Kaiser did not level off immediately after taking flight, and Noctis did not interrupt that ascent, because the climb itself served a purpose beyond simple elevation. The dragon's wings beat in steady, measured intervals that carried enormous force with each downward motion, and every stroke pushed them higher into the night where the air thinned and the density of the forest below gave way to a darker, wider expanse. The clearing they had left vanished quickly beneath them, replaced by a layered canopy that stretched outward like a shadowed ocean, and then even that began to flatten into indistinct texture as distance removed detail.
Noctis stood on the dragon's head without shifting his stance, his boots planted along the natural ridges between scale and bone where Kaiser's structure provided the most stable line, and he did not lean into the wind or brace against it in the way the escorts behind him were forced to do. His arms remained folded across his chest, his posture aligned rather than rigid, and the air that rushed past him in powerful currents moved his hair and mantle in long streaming lines that followed the dragon's velocity rather than disrupting it. The force of that wind was not small. It carried enough pressure that even a misstep could have thrown an unprepared body from its position, yet he stood within it as though the environment had been accounted for long before it ever reached him.
He allowed himself a breath.
The air at this height was colder, thinner, and sharper, carrying fewer of the grounded scents that filled the forest below and more of the distant currents that came from mountain ranges and open sky. He let it pass through him without resistance, the sensation grounding in a different way than the enclosed density of the dungeon had done earlier, and for a brief moment, there was nothing pressing on his awareness except the steady rhythm of Kaiser's flight and the open space stretching endlessly ahead.
Then the moment shifted.
It did not come from outside.
It came from inside.
Noctis's brow drew slightly as a thought surfaced with enough weight to interrupt the calm he had just allowed himself to settle into, and once it appeared, it did not fade the way passing impressions often did. It remained, sharp and specific, demanding attention.
"…did I almost shoot her?"
The question did not feel like idle reflection. It felt like a correction that had arrived late.
He did not move his body, but his focus shifted inward as he replayed the moment in the cave, the sequence of Emeralda's hesitation, her explanation, and then his own response. He saw it clearly—his hand moving to Ruin, the weapon drawn without hesitation, the angle of the barrel aligned toward her, the mechanical click that had followed as he primed it for use.
That part was factual.
What unsettled him was not the action itself.
It was the absence of resistance to it.
He frowned.
"Why would I do that?"
The question did not come with denial, because denying the action would have been pointless. He had done it. That much was clear. What did not align was the reasoning behind it, or rather, the lack of reasoning that should have preceded something like that.
Alter did not operate like that.
He understood his own baseline well enough to know that. He did not execute without purpose. He did not escalate to lethal force simply because someone hesitated or questioned a command. Emeralda had not defied him. She had explained a limitation rooted in bloodline hierarchy, something that, under normal circumstances, would not have warranted a threat of immediate execution.
"And I didn't even think about it," he muttered under his breath, the words carried away by the wind almost as soon as they left him.
That was the part that held his attention.
There had been no pause.
No internal check.
No weighing of consequence.
The action had come cleanly, directly, as though it had already been decided before the situation demanded it.
His gaze remained forward, but his thoughts deepened around that realization.
"That's not how I handle things."
The wind pressed against him again, stronger at this height as Kaiser continued climbing, and behind him, the escorts shifted, their movements far less stable than his own. He could hear the subtle friction of armor, the strained adjustments of footing, the occasional sharp intake of breath as one of them fought to maintain balance against the force of the air. A few of them had lowered their bodies closer to the dragon's back to reduce exposure, while others kept one hand locked against the ridges of scale and the other free near their weapons, not because they expected immediate danger, but because the situation itself was enough to keep them on edge.
Noctis did not turn to look at them.
He did not need to.
Their condition was obvious from the difference between their movement and his own.
"They're struggling," he noted internally, not with judgment, but with observation. The wind that passed over him did not disrupt his center of gravity because his control over his body compensated for it instinctively, his stance adjusting in micro-movements too small to be noticed externally. The escorts did not have that same level of control in this environment, and the result showed in every minor shift of their footing.
A faint edge of something like irritation flickered through him, then faded just as quickly.
"That's normal for them," he thought, dismissing it before it could take shape into anything more. "Different baseline."
His attention returned to the earlier thought.
The gun.
Emeralda.
The lack of hesitation.
Then another moment surfaced.
Not from the cave.
From the dungeon.
His expression tightened slightly.
"…and that line."
He remembered it clearly.
The words he had spoken to Kaiser after naming him.
