"Aerial tag still isn’t my game. What now?" Adyr stood at the rim of the islet, eyes fixed on the Sparks drifting and darting wherever the wind carried them, mind turning over possible solutions.

On the ground, he would have ended it quickly. His footwork and acceleration were stronger there; angles, feints, and cuts came naturally when his soles touched earth.

In the air, he had only the basics—up, down, forward, and a hard brake—enough to stay aloft, not enough to carve precise lines.

He was still a novice at flight, relying on the Dawn Raven ’s coded instincts and the few sessions of practice he had forced into his muscles. Nowhere near a professional.

"What is the source of this wind?" He shifted frames and treated the problem as an environment rather than a target.

The gusts were erratic, shouldering him first from the right, then the left, sometimes from ahead, sometimes from his back. That irregular push was what gave the Sparks their agility. If he could cut it, even a little, he could bleed their speed and catch them while they hung between currents.

He searched for the culprit. The islet’s skin was hard and thirsty, a pale crust broken by sparse, brittle tufts of grass.

He studied the set of each tuft and the angle of their stems, noting how they leaned, hesitated, then crept back toward upright. Dust shivered at his boots in thin veils that rose and fell in place. He held his breath to hear better, listening for a steady throat of air, any fixed pulse hidden in the quiet. He searched for hairline cracks or a pinched vent, some small mouth in the rock that might be breathing.

He found nothing. No fissure, no vent, no telltale whistle. Compared to tracing the flames on the previous islet, where heat and draw had pointed cleanly to their source, this was more elusive—slippery each time he thought he had it.

He pulled back from the urge to stare harder at the same patch of ground.

Think as a whole.

If he couldn’t point to it, then either the source was buried out of sight, or it was sitting in the open where his eyes refused to recognize it.

He waited, observing every detail, every possibility, every shift in the ground and the air alike, yet after minutes of pondering and searching, he was still clueless.

"It doesn’t make sense. I’m missing something."

The breeze wasn’t natural; it couldn’t be. There had to be a source. He forced the question into its simplest form: "How does a wind form?"

This was a world of fantastical things, yet to get to the root of the problem, he tried to analyze it through the rational lens of his own world, brainstorming possibilities to gain a different perspective.

Wind begins when air moves from high pressure to low; uneven heating makes warm air rise and cool air sink, and terrain can funnel or spread that flow.

The explanation was textbook, but the islet was too small. He checked for temperature breaks and found none; the surface felt uniform from edge to center, and the air above it offered no warmth or chill to work with. There was no hot–cold contrast, no heat source to build a pressure gradient, and nothing that should have produced wind.

"Should I consult the researchers again?" he murmured, barely above a breath. If he was honest, he wanted to crack the mystery himself; the very act of solving it was a kind of entertainment for him, a private game that sharpened the mind. Still, spending too much time on it would be unwise.

He was on the verge of giving up and asking for outside perspectives when something snagged his eye—a tiny shift, the faintest hint of movement that didn’t match the background.

"Hey, hey... did the islet just move?"

He beat his wings at once and climbed higher into the void to gain distance and a wider frame. The backdrop was absolute stillness, a blank nothing that offered no reference lines; without anything to compare against, deciding whether the islet moved was maddening.

He forced his body to steady, kept his wings to the smallest possible flutter, and let the tension drain from his shoulders. After a patient count, he caught it: an almost imperceptible drift, perhaps only centimeters per minute, but real. The islet was moving.

"Can that explain the wind?"

On its face, such a minimal drift should not have been able to produce gusts this chaotic and strong. It defied simple sense. Yet even if the motion wasn’t the full answer, it could be the thread that led to one.

He shifted focus from the first problem to the second: why was the islet moving at all?

There was an easy, reasonable explanation. All the islets floated in the endless void. A bit of lateral drift to the left or right was not abnormal, and treating it as ordinary would be the simplest path.

He refused simplicity this time. He set aside tidy logic and, just for once, let himself lean into the fantastical perspective the world so often demanded.

"This islet is alive, moving by itself." It was only a theory, the kind of hypothesis-first approach scientists used when they needed to corner a problem from a new angle. It did not entirely suit his usual logic, but he chose to evaluate the scene through that lens and see what it yielded.

So instead of hunting for the wind’s source directly, he decided to prove or disprove the islet’s supposed life.

He circled its perimeter, keeping a careful radius, studying hairline cracks, shallow ridges, and any regular throb he could feel through the pressure on his skin. If it lived, it would respond to pain. That was simple, testable, and fast.

He drew his sword. Power gathered at his core as he chained Sonic Burst with Burst Hop , compressing power into an instant. He released a sword wave toward one corner of the floating rock, aiming to score rather than obliterate, to send a clear signal and read whatever came back.

BOOM!

The strike bit deep, carving a long, open gash across the islet’s edge. Stone shards and dust fountained outward, crystals of grit glittering for a heartbeat before they were swallowed by the endless void.

The blow did more than scar; it nudged the islet’s path, altering its trajectory so that it drifted the other way with a faint but measurable pull.

Amid the shock, rebound, and settling debris, another response drew his eye.

"Oh, fuck. I would never have thought this line of thought would actually work."

At the base of the wound where the sword wave had landed, a thin, dark line appeared and then widened.

From within the cut, a fluid began to well up, as if he had nicked a hidden channel under the rock. It bled to the surface in a slow bead and then a steady thread—green, viscous, unsettling, like the blood of some alien creature.

It was not only the fluid that seemed strange. Around the wound and the strange green seep, a peculiar current gathered, drawing threads of air inward and then sliding them along the cut in a restless spiral. The breeze there had structure; it clung to the bleeding edge and fed outward in uneven pulses, just like the gusts that had harried him from every angle.

A small smile touched Adyr’s lips as he watched the strange phenomenon take shape. "I think I finally found the source."