There were five teams heading out in total.
Each had forty Knight Apprentices and two or three Mage Apprentices, along with three or four Convicts from the Stardust Circus, Fish-Tailed Sea Ducks, Mushroom People, and Black Crows serving as scouts.
Speaking of those Black Crows, ever since they had arrived at Kroya's flame Magic Field, they had happily made themselves at home and quickly grown accustomed to being fed and cared for.
They had grown lazy at an astonishing speed, unwilling even to fly out to forage-something the Blood Pasture Fungus also deserved credit for, since they had become used to eating that Magic Plant.
Some of the friendlier ones had been trained by Elena and Mir, the Stardust Circus's beast tamer, to serve as scouts.
As for the other birds, the Storm Petrels and Heavenly Windfeather Birds... they remained rather aloof and were unwilling to cooperate with people for now. The latter in particular did nothing but eat fish and spend their days fooling around in the Flame Stump's resin.
Kroya had even... personally witnessed them putting on a "bird porno."
The sight was utterly unbearable.
Still, with these crows joining them, their journey would certainly go much, much more smoothly.
Of these teams, the one Kroya paid the most attention to was not Baron Kermoyer's group, which intended to cause trouble for the Viscount, but the team led by Ryan, whose first stop would be Baron Andy's territory.
The blizzard outside Reef Island remained terrifying.
It was practically a white catastrophe. The Knight Apprentices protected the relatively frail Mage Apprentices and Convicts in the center as they trudged through the snow.
The snow was already twenty to thirty centimeters deep, making travel difficult, but fortunately, these people were accustomed to hardship and had undergone training for marching through