Loa probably never imagined Tony was bad with directions.
He had shown no sign of it at Headquarters!
Was it a Swordsman's passive ability?
What kind of joke was that?
Unlike the famously directionless Swordsman Zoro, though, Tony was nowhere near that hopeless.
Besides, he had spent enough time at Headquarters that his days consisted of little more than sleeping, eating, and training. Moving between those three places had made him seem perfectly normal.
Who could have guessed his first field mission would expose the problem?
Tony had been following the Ice path without trouble. Then, halfway along, he had no idea where to go.
The Ice path had suddenly ended!
Loa had overlooked that. When he saw the devastation in Big Snail City, he had decided to rescue the civilians first. Rescue work took time in any world, so he had canceled his Pseudo-Dragon Transformation to conserve Magic Power.
Without the transformation's boost, and desperate to save people, Loa naturally had no intention of wasting Magic Power to leave markers.
And that was how Tony got lost.
Towering trees surrounded him, and every direction looked the same. Faced with unfamiliar terrain, Tony resorted to a Swordsman's secret art: throwing his shoe to pick a direction!
There was no need to dwell on how that turned out. Mingde and Arudo were looking for him now.
"High-Frequency Rock Thrust!"
Beard slammed his fist into the ground. In the next instant, a dense barrage of sharp Stone Spikes shot up and hurtled toward Loa.
The move showed one facet of Beard's skill. The High-Frequency Fruit could only make objects vibrate, but Beard used those vibrations to carve stone into Stone Spikes, then carefully force them out of the ground.
A fraction too little power, and the Stone Spikes would be too weak.