Leon and the rest of his party, as soon as the meeting between Maia and her Naiad contact ended, returned to Vyrias to link back up with Elise and Talal, their plans to spend the night out in the wild scrapped with the success of the mission. They returned not long after sundown. Elise and Talal were both still up as Leon had used his mental communication technique to inform them that the team was on its way back.

Once they touched down, everyone met in the dining room to go over what Maia had discovered.

“So,” Leon said as everyone took their seats, “you said that you were told something useful?”

I was, Maia replied with a dark smile. This region is very well known to my people, and their influence stretches all the way to the far coasts of your Raj. Maia pointedly looked at Anshu, who looked a little surprised. Though, Leon wasn’t sure why, because he already knew that Maia’s father, a famous war leader in the Free Cities of the Tam south of the Raj had been taken by Maia’s mother, so the presence of river nymphs that far west certainly didn’t surprise him.

Maia continued, The wyvern aeries are generally avoided, being too dangerous. However, my people know quite a bit about them, including many hidden routes and passages through the mountains we could take.

Leon smiled in anticipation and excitement. He’d seen the aeries himself, though he’d never gotten close. Five years ago, his hunt had taken him within a hundred miles of the foot of the mountains that the wyverns laired within, and they were incredibly imposing. Tall, steep peaks that could give the Frozen Mountains that he’d grown up in a run for sheer ruggedness. As far as he knew, there were no routes that humans could use to get through those mountains, the wyverns were simply too numerous and territorial to allow for that kind of travel. Knowledge of relatively safe ways to get through the mountains, or at least to some of the aeries, would be worth his weight in gold to the right people.

And his party just so happened to be the right people.

“What kind of routes are we talking about?” Leon asked. “Are they routes that all of us can use, or are they underground rivers that are only accessible to your people?”

Most of the underground rivers reach the surface before the foot of the aeries, Maia informed him, and Elise helpfully pulled out a detailed map of the Scorched Fields for Maia to use as an aid.

Maia then indicated a place on the southern end of the mountain range, tracing it with a bronze finger.

Here, she explained. There’s a pass through the mountains that’s well-shaded by trees and boulders, offering plentiful cover from any wyverns flying above us. The pass doesn’t go all the way through the aeries to the Raj on the other side, but it cuts through a valley with several wyvern lairs that should be relatively deserted once their eggs start hatching and the adults go out hunting.

“Do you know how deserted?” Gaius asked with some concern. “I can’t imagine that all wyverns everywhere leave their young vulnerable as they head out to hunt…”

“That’s something that’s actually pretty common,” Anna countered. “A lot of creatures will hide their young while they hunt or keep them in secluded nests. Wyverns don’t really make family units, only coming together to mate, generally speaking. Once all the mothers leave the aeries, there shouldn’t be many surprises in those aeries for us to stumble across.”

“And, if all things go well, we’ll be able to snatch up all those young and the eggs yet to be hatched!” Alcander exclaimed excitedly.

“Maybe,” Leon cautioned. “Let’s not get carried away. For the most part, the mothers leaving their aeries forces nearly all of their males to hunt further afield. However, sometimes, they’ll stick around to opportunistically snatch up some of the young.”

“Why would they do that?” Alcander wondered. “What use could they have for doing that?”

Anna answered, “Eating their own young can be a good way to avoid having to hunt. Plus, with all the females gone from the aeries, there’ll be more food to be found in the mountains. People like us might be heading up there to look for eggs, too…”

“Making matters more complicated,” Leon added, “is that the females will be constantly returning and leaving again with their catches. The aeries are going to be ‘relatively’ deserted, but we’ll still have plenty of opportunities to snag a few heads on our way.”

Alcander fell silent as all of that sank in., though he put on a brave smile. There’d be a few male wyverns hanging around the aeries, along with a few mothers who would strongly disagree with their attempts to take the wyvernlings and yet-to-be-hatched eggs. And though most of the wyverns would be out hunting, the Scorched Fields were huge, bigger even than all of the Bull Kingdom. That meant that while there would be a massive number of wyverns out hunting, their density was going to be fairly low. There’d be comparatively fewer wyverns in the aeries, but Leon and his party, if they decided to make this assault on the aeries, were almost guaranteed to encounter more wyverns than any other team out hunting in the Fields.

Judging by the looks many of his retainers wore, Leon knew that this information was not lost on anyone. Still, he decided to give voice to it anyway, just to be sure they were all on the same page.

After some deliberation, however, they all agreed, regardless of the risk. Wyverns were powerful and ferocious beasts, but Leon and Maia were eighth-tier mages with powers greater than the average wyvern. It was natural for everyone to feel confident in their chances, and once he got over his initial surprise and shock, Alcander went back to his usual boisterous attitude, bragging about how many wyverns he was going to bring down.

