The smoke from the signal fire still lingered thinly in the eastern sky. Raid watched from the window of the cottage as the white streak—meaning they had crossed Koetori Pass, the mountain gateway at the eastern edge of the Hekihou mountain range—drifted out from beyond the ridgeline and dissolved into the pale light of dawn. He rested his elbow on the windowsill, gazing absently. The characters he had added last night caught the corner of his eye. How many more times. The lower right corner of the spell formula book's cover. His own handwriting, yet it looked like someone else's words. Raid's gaze left those four characters and followed the smoke beyond the window. Now that they had crossed the pass, the vanguard of the Akatsume Tide—the massive horde of magical beasts without command structure that repeatedly surged from the eastern mountains—would next target this place. Sixty kilometers away. If they came on human military boots rather than the legs of magnetic-fang beasts—it wo