Tao

The next day, Tao and the others went out to look for Kris. He still hadn't returned, and even Suho agreed to let them search for him. He wouldn't have disappeared for this long unless he was in trouble.

Tao ducked underneath a branch as he walked through the trees. He had been tasked to search around the mountain that was past the forest and river. Xiumin and Baekhyun went to search the cave complex close by, and Kai was going to every area they had previously gone to for a mission. Lay stayed behind to look after Suho.

Tao thought about what Kris could be doing. He had a sharp eye, and he was good at picking up on suspicious clues, which had saved them on several missions, like the time he stopped a line of bombs from blowing up when he saw a traitor in the ally army repeating the same hand signal when no one was looking.

Tao knew he was likely to follow a suspicious trail, but he didn't think he would leave Suho in the punishment room either.

If he was caught by the Yaelumian Army and couldn't escape, the news would have reached Commander Lang. Tao didn't doubt that the commander would punish Kris like he did with Suho and then taunt them with their beaten friend.

If he was captured by the Reysian Alliance, he would have been able to escape easily. His power could be used more subtly compared to the rest of theirs. He could use it without outsiders knowing about their existence.

So what was taking Kris so long?

The mountain Tao was going to search on was a long shot. Kris liked to come here on their off-days for leisure, walking along the massive pines. Tao doubted that he would come here when he was on his way to the lab and the punishment room.

Climbing up a tree, he looked out over the scene. Green needles covered the entire area, and the midday sun doused him with a wave of heat. In the distance, he could see the rugged slope of the mountain, but something about it seemed odd. The slope seemed to be cut in half and missing. Part of the middle and the summit were gone, covered in a blank white. Tao thought that maybe a humongous cloud obscured the mountain. He hadn't looked at the mountain enough to know how the scenery might have usually been.

He slid down the trunk and started walking again. He reached the end of the forest and the beginning of the stubby mountain grass and started hiking upwards. The chill from the breeze was refreshing after the heat.

Tao had never been to the summit before. The farthest he had ever gone was to the edge of two cliff faces that he would have had to climb. He would wait for Kris to fly down from the summit, and they would walk back to the barracks. They sometimes talked, and sometimes they just walked together in comfortable silence. Those were peaceful days.

Tao came to the cliffs and tilted his head back at the height. It was a near vertical wall of rock with few and tiny footholds. He didn't get how the mountain goats could climb something like this.

"Kris ge?" He shouted up the rock face. Echoes replied him. A bird flapped its wings at his shout, glaring at him from its nest on the cliff. Tao took a step away from the bird and shouted again.

More echoes.

Tao scanned the wall. A cluster of small indents were within reach, and a sparse trail of holds s up nearby. Waiting for a little longer, Tao decided he would have to scale up the rock himself. He slipped more than a few times and almost fell before he started using his knives to climb.

He had never tried climbing a cliff without rope before, and he was breathing hard by the time he reached the same height as the bird's nest. If Kris wasn't at the top of this mountain, Tao swore he was going to--

His thoughts stopped as he looked up the cliff side. The rock face continued up for a few more indents, but then it was gone. Not covered in moss or sloped into flat ground again but just gone. Tao hurried up the last few foot holds and looked at the rock, or rather, the lack of rock. Where the cliff should have continued was only white, a blank white that his hand could past through. It reminded him of the white room he woke up in before they were thrown into the trials.

Tao waved his hand through the space a few more times. It was as if it didn't exist anymore. Did the labyrinth simply not make this part of the mountain? How could everything else be so vivid and detailed and then have an entire summit missing?

"Kris ge?" He shouted again, but this time there was no echo. The sound fell flat, like back in the white room. He turned his voice back down the cliff side, and it echoed again. The mountain really had just disappeared.

Tao half-climbed, half-slipped back down the cliff, landing in the grass on his .

He just couldn't believe it. What did it mean? Did it have any impact on the slim chance that the trials were their memories? Was this planned by the beings?

Tao knew one thing though: Kris wouldn't be here. There wasn't any summit. With something as strange as this, Kris would have noticed the missing peak, flown home, and reported it to Suho.

Tao started running back to the barracks. He would probably catch him just as he was reporting where he had gone to their