There was no further argument. John left his friends at the entrance of the tunnel and ran into it. For half an hour, he sprinted through the tunnel, realising how many cores were wasted on carving it.
He encountered a few large groups of Fog Seekers that slipped through the walls of the corridor; he silenced them with single, fluid slashes, barely slowing his pace as he snatched their cores.
Finally, he reached the end. The path stopped abruptly, facing a wall of impenetrable, swirling black fog. This was the point where his friends' cores were exhausted.
"Tsk! They didn't even cross half the distance I walked to get to them from the last device!" John muttered, shaking his head. Their progress was doomed to fail if they kept adopting that clunky, resource-heavy tactic.