You'll be my mount while I carve a path of carnage through this world.
The phrasing replayed in his mind, and the more he examined it, the less it aligned with his actual intent.
"I'm not trying to rule this place," he thought. "That's not even part of the plan."
The objective had always been clear. Growth. Power. Understanding the system. Preparing for what came after. Ruling a world required conquest, sustained control, and long-term investment in something far beyond the scope of what he had set out to do.
"And ruling means fighting everything at the top," he continued, the logic forming naturally. "Gods, higher entities, whatever sits above the structure here."
That was not something he avoided out of fear.
It was something he avoided out of efficiency.
There was no value in declaring war on an entire system before understanding it completely.
"So why did I say that?"
The question lingered.
It did not resolve.
The wind continued to move past him, and the rhythm of Kaiser's wings remained steady, but the clarity he had felt a few moments earlier no longer held the same stability. Something had shifted, not in his surroundings, but in the alignment between his actions and his intent.
He let the thought sit.
For now.
Behind him, one of the escorts nearly lost footing and caught themselves at the last moment, the sound of metal scraping against scale sharp enough to carry forward even through the wind. Another cursed under their breath, the word torn apart by the air before it fully formed. A third adjusted position entirely, lowering themselves further and gripping tighter, choosing stability over pride as the flight continued.
A few of them glanced forward.
Toward him.
The contrast was impossible to ignore. While they struggled to maintain position against the speed and altitude, Noctis stood unmoved at the head of the dragon, his posture unchanged, his balance unshaken, his presence as steady as if he were standing on solid ground.
Jealousy surfaced.
He did not need Omni Eyes to see it.
It showed in the tightening of their expressions, in the brief flickers of comparison that passed between them and then forward again to him. It was not hostility. It was recognition of difference, sharpened by proximity.
Noctis ignored it.
His focus shifted outward instead.
Time passed.
Kaiser maintained a consistent velocity, and as the distance from the southern forest increased, the terrain ahead began to change. The flat spread of trees gave way to rising elevation, the land gradually lifting into darker shapes that broke the horizon line, and after enough time had passed, those shapes resolved into the first visible outline of the northern peaks.
They were not gentle mountains.
They rose sharply, their silhouettes cutting into the night sky with jagged edges that caught what little light existed and turned it into stark contrast. Clouds gathered around them at mid-height, but these were not ordinary storm clouds. They pulsed faintly from within, flashes of light flickering through them in irregular intervals that suggested contained lightning rather than open sky storms.
Noctis's gaze sharpened.
"Frost lightning," he said quietly, recognizing the environment before they even reached it fully.
Above the cloud line, the peaks were dusted in snow, the white surfaces reflecting the moonlight in a muted glow, while below, the clouds churned with contained energy that occasionally broke free in streaks of lightning that danced across the surface before vanishing again into the density.
He adjusted his stance slightly, not because he needed to, but because the shift in terrain marked the next phase of movement.
"Kaiser," he said, his voice carrying clearly despite the wind. "Angle toward the central peaks. We'll approach from above the storm layer."
The response came through the bond immediately.
"Understood, Master."
The dragon adjusted his trajectory, the angle of his climb shifting just enough that their path aligned with the central cluster of peaks where the lightning activity was most concentrated.
"At this pace… three more hours," Noctis calculated, the distance and speed aligning into a rough estimate without requiring exact measurement. "Then we start the hunt."
The frost lightning wolves would not be passive targets. Their environment alone guaranteed that. The combination of ice and lightning suggested speed, adaptability, and possibly coordinated movement if they functioned in packs as wolves typically did.
"That'll be a better test," he thought. "Mobility, reaction, pressure under multiple angles."
His focus remained forward.
Then something at the edge of his perception shifted.
It was not immediate.
Not obvious.
A flicker at the far right of his vision, distant enough that it could have been dismissed as a reflection of lightning from the northern clouds if not for the pattern it carried.
Noctis turned his head slightly.
His arms lowered from their folded position as his attention narrowed onto the distant horizon beyond the mountain line.
"…what is that?"
The movement was too structured.
Too consistent.
He engaged Omni Eyes.
The distance between him and the source collapsed in his perception, not physically, but through layered observation that pulled detail into clarity where ordinary sight would have left only suggestion.
Then he saw it.
A battlefield.
Far to the east.
The scale of it became apparent first, the spread of movement across a wide area where two opposing forces had collided and continued to collide in waves. The ground itself was scarred by repeated impacts, lines of magic and force cutting across the terrain in overlapping patterns that marked the flow of battle rather than a single engagement.
