“Okay,” Cuby said as we picked our way down the mountain. “Whether they stay in camp or make for town, if we kill things until our clocks hit zero—eight hours from now—we’ll out-level him. You’ll have more spells, I’ll have another iconic—if I don’t have a class card by then, I’ll take the temporary invisibility.”

I blinked, considering this. “You get a temporary invisibility?” I asked.

“I took Flurry of Steel instead,” she said. “The only real question is: do we watch Haroshi to see if they try to rest, or head to town?”

“By town,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Come on,” she said, suddenly picking a new path toward a large outcrop of rock that was out of our way. “I’ll show you.”

I followed her. Once we were behind the stone, she drew her weapon to give us a little light, then materialized a map and compass.

“Oromar’s Bastion,” she said, pointing at a dot on the map. “Which means we’re here—this valley is called Eleth’s Cradle. Mirrakatetz is atop the mountain called Mount Mirrak. She pointed into the distance, past the nearest peaks at the edge of the valley. “That way.”

She pointed back to the map. “Past it from where we are are two settlements—Aranar and Vereth’s Rest. Aranar can be got to by a path that leads out of this valley—this passage here,” she said, pointing. “But to get to Vereth’s Rest, we’d have to climb the mountains behind Haroshi—and so would he.” She looked up at me, expectant. “So what do you think?”

I looked over in the direction of his camp, at the black shapes of the looming mountains behind it. We’d climbed, launched from, and hidden in the contours of those shapes—but only along the base. They rose far, far higher than I would like to climb with no clear path upward along many of their steeper faces, even for someone with Mighty Leap and a grappling gun. “Even if he rests tonight,” I said, “his only real option seems to be to go to Aranar. Crossing the mountains might not even be possible, and if it is possible than it will waste valuable clock-time that could be spent farming.”

I looked back over at his camp, hearing the distant, illusory sound of wyverns. It was still playing. “They obviously don’t have a way to dispel the illusion I placed,” I said. “There’s clearly combos—things that can be done that they have no response for. At level 1, I got a Spell Augment option for a range increase—and with Warped Spell and my Farcaster Passive, I could really start picking them off. More spells, and another chance to look at spells in another town, could completely change the game.”

“So we should farm our way to town?” she asked. “But do you want to check on them first—see if they’re going to be on our heels?

I shook my head. “I think we should leave them,” I said. “Kill our way to this settlement, Aranar. If monsters don’t respawn fast, we’ll deplete the experience that they have available, and we can warn the town when we get there. It doesn’t seem to matter to me whether they stay in camp tonight or follow—we’ll keep an eye out behind us and proceed. This way is his only real choice, and we need to stay ahead of him.”

“If you’re sure,” she said, standing. “But we’re going to need to be cautious. Let’s stick to the slopes and hope that Haroshi’s people will make a lot of noise if they do decide to come after us.”

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“As you like,” I said. “Which direction to this path we’re supposed to be taking.”

Cuby spent a moment looking at her compass, then stood and pointed somewhere that was back toward where we’d entered the valley. “Should be over there, somewhere.”

We set out, walking for awhile to regenerate resources. It wasn’t long before she spoke again: “Say, do you think any of them died to the wyverns?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Me too.”

We both enjoyed this satisfaction in silence for a minute or so. We’d knocked four players off the ridge, and four more had chased me into the forest. By my count, that left 7 players with low Hit Points to deal with both the second group of wyverns and the final one—the Matriarch. And all with only whatever hybrid healers had remained.

“Another thing we learned,” I said. “When we get far enough ahead, we can plant a wyvern call and apparently pull every wyvern from every nest within earshot.”

Cuby laughed. “Is that a good idea? I don’t know how we’d fare against that particular succession of monsters. Those things seemed even stronger for their level than the rock worms were.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Not yet, that is. But maybe with another spell—”

“Demon!” Cuby said suddenly, pointing.

I looked. Below us, among the trees, I could see a single red eye, seeming to waver in the darkness as its owner moved about.

“All right,” said Cuby. “You keep watch for Haroshi’s people—I know they won’t be over here yet, but we might as well start practicing caution. You cast Haste, make sure Mana Shield in on me, and I’ll kill while you lookout.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I should store a Fragmented Spell just in case we need to escape—are you thinking a Haste, a Hex of Chains, or a Hardlight Construct?”

She thought for a moment. “Haste,” she said. “I’ve got three uses of Spectacular Acrobatics to avoid them if they jump us, but that won’t mean a thing if I can’t outrun them.”

The creature in the valley was a wolf, a level 6 with the same metal-warped head as the others I’d seen. Cuby dispatched it in mere moments, and I doubted it did much to her Mana Shield. I kept a lookout on the dark of the forest ahead, my eyes continually returning to where I knew Haroshi’s people were camped on the ledge—it was still lit.

We proceeded this way along the edge of the valley for a while. Cuby would descend to kill anything we spotted and I would search for some sign of approaching enemies. I was even paranoid to occasionally scan the slopes above us, thinking that if I were Haroshi, and wanted to kill us, I’d try to cautiously arrange a pincer attack to deal with our mobility advantage.

But soon we found the entrance to the path that Cuby had spoken of. It was a small thing, easy to miss—a path of smooth stones set into the mountainside that led up out of the valley, then down into a narrow, winding road with steep rises on either side, a short tunnel occasionally carved through an impassible rock.

The slopes on either side were too high for us to meaningfully climb, though there was a skill we might have been able to buy to help us.

It was dark in the pass, but soon we saw a shape looming ahead—that of a massive structure of some kind, seemingly the same style of square-cut buildings that we’d seen in Oromar’s Bastion. I saw it and felt my heart lift a little, thinking that we’d found an outpost of some kind—people we could warn against Haroshi, and might potentially help us.

But as I got a better look, I stopped dead, and Cuby stopped beside me.

“Not good,” I whispered, looking at the creature on the battlements.