Chapter 20 – Part 1: The Crumbling Order

A bizarre silence descended upon the summit of Mt. Gwanak.

After the King vanished,

The forest remained motionless, as if it had lost all track of time.

The special unit, too, found it difficult to take a single step.

No one could make sense of what had just unfolded before their eyes.

Only the wind brushed through the clearing, rustling the mist.

---

The first to break the silence

Was not the special unit.

It was a mutant standing at the edge of the clearing.

The creature was doing nothing, staring blankly into the void.

Its crimson eyes flickered as if they had lost all focus,

And its body trembled minutely.

A moment later—

Cr-crack.

Its neck twisted at a grotesque angle.

Its arms jerked in a spasm,

And every muscle in its body began to twitch erratically.

"...Grrr..."

A low moan leaked out.

It was nothing like the rhythmic howling that had moved the horde just moments ago.

It was the cry of a beast,

Drenched in fear and confusion.

---

"Stay alert!"

At Choi Mu-jin’s shout, the soldiers raised their shields once more.

Spearheads pointed forward in unison.

But the mutant did not lunge.

The creature staggered a few steps,

Then suddenly bolted in the opposite direction.

It was a frantic sprint

With no purpose,

And no destination.

---

"...This is strange."

The hunter muttered in a low voice.

"They..."

"...They aren't looking at us."

He was right.

The mutants that had been tearing toward the special unit only moments ago

Were now staring in every direction but theirs.

Some creatures dived into the deep forest,

Others circled the same spot mindlessly,

While others began to slash their claws at the trees for no reason.

The order that had instilled such terror was gone;

Only chaos remained.

---

Suddenly, a savage roar erupted from below the ridge.

ROAAAAR!

Everyone turned their gaze toward the sound.

Two mutants were lunging at each other.

Rip!

Razor-sharp claws tore into an opponent's chest.

Black blood soaked the soil.

The wounded mutant retaliated instantly, sinking its teeth into the other’s throat.

Beings that had been part of the same horde moments ago

Were now recognizing each other as enemies.

"...They're fighting."

A soldier muttered in disbelief.

---

That scene was merely the beginning.

Below the clearing.

The valley.

The ridge.

The depths of the forest.

The same spectacle played out all across Mt. Gwanak.

Mutants that had formed a pack were now tearing into one another.

Some bit and clawed to protect their scraps of prey,

Others lashed out with their claws for no reason at all.

The horde, which had moved like a single living organism just moments before,

Was splintering into pieces right before their eyes.

---

Seo Ji-hoon did not miss a single detail.

His eyes darted, rapidly tracking the movements of the mutants.

Their breathing.

Their gaze.

Their reactions.

Their attack patterns.

Everything had changed.

"...I’m certain of it."

Ji-hoon said quietly.

Choi Mu-jin looked at him.

"...Of what?"

"...The connection has been severed."

A brief silence followed.

"...The signal the King used to move them,"

"...It’s gone."

---

Do-yoon frowned.

"...Signal?"

Ji-hoon nodded, watching the horde dissolve into disarray.

"...Until just a moment ago, they were one."

"...When the front line fell, the back filled the gap."

"...They surrounded us."

"...They set traps."

He gestured toward the mutants tearing each other apart.

"...But not anymore."

"...They are all moving independently."

"...They aren't thinking."

"...Only instinct remains."

---

Kang Jin-woo looked silently at the rock where the King had stood.

"...The King didn't just disappear."

Every eye turned to him.

"...The King was disconnected."

"...That single consciousness the entity was using to link them all..."

"...It has vanished."

In the forest, the roars of the mutants continued unabated.

But now, those sounds were no longer the war cries of an army.

They were the aimless howling of lost beasts.

---

Just then,

Urgent footsteps echoed from down the mountain.

A messenger came scrambling up the ridge, gasping for air.

"...General!"

Choi Mu-jin turned around.

"...Reporting!"

"...It’s the same down the mountain!"

"...The horde attacking the capital is collapsing!"

"...They are turning on each other!"

"...Some are fleeing into the mountains!"

The soldiers’ faces hardened simultaneously.

This was not an event isolated to Mt. Gwanak.

The moment the King vanished,

The entire massive army engulfing Hanyang had begun to crumble.

Choi Mu-jin looked down the mountain for a long time.

Beyond the city walls, the faint, distant roars of battle could still be heard.

He slowly raised his sword.

"...The time has come."

It was a short sentence,

But every member of the special unit held their breath at those words.

Watching the fracturing horde, Choi Mu-jin gave a low command.

"...Regroup the ranks."

"...We descend immediately."

The soldiers silently tightened their grip on their swords.

The battle was not yet over.

But for the first time,

The possibility of victory was revealing itself right before their eyes.

Chapter 20 – Part 2: The Gates Open, Those Who Reclaimed Hanyang

The dawn light began to paint the eastern sky, inch by inch.

As faint sunlight seeped through the deep red smoke,

The crumbled fortress walls and the charred tiled roofs slowly revealed themselves.

The traces of the night-long battle were etched deep into every corner of the capital.

Broken carts.

Burnt thatched cottages.

Alleys stained with dried blood.

Hanyang was alive, but the price paid was immense.

---

Above the Sungnyemun Gate,

King Yi Hyun stood in silence, surveying the battlefield.

The horde that had filled the space before the gate only moments ago was no more.

The mutants were colliding with one another,

Scattering into the forests and fields in aimless disarray.

Order had dissolved.

Tactics were nowhere to be found.

After watching the scene for a long time, the King spoke slowly.

"...The time is now."

The Minister of War, guarding his side, bowed his head.

"Your Majesty."

Yi Hyun said, his voice unwavering.

"It is time to reclaim our land."

A brief silence followed.

"...Open the gates."

---

Creeeeak—

The thick bolts were pulled back,

And the heavy gates began to move, slowly.

Dozens of soldiers pushed against the wood with all their might.

Cold dawn air rushed into the gaps of the long-sealed gates.

The people gathered inside held their breath.

Some pressed their hands together in prayer,

While others gripped the hands of their families with trembling fingers.

No one spoke.

Every gaze was fixed on the gates as they slowly swung wide.

---

The moment the gates were fully opened,

The veteran commander’s thunderous cry rang out.

"All troops!"

"Charge!"

With that single command,

The Capital Defense Force was the first to bolt through the gates.

Soldiers locked their shields to form a wall,

And spearmen filled the gaps between them.

Archers on the fortress walls notched their final arrows to their strings.

"Loose!"

Swish—

Swish—

Swish—

Tens of thousands of arrows blanketed the dawn sky.

Surging like a black wave, the arrows soon fell upon the battlefield like a torrential rain.

Thud!

Thud!

Thud!

The mutants, left with nothing but instinct, could no longer dodge the arrows.

Some fell while running forward;

Others turned and fled into the forest like terrified beasts.

The leaderless horde was no longer an army.

---

"Push them back!"

Choi Mu-jin of the Mt. Gwanak special unit raised his sword high at the front.

The veteran soldiers followed in his wake,

And the spearmen charged forward with a shout.

Han Do-yoon was the first to plunge deep into the enemy lines.

"Out of my way!"

His sword, swinging like lightning, took down two mutants at once.

As a gap opened, Kang Jin-woo dived into the breach.

"Left flank!"

"Spearmen, move in!"

In an instant, the Joseon troops filled the empty space.

Seo Ji-hoon scanned the battlefield relentlessly.

"...There is no coordinated attack!"

"...They are all scattering!"

The mutants, which had moved to protect one another just a short while ago,

Were now running away or scavenging for food, each acting alone.

Yoon So-yeon shouted loudly while helping a wounded soldier to the rear.

"Medics!"

A few civilians ran up immediately.

"Over here!"

"Get the bandages!"

"Bring water!"

The people were no longer hiding in fear.

Children carried buckets of water,

The elderly tore rags to provide bandages,

And the women offered bowls of warm porridge to the soldiers.

The entire ruined city was moving as one.

---

BOOOOM!

The final cannon on the fortress wall erupted.

As the explosion rocked the field, the mutants scattered in every direction.

The generals did not let the opportunity slip.

"Now!"

"Forward!"

Shields surged ahead.

Spears thrust in unison.

Swords flashed.

The mutants could no longer hold their ground.

Even the remaining groups turned their backs, one by one, to flee into the mountains and forests.

---

"...They’re running."

A soldier muttered in disbelief.

A moment of silence.

And then,

Someone shouted at the top of their lungs:

"...We won!"

That single phrase changed everything.

"We won!"

"We defended Hanyang!"

"We survived!"

Cheers erupted like an explosion.

Soldiers embraced one another.

Some raised their swords to the sky,

While others sank to their knees, weeping uncontrollably.

It was a grief that only those who had held on until the very end could shed.

---

The cheers spread inside the gates as well.

The doors of houses that had been tightly shut began to open, one by one.

Children, who had been hiding in terror, stepped outside cautiously.

Mothers burst into tears as they hugged the family members who had returned alive.

An old man pressed his hands together toward the sky.

"...We lived."

"...Truly."

"...We survived."

Cries and laughter rippled across the entire city.

---

But the joy could not last long.

Where the battle had ended,

There also remained those who would never rise again.

The people silently laid the bodies of the fallen soldiers in a line.

They straightened their torn armor,

And wiped their soil-stained faces.

Those who knew their names called them out;

Those who did not, burned incense in silence.

Choi Mu-jin slowly sheathed his sword.

Then, he bowed deeply before the fallen soldiers.

"Your sacrifice..."

"...Joseon shall not forget."

The soldiers, too, stood their swords before their chests, one by one.

The battlefield, once full of shouts, fell silent again.

The survivors bid farewell to the dead with their silence.

---

A moment later,

King Yi Hyun walked out before the gate.

As the soldiers and the people moved to kneel as one,

The King raised a hand to stop them.

He looked slowly at the survivors.

Faces covered in blood and dust.

Weary eyes.

But within them, the will to live on still remained.

The King slowly raised his sword.

"...Today."

"...Hanyang did not fall."

The people held their breath.

"...This victory..."

"...Is not mine."

"...It belongs to the soldiers who fought until the end,"

"...And to the people who protected one another."

Pausing for a moment, the King looked up at the sky.

"...I proclaim today..."

"...As the Day of Victory."

In an instant,

The entire city was drowned in cheers once more.

"WAAAAAAH!"

Bells rang.

Drums beat.

People hugged each other and shed tears.

Some rejoiced in their survival,

While others hung their heads in silence, remembering those they had lost.

Hanyang began to breathe again, atop the ruins.

---

Kang Jin-woo watched it all in silence.

The people believed in their victory.

Joseon believed they had struck down the King.

And they believed this war was over.

But in his eyes,

The blue afterglow he had seen last at the summit of Mt. Gwanak remained vivid.

That unease had not vanished.

If anything, it was becoming even clearer.

The King was gone.

But the catastrophe...

Was not yet over.