Demons.
They surged forward in large numbers, their forms varied but unified in purpose, a tide of bodies pushing against a line that did not break easily.
Opposing them stood humans.
Noctis's gaze sharpened further as the details resolved.
Not ordinary soldiers.
Holy crusaders.
They stood in formation, their lines organized with discipline that held even under pressure, shields layered with protective magic while weapons and spells struck outward in coordinated waves. Light flared repeatedly across the battlefield, the signature of holy energy manifesting in bursts that tore through the front ranks of the demonic forces.
The demons died.
By the thousands.
Their bodies fell in rapid succession under the barrage of organized defense and counterattack, the human line holding firm while their attacks carved through the advancing tide with efficiency that suggested preparation rather than desperation.
The sound did not reach him.
The distance was too great.
But he could see the effect of it.
The humans advanced in controlled increments, their formation tightening and loosening as needed while maintaining cohesion, and even from this far, the rhythm of their success was obvious.
Victory.
At least on the surface.
Noctis watched for a few moments longer.
Then he scoffed.
"…cannon fodder."
The conclusion came easily.
The demons at the front were too weak.
Too expendable.
Their deaths came too easily, their numbers too high, their formations too loose to represent anything of real value.
"They're burning resources," he thought, the pattern aligning with something he had seen before in different contexts. "Wearing them down."
The humans believed they were winning.
That was clear from the way their formation pushed forward with confidence, from the way their attacks increased in frequency as the demon line thinned.
But Noctis saw the flaw.
"This is the opening phase."
The real force had not entered yet.
The higher-ranked demons would come later, once the human forces had expended enough energy, enough mana, enough stamina to make their formation less stable.
"That's when it flips."
He let his gaze linger for one more moment.
Then he turned his head back toward the northern peaks.
"Not my problem."
The battlefield faded from his focus as the mountains reclaimed it.
The hunt ahead mattered more.
And whatever war the humans and demons were playing out below could continue without him.
For now.
Kaiser did not reduce his pace after the distant battlefield disappeared behind the line of Noctis's attention, and the dragon's steady ascent into the northern air gave the landscape below enough time to change in ways that would have gone unnoticed had they been crossing it on foot. The endless green spread of plains that had dominated the earlier stages of their journey no longer reached unbroken toward the horizon, and as the altitude and latitude both increased, the world beneath them began to lose softness first in patches, then in broad sweeps, until the lush color of grass and forest thinned into harsher stretches of exposed earth and stone. The air itself announced the transformation before the land fully displayed it, because the wind moving past Noctis's body no longer carried the living damp of soil and woodland growth, but a sharper, drier cold that slid through cloth and armor with a more deliberate edge, as though the north had already begun pressing its claim on everything that entered its sphere.
Noctis stood on Kaiser's head with the same unnerving steadiness he had maintained since the dragon first took flight, his posture aligned so cleanly with the movement beneath him that the force of speed and altitude seemed to pass around him rather than through him. His arms were no longer folded now, not because the air demanded compensation, but because he preferred to keep his body loose and ready while the route ahead resolved itself, and the long fall of his white hair and the dark sweep of his mantle streamed backward in the high wind in continuous motion that never once disrupted his footing. Behind him, the escorts did not enjoy that same ease. They had improved since the first stage of flight, enough that none of them looked close to losing position now, but improvement was not the same as mastery, and each of them still moved with the small corrections of bodies resisting the fact that they were riding a dragon over hostile terrain at unnatural speed.
The change beneath them became more pronounced the farther north Kaiser carried them, the lower elevations giving way to uplands where vegetation no longer grew in broad, healthy coverage, but clung in sparse bands to the ground between long stretches of barren rock. Another stretch of time passed, and even those stubborn growths began to disappear, their place taken by frost that spread in broken white veils across the dark stone before thickening into more permanent cover. The first true fields of snow appeared afterward, not as isolated patches but as layered expanses that covered the rising ground in smooth pale drifts whose contours revealed the shape of the land more by shadow than by texture. The higher they climbed into the north, the more complete that transformation became, until the world beneath them no longer looked merely cold, but belonged fully to another order of terrain where life would have to negotiate with winter before it could do anything else.
