The other townsfolk seemed less surprised than I was, but their reactions had an unusual undertone to them. They eyed the area surrounding the church, as if something would jump out of the shadows at any moment and try to eat them. I felt pinpricks of hope blossom in my surroundings, like little fireflies in the night, while fear buzzed underneath that hope. The eldritch half of my body buzzed and twitched in response to these emotions and made me more aware than ever before of the acute, buzzing emotions in the area.

I blinked in surprise. This mixture of emotions hadn't been what I had expected to feel from people around us. Why was there such a strong mixture of hope and fear?

I decided to be a bit inquisitive. After all, I was a kid - I could get away with asking a few blunt questions. I glanced around us, just to make sure there were a few people who were visibly nervous - that way, my question wouldn't seem as if it had come out of nowhere. After I confirmed that the situation looked right, I turned towards my father.

"Papa, why are some people nervous?" I asked. "It's just another wandering town, right? Isn't it a good thing to be able to trade sparks?"

My father blinked in surprise. "You realized that we trade sparks with other wandering towns? I don't remember telling you about that."

"We have sparks related to crafting, but our ember can't produce any crafting related sparks. They have to come from somewhere, right?"

I had not, in fact, noticed that inconsistency - but I decided to shamelessly steal credit from Felix anyway.

My father grinned at me, and ruffled my hair. "You really are a smart kid, Miria. You're right, we trade sparks with other wandering towns - although sometimes it's also possible to find rare sparks out in the wild, too. That's a very inconsistent way to find sparks, but some people do end up with unusually powerful compound classes as a result." Then, my father leaned closer to me.

"But other wandering towns aren't always a good thing. Do you remember when I was talking about materials that can be born in the wilds, and how some of them can be used to upgrade our ember?" He asked.

I nodded.

"One of the most useful materials for upgrading an ember is another ember. In fact, some people in big cities that call themselves 'scholars' claim that all materials used to upgrade embers are unborn embers. A bunch of them need to be born in close proximity to each other, and then some other conditions need to be met, and they'll all fuse together and create a newborn ember…" My father shrugged. "I don't know much more than that, since it never seemed all that important to me. In any case, it's a well known fact that embers can be torn apart and fed to another ember to strengthen it. This can make the ember better at repelling monsters while it rests, make its surroundings warmer, help it produce new sparks, and a whole host of other upgrades. That being said, wandering towns need embers to survive, because without an ember, even if a wandering town finds a way to stay warm, they won't have access to consistent, reliable sources of sparks. Not to mention, people like [Fire Mages] run out of mana eventually. So ripping apart an ember and using it as upgrade materials means that everyone originally attached to an ember is probably going to die." My father's gaze darkened. "Two years before you were born, we had a really bad fight with another town. Nearly two hundred warriors died in the battle, and three hundred tamed beasts also fell. If it weren't for one of the village chiefs sacrificing his life at the right moment, our town might have gone extinct. That battle also cost your mother one of her legs, and left our defensive line weakened for years afterwards. Our warrior population still hasn't entirely recovered - though by now, at least a few new children have filled in the gaps." My father sighed, and then held me a lot closer to his chest. It seemed as if he were trying to comfort me… but it also seemed as if he were trying to reaffirm the fact that I was still there with him.

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I felt a twinge of pity for my father. He didn't talk about my mother much, but I got the sense that he had really loved her. It must be incredibly painful for him to talk about a battle that had cost her a leg. Since my father had also hinted that my mother had died at the hands of monsters… I suspected the battle with the raiders all of those years ago hadn't just cost my mother a leg. If she hadn't been missing a limb, she might have been able to survive whatever had killed her when I was younger.

Still, I was grateful that my father was willing to talk about it with me. I didn't like it when adults tried to shield me from the ugly truths of the world. Perhaps it was because I had been both a child and an adult so many times, but I was starting to notice that I got irritated now when adults tried to protect me from danger 'for my own good.'

At the same time, I finally understood why people weren't ecstatic to see another town. No matter which world I was in, conflicts between people were inevitable. However, this world definitely had a stronger driving momentum behind conflicts than I had seen in most other worlds. Some other words had conflicts between nations over resources, but I couldn't think of another world where it was so directly possible to grow stronger by massacring other towns and villages. That was a good warning for the future.

It also made me reassess our town's position in this world. How strong were we, compared to other towns in this world? If we met a town that was stronger than us and intent on pillaging our ember for supplies, we might end up being wiped out. Therefore, maintaining our town's strength wasn't just a way to keep us from getting overrun by monsters - people were just as much of a threat.

The townsfolk around us discussed the town in the distance for a few more minutes, before we started to drift out of the church one by one.

I took the opportunity to urge my father closer to the edge of the village-bearing beast, and then I relied on my spatial sight and my exceptional perception to get a look at the village approaching us.

The other town seemed surprisingly similar to ours - like us, they also travelled on a large herd of massive village-bearing beasts. However, they had twelve beasts in number, and it certainly seemed that they were more populated than our village beasts were. That meant that they had a much bigger population than we did. I had no idea how strong they were on an individual basis compared to us - but if they had numbers on their side, I didn't like our odds if a fight broke out. Of course, perhaps our [Tamers] could swing the military advantage back in our favor - each [Tamer] had multiple companions to help them fight, after all. I didn't know if the other town had any equivalent to the [Tamer] spark, but from what I had seen, [Tamer] was one of our better combat sparks.

I glanced at the town, and relaxed slightly when I confirmed that we wouldn't meet immediately. The two herds of towns weren't heading directly towards each other. Instead, they were travelling in nearly parallel lines, but they were slowly converging. I estimated that we would get close enough to contact each other within two days. The other thing I noticed was that our ember seemed increasingly agitated as we slowly got closer to the other ember - it almost seemed as if the ember were hungry, and it had just caught sight of a delicious buffet in the distance. I frowned at the ember, and then checked it with my soul sight. Then, I scratched my cheek in surprise.

The Ember had a tiny, barely-recognizable soul inside of it. It was actually alive, although its soul was very small and faint compared to its size and the amount of essence in its body. My eyes hadn't been deceiving me earlier - our ember was basically salivating as it looked at the bigger, stronger town approaching us. Perhaps human desire wasn't the only thing that drove conflict in this world. Perhaps embers themselves had ways to drive or initiating conflict too.

I shivered at the thought. I didn't like conflicts between humans. I just hoped that this wouldn't end up becoming a battle - Felix needed a crafting spark, and the other side looked stronger than us. Still, there wasn't much I could do to influence the outcome. All I could do was try to spy on the other side, and see what kind of people they were - but with no ability to eavesdrop on their conversations, learning anything substantial would be difficult.

The next two days passed by in a flash, as the two groups of towns got closer and closer together. The warriors of our village grew increasingly tense, like bowstrings on the verge of snapping, and through my spatial sight, I started to notice that the other town was just as tense as we were. Finally, the two embers started to cool down. Their speed of travel dwindled, and finally came to a stop less than five hundred meters away from each other.

We had made contact with the other herd of towns.

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