moment, but enough that it became harder to ignore.
Reoloy realised, somewhere in the middle of it, that he had stopped thinking about anything else.
Not the ruins.
Not Cube.
Not even the reason he was climbing.
Only the next hold.
The next movement.
The next second of not falling.
His hand struck a ridge and held.
He pulled himself up again.
Below, Frusen shifted slightly, repositioning without a word. The cable slackened for a moment, then tightened again—perfectly timed to Reoloy's unstable footing.
It wasn't support.
It was surveillance and coordination.
And trust, in the most inconvenient form possible.
Reoloy gritted his teeth and climbed anyway.
The wind returned in bursts the higher they went—short, violent gusts that didn't linger long enough to become predictable. One of them hit him hard enough to peel him half off the wall.
The cable snapped tight and then retracted.
He was yanked back into place.
This time, he paused.
Just for a breath.
"...How are you doing that?"
There was no reply.
But the cable loosened slightly—he took it as a signal to move again without restraint.
For what seemed like the millionth time, he controlled his exhale and kept climbing.
Once again, the world narrowed.
Stone. Breath. Motion.
The cable let him know to make a left, just in time to avoid grabbing onto a patch of snow and slipping.
They were now high enough that the harsh wind wasn't the only problem.
'At this rate, there'll be a blizzard up there...'
A sequence of subtle pulls and releases communicated that they were close. How Reoloy knew that, he wasn't sure.
The slope began to change.
Not gradually, but decisively.
The rock face levelled just enough to form a small plateau—bare, wind-swept, and unnaturally still compared to everything below.
Reoloy pulled himself over the edge and rolled onto solid ground.
For a moment, he didn't move.
Frusen climbed up after him shortly after, steady and unhurried, as if the entire ascent had been nothing more than a routine exercise.
He deactivated the mana cable with a practised motion.
Looking down at the teen, he frowned—almost unhappy with what he'd observed.
It turned out he was far from stupid.
He was too sharp even.
At first, he'd been toying with him—feeding faint signals he didn't expect the boy to notice at all.
But that was the issue.
He had.
Not only had Reoloy picked them up, but he had understood what they meant.
And he clearly had no experience with this kind of coordination. So how?
Frusen narrowed his eyes slightly as he studied the boy's back.
He was left with only one conclusion.
'The brat did it through a mixture of wit and instinct,' he mused. 'He observed, formed rough interpretations of the intent behind each signal, and narrowed them down mid-action—all in a short span of time.'
Unlike himself, there was no sign of formal training.
No structured familiarity.
Just rapid adaptation under pressure.
Frusen exhaled quietly through his nose.
He was certain now.
The kid had likely "manipulated" the chieftain and the ruin keeper as well—but not intentionally. More like he'd simply drifted through interactions and ended up steering outcomes without realising it.
A dangerous kind of talent.
The kind that didn't look like talent at all.
Pure instinct-driven intelligence. Rapid, on-the-fly adaptation at a level most people never reached even with training.
'When I get back, I need to talk to both of them...'
Frusen stepped in and kicked Reoloy over onto his back with blunt efficiency, his expression not shifting in the slightest.
Whether he had misjudged the force or simply didn't care was unclear, but Reoloy slid several metres across the snow before rolling and springing back to his feet.
"Did you even think about where you were going before you dressed up?" Frusen asked. "That thing won't protect you against the col—"
He paused.
A second look confirmed something unexpected.
Reoloy was fine.
"...What's that jumpsuit made of?"
Reoloy almost instantly forgot his irritation at being kicked, giving a light shrug.
"Beats me," he answered. "I just know that the holes were recently patched up with pieces from… Graham's, or maybe Hugo's—ah, whatever. One of their suits."
Frusen studied the boy for a moment before tensing and immediately marching toward a hollowed-out opening in the peak that connected to the next section of their journey.
'I almost got caught up in his intrigue...' the man thought, briefly pressing a hand to his forehead. "That was dangerous."
"What was?"
Frusen glanced at the teen, then back ahead.
"Nothing."
Reoloy didn't press further. Instead, he let out a low whistle as he stepped through the short tunnel behind him and emerged on the other side.
The world opened up abruptly.
A vast, broken bridge stretched between their current peak and another mountain far beyond it—the tallest of the jagged giants in the range, its upper reaches vanishing into cloud and snowfall. The structure wasn't natural—it was an ancient crossing of stone and metal, half-collapsed in places, its remaining segments jutting out like fractured ribs suspended in the sky.