Noctis watched the peaks as they drew nearer, and what had first appeared as distant silhouettes now resolved into a range far more severe than the name "northern mountains" had suggested while he still stood in warmer country. These were not broad rounded heights softened by age and erosion, but jagged ascents whose lines cut hard against the sky and whose faces were broken by shelves, crevasses, and towering walls of ice-veined stone. Midway up several of the tallest peaks, dark storm masses had gathered into dense belts of cloud that did not drift naturally with the rest of the atmosphere, but churned around those elevations as though anchored there. Light moved within them in erratic flashes, not the distant silent shimmer of ordinary weather but the repeated interior discharge of lightning trapped in constant circulation. Above and below those cloud belts, snow moved in visible currents where the wind caught it, and at certain angles the whole mountain range looked less like terrain and more like a system built to reject anything that approached without the strength to deserve its heights.
He narrowed his eyes slightly, reading the arrangement of cliffs, shelves, and breaks in the mountain walls while the route formed itself inside his mind. The wolves would not den in open exposed places where lightning and snow stripped every advantage from them equally. They would use the mountain's complexity, moving through lines where ice, cover, and elevation favored their own speed and pack tactics while punishing anyone else forced to chase them. If he wanted the escort to reach the hunting range without arriving half-spent from useless climbing, then the insertion point mattered.
"There," he said at last, lifting one hand and pointing toward a long diagonal tear in the side of one peak where the stone had split inward far enough to form a sheltered break in the mountain face. "Take us to that crevasse. It's high enough to cut distance, and the wind won't hit us as badly once we're inside the break."
Kaiser acknowledged at once through the link between them, the reply arriving not as spoken sound but as clear mental obedience shaped by the dragon's older voice. "As you command, Master."
The adjustment in flight path did not come with any visible struggle despite Kaiser's size. The dragon angled his body through the air with controlled authority, one wing dropping slightly while the other lifted to carry the turn, and the escorts behind Noctis shifted visibly as that change in angle altered the way the wind struck them. A few of them lowered further against the ridges of Kaiser's back. One reached instinctively for a handhold that had not mattered earlier but mattered very much now. None of them spoke. Whatever surprise or discomfort they felt had already learned caution after the earlier stages of the journey.
As they descended toward the crevasse, the temperature dropped enough that even the motion of the air changed character. It no longer struck like mere cold wind, but like narrow blades of frozen current pouring around the angles of the mountain and colliding in abrupt shifts wherever the stone redirected them. Snow moved in airborne sheets along the cliff faces, and the shelf Noctis had chosen for landing came into clearer view as a long recessed stretch of ground sheltered on three sides by mountain walls and open only toward the falling slope below. It would not hide them from anything already nearby, but it would give them cover from the worst of the wind and a stable entry point into the higher hunting range.
Kaiser dropped the last distance and touched down with the kind of force that only a dragon his size could make look controlled, the first contact of claw against snow-packed stone sending a shock through the shelf itself while his wings drove once more to stabilize the landing. That final beat hurled snow upward in a dense explosive surge that raced outward from under the dragon's body and wings in all directions, engulfing the landing area in a violent white storm of powder, shards of frozen crust, and air pressure strong enough to make the escorts brace with full weight against the scales beneath them. Noctis did not yield to it. The snow and cold rushed around him, his stance adjusting in minute invisible ways that preserved perfect balance while the mantle behind him whipped hard enough that the fabric snapped in the air like a dark banner under siege.
The cloud of snow did not settle quickly, because the mountain wind caught what Kaiser's landing had thrown loose and drove it through the crevasse in spiraling currents before gravity gradually reclaimed enough of it for visibility to return in stages. Shapes came back first—the rough line of the sheltering stone, the broad dim silhouette of Kaiser's neck, the darker figures of the escorts still mounted farther back—then detail returned, and with it the full texture of the place they had reached. The shelf was broad enough to support the dragon easily, but uneven in places where ice had gathered over stone, and beyond the lip of the landing point the slope dropped away toward wider fields of snow cut by black rock and the deeper lines of the mountain's hidden paths.
Noctis stepped down first. His boots met the frozen surface with almost no sound after the violence of the landing, and he moved away from Kaiser's head with the calm efficiency of someone crossing an ordinary courtyard rather than the side of a lightning-haunted mountain. The escorts dismounted after him less elegantly, though still with more discipline than panic, each of them taking a moment to secure footing on the ice-bound stone before widening the distance between themselves and the dragon's wings. Before any of them could begin voicing the obvious questions pressed into their expressions, Kaiser's form answered the command Noctis had not yet needed to speak. The dragon dissolved into crimson light in a controlled inward collapse, the vast length and wings shrinking into a dense orb of red radiance that hovered for the briefest instant before returning to the mark at Noctis's forehead and vanishing there in a pulse that left only the faint outline of the dragon sigil before even that settled back into stillness.