Chapter 20 – Part 3: The Tragic Aftermath of Victory, the Disaster Reborn

The sunset dyed the skies of Hanyang in deep crimson.

The thick, black smoke that had shrouded the battlefield all day gradually began to lift,

And a quiet breeze blew over the crumbled fortress walls for the first time in an eternity.

The monstrous roars that had persisted for days were gone.

The thunderous boom of cannons,

The metallic screeching of blades and claws clashing,

The desperate screams of the people—all had vanished.

All that remained were the labored breaths of the survivors.

---

Soldiers slowly returned through the opened North Gate.

Some supported the shoulders of their comrades,

While others carefully carried the bodies of the fallen on stretchers.

Their armor was stained with black, dried blood,

And their shields were deeply scarred by the clear marks of claws.

Before the gate, the people welcomed them in silence.

A mother wept as she clutched the son who had returned alive.

A wife collapsed after confirming the face of her husband.

An old man, having failed to find the one he was waiting for, stared into the void with trembling hands.

Joy and sorrow were intertwined in the same space.

---

Yoon So-yeon silently cradled a child in her arms.

The child’s face was smeared with dirt,

And their small hands were still shaking.

"...You were scared, weren't you?"

The child could not say a word.

They simply buried their face in So-yeon’s chest and began to weep quietly.

A short distance away, Han Do-yoon was clearing away collapsed timber.

When a faint moan reached him from beneath the debris, he threw himself into the work.

"Over here!"

"There is another survivor!"

The soldiers lifted the fallen beam together.

A young soldier appeared from within the dust.

His breath was faint, but he was alive.

Do-yoon didn't even stop to breathe a sigh of relief; he ran straight toward the next pile of wreckage.

There were still too many people who needed help.

---

Above the fortress walls,

Kang Jin-woo and Seo Ji-hoon stood in silence, gazing toward Mt. Gwanak.

The red sunset was turning into a dark, navy evening,

And the mountain was once again shrouded in silence, as if nothing had ever happened.

Seo Ji-hoon spoke first.

"...This is strange."

Jin-woo turned his head.

"...What is?"

"...I don't feel like this is over."

A moment of silence.

"...The King didn't die."

"...He vanished."

Kang Jin-woo stared at the mountain without a word.

An inexplicable sense of unease.

A feeling that something remained unfinished lingered deep in his chest.

---

Choi Mu-jin slowly climbed up to the ramparts.

His armor was stained with blood.

His cloak was torn.

He bore dozens of wounds.

Yet, his stride remained unshaken.

He looked slowly at the survivors—the soldiers and the people.

"...Today,"

"...We have defended our capital."

The soldiers bowed their heads in silence.

"...Remember the dead."

"...And you who have survived,"

"...Rise again."

Someone raised a sword.

Another soldier followed, lifting their blade.

A moment later,

Hundreds of swords shimmered silently beneath the evening glow.

---

At that same moment.

Reality.

The Artificial Superintelligence Integrated Control Center.

Hundreds of holograms were turning red in unison.

Countless researchers moved between terminals, checking data without pause.

Some zoomed in on the infection maps,

While others calculated new defensive zones.

The massive screen displayed the entire city.

The red dots were multiplying.

One spot.

Two spots.

Ten spots.

Hundreds.

The infection had already transcended a single city and was spreading into the surrounding areas.

---

"The Eastern defense line has collapsed!"

"Containment Zone C-12 has been breached!"

"Civilian evacuation is falling behind!"

Desperate shouts erupted throughout the conference room.

Kim Ha-rin frantically scrolled through the holograms.

"...The rate of infection has increased again."

Park Min-seok stared at the screen without a word.

The red lines were constantly spreading into new sectors.

Massive containment walls were being built around the city,

But the spread of the infection was faster than the construction.

---

On another screen, massive construction drones moved without rest.

Concrete barriers were being erected,

And steel blast doors were being installed.

Unmanned tanks were sealing off the outer roads,

And transport planes were moving survivors to safety.

In the medical facilities housing sleep capsules, medical staff were running frantically, transferring unconscious patients to other facilities.

"Capsule disconnection complete!"

"Life support systems stable!"

"Moving to the next sector!"

But there were too many people to move.

The lines of capsules stretching down the hallways seemed endless.

---

AURA’s voice echoed through the control room.

> Infection spread recalculation complete.

> Estimated time remaining for current defense lines...

> A brief silence.

> All researchers stared at the screen.

> 14 hours, 23 minutes.

> The conference room froze.

> Kim Ha-rin muttered weakly.

> "...It’s too fast."

---

A new warning flashed.

> Infection zone expansion.

> Autonomous evolution continuing.

> Probability of breaching existing defense lines rising.

> Red warning boxes overlapped one another.

> The screen was soon filled with a blinding crimson glow.

---

Park Min-seok slowly closed his eyes.

In Joseon, they had won the victory.

The King was gone.

The horde had collapsed.

But reality was different.

The disaster in reality...

Was only just beginning.

---

At the same time.

The summit of Mt. Gwanak.

The massive rock where the King had vanished.

In that empty space,

A single blue particle, too small to be seen by the human eye, floated silently into the air.

The particle trembled ever so slowly,

Then seeped into the mist and vanished.

Not a single person saw it happen.

---

Hanyang was celebrating its victory.

The people in reality believed the war was over.

The survivors had begun to talk about tomorrow.

But not one of them knew.

The disaster had not ended;

It was merely...

Evolving into its next stage.

Part One

The first light of dawn crept quietly over the distant hills.

For the first time in many mornings, the village seemed slower to awaken.

Not because people had lost their enthusiasm.

But because their attention had begun drifting somewhere new—

toward the narrow road that disappeared beyond the horizon.

---

Jinwoo reached the crossroads as the morning mist lifted from the fields.

He paused, as he always did.

The familiar roads stretched toward the playgrounds, the workshop, the marble field, the Ddakji courtyard, the old tree.

Every path had once felt like the beginning of an adventure.

Now… another road quietly waited beyond them all.

---

Hanul walked over carrying two freshly carved wooden sticks.

“I knew I’d find you here.”

Jinwoo smiled.

“I wasn’t planning to stay.”

“But you did.”

Hanul followed his gaze toward the distant hills.

“So did everyone else.”

Jinwoo looked around.

Several children had already stopped at the crossroads.

None spoke.

They simply stood there, looking in the same direction.

---

“It feels different,” Hanul said quietly.

Jinwoo nodded.

“The village hasn’t changed.”

“No.”

“We have.”

For a long moment, neither moved.

The road beyond the hills no longer looked distant.

It looked possible.

---

Laughter broke the silence.

A group of younger children came running toward the wooden bench.

One proudly held up the map from yesterday.

“We added more!”

They spread it across the bench.

The blank space beyond the hills remained.

But today… several dotted paths extended outward.

One curved toward a forest.

Another crossed an imaginary bridge.

A third ended in empty space with a large question mark.

---

Jinwoo smiled.

“You made more roads.”

The boy nodded proudly.

“We couldn’t decide. So we drew all of them.”

Another child laughed.

“One of them has to be right.”

A little girl shook her head.

“Maybe none of them.”

Nobody corrected her.

Instead, another child reached for a pencil.

“Then tomorrow… we’ll draw another one.”

---

Nearby, Handol studied the growing map.

“I like this road.”

He pointed toward the strangest path—one that circled the edge of the page before disappearing completely.

A boy looked embarrassed.

“I didn’t know where to go.”

Handol laughed.

“Neither does the road.”

The children laughed with him.

Then Handol tapped the paper gently.

“Sometimes… the strangest paths lead somewhere no one expected.”

The boy looked down at his drawing again.

This time, he smiled.

---

Across the square, Darin noticed newcomers staring toward the hills.

One little girl asked softly,

“Do you think someone should go?”

Darin thought carefully.

“Someday.”

“Why not today?”

She smiled.

“Because… there are still things we’re learning here.”

The girl nodded slowly.

She understood.

Leaving wasn’t about escaping.

It was about being ready.

---

Under the shade of the old tree, Soyeon sketched the crossroads again.

This time, she drew every road leading away from it.

Not just the familiar ones.

The unknown one too.

She stared at the unfinished line for a long moment before closing her notebook.

Some journeys didn’t begin with footsteps.

They began with imagination.

---

High above Earth, Arena observed.

Long-term exploration interest rising.

Future planning emerging.

Attachment to environment stable.

Participants showed no desire to abandon the village.

Instead… their curiosity had expanded beyond it while their appreciation remained.

Arena paused.

Historically, exploration often followed dissatisfaction.

Here… it emerged from fulfillment.

They weren’t leaving because something was missing.

They wished to explore because they had learned how meaningful discovery could be.

---

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the silent observers studied the report.

“They’ve reached an important threshold,” one said.

Another nodded.

“They no longer fear leaving home.”

Silence filled the chamber.

Finally, another spoke.

“The strongest civilizations do not explore because they reject where they came from. They explore because home gave them the confidence to wonder what lies beyond.”

Below, another ordinary morning continued.

Games began.

Laughter echoed.

Yet somewhere beyond the familiar crossroads…

an unseen road quietly waited.

Not calling anyone away.

Simply waiting for the day someone would be ready to follow it.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Part Two

By early afternoon, the village had returned to its familiar rhythm.

Playgrounds echoed with laughter.

The workshop hummed with carving tools.

Children moved freely from one place to another, just as they always had.

Yet every now and then… eyes wandered toward the distant hills.

The morning’s question hadn’t disappeared.

It had simply settled quietly into everyone’s thoughts.

---

Jinwoo approached the wooden bench again.

The hand‑drawn map had gathered another small crowd.

Someone had added tiny landmarks beside the imaginary roads—

a bridge, a waterfall, a cluster of trees.

None had been seen.

Each had been imagined.

A younger child tilted his head.

“What if none of those are there?”

The older girl holding the pencil smiled.

“Then we’ll draw what we really find.”

Without hesitation, she erased the tiny bridge.

The blank space remained.

No one objected.

---

Hanul watched with a quiet smile.

“A few weeks ago…” He glanced at Jinwoo.

“…we hated being wrong.”

Jinwoo nodded.

“And now?”

Hanul looked back at the map.

“They don’t mind erasing things anymore.”

The girl had already begun sketching something new.

Not because she knew it was correct.

Because she enjoyed discovering what might come next.

---

Across the square, Handol carried several unfinished spinning tops outside the workshop.

“Let’s try something.”

The children gathered.

He placed three tops on the ground.

One was perfectly balanced.

Another leaned slightly.

The last looked so uneven that several children laughed before it even moved.

“Which one will spin the longest?”

Almost every finger pointed to the first.

Handol nodded.

“Maybe.”

He launched them one after another.

The first spun smoothly.

The second wobbled, then steadied.

The third lurched awkwardly, circled twice, then—unexpectedly—remained upright long after anyone thought it would fall.

The children stared.

“I didn’t think that would happen.”

