The winds of Hueco Mundo were fierce, always carrying fine grains of sand as they swept through the empty night, raising mournful howls.
Asano Kiyoshi sat beside Nel, watching the crackling fire. His face, bathed in firelight, bore a thoughtful expression.
He had gotten up very early, though it was impossible to distinguish day from night here.
Looking at the others still asleep around him, Asano Kiyoshi shook his head slightly and began recalling everything that had happened during this time.
That suddenly appearing Runuganka had given Asano Kiyoshi an extremely abnormal, unsettling feeling.
Taking out the map, Asano Kiyoshi carefully examined the direction they had been traveling in recently. Without a doubt, they should have been wandering along the outermost edge of Hueco Mundo all this time. How could they possibly have encountered Runuganka, which was responsible for guarding Hueco Mundo?
First, he ruled out the possibility that Runuganka had simply been wandering around. Though there was more than one of them, their duty was to guard Hueco Mundo. They could not possibly stray too far from it.
Then, if the problem was not with Runuganka, and the distances were equal, the only possibility was that they had gotten closer to Hueco Mundo.
Assuming they had drawn closer to Hueco Mundo, working backward from that conclusion made it easy to see that there was definitely something wrong with the map.
He had planned their route entirely according to that map. If the map had been fine, then it would have been absolutely impossible... Wait!
The Hollow swarm attacks they had encountered over the past few days suddenly surfaced in his mind. As he roughly plotted the locations of those attacks in his head, they formed almost a straight line!
Damn it! How had he failed to notice such an