The escorts looked at that mark and then at one another, but whatever thoughts moved between them remained unspoken. Their ability to be openly astonished had been worn down by repetition. Nothing about Noctis stayed surprising for long because each new impossibility arrived before they had properly finished adjusting to the one before it.
He turned to Emeralda. "Lead us in," he said. "Take the route that gives the fastest contact with the frost lightning wolves. I'm not interested in wandering the mountain until one of them decides to find us."
Emeralda inclined her head at once. "Yes, my lord." The answer carried less hesitation than some of her earlier responses had, and that was not because the mountain made her less cautious, but because the environment itself had returned the escort to a domain they understood. Forests, open plains, and dragons were one thing. Harsh northern terrain and hunting routes through snow were another. This was closer to the kind of practical challenge her unit existed to solve.
They moved out from the crevasse in a staggered formation with Emeralda at the front, two of the escorts widening slightly to scan the surrounding slope while the others preserved enough spacing that a collapse or lightning strike would not take all of them in one line. The mountain path did not make itself easily legible. Much of what should have been visible under ordinary conditions lay hidden beneath snow, and the route forward depended less on marked trails than on reading wind patterns, broken drifts, stable ridges, and the shapes of natural channels cut between rock outcrops.
At first the snow did not hinder them beyond the obvious drag of stepping through it. It reached above the ankle, then toward the shin, and in those early stages the escorts moved through it with little difficulty because neither cold nor reduced traction posed the same threat to vampires that it would have posed to humans. Their bodies held strength beyond human limits, and even the changing terrain did not break the pace Emeralda set. For a time, it looked as though the frozen slope would remain merely inconvenient rather than obstructive.
Then the mountain began to store its own weight in the snow.
The drifts deepened where the terrain folded inward, gathering in troughs and broad channels where the wind had deposited layer upon layer over time, and what had first been ordinary accumulation thickened into something far more troublesome. The escort started lifting their knees higher. Their lower bodies sank farther with each step. The visible line of the path became less a route to walk than a medium to wade through, and though none of them voiced complaint, the inefficiency of it became obvious in the way their pace bled away under the same continuous effort.
The snow reached their knees, then climbed toward the thigh, and eventually there were sections where it rose near the waist, forcing even the stronger escorts into a motion that looked less like travel and more like sustained resistance against the mountain itself. Emeralda kept pressing ahead, but the cost of every meter increased, and Noctis watched that cost accumulate with growing impatience. Their strength allowed them to continue. That was not the issue. The issue was time. Progress measured in sheer effort rather than clean velocity was still wasted when a simpler answer existed.
The escorts noticed him before they understood what was wrong with the comparison their eyes were making. One of them turned back first, perhaps intending only to gauge whether the rear spacing had held, and instead stopped mid-step with such complete surprise that the movement behind him nearly drove into his back. Another followed his gaze. Then another. By the time Emeralda looked over her shoulder in response to the silence that had abruptly replaced the sound of trudging effort, the entire rear half of the formation had slowed enough that the line of travel nearly stalled.
Noctis was not pushing through the snow.
He was moving over it.
His body remained upright and perfectly composed, and between the soles of his boots and the surface of the drift there was just enough empty space to make the truth undeniable. He was suspended above it, not by wings, not by footholds hidden under the snow, and not by any compensating movement of his limbs. He simply glided forward at the same speed they had been struggling to maintain, the wind catching his hair and mantle while the surface below him remained untouched by his weight.
Emeralda stared. The expression on her face shifted through confusion fast enough that she nearly missed the first version of the question that wanted to leave her. When she did speak, the formality of her title for him remained, but the blunt disbelief underneath it made the rest of the sentence impossible to conceal. "My lord… how are you doing that?"
Noctis looked down at her from the slight height of his floating position, then past her at the rest of the escort whose open expressions now ranged from bafflement to something dangerously close to offense at the unfairness of the universe. He let the silence hold for a breath, not because he needed it, but because sometimes that was the best way to feel whether a question deserved a real answer.
"With my magic," he said at last.
The simplicity of the reply landed like a closed door, and the effect it had on them was immediate. Whatever secondary questions might have followed died in place, not because the answer was satisfying, but because it was delivered with exactly the amount of cold patience that made the subject feel exhausted before it had even begun. Noctis let his gaze linger long enough that no one mistook the statement for an invitation to ask for a demonstration or explanation.
