It was a rare occurrence for Grudge to notice hesitance in their own steps. Hesitance itself was not, by and large, a common emotion for them, though that was not to say that Grudge struggled to identify it. On the contrary, they found it remarkably easy, for hesitance stood polarly opposite to their very nature, and definition came thus through antithesis. Yet, this begged the question of whether or not something could embody its own antithesis without being at the same time the very idea of "everything" – which they believed they were not. Grudge's conclusion was then that they must not have been “the opposite of hesitance” per se, but something else for which hesitance was possible, yet so marginal that the distinction between the words “marginal” and “uncharacteristic” became so subtle that it became functionally non-existent.

And that left them with only the second, harder conundrum: was it a good idea to concede to part ways with Yunyuq in Sonora, after they spent so much time looking for any of their previous comrades-in-arms? She had argued that while their meeting again was fortuitous, there was nowhere for the two of them to go next, and if there was, neither had any way to know exactly where and why, though she had at least agreed with them that there must have been a why to find somewhere (somehow) or there would be no real explanation for the two of them to have been tossed into the same world at similar times, and if the two of them were there, then that most likely meant that the other two were out there somewhere, or they were going to appear at some time in the near future. However, once again...

...they had no way of knowing where or when. So, Yunyuq made the choice to stay in Sonora for a while longer, and agreed to meet Grudge within half a year from now. Any longer than that without anything happening in-between, she had said, would have meant that their presence there might have been a coincidence after all, for their original mission had already been completed, and there might have been other people from their world out there, too, people who did not participate in their quest at all, people they had never met... As unlikely as it was.

Grudge stepped aside to let the yeti's corpe roll down the ridge and away into the forest they had just walked through. For its size, it barely made a sound even as it crashed into a fir. They cleaned their knife into some snow by their feet, and resumed walking as more snow fell from the branches and buried the creature from its head to its torso. It was the second one of that morning. Grudge did hear from Yunyuq that some areas of those mountains were infested with monsters. They wondered for a moment if their presence alone boosted their numbers by one, and squinted to the horizon. On the other end of the crest was a single dark grey blot in a world of pure white: their destination.