They soon broke for the night, their plan set. For the moment, they had nothing to do but wait for word of the first wyverns to start coming down from aeries, which could be as long as a month away. Their greatest challenge at this stage was just finding something to fill the days they’d be spending at this camp, but for that, Leon had a few ideas…

—

“… and adjust it a little more this way…” Valeria whispered, crouching down and fiddling with some of the enchantments that Leon had inscribed upon his Lightning Lance.

In keeping with the focus of his enchantment research over the past decade, much of the weapon’s enchanted components could be swapped out, replaced, or adjusted, giving a much greater degree of control over the weapon than any others that Leon had ever used.

It had been two weeks since the meeting with the local Naiad, and Leon and his party were still waiting for the wyverns to start their great hunt, and to fill his days, Leon had taken to adjusting his Lightning Lance. After the first lackluster test, he really wanted to get it working as well as he needed, and in these two weeks, he’d spent enough time adjusting it and testing it that he didn’t even need to actually fire an iron bolt through it to know if it was working—he’d just observed the magic flowing through it enough times to get a good idea of what was going on.

He’d made some progress in bringing the power of the weapon closer to what he wanted it to be, but that also threw off many of his calculations regarding the weapon’s magic power requirements. He needed both force and efficiency, and to do that, Valeria had taken to spending much of her time not spent training helping him adjust the Lance. That was where Leon now found himself, listening to Valeria run through her own theories regarding the weapon’s shortcomings.

Once Valeria finished adjusting a small dial inscribed with more than a dozen runes on the side of the weapon—one of several that helped Leon to adjust the weapon’s power—she stood up.

“The magic power you’re pumping into the Lance is getting caught up in an amplification loop,” Valeria explained, and Leon immediately crouched down to see what she was talking about. Valeria continued, “The power was having trouble getting out of that loop, and eventually just bled out of the Lance over several hours.”

“Ah, **,” Leon whispered. “How did I not see this?”

“Too focused on smaller and more technical problems?” Valeria suggested as Leon rose to his feet, a look of self-admonishment adorning his face. “I’ve seen you work enough to know that, when it comes to enchantments, at least, you get caught up in the little details. Tends to blind you to more basic problems. I’m guessing you assumed most of the problems were coming from the more complicated enchantments you made, and never really examined the amplification loops?”

Leon scowled and didn’t immediately answer, but he was hardly upset at Valeria for this. She was a fresh pair of eyes seeing what he couldn’t, and it was an extremely dangerous problem she’d pointed out.

“Good thing I wasn’t testing this thing too frequently,” Leon whispered with some worry.

The specific problem that Valeria had pointed out and adjusted was one where magic power was supposed to flow into and loop through an amplification array several times, and then flow into the weapon’s barrel, where the meat of the Lance’s enchantments lay. However, the magic power wasn’t flowing out of the array, and was instead just being amplified endlessly.

In the worst case scenario, power trapped like this would eventually cause the enchanted object to explode. Leon had placed some safeguards against this by ensuring the amplification array was only active for a short time, but that didn’t stop the problem of power getting trapped within it. The enchantment wasn’t completely lossless—fortunately, in this case—so that trapped power did eventually bleed off into the environment at a rate slow enough that he never noticed, but if he’d tested the Lance frequently enough, then that power might’ve built up faster than it could bleed out, eventually causing the very explosion that Leon’s safeguards were meant to prevent.

“Shit…” Leon whispered as all of this ran through his head, knowing just how close the weapon had been to his family and retinue.

“We got a bit lucky there, didn’t we?” Valeria said, her voice just a little shaky.

“Yeah,” Leon replied as he pulled her into a quick hug. “Good thing you noticed that, because I think it would’ve taken me a while longer to see it, and who knows what could’ve happened in that time?”

“You would’ve seen it before that happened, I’m sure,” Valeria said with a glowing smile. “I have faith in your abilities. As far as I can tell, the more technical and specialized enchantments in the rest of the weapon are working fine, it’s just that magic power was getting trapped in that loop—”

“—And not traveling to those specialized enchantments,” Leon finished. He crouched back down to look at the amplification array and the adjustments Valeria had made. She hadn’t done much, merely twisting a dial just a couple of degrees, but it was enough to improve the array significantly. He’d still need to re-enchant that dial, or replace it entirely, but her adjustment was probably enough to make the weapon far more functional than it was.

Leon reached out to perform a few more adjustments to other dials and control enchantments, hoping to increase the weapon’s efficiency just a little bit more when Talal suddenly ran into the courtyard.

“Leon!” he shouted, and Leon’s head snapped in Talal’s direction. “Wyverns have been sighted in the west!” Talal shouted. “The hunt is on!”

—

Leon’s camp was back in his soul realm, his family and retinue were at his side, and he sat astride Anzu in full armor. Everyone else he was traveling with was in their armor and wore their flight gear, ready to follow him into the sky. However, they just needed to make a few last arrangements before they could leave, which Talal was seeing to not too far away, where he was locked in conversation with the Heaven’s Eye representatives who were actually in charge of the delegation, rather than serving as the nominal leaders that Leon and Penelope were.