Rusted chains as thick as tree trunks hung under immense tension from anchor points carved directly into the two mountain faces, some snapped clean through, others still barely holding the suspended path together. Entire sections of the bridge left gaps that revealed nothing but a white void swallowed by mist.
Frost clung to every surface, and the wind threaded through the ruins with a hollow, echoing sound—like something breathing through bone.
"When was the last time someone used this bridge?"
"Eleven years ago, Master Marnsteil did," Frusen replied. "Before that, someone else fifteen years ago."
"And what happened to them?"
Frusen gave him a blank look.
Reoloy nodded slowly.
"Right…"
The guide stepped onto the bridge and began the ascent further upward.
"If we can make it to the next checkpoint in under thirty minutes, the rest of the journey is essentially done."
"Unless..."
"Unless what?" Frusen blinked.
"Things always go wrong when they're going the smoothest."
"You aren't very optimistic."
Reoloy didn't say anything.
They made their way across, nothing eventful happening aside from the occasional instance where Frusen hovered over a massive gap and roped Reoloy across.
Fortunately, they were well within their timeline.
Frusen fought the urge to rub it in the boy's face that nothing had, in fact, gone wrong.
Finally, they crossed over to the highest point in all of Cardana—though the familiar regions were now long beyond sight.
Strangely, the air felt thin, but not uncomfortable to breathe.
Reoloy chalked it up to fantasy nonsense.
The view felt unreal.
Snow-capped peaks and towering mountains stretched endlessly in every direction he could see. From where he stood, it made sense why no one approached the southern region through this route.
And through another short tunnel—this one more decorated than the last—he could faintly make out what looked like still-elevated, but flatter terrain slightly lower than where they stood.
"You see that?" Frusen asked, pointing at a faint dark structure through the falling snow. "That's your destination."
Reoloy's chest tightened—not with fear, but with a rising sense of anticipation, almost catharsis.
It had been a long way here. Longer the more he thought about it.
But he had made it.
He closed his eyes.
"It's about time."
Frusen's brow rose. "Hm?"
The crossing in front of them collapsed in a violent explosion, forcing the man to shield his eyes from the shockwave as fragments of stone and metal were ripped away into the abyss. He immediately rushed forward again, scanning the destruction with open shock.
"It was pretty obvious," Reoloy said flatly. "We're almost at the destination, everything's cut and dry, and there's no immediate problem in sight. Like I said—things always go wrong when they're going the smoothest."
He paused, looking down into the endless drop where the bridge used to be.
"It's the law of clichés, unfortunately..."
Frusen looked at him in disbelief, a flicker of panic creeping in.
"This has never happened before!"
"Clearly. The bridge wouldn't have been there if it had."
"You don't get it!" Frusen snapped. "Something caused that!"
Reoloy stared. "Does it matter?"
Frusen froze.
Then it hit him—this wasn't ignorance. It was something worse.
He remembered their earliest interactions. This kid had no real sense of fear. He didn't brave danger—he simply moved through it as if consequences were optional. As if outcomes had an unspoken bias in his favour.
That was why he could almost fall off a precarious ledge and still keep a straight face.
Why he could declare he'd challenge the ruins that had claimed countless lives and insist on doing it in a day.
"We're turning back."
"No, we aren't."
"Yes, we are," Frusen said with finality. "This journey is over."
Silence followed, broken only by the crunch of Frusen's footsteps on frostbitten stone.
"Did you know that your children threw themselves into the path of danger when they could've run away?"
Frusen paused mid-step, his foot still hanging centimetres off the ground.
He turned slowly.
"...What about it?" he gritted out.
"I'm just surprised, is all," Reoloy said lightly. "Since someone like you is their father, they must not be as impressive as I thought."
Frusen moved instantly.
He grabbed Reoloy by the collar and yanked him forward.
"Don't you dare use me to talk down on them!" he barked, eyes wide with rage. "Those two are my pride and joy... my everything!"
A flicker crossed his expression.
For a moment, the image of a cerulean-haired woman flashed through his mind—warm, distant—before it was replaced by a grave marker.
His grip tightened and his face twisted under the weight of that memory.
"They're great, aren't they?"
A soft, melodious laughter slipped out after the words.
"You of all people don't get to mouth off, brat!"
Reoloy stared at him blankly for a moment… then smiled.
"There's some fire," he said finally. "Use it for what comes next."
Frusen's chest rose and fell in sharp, uneven breaths.
"What… are you… talking about?"
Reoloy leaned back.
And the world dropped away beneath them.