***
It didn't take long before Acolyte Orgten and his battered march finally came into view of the main army they had so desperately chased after.
It was accomplished under the sporadic guidance of the FRC unit within the Gate, and in not too much time at all.
Well, "not too long," of course, is a relative term.
It was somewhere between three to four grueling hours after the monstrous lizard's savagery, a journey that had taken them through devastated Folk-man villages, treacherous mountainous pathways, and countless corridors of rock and ice, some of them open to the hazy sky, others hidden in shadow.
Finally, they had caught up.
They were barely a couple of hundreds of meters away now, according to the disembodied voice from the transponder that occasionally informed and guided Acolyte Orgten through the earpiece in his head gear.
The long, weary march came to a momentary halt, right at the jagged edge of a small cliff.
