Ruger frowned, then slowly relaxed his brow. Under Mona's puzzled gaze, he stopped without calling out and simply stood there in silence. Logically, finding Wizard Zorn was the best option for them both. The Wizard seemed to be sitting there, quietly waiting for them.
Across the street, Zorn sat at his leisure in the tavern opposite them.
Meanwhile, they stood quietly in the alley.
Ruger turned to glance at Mona. She blinked, then finally chose to trust him, holding onto his robe as she stood beside him.
A suspicion gradually formed in his mind, and this was a simple way to test it.
Why didn't he walk over?
Because he couldn't get there at all.
Why didn't he call out? Because calling would be useless, too. Keeping quiet would at least let them stand here a little longer.
That was his judgment.
The point was to stay still and silent, to test his suspicion.
At the same time, there was a second step to testing it.
He had been thinking throughout their journey. Sometimes, taking just a couple of steps triggered an abnormal change; other times, they could walk from one end of a street to the other. He kept wondering whether these seemingly random changes were truly random. Did they depend on the location, or was someone controlling them, unwilling to let their group reunite?
Yet Zorn could sit here drinking at his leisure without anything happening.
That inevitably brought two more questions to mind. Why separate them? Zorn clearly hadn't been attacked, and even the weakest among them was a One-Ring Wizard with a sufficiently long lifespan. Trying to trap them here until they died was, for the time being, nothing more than a bad joke-and a worse one than his own.
The second point was that there