To ensure the safety of not only Leon’s party but Vyrias as well, constant communications between the strongest mages taking part in the hunt and the hunting city had to be maintained. It was also best for Heaven’s Eye to know where Leon was at most times. He instinctively balked a little bit at this, not wanting his whereabouts to fall into Penelope’s hands, but he figured that the safety of himself, his family, and his retinue was far more important than winning the bet.

That certainty was challenged when Penelope and her retinue emerged from her camp and made their way down the road. Most of her retainers were riding on the sides of horseless and wheelless carriages, but Penelope herself rode with three others in a wheelless chariot pulled by four huge horses that Leon recognized as being the same breed of ruinously expensive beasts as those that had pulled Emilie’s carriages during their move to the Central Empires.

Saternan horses. She’d be able to move quickly with those things.

Penelope’s group rode right past him, the woman herself smirking at his group as she passed, and Leon was rather unpleasantly surprised to see that she was wearing one of his flight belts. He’d only recently sent the design to Heaven’s Eye and didn’t know that they were being manufactured, yet.

“I look forward to receiving that stone of yours, Leon!” Penelope shouted at him. “I’ll be sure to put it to better use than you ever could!”

Speaking for him, Alix muttered just loud enough for all of them to hear, “Bitch…”

Leon fought the urge to chuckle, and responded to his people, “If we lose to her, none of you will see the outside of my training room for a year.”

“Sounds like a win-win to me,” Alcander growled.

“I’ll pass on that, husband,” Elise said. “But I’ll do what I can do ensure our triumph, anyway.”

Leon warmly smiled at her. She and Talal would be maintaining communications at their camp wherever Leon decided to establish it while Leon and the others actually went out to hunt.

“Are you so sure that you want to pass on it?” Leon asked as his smile widened mischievously. “That could be quite fun, in more ways than one…”

“Is it the kind of fun that I would be interested in?” Elise replied as her eyes narrowed coquettishly.

Before Leon could respond, Gaius loudly coughed and said, “Perhaps not right now?”

“Yeah,” Alix added. “All of us use that room. Maybe don’t make us think you’re **ing in there?”

“We haven’t **ed in there…” Elise replied. “… Yet, anyway. How about this, Leon? If you lose this bet and cause our family that dishonor, then you do what I want for a day.”

“A blank check?” Leon inquired with faux-incredulity. “I’m not sure I can agree to that…”

“Who said anything about agreement, husband?” Elise asked. “How about this, then? If you lose, then you owe me a night on the town!”

“I don’t need to lose a bet for that,” Leon replied. “How about the night after we get back to Occulara? We’ll go out and do something fun?”

“I like the sound of that,” Elise replied as her tone turned playfully flirtatious. “But if I agree, then what incentive can I give for you to do well in this bet?”

Before Leon could respond, Talal walked back over, a comm stone in hand. “We’re good to go!” he called out as he made one last quick check of his flight belt.

Leon stole one last quick glance at Elise, then one at the back of Penelope’s head, already fairly far in the distance. “I have incentive enough to win this thing,” he growled.

Elise climbed up onto Anzu’s back behind him and wrapped her arms around his midsection. She didn’t say a word but gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and a bright look.

Thusly encouraged, Leon ordered his retinue, “All right, let’s get going!”

A moment later, he and his retinue were rising into the air, Leon and Elise riding Anzu for a short distance before letting their flight gear take over. The rest of the retinue followed behind.

They went due west for a long way, flying just high enough over the massive, sparsely-positioned trees to duck back down below their canopies if they had to. While the Scorched Fields didn’t have many predators that could strike them in the air under normal conditions, with the wyverns coming down from their aeries, that was about to change, so they had to fly with a little more caution than they could when they ventured out to meet with the local Naiad.

With a destination in mind, they made good time for the first day, but as night began to fall, they were able to start to see the haze in the distance had turned a dull orange: the wyverns were out in force, and parts of the Scorched Fields were already burning.

Leon had them head for the ground as the sun started to dip below the edge of the plane far ahead of them, casting long shadows across the ground. They were fortunate that wyverns were daylight hunters, so Leon wasn’t too concerned about their camp being found by any of the flying beasts. Still, as he quickly set up the modular house for his retinue to shelter in for the night, he resolved himself to stay awake the entire night, just in case. Besides, there were other groups of hunters out that he could see with his magic senses, having moved almost as quickly as he and his retinue did, and if any of them were attacked in the night, he was willing to step in.

It would be a good way to grab a wyvern head, if for nothing else.

It was a fairly fitful night even with the exhaustion of having flown so far. The excitement of finally starting the hunt had permeated the entire retinue, and everyone was just waiting for the first encounter they’d have with a wyvern.

They wouldn’t have to wait long. Just as dawn broke, Leon hurriedly woke everyone up and got them ready: a wyvern was flying straight for them.