Then his attention shifted back to the terrain itself, and the practical problem returned with full clarity. The escorts could continue like this. Given enough time, they would even succeed. But the route through deep drift at this pace would grind away hours to gain what should have cost them far less, and no matter how competent Emeralda's tracking became once they reached wolf territory, dragging the unit through waist-deep snow first would leave the whole approach inefficient before the real hunt even began.
He came to a stop over the drift and turned to face them. "Jump," he said.
The command landed harder than the question had. Confusion spread through the escort again, but of a different kind now because the order had no visible relation to the problem in front of them. One of the escorts frowned openly before remembering too late whose command it was he appeared to be frowning at. Emeralda's expression tightened with the kind of restraint that meant she also wanted an explanation but had enough sense not to ask for one before obeying.
"My lord?" she said, not challenging, only confirming she had heard correctly.
"You heard me," Noctis replied. "All of you. Jump."
The mountain did not provide comfortable footing for such an action, but discipline overrode confusion after the second instruction, and the escorts bent their legs and drove upward through the heavy snow as best they could. The leaps were uneven because the terrain beneath them had offered different amounts of resistance to each body, but all of them left the surface at once, and that was enough. Noctis's right hand rose as they did, not dramatically, but with the same direct certainty that had governed every worthwhile use of his abilities so far, and the air above his palm began to distort almost immediately as cold gathered into it in visible density.
This was not the passive chill of mountain wind. It was concentrated winter pulled inward and forced into form. The temperature around his hand dropped fast enough that the nearest air lost clarity, and a pale pressure built there that made the surface of the surrounding snow tighten in faint crackling lines even before the release happened. He let the compression deepen for only as long as necessary, then drove the gathered force downward into the drift below with an open-palmed strike.
The cold answered outward.
It did not explode upward in useless spectacle. It traveled over the surface in a broad expanding shockwave that remained low and perfectly even, racing out through the snow in a widening ring that outpaced the escorts while they were still in the air. Wherever it passed, the upper layers of the drift changed instantly. The loose granular structure of packed snow compressed and froze in one continuous transformation, spreading farther and farther until the whole visible stretch of the slope within their immediate route had become a single hardened surface.
By the time the escorts came down, what met their boots was no longer drift but solid ground.
Not stone, and not ordinary ice either.
The first vampire to land braced for the familiar sinking resistance and instead found complete support, his weight accepted by the newly formed surface with none of the give or slide that should have followed. Another touched down beside him and took two involuntary corrective steps, expecting to lose traction and finding, to their visible confusion, that the frozen layer gripped rather than betrayed them. One of the rearmost escorts, less restrained than the rest, deliberately shifted side to side to test the surface and then stared at the lack of slipping as though the mountain itself had begun lying to him.
"It's frozen solid," one of them said.
"No," another answered, crouching to press gloved fingers against the surface before drawing them back. "It's more than that."
Emeralda went down on one knee and laid her hand flat against the hardened layer, her expression deepening into concentration as she tested not just its existence but its behavior. She lifted her head after a moment and looked at Noctis. "Why doesn't it slide?"
The answer came out of him faster than he meant it to, because the explanation was too simple in the frame he carried from older habits of thought. "Because the surface layer is well below ordinary freezing and the molecular arrangement doesn't have enough mobility left to reorganize under localized pressure, so instead of generating a lubricating melt film under contact, it holds structural friction." He looked over the ground as he said it, half checking the result while he explained it. "I drove it down close to minus one hundred Celsius. At that point, you're not stepping on ordinary mountain snow anymore."
Silence met him.
Not respectful silence.
Blank silence.
When he looked back at them, the entire escort wore the same stunned, vaguely comedic expression of people who had just been handed a perfectly valid answer in a language adjacent to their own but somehow still not the one they needed. Emeralda's face, disciplined as it was, held a thin strained stillness that suggested she was trying very hard not to let the fact that none of that meant anything to her become visible.
Noctis recognized his mistake a beat late.
"…right," he said, coughing lightly into one fist as if he could clear the previous explanation out of the air by force of embarrassment alone. "The point is, it won't collapse under you and it won't send you sliding down the mountain. That's the only part that matters."
The escort looked relieved to finally have the answer translated into something useful, and Emeralda rose from her crouch with a small nod that said more about her willingness to move on than her actual comprehension. "Understood, my lord."
"Good," Noctis said. "Then stop staring at it and move."
They did. And this time the mountain stopped wasting their time.