The ground shook twice more before they reached the clearing.
Not back to back — at forty-second intervals, just as the hunters' report had described.
Kai counted them.
Serah felt them with her feet before they reached her ears.
Lira noticed them in the frequency the mount emitted, which her vampiric senses had been processing since morning.
The clearing was large — the size of the Valdris market plus the inn plus the space between them.
The northern sector trees ended at a clean edge, as if something had decided at some point that the trees went that far and no further, and the resulting space was packed earth and flat rock and three hundred Orcs...
The three stopped at the tree line.
They looked at the clearing.
"That's a lot," Kai said.
"Three hundred," Serah said.
"And they're fighting?"
"They're training," Lira said.
---
It wasn't training.
Or it was training in the sense that someone was learning something.