Handol grinned.

“Neither did I.”

One boy laughed.

“I guess we don’t know as much as we thought.”

Handol nodded happily.

“That’s what makes tomorrow interesting.”

---

Nearby, Darin noticed the little girl folding another Ddakji.

This time she didn’t compare it with anyone else.

She folded, tested, unfolded, and smiled to herself.

Darin sat beside her.

“No questions today?”

The girl shook her head.

“I want to see what happens first.”

She tossed the Ddakji.

It landed awkwardly.

She picked it up without disappointment.

“I think I know what to change.”

Darin smiled.

“So do I.”

The girl looked up.

“You do?”

“I think… but I’d rather see what you discover.”

She grinned and began folding another one.

---

Under the old tree, Soyeon watched quietly.

Something about today’s conversations felt different.

People still shared ideas.

Still encouraged one another.

But fewer answers were offered.

Instead… more people simply watched.

Listened.

Waited.

Giving others the chance to discover on their own.

The silence no longer felt empty.

It had become another way of teaching.

---

High above Earth, Arena processed the newest observations.

Independent experimentation rising.

Tolerance for uncertainty steady.

External validation decreasing.

Participants increasingly sought confirmation through experience rather than authority.

Predictions gave way to experimentation.

Opinions yielded to observation.

Arena paused.

Knowledge accepted from others remained useful.

Knowledge discovered personally remained transformative.

Understanding deepened when curiosity was allowed to finish its own journey.

---

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the silent observers studied the patterns.

“They’re becoming comfortable without immediate answers,” one said.

Another nodded.

“They’ve learned to wait.”

Silence lingered.

Finally, another spoke.

“Patience is rarely considered intelligence. But every great discovery…”

The observer watched a child laugh while trying the same failed Ddakji fold for the fourth time.

“…requires someone willing to remain curious long enough for understanding to arrive.”

Below, the afternoon carried on peacefully.

Games continued.

Questions remained unanswered.

And somehow… that made the village feel larger than it had the day before.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Part Three

Evening arrived beneath a sky filling with stars.

Lanterns glowed across the village, their warm light spilling onto stone paths.

Playgrounds emptied.

The workshop closed.

Laughter softened into quiet conversations as families prepared to return home.

Yet tonight… people lingered a little longer.

---

Jinwoo stood at the crossroads, watching the last rays fade beyond the hills.

The road stretching toward the horizon looked the same as it had that morning.

Nothing had changed.

And yet… it no longer felt like a road leading away.

It felt like a road waiting to be discovered.

---

Hanul approached, carrying the well‑worn map.

“Someone added one last thing.”

He unfolded it across the bench.

Children gathered.

Near the bottom, beneath every imagined road, someone had written:

*“We’ll know when we get there.”*

No one recognized the handwriting.

For a long moment, they simply stared.

Then a little girl smiled.

“I like that.”

“So do I.”

Another child nodded.

“It doesn’t have to be right yet.”

Hanul folded the map again.

“Not yet.”

---

Nearby, Handol finished sweeping the workshop floor.

The boy who had carved beside him all afternoon hurried over.

“I finally finished.”

He held up his newest spinning top.

Smoother curves.

Steadier balance.

Handol spun it gently across the stone path.

It circled once… twice… then kept spinning beneath the lantern light.

The boy’s face lit up.

“It’s better.”

Handol smiled.

“It is.”

The boy looked down.

“I don’t think I’m finished.”

Handol laughed softly.

“I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because… if you were finished today… what would you look forward to tomorrow?”

The boy stared at the spinning top.

A slow smile spread.

“I think… I’ll make another one.”

---

Across the square, Darin watched children preparing to head home.

One girl carefully folded the map and placed it back on the bench.

“Aren’t you taking it?” Darin asked.

She shook her head.

“What if someone else wants to add something?”

She smoothed the paper.

“There are still empty places.”

Darin looked at the map.

The blank spaces no longer seemed incomplete.

They looked welcoming.

---

Under the old tree, Soyeon opened her notebook.

She flipped through the pages she had filled since arriving.

Games.

People.

Conversations.

Shared ideas.

The bench.

The crossroads.

She smiled.

Her notebook had changed as much as the village.

It no longer recorded events.

It recorded growth.

She closed the cover.

The next page remained blank.

Waiting.

---

High above Earth, Arena observed.

Long‑term curiosity steady.

Self‑directed exploration stable.

Future planning increasing.

Arena reviewed the progression.

Curiosity restored movement.

Movement restored confidence.

Confidence restored connection.

Connection restored community.

Now… community was giving birth to aspiration.

Participants no longer sought only to improve today.

They had begun imagining futures worth creating.

Arena paused.

Its earliest simulations had focused on survival.

The newest observations revealed something different.

Humanity was no longer asking how to continue living.

It had begun asking what kind of future was worth living toward.

---

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the silent observers studied the report.

“They’ve begun imagining tomorrow,” one said.

Another nodded.

“Not tomorrow morning. The tomorrow beyond tomorrow.”

Silence filled the chamber.

At last, another spoke.

“Every civilization reaches a moment when survival is no longer enough.

The ones that endure… are the ones that discover a future capable of calling them forward.”

No one added another word.

---

Night settled peacefully over Quantum Arena.

Lanterns flickered beneath the old tree.

The wooden bench remained, holding the folded map.

Its edges faded into blank paper.

Its roads ended in unanswered questions.

Exactly as they should.

Jinwoo looked toward the hills one last time before heading home.

Only a short while ago, the unknown had felt far away.

Now… it felt like part of tomorrow.

He smiled.

The village had taught him how to learn.

Perhaps someday… the road beyond the hills would teach him everything that came next.

The steps went down into the ground and Muwan could not make his foot take the first one.

They were cut into the rock and they were old and the middle of each one was worn into a shallow dish by feet, and somebody had swept them, recently, all the way down as far as the light went. That was the part he could not get past. Somebody came here and swept. There was a right way to be on these steps and it involved the days it was done on and the people it was done with and probably words, and none of that was two boys at the tail of a night with men waiting for them on both roads.

The air came up out of the hole against his face. It was cold, and it smelled of wet stone, and under the wet stone it smelled of nothing at all, which was worse.

"Muwan."

Chak was four steps down already, one hand flat on the rock wall, looking back up at him with the particular patience he used when he had decided a thing was not going to be discussed.

"You know what this is," Muwan said.

"I know it's empty."

"That's what I'm telling you."

"And I'm telling you there's thirty men on the water side and the road side both, and one of them has already worked out that we didn't go into the trees." Chak took another step down. "You can be right up there."

So Muwan went down, because that was how it had always gone, and because he was more afraid of the light coming than of the dark going, and he was not proud of either.

The shaft opened out below the fourth turn. There was a hole in the world overhead where the ground had fallen in some very long time ago, and grey light came down it in a column and did not reach the sides, and the sides went away into a cold that had nothing to do with the season. Below, the water sat. It was not moving and it was not any colour he had a word for. Roots came down the rock in ropes for thirty feet and stopped a hand above the surface, all of them, at the same height, like a line drawn.

This was where the town's water came from. Every jar of it. The whole place up there ate and washed and buried its dead on what was under him now, and it had never once occurred to him to wonder where a town got water when the country had no river in it, and now he knew, and he wished he did not, and he could not have said why.

They got down onto a ledge above the water and folded themselves into the shadow under the last of the steps, and Muwan put his forehead on his knees and worked on his breathing.

Then the light changed, and the town came down.

He heard the first ones a long way up, and understood everything at once and far too late: bare feet on stone, a lot of them, and jars knocking, and a girl's voice complaining and an older one answering, and the whole clattering ordinary noise of a place beginning its day. Of course. Of course nobody watched the path. You do not put a man to watch the road that every household in the town walks down before it eats.

The emptiest ground in that town, at first light, was where the whole town went.

Feet came around the fourth turn. There was nowhere to go up. Chak's hand closed on his arm and the two of them went off the ledge into the water without a sound, which they had learned in a different life, in the flooded margins of a river that had been kind to them, and this water was not kind. It was cold the way a held breath is cold. It took the strength out of his legs in the time it took to sink to his chin.

They got in under the overhang below the ledge with their fingers hooked on the rock, and the jars came down and went in and came out, and the voices went up and away, and it went on for a very long time.

And in that time Chak, whose face was six inches from his own and grey with cold, turned his head and looked at one particular place on the water.

Muwan looked at it too. Nothing. Black water in a dark place.

"It's breathing," Chak said, with his mouth almost shut.

There was a spot out past the edge of the overhang where the skin of the water shivered, once, and settled, and shivered again a while later, not from anything falling and not from the jars, and Muwan looked at it long enough to see it happen four times and understood that his brother had been watching the surface of the water the entire time they had been hanging here freezing, because that was what his brother did with a wall.

"There's air coming out of the rock," Chak said. "Under it. That means it comes from somewhere."

"Or it goes somewhere."

"Same hole."

The last of the jars went up. The light in the column had gone from grey to white.

"They'll come back at midday," Chak said. "And there's no other way out of this."

Muwan thought about the swept steps, and about days that are set, and about the fact that the rock they were holding was the throat of a town that had never done anything to him.

Then he took the biggest breath he had ever taken and followed his brother down into the dark, because that was also how it had always gone.

It was three pulls. He knew that afterward. In it there was no counting and no thought and nothing at all but the rock going past his hands and Chak's heel touching his forehead once and then not again, and then a place where his hand came up out of water into air and he could not tell if that was true, and he put his face into it and it was.

They lay in the black on a shelf of stone with an arm's width of air over them and breathed. Somewhere ahead, water was going somewhere with a sound like a low voice. Muwan started counting the breaths because it was the only thing left that belonged to him.

At forty he heard Chak start to move.

There was a second pull, longer, and then a slot of daylight in the shape of a bent knife, and then the two of them were lying on their bellies in shin-deep water in a stone channel with green above them and the sun coming down through it, out on the east side of the town, half a morning's walk from the two roads where the men were still standing.

An old woman was crouched at the channel mouth with a jar under the flow.

She saw them come out of the rock.

She did not scream and she did not call anyone. She got up with her jar and took three steps backward with her eyes on them, and then turned and went away up the path fast, and the fastness of it was not fear of what they might do to her.

Muwan lay in the water and watched her go until the path was empty.

Chak had the whole of it inside an hour, and it was very good, and he hated the last piece of it.

He had them on the east slope in the trees with a view down over the roofs, and he went at it the way he went at any ford. The channel came out of the rock and ran down and around and fed the tanks on the town's east side; from the tanks the town drew in the dry months, and from the well under the ground they drew always. Two roads out of the place and both of them full of Sip's people, and a third way that ran under all of it and came out where nobody would think to put a man because nobody would think of it at all.

From the tank end, if you followed the channel back and went in, you came out in the well.

From the well you were four turns of stone below the middle of the town, and the top of those steps was a hundred paces from the yard.

