Noel didn’t rush the final preparations.
One of the teleportation circles remained secured inside a reinforced chamber within his mansion, embedded into stone and layered with restriction seals that only responded to approved mana signatures. The second platform rested inside his dinsional pouch, compact for transport but inert until deployed and anchored properly.
He stood alone in the activation room for a brief mont before leaving, verifying once more that the inner lattice was stable and the anchor core dormant. Everything responded as expected.
That was enough.
"Spatial Shift."
The air folded cleanly around him.
When space reopened, the temperature changed imdiately.
Dry wind brushed against his coat as he materialized atop a watchtower along the southern edge of Thorne territory. Below him stretched a modest border city—stone buildings, narrow streets, defensive walls that had been repaired more than once over the years. Compared to Valon, it felt smaller, tighter, less polished. A place that existed because it had to, not because it flourished.
It carried the quiet tension of a frontier settlent.
Beyond the city walls, the land gradually lost softness. Vegetation thinned. The terrain hardened. And in the distance—
The mountains.
They dominated the horizon completely.
From maps, they appeared like a barrier line dividing continents. From here, they felt closer to a wound carved into the world. The Iskandar Peaks had been tall and cold, sharp with winter authority. These were different.
Darker.
Denser.
Their ridgelines rose in uneven, jagged formations, so leaning inward like broken teeth, others thrusting upward at angles that seed structurally impossible. They did not simply rise; they pressed.
Noir materialized beside him, her black fur shifting lightly in the wind, purple streaks catching the fading light.
She stared ahead.
’They’re very tall, dad.’
Noel kept his gaze on the horizon.
"Yes," he said calmly. "Taller than they look from maps."
He traced the route ntally.
Shadow Step would carry him through the forests and rock formations faster than any mounted unit could travel. He would advance far enough to establish a defensible location, deploy the second circle, anchor it into stable terrain, and secure the return link.
Once installed, the distance between this frontier and his ho would beco irrelevant.
"If the terrain turns unstable or sothing stronger than expected appears," he said quietly, more to confirm the plan than to declare it, "I’ll use Spatial Shift. I already have this city’s coordinates locked."
Noir flicked her tail once.
He stepped down from the tower platform and moved toward the inner side of the wall where long evening shadows stretched across the stone.
"Let’s move."
Noel stepped into the shadow cast by the battlents and spoke the spell aloud.
"Shadow Step."
His body thinned into darkness and slipped forward as if the world had simply decided to let him pass through it. A heartbeat later, he reappeared in the next stretch of shade beyond the wall, already moving, already scanning. He didn’t pause to admire the view behind him. The border city beca irrelevant the mont the route began.
The first leg carried him through dense woodland where the canopy swallowed most of the remaining daylight. Shadows were everywhere—between trunks, beneath branches, beneath roots that pushed through the soil like veins. Each step was a clean jump from one patch of darkness to the next, the rhythm fast but never careless. It wasn’t teleportation that ignored distance; it was movent that respected it in a different way, compressing travel into a sequence of controlled leaps.
Noir kept pace easily, sotis dissolving into his shadow when the terrain narrowed, sotis running beside him in her pup form when Noel slowed just enough to read the land ahead. Her paws barely made sound on leaf litter and damp earth, her ears angled forward, listening for anything that didn’t belong.
They crossed out of the forest into irregular plains where the ground hardened and the wind ran uninterrupted. Out here, shadows grew longer, stretched thin by the low sun. Noel adjusted his route instinctively, using the shade of boulders, the underside of broken ridges, the dark strips cast by sparse trees. The jumps ca faster now, each one carrying them farther than the last.
He rembered what travel used to feel like.
Days of movent. Camps. Rotations of guard shifts. That slow, inevitable drain of ti that always ca with distance, no matter how strong you were. Now the world folded under his feet in smaller incrents, not because it was easy, but because he had learned how to force it to behave.
They began encountering creatures as the terrain grew wilder.
A colossal wolf-like beast moved along a distant ridge, its silhouette too large to be natural, mana pulsing faintly beneath its fur like heat under skin. Noel watched it for a mont from the edge of a shadowed outcrop, asuring posture, breathing, intent. The creature turned its head as if it sensed sothing, then continued on without commitnt.
Later, in a rocky stretch, an insect the size of a cart remained perfectly still against a cliff face, its body indistinguishable from stone until the light shifted and revealed the faint geotry of its armored shell. Noel didn’t approach. He marked it ntally and moved on.
Above, sothing flew high enough that it was almost a mistake in the sky, wings catching the sun for a brief flash before it vanished into cloud-shadow.
’Strong,’ Noel thought, not impressed, just aware.
None of it mattered yet.
His objective was not combat. Not today. Today was positioning.
Hours blurred into rhythm. Forest to plain to broken rock, each transition sharper than the last. The air beca colder without warning, not from weather but from altitude creeping upward. The land began to rise in subtle slopes that stopped being subtle after a while.
Then he reached the true base of the mountain range.
The difference hit like pressure in the chest.
Mana here wasn’t calm. It wasn’t evenly distributed. It moved in irregular pulses, like sothing beneath the earth was breathing. The shadows felt deeper, but less predictable, as if even darkness behaved differently under that influence.
Noir lifted her head and her ears angled forward, her tail slowing.
’It’s heavier here.’
Noel nodded once, eyes fixed on the first wall of stone rising ahead.
"Good."
He stepped into the next shadow without hesitation, voice quiet and clear as he spoke the spell again.
"Shadow Step."
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