The outside of the Path that Lucas and his group had dived into was still as crowded as when The Adventurer had arrived. It might not have been made clear earlier, but unlike the empty Path, or rather, precisely because the Path had been emptied, the outside, which normally should have been empty, was 'crowded'.
Consequently, the spaceships hovering in the vacuum showed no intent to leave, whether they were the military ones or the few others geared for transportation. Still, compared to the wide vacuum, their number meant nothing. And, with all the available space, only a few military spaceships were positioned closer in a perimeter along an arc a few hundred kilometers away from the entrance of the Path while the rest were lingering a little farther away.