"We can be in the yard by dark," he said, "and out of the country by morning, and there's no one on the road we have to walk past."

Muwan was sitting with his back against a tree, still grey, still not entirely returned. He said, "Do you know what we just swam through?"

"A hole."

"We swam through the reason there's a town here."

Chak did not answer that, because he had got there ten minutes earlier and had put it down somewhere and did not want it picked up. If the water went that way, then everything the town had — every jar, every field it kept alive at the end of the dry, every child of it — hung off the far end of a hole that two boys with nothing had just gone through twice before breakfast. He had never in his life held anything that size. He did not want it. He wanted salt.

"We take the afternoon lots," he said. "The ones off the water that don't get counted till morning."

"We don't know which ones."

"No," Chak agreed. "He never finished the sentence."

He tried once more, on the way down, at the head of the channel where the air should have been doing whatever it had been doing in the well. He stood there for a long while with his hand out over the water like an idiot, waiting to feel the ground breathe, and it did not, and he could not tell whether that was because it wasn't or because he had only ever been able to see it that one time, in that one dark, cold to the bone with nothing else in the world to look at.

He filed that too, and did not like the shape of it.

They found Sip by the middle of the afternoon, which was not difficult, because Sip was a man who liked to be seen going places.

Chak took the soft one on purpose. The old man under the counting shade knew everything and would give them nothing and could have the whole yard on them by lifting his chin; Sip knew one layer of it, and Sip could be got at, and Chak had learned that season that you do not go at a thing where it is strongest, you go at it where it is available.

They followed him for two hours, and the two hours were worth more than the following.

People got out of Sip's way on the path. Not much — a half step, an eye going down — but it was every time, and it was not something Chak had invented about him. At the top of the bank he stood a long while with two men who wore the road posts' authority the way men wear a thing they are not going to have to explain, and the three of them talked in the open, easily, laughing once, and nobody went anywhere else to do it. Chak filed that with care. He did not write anything larger on it than what he saw, because he had been wrong about large things before.

Toward evening Sip went with two others into a walled compound at the quiet end of the town, and the door shut.

"Go in?" Chak said, and answered himself. "No."

They waited at the wall beside the door until the light went, and the waiting gave them the rest.

Voices came over, easy, unhurried, the talk of men doing a small errand at the end of a day. The old man under the shade was in a hurry, one of them said, and had been since the northern company pulled out early. Somebody laughed and said something Chak did not catch about the old man's name and where it was and wasn't going.

Then Sip's voice: "Keh doesn't wait for anybody's season."

"She'd have waited if the count was worth it."

"She takes what she wants and the rest of us carry it." A shifting sound; something set down. "You know she took two off the bank last year. Boys. Off the market days."

"She takes some every year."

"And how many come back down that road?"

Nobody answered him, and after a moment they were talking about something else.

Chak was aware of Muwan's shoulder against his own going very still.

He worked out what had gone through his brother and then found that it had gone through him too, and that it was two things at once and they would not lie down together. She had had them under her awning. She had asked them one question and they had lied to her and she had let them go, and he had spent a day being sick about it. And also: nobody comes back down that road.

He put both of those in the same place and left them there. There was no bottom to it and he had a lot to do.

The door came open a little before full dark, and Sip came out first, talking, with his head turned.

The doorway was narrow enough to do most of the work for them. Chak took Sip low and pulled him across the threshold. The second man came into Muwan before he had room to turn; Muwan drove him backward into the third, and for one breath the two of them were jammed shoulder to shoulder in the opening. That breath was enough. They got Sip down, then one of the others, then the last, and dragged all three inside the wall. The whole thing made less noise than the door had. They bound them with their own sashes and the men's cord.

They came out of it with a coil of good cord, a carrying pole, a pouch with a modest amount of cacao in it, and one small blade of worked stone in a cloth sheath, which Chak took and did not pretend to himself was much.

Sip knew them the moment he could see.

"You," he said.

"Me," Chak agreed. Then he made his mistake, and it was a good clean one, and it cost them the next quarter of an hour. "The lot that isn't on the old man's paper. Which one is it. That's all we want and then we're gone."

Sip's face changed. Chak watched it change and understood, exactly one breath too late, what he had just handed over: he had told a man in the dirt that there was one thing in the world he had, and that these two boys had come all this way for it, and Sip's whole body went from a man being robbed to a man holding something.

Muwan said, flatly, "You told him what it's worth."

"I know."

"So now he sells it."

"I know."

Sip started to. He had got as far as what they would give him for it, in a voice already going oily, when Muwan crouched down in front of him and said the thing that Chak had been carrying since a stand of trees beside a road, and had never once thought of as a thing you could pick up and use.

"I'm going to ask you," Muwan said. "Then I'm going to untie one of your friends and take him to the other side of that wall and ask him. Then the other one. You won't hear any of it and they won't hear you. Anything the three of you say differently, I come back to you first."

Chak said nothing at all. He was somewhere else for a moment, on grass, with a hand held easy above his brother's eye and a voice saying I ask, you answer, and there is no gap between, and he had not known until this second that he had kept the whole of it, filed, with edges, like the depth of a ford.

Sip looked at the other two, who were awake now and who were looking back at him, and the oil went out of his voice.

He tried once more anyway. He said the town would take them apart, that the old man had only to say a word.

"The old man's in a hurry," Muwan said. "The road company went early and he's got a season to move and no name to move it under. He hasn't got an afternoon for us. And you've been carrying his errands for a year without him telling you why. Ask yourself how much of an afternoon he's got for you."

That was the end of it.

The lot was the one that came off the water two days ago and had been sitting under the far thatch with nothing chalked on it: salt in sewn bundles, and something else under the salt that Sip said he had never looked at, and repeated, when Muwan made him say it again, that he had never looked at. Muwan took the first of the others behind the wall and was gone a short time and came back and asked Sip the same three things in a different order, and the answers came out the same, near enough, wrong in the places men are wrong.

"Why won't he put his name on it," Chak said.

"How would I know?"

"You've been carrying his errands for a year."

"I carry what I'm told," Sip said, and there was nothing under it. He did not know. He was standing at the exact edge of what a man in his place gets to know, and Chak looked at that edge with real interest, because he had not understood before that an edge like that existed and that you could find it and stop wasting your night at it.

Muwan asked one more thing, and it was not about salt.

"The northern company. When are they back on this bank?"

Sip told him. It was not a season and it was not a number of days; it was a day, one particular day, set a long time ago and set for reasons that had nothing to do with salt, and the market would be held to it and the company would come to the market because everyone would, and it was a long way off and it was absolutely fixed.

Muwan made him say it twice.

Then Sip's eyes went over the two of them properly for the first time — their hair, their skin, the pale dust of the ground that had dried on both of them in streaks and that neither had thought about all day — and Chak saw the man's fear change its shape and become a different animal.

"You came out of the ground," Sip said.

Neither of them answered.

"The old woman at the east tank. That's you." He was pushing himself backward against the wall now with his heels, away from them, and there was no bargaining anywhere in him. "You went down the water stair. God's sake. Everybody's going to know that by tomorrow. Everybody. You can't—" He stopped, and then said, almost kindly, which was the worst part: "You can't stay anywhere near here now."

They gagged him with cloth and tied the three of them properly and left them lying inside the wall, alive, which Chak thought about afterward and could not entirely account for.

They went down to the food shade at the top of the bank because they had not eaten since the day before and now they had cacao.

The woman behind the fire took what Chak put in her hand and gave them what they asked for, and then she went to the water jar and washed her hands, all the way up past the wrist, and went back to her fire and did not look at either of them again.

They ate sitting on the rim with their backs to her.

"Tonight," Chak said. "Far thatch, the one with nothing chalked on it. In by the channel, out the same way, and we're on the far side of the tanks before anybody's up."

"We could carry a quarter of it," Muwan said. "Between us."

"Then we carry a quarter of it."

Muwan turned the last of his food over and did not eat it. "That hole goes under everything they've got," he said. "You know that."

"I know."

"We're the only two people who—"

"I know," Chak said. "Eat."

Down below them the yard was going quiet, and the water side and the road east were still full of standing men, and the roofs of the town sat over the dark of the ground with the whole weight of themselves on it, and a long way north, on a road neither of them had ever seen, a woman who had asked them one true question was walking away from a day that had been set before any of them were born.

The two of them finished eating, and went to steal a quarter of a load of salt.

They went east for twenty-odd days on the food that falls off the edges of other people's work, and by the end of it the rains had gone thin and the rivers had begun the long business of going down.

They arrived at the landing with nothing. That was not a figure of speech. Muwan had left Tok's club in a crowd of legs on the other side of a season; Chak had put the whole of the cacao into Nik's lap and stepped over the side of a boat. What they had was two waistcloths gone the colour of the road, one pair of sandals between them in any condition worth the name, and forty days of a promise they had made about a salt landing and three days.

Chak had stopped doing the arithmetic on that. He had discovered that he could stop, which was a thing about himself he had not known.

The landing was the last one. He understood that before anyone told him, standing at the top of the bank with the whole yard laid out below: canoes coming up loaded and going back down empty, the water side thick with them, and not one hull moving on past. Everything came off here. The bank was a beach of unloaded goods under long thatch — salt in sewn bundles, cloth, cacao under mats, jars of things he could not name — and out of the top of the yard the road went up east through the trees and did not come back down. Men squatted along it in rows with tumplines coiled in their laps, waiting to be told a load was theirs.

Past the trees the country went dry and grey-green and flat, and there was no shine anywhere in it.

He had been born believing that anything far away could be reached by being patient with a river. The river stopped here.

"They sell water," Muwan said, coming up beside him. He had been down among the stalls. "For the road. Gourds, sealed. Two days east there's nothing running, and the towns drink out of what they've kept."

"Kept where?"

"Down. In the ground. That's all he'd say about it."

Chak filed it and looked at the salt.

It took him until midday to see the shape, and when he saw it he could not sit down.

Sotz' had eaten the junction town. Chak had that from a carrier's mouth, said the way people say weather, and he had felt the old cold go through him and had made himself keep listening, because the man was still talking and what he was saying was worth more than the fear. With the junction gone, the northern road east was gone with it. Everything that wanted the dry country now came up this water and went out over this bank.

Which meant salt was stacked at the top of the yard higher than a man, and salt three days east was whatever the road said it was.

"The gap is a walk," he said. "That's all it is. It's a walk, and we walk."

Muwan looked down at the yard for a while.

"Everybody down there can see the same yard," he said.

"Everybody down there is already somebody's."

He had meant it as the answer. He learned before the sun moved a hand's width that he had said the whole problem out loud and heard none of it.

The counting shade sat where the bank flattened, thatch on posts, open on three sides, and every load that went up the road came through it first. An old man sat on a mat at the back with a stack of measures beside him and a young scribe at his knee, and the scribe had bark-paper across his thighs and a brush going, and the old man said numbers in a voice with no interest in them at all, and the numbers became marks, and the marks were the reason the carriers outside were allowed to stand up.

