They set a harder pace on the second leg, now that they truly understood what their bodies could do.
A hundred in every stat was not a number that meant much until you tried to outrun it. Peak Sunken, the storm-being had called it, the very top of the depths, and on the open road that strength finally had room to stretch. What would once have been a day's hard slog, they ate through in a morning. They were not running, not exactly. They were flowing, the way water flows downhill, fast and easy and tireless, and they had learned to lean on one another to do it.
It was the morning of that second leg when the quest arrived.
It came to all of them at once, a quiet panel unfolding behind the eyes the way the system's words always did, and one by one they slowed to read it.
