As Yoru scouted the inside of the warehouse from the shadows, I was looking from his perspective and saw how the beastkin were leaving chunks of unrefined mineral in the first room of the warehouse.
While we were flying to the town, Gina told me that the starstone mine was quite far from our location since it was closer to the savannah, which made me believe that the minerals they had in the warehouse were something different.
I asked Yoru to inspect it, and he said it was a rock called "terranium," with its description saying that it came from the metallic coating of a Terra Titan.
’Huh? The Terra Titan that we took down? But it wouldn’t be possible for them to get to the place where we left the remains of the tian...’ I thought.
I told Gina what I was seeing, and she gasped with concern, although I couldn’t see her face since my vision was still focused on Yoru’s point of view.
She explained that terranium was the material that composed the Terra Titan, which was used hundreds of years in the past to power up weaker titans to defend the kingdom.
The Terra Titan was a legendary beast that could split itself into different bodies. However, he hadn’t done it in a long time, as it required the titan to die and his heart to be divided into separate pieces.
Gina only knew about this since it was common historical knowledge in Kalusia. Still, the separation of the Terra Titan wasn’t a thing that the citizens would even consider doing as the titan had a good relationship with the citizens, and it seemed cruel to turn him into a mindless army of monsters.
It was easy to suspect that Zagor had ordered the Terra Titan to split, which meant that the titan we fought wouldn’t be the only one trying to defend their nation.
Yoru kept looking around the warehouse until he found a trap door hidden behind a few mineral crates and went through it to peek inside.
Thanks to my companion’s night vision, I was able to see in the pitch darkness that Yoru found himself in and spotted a couple of footprints on the ground.
Most of the beastkin were either barefoot or wearing simple sandals, but the footprints looked like they were from armored shoes, which I knew that people from the Dawn’s Defenders wore.
The footprints stopped at a certain point where a spiral appeared on the ground, and the crates around were all empty.
"I get it! They used the teleport gem at that spot." I exclaimed, returning to my vision and turning towards the direction Lampart and Rio teleported to.
Yoru quickly left the building and returned to my shadow as we all flew in a straight line, hoping that we could find the two.
The more we kept moving, the more I used my search spell to look for any signs of life around me, and after over thirty minutes, I felt the presence of two people not too far from our position.
"There!" I exclaimed, pointing at two figures lying in the middle of the arid zone.
It was Lampart and Rio, who were unconscious beside a crate filled with black pearls.
When I checked their bodies, they had no injuries, they were breathing fine, and their hearts were beating soundly, making me let out a sigh of relief.
"What happened to them?" I wondered out loud.
Vespera checked the body of Rio and spotted a red mark on the back of his neck, making me look at Lampart’s, which had the same thing.
"Someone knocked them out..." I muttered, realizing that the red marks were the print of a karate chop that made them faint instantly.
However, the person who did it clearly didn’t have bad intentions towards them, or they would have killed them and taken the black pearls.
The fact that they were left alive and with the crate full of hundreds of black peals was strange. Nonetheless, I stowed the container in my void pocket and asked Vespera to carry one of the fainted soldiers as we took them back to our camp.
When we returned to the camp, it was late at night, and most of the soldiers were sleeping, with only the empress and the night guards awake.
She received us and helped us take Lampart and Rio inside a tent, where we gave them a healing potion just in case they suffered any injuries that we couldn’t see.
I told the empress what we had seen and about my suspicions of the Terra Titan being split into different pieces, making her nod in understanding.
"If I’m being honest, the past titan seemed too weak for the stories I’ve heard about him," Lysandra commented, looking unsurprised of the information.
She had a point. The Terra Titan was supposed to be a Legendary Beast like Vespera, and even though he was fighting a group of us, it definitely felt quite easy to defeat.
The problem now lay in the fact that we didn’t know how many or where the titans were, so we would have to act even more carefully in enemy territory.
The following morning, I went to the tent where they were keeping Lampart and Rio, and they were both awake and looking healthy.
"Ichiro!" Rio called as he waved at me.
My companions came inside the tent behind me, and we began discussing with them the events that happened at Howlsridge and why they were unconscious in the middle of nowhere.
They told me that after infiltrating the town and the warehouse without any of the villagers seeing them, they found the trapdoor where the beastkin kept small crates with black pearls.
Lampart and Rio then dumped all of the black pearls into a bigger wooden box, but when they were almost finished, they heard steps coming toward the trap door, making them use the teleport gem instantly.
When they appeared in the middle of nowhere, they tried to look in the direction of our camp and started walking there while carrying the crate.
However, not even five minutes later, a man with red hair and golden eyes crashed down from the sky before them, creating a fire vortex in his landing spot that scared them.
They said that the man didn’t say a word to them. He simply glared at them and at the box with black pearls, scanned his surroundings, and that was it.
That was the last thing they remembered before waking up at the camp.
"Red hair, golden eyes... The phoenix guy?" I said, looking at Vespera, who seemed deep in her thoughts.