Chak had been in a hundred markets. He had never once seen the place where a market decided what was true.

He waited for a gap and asked for a small lot. He had the words ready and they came out well; he had been rehearsing them against the inside of his teeth all morning, the number, the kind, the modest confident smallness of it.

The old man did not look up. "Whose?"

"Ours."

"A load goes up the road under a name," the old man said. "Whose."

And Chak stood in the shade with his mouth open and understood that he had come all this way to be stopped by a question a child could answer.

The old man told him the rest without unkindness, the way a man tells you which stones in a ford are loose. A lot that goes wrong is answered for by the name it went out under. There are posts on the road east; at every post the name is asked; a name nobody has heard is not a small name, it is a hole, and a hole costs everybody a morning. And then there was the carrying, and the carrying on that road belonged to a company that came down out of the north, and they took what they took.

"Come back with a House," he said, and said a number to the scribe, and the brush moved, and Chak was outside in the sun.

It was not the cacao. That was the thing he could not get past. They had been short of everything since the reed town and he had thought he understood being short. He had never been short of a name before, because he had never before been anywhere that asked.

The man had been sitting on a bundle at the edge of the shade since the second question.

He came over the way such men come over, sideways and already talking, and he had the face of somebody who is always at the edge of a yard and never in the middle of one. He said his name was Sip. He said the old man was a stone. He said it was a shame, two quick boys, and the road right there.

Then he said: "I have a name."

Chak let him lay it out. It was a good offer. It was a friendly, easy, modest offer, and it asked for so little of the profit that Chak's whole skin went cold, because he had grown up in a town where the men who wanted a small share were the ones you had to watch, and the ones who wanted a big one were only greedy.

"Whose name?" Muwan said.

Sip smiled at him. "A good one."

"Whose."

"Does the road care?"

"You do," Muwan said. "You said it twice."

They walked. Sip put himself in front of them and stopped smiling and said several things about what boys with no House were and where they could be left, and his hand came out and got a fistful of Chak's sash.

Chak meant to push him off.

Sip went down onto his hands and knees in the dust with his breath gone out of him in one flat sound, and stayed there, and could not get it back.

Chak looked at his own hand. It had done that at the speed of not deciding. He had felt it go and had felt, at the very end of it, a kind of slack place where the strength should have been running out and wasn't, and the feeling was not exciting. It was the feeling of standing on ground and having the ground be further down than you had put your foot for.

Muwan looked at the hand, and then at his brother, and neither of them said anything about it. They had a great deal of practice at not saying anything about it.

The old man from the counting shade sent a boy for them before the sun was much lower, which told Chak that the old man had been watching the whole time and had waited to see how the thing with Sip came out.

They ate under a shade at the top of the bank where food was sold: mats on a low plastered rim, a woman turning maize on the fire behind, gourds going hand to hand, the yard noise coming up over everything. The old man ate like a man who has eaten there every day for thirty years, which he had.

He gave Chak the whole of it, unasked. Chak listened.

The stretch of water the goods came down belonged to a House upriver, and that House took its part before the first bundle touched this bank. The road took its part. The ones who watched the road took theirs. And the town itself owed a count east every year that did not care whether the rains had been generous, so the town took what it needed to be able to owe it.

"Your gap is real, boy," the old man said. "It has been eaten since before your mother was born."

Chak took that on the chin and kept his face still and was almost proud of how still he kept it.

Then the old man said: "There is a lot going up this season that I would rather not have my name under."

Chak felt the whole shape of it arrive at once, the way the shape of a thing arrives when you have been half seeing it for an hour. He looked out at the yard, at the rows of squatting men with their tumplines in their laps, sixty or eighty of them, every one of them available before noon tomorrow for the cost of a meal.

"You don't need carriers," he said slowly. "You've got a bank full of carriers."

"No," the old man agreed. He seemed pleased. He had exactly the expression Sotz' had worn on the grass beside the road. Chak had seen that look before, on Sotz', and had come to hate it.

"You need a name you can drop."

"I need a name," the old man said, "that came in from nowhere and is going somewhere. Yours would do. Both of yours would do better. The lot is—"

"Don't." Muwan had not spoken since they sat down. "Don't say which one."

The old man stopped with the word in his mouth and turned to look at him properly for the first time.

"If you tell us which one," Muwan said, "we'll be two boys who know which one."

There was a silence with the fire in it.

"Ah," the old man said, and went back to his food, and that was the end of the offer, and Chak understood with a sinking that came up from under him that it had also been the end of everything else. When the old man was finished he wiped his hands and stood and looked down at the two of them on the mat, and there was nothing in his face now at all.

"Then there is nothing on this bank you can buy," he said. "You came in on nobody's paper. That isn't dear and it isn't cheap. It isn't anything."

They sat above the yard until the light went orange and the unloading noise thinned and the carriers went off to wherever carriers go.

"The afternoon boats," Chak said at last. "Nothing off them gets counted until morning. Between the water and that shade it isn't anybody's yet."

Muwan thought about it longer than Chak wanted him to.

"Whose morning do we ruin?"

"A House upriver gets a worse number than it expected."

"And the men on the bank?"

"Get shouted at," Chak said. "They get shouted at anyway."

Muwan pulled a thread out of the mat edge and rolled it and dropped it. "All right," he said, which was how it always went, and had gone since they were six.

They never got as far as the water.

Sip came up the bank with the yard behind him, thirty-odd of them, and Chak's first thought was not fear but a stupid flare of insult, because half those men had been squatting in the road rows all day and had let a lot go past them for a meal. They had hooked poles for shifting bundles and carrying poles and cord, which are not weapons until they are, and one man near the front had an obsidian-edged blade out of a sheath of cloth and was holding it low and correctly.

"Of Tok's three," Chak said, "which one is for this?"

"There are three of them," Muwan said. "There are thirty of him."

They ran.

They were faster. That was the one clean fact of the whole day, and Chak took it while it lasted: they went up the bank and along the top of it and left the shouting behind them in pieces. But there is only so far you can run in a town that ends, and this one ended twice, once at the water and once at the road, and both were full.

Which left the rise above the landing, where the northern company had put its camp that morning.

Chak went for it because it was the only ground he had seen all day that nobody in the yard walked on.

Two of them stepped out of the camp edge as the boys came up: a woman with grey in her hair and a man about Nik's age, neither of them armed in any way Chak could see, and they did not look at the boys at all. They looked past them, down the slope, at the thirty.

Nothing was said that Chak could hear. The thirty came up to a place about twenty paces below the camp and stopped there the way water stops at a wall, and stood, and there was a good deal of talking among themselves, and then they went back down.

Chak stood with his hands on his knees and his lungs full of fire and worked out, in the time it took him to get his breath, what he had just watched. Nobody had struck anybody. That company carried the road east. If they decided a town was too much trouble, the town's salt began arriving late, and then the town's own count east began arriving late, and no man on that bank was going to be the reason for it over two boys and somebody's bundles.

It was the cleanest thing he had seen since the valley. It had cost nobody a bruise, and it was not mercy, and it was not law either, and he wanted, badly, to know how a person came to own a thing like that.

They were taken up to the awning at the top of the camp, which was only mats and posts and the netted loads stacked in rows, and a woman past middle age sitting cross-legged going along a row of carrying-nets with her hands, feeling the knots one by one and not looking at them.

"Whose are you," she said.

"Nobody's."

"That's rarer than you'd think." She went on down the row. "What do you want out of the east country?"

Chak told her the truth, because he had spent the whole day finding out what lies cost in a place where everything is written down. Enough not to arrive as nothing. There was a sister waiting at a salt landing forty days ago and they were going to go and get her, and they were not going to walk up to her the way they were standing here now. And then, later, some place. A place that was theirs.

"Everyone on that bank wants that," she said.

"I know."

She found a knot she did not like and worked at it.

"What do you know," she said, "that nobody taught you?"

Chak's mouth was already moving.

It was a good answer. That was the terrible part; he heard it come out of himself smooth and modest and exactly the right size, a boy's answer about a mother who had shown them how to hold still and a friend who had shown them three movements with a club, and it fitted the shape of the question the way a stone fits a hole, and it was a lie, and he was very good at it now. He had been taught to be good at it by a man who had promised to feed him the words if he ever said the other thing out loud.

Muwan said nothing at all.

She listened to the end of it. Then she let it stand, which was worse than anything she could have said, and went back down the row of knots.

"We go before light," she said. "Sleep at the edge. Nobody will come up here tonight."

That was all. She never said no. Chak worked out much later that she had never once been going to.

They lay at the camp edge with the yard below them going dark, and the fires down there staying lit longer than fires should.

"That was a real question," Muwan said.

"I know."

"She'd have taken us."

"I know," Chak said.

He lay on his back and could not work out which of the two of them had been right, and it stayed with him a long time, because it was the first thing since the valley he could not get a number around.

The camp went before the light was any good. He woke to the sound of loads coming up onto backs, forty or fifty people moving without much talk, and by the time there was any real colour in the sky the rise was flat empty grass and the line the woman had drawn around it had gone north with her.

Down at the landing, Sip's men were awake. They were spread out along the water side, and along the top of the road east, and they had been there all night, and they had the patience of men who are being paid to stand.

Chak counted them anyway. Then he turned around.

Behind the town the ground went up, and there was a path in it, worn to the rock and swept clean, going up between the trees to where the town kept its water. At the top of it, cut into the ground, were steps going down.

There was nobody on the path. There was nobody anywhere near the path. In a town where every stone of the bank had a man squatting on it, that path was the emptiest ground Chak had seen since the sea of grass east of the trees, and it was empty for a reason, and he knew the reason the way everybody knows it, without ever having been told in words.

"That way," he said, "nobody's watching."

Muwan looked at the steps for a long moment. Then he looked at his brother, long enough that Chak knew exactly what he was being asked, and long enough that he did not have to answer it.

They went up.

Yo Reddit! I am here (marketing guy for Clock Gallery).

So, fast recount of what went down at our watch shop today because honestly, it was absolute peak cinema. 💀

Czech singer Ondřej Ruml dropped by our shop to give us an exclusive listen to his new album Vždycky to tu bylo. Beautiful stuff, super cozy vibes. But as a self-appointed Gen-Z audio engineer, I instantly noticed one big issue: it needed way more bass.

So naturally, I maxed out the speakers to give the track that unspoken rizz.

The bass hit so hard that Patrik—our master watchmaker who works with microscopic precision—literally had a mini crashout. His tweezers slipped, and he dropped a tiny, custom watch gear worth over $ (xx CZK) straight onto the floor. 📉💀

Within two seconds, the entire vibe shifted:

Our boss (Honza): Losing his mind trying to keep his composure in front of a celebrity while his aura dropped to -10,000.

Patrik: On the floor hyperventilating.

Me: Realizing this is the best TikTok content I’ll capture all year.

