Niko landed down with a thud, kicking up a small cloud of dust, and started looking around.
Hana was standing a few feet away, curiously studying her surroundings.
The broken roof allowed plenty of sunlight to enter the room, brightly illuminating its interior and allowing them to search around in the room with ease.
But throughout the time that they spent searching the house, Hana kept noticing Niko seeming distracted, staring into the distance with a strange expression.
However, every time she tried to ask him about it, Niko simply shook his head, telling her that it was nothing.
Unable to figure out what he was doing, Hana decided to focus on searching through the house, for the time being.
Her gaze settled on a small frame housing a glass panel, and she went and picked it up.
The frame was made of metal and adorned with a single gem. When she touched the glass panel with her hand, the gem lit up, and its mana started flowing into the glass panel.
Then, the panel lit up as well, and a three dimensional image was projected above it. It seemed to be an image of a family of three humans — the husband, the wife, and their son.
Hana's eyes widened in awe as she saw the image, which seemed almost life-like. Then, she focused her attention on the people in the picture, looking at them fondly.
Their expressions, their clothes, the jewelery that the woman wore, the toy in the boy's hand, she made sure to take in every detail.
Niko, on the other hand, turned away as soon as the image appeared, hiding his face from view by pretending to search the opposite end of the room.
He felt a pang of pain in his heart as old memories resurfaced in his mind, but he stubbornly ignored it and tried to find something to distract himself.
He got his hands on a toy that looked like a small, metallic golem of some sort.
Meanwhile, Hana found a box full of jewelery that seemed a bit too lavish.
She wore it all over her head, neck and arms, and Niko had to struggle hard to keep himself from laughing at her comical appearance.
Niko eventually found another metal frame. He hesitated for a moment, before touching the glass panel in it.
The panel lit up, but this time there was a different set of images, which showed up one by one.
They depicted a festival of some sort. There were people filling the streets, wearing all kinds of stylish clothes and jewelery. There were also strange devices hovering in the air above them, filling the area with vibrant, colorful lights.
Then there were images of a parade. There were singers, acrobats and all kinds of other performers showing their talents as the parade moved towards the city square.
Both Niko and Hana looked at the cheerful images of the lively city, all the while smiling fondly. Then, the device suddenly flickered, before turning off.
Thinking that the device had finally stopped working too, Hana turned away to look for something else.
Niko was about to set the frame down and follow her, but then the device flickered on once again, continuing from where it had left off.
It showed the parade having reached the city square, where a large crowd of people was already gathered around a circular platform.
And on that platform...
Niko's eyes widened, while his grip tightened around the device.
Hana noticed him still standing there and came up to him, and he quickly turned the device off and hid it behind his back.
Hana tilted her head as she looked at him, wondering if something was wrong. Niko shook his head with a smile, setting the device back to where it had been before joining her in looking through the rest of the house.
They found quite a lot of things — clothes, toys, strange devices of all shapes and sizes. The people living here had left a lot of their belongings behind.
After looking through the entire house and satiating their curiosity to some extent, the two Spirits finally decided to leave the house.
They eventually found a few more houses that were partially damaged, using the broken walls or roofs to get inside.
There was one particular thing that all the houses had in common — they all looked like they had been abandoned in a hurry, with most of the belongings still inside.
The Spirits found toys lying on the ground, dishes and cutlery sitting on top of the dinner table, and devices that had been left on and were now on the brink of running out of power completely.
There was even one particular house that still had some power, allowing the devices inside it to still function to some extent. But it still wasn't much use, since they couldn't figure out how to use most of them.
After a while, they walked out through the door and onto the metallic pavement.
As soon as they stepped onto the edge of the pavement, it started to shudder, and the part of it beneath their feet separated from the rest to form a small platform.
The metallic platform started moving, carrying them onto the metal road.
An image appeared in front of them, showing a map of the city. Hana noticed the image of the city square on the map, and tapped on it while looking at Niko, wondering if he wanted to go there.
But he didn't get to answer, because the platform started to move again as soon as she tapped the screen, likely carrying them towards the city square.
Sighing inwardly, Niko shrugged.
The path Leta had found for them required them to move across the ancient city.
Since, according to the map, the city square was close to the castle located at the opposite end of the city, going there would be a logical decision.
But he still didn't like the thought of going there.
So, he tried to distract himself from it by looking around at his surroundings, with Hana soon joining in.
The ancient city around them seemed strangely like a jungle, with large trees and tall grass covering almost every spot that wasn't covered by metallic roads or houses.
There were all kinds of animals scurrying about, filling the scene with their soothing calls and vibrant colors.
There were also plenty of interesting man-made structures.
At first, all they could see were metallic buildings of different sizes. But then they noticed a few stone structures too.
Most were statues made of white marble, standing on pedestals that were adorned with a large number of rare gems.
The statues depicted mighty human warriors, who seemed from their attire to have belonged to the city. They wore strange armor and carried powerful weapons, standing tall and proud.
They were surrounded by a number of other people too, most of whom were of other races. There were dryads, dwarves, harpies and orcs — ancient species that had once filled the lands of the Ashwing continent.
But they were all depicted as...reduced, weak, scared, bowing and groveling at the feet of the mighty warriors.
Hana found that confusing. Were the residents of the city perhaps some ancient heroes who had saved them all from some great disaster?
There were also some engravings on the pedestal, written in an ancient language.
Unfortunately, neither couldn't read what was written there. The statues had been eroded and damaged, and were covered from top to bottom in cracks, moss and vines.
So, even though Leta had taught Niko some of the ancient languages of the continent, Niko couldn't decipher what was written on the marble pedestals.
Hana also noticed a few stone monoliths, having various intricate patterns etched onto their surfaces, which somehow seemed to appear even more beautiful with all the vegetation and cracks covering various parts of their surfaces.
But their sightseeing was interrupted by a number of crackling sounds that came from the moving platform, which then shook and came to a halt, with smoke starting to leak out from cracks on its surface.
Niko sighed.
It seemed like they would have to go the rest of the way on foot.