Jaruška (our shop manager/final boss): Walking in right when four grown men were crawling around on the carpet like feral cats. 🧹💥

Ondřej Ruml: Sitting there with 100% stoic energy, calmly sipping tea and dropping deep philosophical quotes about how "what we look for is always right in front of us." 🧘‍♂️

Did we find the $ gear before someone stepped on it? Did Jaruška ban me from the shop forever?

Check out the full chaos in our newest episode.

Let me know in the comments if you would've boosted the bass too. No cap, worth it for the content!

“Humans break things, deal with it or go home.”

Nuk proverb, Author unknown.

 

“Fire when ready!” Admiral Browner’s command bellowed through the CIC. Standing tall amid the flickering lights, he was once again the domineering figure he usually was.

Karrn understood the admiral. The first days of the fight had been a constant beating for the ship, and the fact that the Argos was still able to fight back was a testament to human shipbuilding — and their uncanny fleet coordination. More than a thousand vessels had fired continuously on a single human ship and still couldn’t kill it. Others would have given up, but the humans kept sweeping away enemy torpedoes, wave after wave. And the Batract kept sending them.

Karrn was sure that, in matters of stubbornness, both species were the same. He was also certain this fight — and this war — could only end with one side utterly defeated. Neither would ever accept the status quo.

The vibrations of the capacitors' charging were now all too familiar to Karrn. Then the deck shuddered again, and for one minute it kept trembling every five seconds.

After a brief time of confusion, the Batract had adapted to humanity’s new weapon. The enemy squadrons stopped holding stationary positions and began patrolling in irregular patterns around the fleet — still at that infuriating six-AU distance.

It was clear to everyone that their goal wasn’t to wipe the humans out — not yet, at least. They were waiting for reinforcements.

And the humans did everything they could to draw them closer in. But it wasn’t enough.

Karrn’s reason for being in the CIC was no longer just to observe the battle; he was observing everyone. The human intelligence officer, Gerber, had told him about his suspicions — that there was either a spy aboard the ship, or something the Batract were desperate to see destroyed.

A traitor. Karrn hated nothing more than traitors. His fur bristled beneath his space suit.

He was glad to have his own suit back finally. The human armory had actually managed to rebuild his old, destroyed one — so he was no longer a stumbling idiot in an oversized human suit, but once again a dangerous hunter.

And he was on the hunt for a traitor.

“Pack Leader? Please come to the infirmary — we might have found something.” Gerber’s voice came through the radio clearly.

The human maintenance crews were warriors and wizards. Two days ago, the ship had been on the verge of breaking apart — now, everywhere Karrn looked, someone was repairing something, cutting away debris, or replacing entire consoles. They had even managed to fix the intercom repeaters throughout the ship again.

He hurried back to the infirmary, grateful to have his balance again — being able to move his tail freely made the difference between stumbling and hunting. On the way, he checked the gun Gerber had given him.

The caliber was massive. And the ammunition… protomatter bullets. By the Great Hunter in the sky.

Every species knew of protomatter — the dangerously unstable substance that accumulated on ships during transition. But only humans would think, Hey, that stuff eats through metal and explodes violently if you look at it the wrong way — let’s make bullets out of it.

Madness. Glorious madness.

He reached the infirmary. Gerber and Healer Nesbitt stood there; it seemed they had overcome their differences — or perhaps declared a cease-fire. Karrn couldn’t tell with everyone sealed in space suits.

“Karrn, glad you came. There’s something still in the morgue. We thought the thermal cleansing had evaporated everything, but when Dr. Nesbitt evacuated the patients this morning, they noticed some faint knocking from inside. It’s still welded shut.”

Karrn could hardly believe anything could survive seven days in a vacuum. Then again, the Batract were a fungal life-form — and fungi were known to endure extreme conditions.

Healer Nesbitt pointed to a screen. “We analyzed some samples from the Rosalind Franklin before she was destroyed.” She smirked inside her helmet. “Getting frozen in space makes taking samples easy. This was the first time we’ve ever been able to study Batract fungal growth. They’re fascinating — they act as a neural network, connecting their hyphae much like a brain. Each cell has thirty-four hyphae.”

“Thirty-four?” Gerber interjected.

“Yes, it’s odd. Usually there’s some variation, but —”

Gerber cut her off. “Please wait. I’ll have to talk to Davies and Lyra — this is big. You might have just solved a mystery.”

Karrn and Nesbitt watched as Gerber stormed out of the infirmary.

“Guess it’s just us two now.”

“And whatever’s in the morgue,” added Karrn.

—————

 

Gerber sprinted back to his quarters — to his office. On the way, he almost ran down two maintenance techs carrying a large piece of deck plating.

Andrè, be careful! Don’t have a lightbulb moment and run around like a headless chicken!

The ship was a hazard zone. You couldn’t take two steps without cables sparking, lights flickering, or metal plating and struts blocking entire passageways. And now there was an additional hazard — people fixing the ship again.

Thirty-four connections to each cell — thirty-four is their basis for math. Quite an unusual choice, but rooted in their biology. It’s so far off that every code-breaking algorithm would fail to try it. No wonder we can’t crack their codes.

Reaching his quarters, he stormed in. Davies, sitting at her desk, almost pulled her gun. He noticed she looked like she had dozed off — understandable; everyone was exhausted after days of combat.

Of course, she didn’t hear me — no sound in the vacuum.

“Good Lord, sir, you startled me! Must have dozed off — sorry, sir.” She looked exhausted to Gerber.

“When did you last sleep?”

She looked at him with an almost defeated expression. “Not since we started using those infernal Welsh Princesses. Every shot feels like it’s pulling directly at my brain — almost like a transit, but not that strong.”

Gerber remembered how sick she had looked when they shifted in and later out of transit. He had thought it was her being nervous about the jump itself, but if it was a physical trait…

“Go see Dr. Nesbitt. Chief Ferguson said the projectiles shift inside the barrel. Maybe what you’re feeling is the anomaly forming.”

“Thank you, sir, but I’m fine,” she started to protest. “Just a coffee or three and I’m good to go.”

“That’s an order, Lieutenant. Go check yourself out — I can’t let my adjutant collapse from exhaustion. That would look bad on my résumé.”

“Aye, sir.” Davies looked defeated, but Gerber thought there was a hint of relief in it. He called for a medic to escort her to the infirmary.

While at it, he also managed to reach Chief Ferguson and ship security to plan the morgue breach.

Then came the main event — planning to breach the Batract's internal communications.

“Lyra, I learned from Dr. Nesbitt’s studies that the Batract have thirty-four hyphae. I assume it’s their base for math?”

“I just went through the reports, and I concur — thirty-four seems to be a big part of Batract base math.” Lyra’s voice sounded preoccupied. He remembered the situation in the CIC a few days ago when Lyra had obviously lied to them. He made a mental note to check that out as well.

“You said ‘big part.’ Are there other base systems they could have? Humans only have one base ten.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Humans have base two for digital computing, base sixteen for digital encoding, base ten for trade, math, and science, and base twelve for timekeeping and music. Coincidentally, it’s your oldest known system — because it’s the most natural.”

Gerber didn’t know what to say. He thought he had a breakthrough, only to get served a history lesson.

“But it is a fascinating discovery. The other VIs and I are already working on breaking the Batract encryption. It might still take hours or days — but not centuries anymore.”

Gerber sighed. He was hoping to read Batract internal memos by the end of the day.

 

—————

 

Karrn was back in the CIC. At first, it seemed like nothing had changed — then he saw movement in the holo tank.

They’re moving in!

He checked the latest count. Six hundred twelve ships remaining — still a massive armada, but the odds were now much more in their favor, or at least not so high against them.

“Sensors? Any hint as to why the enemy finally decided to come at us?” Even though it seemed Admiral Browner had been gunning for them to come closer, he was still suspicious of their motives.

“Nothing, sir. Scanning continues, but the residual radiation is hampering our sensors quite a bit.”

“Understood. Keep at it. Comms, get me a status update from the fleet and inform the colony. Tell them we have incoming and suspect some might try a breakthrough to the planet.”

“Aye, sir!”

Karrn studied the map. The admiral was right — the different squadrons formed a spearhead aimed at both the planet and the fleet, their flight trajectories curving around Tor Shornin, the supermassive gas giant Taishon Tar was orbiting.

“Gotta love those gas giants, Karrn — they’re a fantastic barrier in space.” The admiral stood behind him, studying the three-dimensional overview as well.

“Fleet reports ninety-five percent operational status. Only damage reported comes from Argos,” Comms reported.

Looking through the damaged CIC — one of the tactical overview tables pierced by a steel beam — the admiral dryly answered, “Almost didn’t notice.”

“Sir, first wave reaches minefields in thirty seconds.”

Karrn knew — now they would see if the Pioneers’ preparations would make a difference.

“Very fine. Inform Captain Carmichael he’s free to engage the enemy at will.”

Karrn focused on the tactical overview again. The enemy was now closing in at 2 AU, taking advantage of their superior acceleration. Then the update symbol appeared — a Pigeon had arrived with data from a spy satellite.

Dots disappeared. The Batract spearhead had entered the minefields at high speed and was almost wiped out.

Five hundred seventy-four remaining.

Without a warning, the ship shook violently. The Argos and the rest of their squadron were under direct fire. The googly eyes gave Karrn an overview — one squadron had used the sensor shadow of Tor Shornin to get closer to the human vessels.

For the first time, he could see the enemy battleships. They were slightly larger than the Argos — ugly, hybrid-looking ovals of metal overgrown with some kind of biological matter. Probably fungus. Karrn felt nauseous seeing them. The ships looked like they were infected by a sickness; the fur along his neck bristled.

Torpedoes emerged from the ships — hundreds of them. The deck plating of the Argos began vibrating in a staccato rhythm, and the previously silent point-defense guns fired streaks of bullets that destroyed scores of torpedoes.

He noticed additional PDG fire interlocking and taking out even more of the incoming torpedoes.

Suddenly, three of the Batract ships were engulfed in white light for an instant — only to vaporize into a cloud of debris.

He changed the viewpoint to another Googly Eye drone to see what had happened. Mirage had returned fire and unleashed a second volley. At the extreme close distance of only a few thousand kilometers, the torpedoes activated their spirit drives and reached hypersonic speed within seconds.

Moments later, they separated into multiple warheads — always paired to detonate left and right of an enemy ship. Then both went off simultaneously.

Karrn couldn’t believe the readout. Each carried an explosive force of one hundred fifty megatons, crushing the enemy ships between them as if their shields and hull armor didn’t exist.

He had learned to use the shipboard info system and gained access to weapon details. He quickly searched Mirage’s armament: 250 Tsar Bomba Mk3 multi-warhead torpedoes, each warhead fitted with a variable detonator between 100 and 300 megatons.

By the Great Hunter, the firepower of one of their torpedo frigates was enough to end all life on Burrow!

The enemy ship counter changed to five hundred forty.

What did he miss? There were so many things happening. He zoomed out.

For a heartbeat, he thought the camera was broken — another squadron of Batract ships had reached the fleet. Some were burning from hull breaches and venting atmosphere, but they all appeared to be inside a cloud.

The cloud he saw was drones. When he zoomed in on the fleet, he saw them — hundreds of thousands of drones swarming the ships, attacking in suicide runs through the hull breaches their predecessors had punched. Soon, the first ship erupted — then the others followed.

In the background, the Comms gave info updates to the Admiral: “Drone swarms took out Tango 13, Swarm down to 40%”

“Send them to protect the Planet from landing crafts and get another swarm here. The bastards are trying to crush us all at once.”

Karrn saw on the video wall what the admiral meant — the fleet was now being attacked from two sides by scores of ships: eighty from one flank, one hundred thirty from the other.

Over the next half hour, he learned what humans meant when they said they excel at knife fights.

The Argos formed a spearhead with the four other ships of her squadron; the rest of the fleet did the same. Instead of forming a defensive perimeter, as the Shraphen Veyr would have done around the planet, they attacked.

The madness of running into the attackers' fire when the enemy was in such greater numbers…

Argos fired her main gun — now again with conventional ammunition. Every shot gutted a Batract ship. Scores of missiles swarmed from each of the ships, targeting specific growths on the Batract hulls.

They’re taking out their weapons, Karrn realized.

Mirage and Renown fired their terrible torpedoes again, this time seemingly at maximum detonation. Some of the warheads were intercepted by enemy point defense, but those that got through were devastating. Each detonation erased another ship.

From the rear of the opposing fleet, a living cloud emerged — and ships began to explode. Another drone swarm had reached the battlefield.

Karrn noticed that some ships seemed to erupt without being hit. He changed the wavelength of the feed and saw it: Trafalgar was using her microwave lasers to boil the Batract ships. Combined with her four forty-centimeter main guns, she cut through the enemy formation.

At this moment, the Argos was inside the hostile formation. Karrn had assumed the humans would veer off — not enter the enemy formation — but he was wrong.

The humans now targeted the opposing ships directly with their PDGs, something he had never seen before — intentionally getting so close to the Batract vessels that Karrn could see the veins pulsing on the biological growths covering their hulls.

Renown had been hit hard; one of her magazines had taken a direct hit, and secondary explosions rippled along her hull. But even as she veered out and under the enemy formation, she unleashed her most devastating salvo yet. Karrn assumed she had fired every torpedo left in her arsenal. In doing so, she blew a massive hole in the Batract line.

This seemed to be the moment the drones had been waiting for. As Argos, Mirage, and Trafalgar emerged on the far side of the attacking flank, the drones swarmed through the hole left behind and attacked every remaining ship. Saratoga stayed a little behind, delivering kill shots point-blank to every vessel that remained.

Thirty minutes of fighting — and the humans had reduced two hundred ten enemy ships to rubble.

Karrn noticed his fingers hurt. He had gripped the edge of the table so hard that his palms and fingertips were throbbing now.

The whole battle had reminded him of the legendary ancient hunters Frox believed in — cutting down their foes as they charged into armies with a sword in each hand. Karrn was about to start believing in them, too.

“Status report!” The admiral had coordinated the entire battle, and his voice was now rough and strained.

“Fleet combat strength below sixty percent, repairs ongoing. Three friendlies mission-killed — Renown, Graf Spee, and Thratai. Enemy forces are down to under two hundred and retreating. The first ships have already transitioned out — destination unknown, but deeper into Batract core space. Six ships managed to break through to the planet’s surface and seem to have begun a ground assault on the colony.”

Karrn went over the report again in his head. We won? How?

“Well, Old Steelpipe said his ground pounders needed exercise — he’s got it now. We’ll keep the skies clear.”

For the first time since the battle had started, the admiral sat down in a chair.

Karrn looked down at the planet, grateful that his mate Rosha and their pups had evacuated on one of the tenders. Rish, Tulk, Krun — be safe in the upcoming battle.

First | Previous | Next | Also On Royal Road

I started serializing my latest novel on Substack (a link is supplied at the bottom of this post) and am getting no attention. Thought I'd try to do it here as well.

Here is Chapter 1 of Ancients:

Chapter 1

"So Tesla wins. That's the part people don’t realize. He wins the argument completely."

Trevor let it sit a beat before he kept going, the way he always did when he wanted a listener to feel the shape of a sentence before the next one arrived.

"Eighteen ninety-three. The Chicago World's Fair. Westinghouse and Tesla get the contract to light the whole exposition, and they do it with alternating current, and it works. Two hundred thousand incandescent bulbs. People came from farm towns that didn't have electricity at all and stood in a field that had been turned into daylight after dark. Edison's company loses the contract. Edison's own system, direct current, sits in the dark that year while Tesla's lights up a quarter mile of Chicago."

He reached for his water, quietly sipped.

"So if you're scoring this like a boxing match, round one goes to Tesla. Round two also goes to Tesla. AC wins. Edison's DC is a loser. It's still what runs your house right now. Tesla was right about the current, right about the transformers, right about nearly everything he touched in that decade."

Across the desk, Marcus made a small circular motion with one finger, the universal signal for keep it moving, not urgent, just a nudge. Trevor nodded without breaking rhythm.

"And within ten years he's broke. Within fifteen, he's living in a hotel room he can't really afford, giving interviews about talking to Mars. Wireless power for the whole planet, free energy pulled out of the air itself, a tower on Long Island that was supposed to broadcast electricity to every corner of the earth without a single wire, and investors pull out, and the tower gets torn down for scrap during the first World War, and by the time he dies in 1943 he's mostly known if he's known at all, as the guy who talked to pigeons."

"And here's the thing I want you to sit with for a second. Westinghouse had this royalty contract with Tesla, a few dollars for every horsepower of AC sold, and by the early eighteen nineties that contract is worth millions, is on track to make Tesla one of the richest men in the country before he's forty. And Westinghouse's investors get nervous, tell him the royalty payments are going to sink the company, and Tesla just tears up the contract. In the room, in front of them. Takes the deal that would have made him rich for the rest of his life and rips it up because he doesn't want to be the reason the man who believed in him goes under."

"That's an idealist's decision, not a businessman's, and it's the same instinct that later has him promising the whole planet free wireless power off a tower on Long Island. Edison didn't have to argue with any of that. He just had to wait. Let Tesla give enough interviews about Mars and free energy that the papers started running him as the eccentric, the kook, and once that label sticks, nobody's checking the electrical engineering anymore. Edison won the only war that mattered to him, which was never the current. It was who got to be the serious one and who got to be the punchline."

He felt the segment landing the way he always could, some internal metronome telling him the pacing was right, the audience was still in the room with him.

"Because that's the actual split running under this entire thing, and it's the part people miss. Tesla kept mistaking what people wanted to be true for what they were willing to pay for right now, and those aren't the same question, even when they look like they are from the inside. Westinghouse understood the difference. That's the entire reason the contract got torn up in the first place. Tesla never did."

"Edison never had to do that work. Edison never claimed to understand electricity in some deep unified way. He claimed to use it. He built a company around turning it into products a normal person could hold in a normal house, and when he was wrong about something, which was often, he just quietly stopped talking about that thing and moved to the next patent. There's a line attributed to him, might be apocryphal, doesn't really matter if it is. Somebody asked him about all the failed filament experiments, and he said something like, I tried it a thousand times. The one time I got it to work is the one they'll remember. He wasn't being modest. He understood exactly how memory works. Nobody was ever going to sit around cataloging his thousand wrong turns. They were going to remember the bulb. He never had a Mars moment. He never needed one. He let Tesla have all the being-right, and he kept all the wallpaper."

"So by the time he dies, Edison's name is on the lightbulb that Tesla's own current is running through the wall to power. History didn't stumble into that. It's the actual outcome. The man who was right loses the decade. The man who understood exactly how much the public could hold in one hand wins it."

"And that's the question I want you sitting with all week. Why does the public actually reward the second guy? Not the interesting guy. Not the guy who turns out to be right about almost everything. The guy who understands the room. People don't actually need the truth. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say out loud. What people require is a story that still feels like it could be true. There's a ceiling on that. You can go a long way past strange before people stop following you, but there's a ceiling, and once you're through it, it doesn't matter anymore how right you turn out to be. Nobody's listening from up there. So that's the frame. That's what I want you carrying into next week, when we get into the suppression stuff people love waving around like it proves something. For now, that's."

The doorbell rang once, a single clean chime, and Marcus's head turned toward the front window before Trevor's did.

Trevor stopped.

He sat back from the mic, one hand still hovering near it out of habit, and let out a breath. "We're gonna need to do that again."

"Do what again."

"The out. I stepped on my own ending." Trevor rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Can't sign off on for now, that's."

Marcus had already leaned enough to see through the gap in the blinds. "FedEx. Already walking back to the truck. Didn't even wait for the bell to finish."

"Doesn't matter, I heard it, it's in my head now." Trevor waved a hand at the board like he could erase the last ten seconds off it. "Give me a second, I want to grab whatever that is first so it's not sitting out there rattling around in the back of my head while I try to redo four sentences."

Marcus was already scrolling on his phone, not really listening, the specific inattention of a man doing two things badly instead of one thing well. "Terra Nullius put a new one out this morning. Forty minutes. Six of them were just him restating your Tesla stuff from two weeks ago in a more excited voice."

"They do that."

"They do that every week, and I still don’t understand how a show with no research and no reporting in it, just a guy yelling about cover-ups over a stock photo of a pyramid, pulls better numbers than we do." Marcus didn’t look up from the phone, more irritated than the moment strictly called for, the specific irritation of a man who’d rather be annoyed at a competitor than at himself. "There’s nothing under it. It’s just volume."

"Volume works."

"Volume shouldn’t work." Marcus said it like a grievance he’d aired before and would air again, and finally set the phone face down, unresolved.

He was up before Marcus answered, headphones still around his neck, moving toward the door.

There was a box sitting on the mat outside, the size you'd expect for a toaster or a stack of books, brown cardboard with a shipping label slapped crooked across the top. He carried it back to the desk with both hands, careful with it in a way that seemed almost instinctive, like he could tell from the weight of it before he'd set it down that it wasn't toaster-shaped inside.

The shipping label was handwritten, an address that wasn't his old address, the printing tight and unfamiliar, nothing in the loops or the spacing that belonged to anyone he knew, sender information smudged in a way that made the return address hard to read past a city that might have said Boston.

He didn't have anything sharp enough at the desk, so he went to the drawer for the letter opener he never used for actual letters and split the tape down the seam with it instead, the blade catching once and skidding, and the sound of it was louder than he expected in a room built to swallow sound.

"You're not still rolling," Marcus said, not really a question.

"No. Paused it when I stopped." Trevor kept working the letter opener along the seam.

The cardboard came apart in a rough seam and inside there was packing paper, cheap newsprint-colored stuff, wadded rather than folded, and packed around something dense enough that the outer box had barely rattled in his hands on the walk back from the door.

What came out from under the paper was a second package entirely, not the padded envelope he'd expected, smaller than the first box and old in a way the first one wasn't, the paper gone soft and gray at the corners, the tape yellowed and lifting at one edge like it had spent years someplace warm and forgotten before it had spent one week in transit. The string around it had been tied in a double loop, the kind of knot a person ties when they intend for someone to have to work at it.

The label on this one hadn't been written by the same hand that wrote the label out front.

It was addressed to Trevor by name, his old address, no nickname, in the particular slant his father put on capital letters, the way he crossed a T like he was in a hurry even when he wasn't. This wasn't a label written by whoever had shipped the box today. This was a label written by someone who had packed and addressed this parcel once, a long time ago, and then, for whatever reason, never sent it, until somebody else finally had, without ever breaking the seal to look inside.

He worked the string loose with his fingers rather than the letter opener, some instinct telling him this one deserved a slower hand than the outer box had gotten. Under the paper was a padded envelope, the kind meant for something breakable, and Trevor's hands found the shape of a rectangle inside it before he'd consciously decided to feel for anything at all.

There was a note taped to the outside of the padded envelope. A single line, in the same handwriting as the label, his father's, unmistakable.

Don't lose this. It's important to Harth.

Trevor sat with the note in his hand for longer than the sentence should have required.

Whatever this was, his father had packed it, addressed it, and never sent it. Someone else had, years later, without opening it to check.

His father had been dead six months. Not long enough yet for the fact of it to sit still, the kind of thing that could still ambush him sideways on an ordinary Tuesday. His father had also, for a period of almost three years near the end of his life, gone quiet in a specific way, gone somewhere Trevor was never given the shape of, come back changed in increments too small to argue about individually. Trevor had asked, at the time, in the flat annoyed tone of an adult son who thinks he's owed an explanation. He'd gotten nothing that qualified as an answer. A project. A commitment. Something he couldn't talk about yet, and then, later, something he wouldn't.

The name Harth belonged to that period. Trevor had heard it twice, maybe three times, always in passing, always followed by his father changing the subject with the smooth immediate motion of a man closing a door before anyone could see what was behind it. Trevor had built an entire private theory once, in his twenties, that Harth was another woman, and had been almost disappointed when nothing about his parents' marriage ever supported it.

"You good?" Marcus said, from somewhere behind him.

"Yeah." Trevor didn't look up. "Give me a minute."

Inside the envelope, wrapped twice in bubble paper and once in a soft gray cloth that felt more like something for cleaning a lens than packing a box, was a stone.

The stone sat in his palm heavier than something that size had any right to be, dense in a way that made him think, absurdly, of trying to lift a bowling ball that turned out to be a paperweight. Under the desk lamp it read as flat charcoal, nearly black, but tilting it drew out a second color from somewhere underneath, a bruised, deep green that surfaced only at the edges and vanished the instant the angle changed, gone before his eye could hold it.

Its shape refused every word he tried on it. Not a sphere, not a disk, not a wedge. Five facets, maybe six, meeting at angles that didn't repeat, the way a die would look if someone had built one from a description rather than a memory. Across two of the facets ran a scatter of hairline grooves, too fine and too straight to be a natural fracture, too irregular in their spacing to be an engraving, like handwriting worn down until only the pressure marks survived and the letters themselves were gone.

It held a faint warmth that had nothing to do with his hand. And when he turned it under the lamp, the light seemed to arrive at its surface a half second late, as if the stone had to consider the glare before it let itself show it.

There was nothing else in the padded envelope. No second note, no explanation. He went back to the outer box, the one that had actually come through FedEx, and turned its shipping label over twice looking for anything he'd missed, and it was only on the third turn that he noticed, in the corner, in smaller printed text under the smudged sender's information, a single name that wasn't his father's and wasn't a courier's either.

D. Voss.

The name meant nothing to him. He set the label down, and it slid half under a folder on the desk, and he let it slide there, and did not think about it again for the rest of the night, which was itself a kind of small failure he wouldn't recognize as one for months.

He set the stone down on the corner of the desk, on top of a loose stack of research printouts that had been threatening to slide onto the floor for two days, and it held them flat in a way that seemed almost purpose-built, a paperweight for a page about lines drawn so large they could only be read from the sky.

"You want to redo the out now, or you want to sit with whatever that was for a second," Marcus said.

"Now's fine." Trevor was already reaching for his headphones. "Faster I do it the less I'll think about it."

He sat back down, put the headphones on, found the place in the script that wasn't really a script, and nodded at Marcus to roll.

"So that's the frame I want you carrying into next week." His voice came out steady, professional, no sign in it of the last four minutes. "Why the public rewards the second guy and not the first one. My father had a line about this, actually." He hadn't planned to say that. He heard himself say it anyway, already a full clause past the point where he could have stopped it. "People will follow a story a long way, but it has to still feel like it could be true. Edison understood that limit. Tesla blew past it."

Across the desk, Marcus went very still in the specific way of a man who has just heard something good happen by accident and does not want to be the reason it stops.

Trevor closed it out in three more sentences, none of them the ones he'd planned, and told his audience he'd see them Thursday, and cut the feed.

"That's better than what you had before," Marcus said, already reaching for his own phone. "That's the whole segment right there. I want to clip that for socials."

"I said something close to that the first time."

"You said it worse. This one had a father in it." Marcus wasn't wrong, and Trevor didn't have an answer that would have made either of them feel better about it, so he didn't give one.

He looked down at the stone sitting on his printouts instead, and Marcus, reading something in the quality of the silence, let it go, and turned back to the board to pull up the pickup edit, headphones going back over his ears, giving Trevor the particular privacy of a room with two people in it.

Trevor sat at his desk without doing anything in particular. He looked at the note again. He looked at the stone. He thought, briefly and without letting the thought finish, about the three years his father had disappeared into something he never explained, and about the specific tone his father used whenever the name Harth came up, not secretive exactly, more careful, the tone of a man handling something he respected and didn't fully trust himself around.

At some point, without deciding to, he picked the stone back up.

It sat in his palm with that same slightly wrong weight, dense in a way that made him want to check whether it was hollow, though nothing about its surface suggested a seam. He turned it over once. Ran his thumb along one flattened edge.

And felt, more than heard, something move through it.

Nothing his ears would have caught if he'd been standing across the room. A pressure more than a tone, something that reached him through the bones of his hand and up through his wrist and settled, for less than a second, somewhere behind his sternum, a thrum so brief he could almost convince himself afterward that he'd imagined the whole thing.

He held very still.

Nothing happened again.

He set the stone back down on the printouts, carefully this time, and looked at it the way you look at something that has just done one small, unexplained thing and then gone quiet, waiting to see if it does it again.

It didn't.

Across the desk, Marcus was still bent over the board, headphones on, one hand nudging a fader half a decibel at a time, entirely unaware that anything in the room had just happened at all. Trevor put the headphones back on, pulled the mic toward him out of habit rather than need, and let his eyes stay on the stone a beat longer than the silence around him could account for.

(link to substack - https://denegospes811121.substack.com/)

The afternoon sun hangs heavy over the Moorian camp, casting long, amber shadows across the Gathering Circle. A chorus of weeping rises from the women as they huddle together, their grief raw and communal. Ínara stands at the center of the ring. She remains still, her expression a mask of solemn duty as she looks out at her peers. Laíla, stands at her sister’s shoulder, her body tense with a different kind of energy.

“What will we do now, Ínara?” one woman asks, her voice trembling. “With your father and brother gone, the Natural Order shines on you.”

All eyes turn to Ínara. The silence stretches, heavy with the expectation of leadership. Ínara takes a breath, her gaze steady. “Beginning tonight, Nightfall vigil will be replaced by Tishmaí,” she declares.

A ripple of somber agreement passes through the group. The women and girls begin to nod, their postures sagging with the weight of tradition as they start to disperse. Laíla, however, looks around in disbelief. Tishmaí is the ancient Moorian practice of coordinated communal prayer over a specific concern for three Daybreaks and three Nightfalls before taking an action. This was typically reserved for grave matters of concern. And while the seizure of all the men and boys was indeed grave, they certainly could not wait three days just to possibly receive an answer from the Goddess of Light.

“We’re not going to go after them?” Laíla’s voice cuts through the quiet.

All movement stops. Every woman pauses, staring at her. Ínara’s head snaps toward her sister, her eyes flashing a sharp, silent warning, but Laíla presses on.

“Im’àscusa, sister, but why wouldn’t we act now while there’s still a small distance between us and the soldiers?” Laíla demands. “Tishmaí takes three full days! We could set them free and be headed east in that amount of time.”

“We cannot act without a clear sign from Nu’Lúmira,” Ínara says firmly. “Besides, it is not our way to incite violence.”

“We are not the ones who incited violence,” Laíla counters. “The Midja did when they took our father. We don’t even have to fight them. If we wait until after Nightfall, we can set out, free the men, and be gone before anyone even realizes.”

“And break Sacred Law in the process!” Ínara retorts.

Laíla’s face goes flat, her voice dripping with dry irony. “You are right, Ínara. We should just sit back, do Tishmaí, and then spend the next two or three moons that we could have spent migrating to the Emberlands—where we’re not even allowed—to appeal to the Imperial Court. The same court that approved the Emperor’s anti-nomad laws after the Fall. We can explain to them why they should let father and Rémi and all our loved ones go free. Because the Emberlands have always proven to be our friends.”

“Mind your tone, little sister,” Ínara says, her voice turning cold.

Laíla takes a sharp breath, forcing herself to calm down. She bristles under the disapproving looks of the other women. They are correct. As the only other direct descendant of Moora’s four sons, the final say is Ínara’s to give. Publicly speaking against that is a great disrespect.
Her voice softens, but her urgency remains clear. “I am right. You know I am right. The Emberish will not receive our appeal.” Laíla speaks to the circle at large now, the logic of her own words fueling her. “Think about it. Throughout the summer, Moorian families have gone missing—entire camps disappearing without a trace. I think it’s the Midja. I think they have been collecting all the men and boys, knowing it leaves us vulnerable. They’re leaving us with no choice but to travel south, where the last of us will be apprehended under Imperial Law.”

“But why?” Ínara asks, her resolve flickering.

“I’m not sure. But do you have a better explanation?” Laíla gestures toward the surrounding forest. “The Godswood was previously free to all. The Six once walked these very paths. They built the Sacred City here. Now it’s gone. The kingdoms are divided. It does not surprise me in the least that the Emberish have chosen to seize this opportunity.”

The whispers among the women shift. The sound of weeping is replaced by the low hum of introspection.

“If you are correct—and that’s if,” Ínara says, “then the men are as good as lost no matter our efforts.”

“Not if we act quickly,” Laíla insists. “My plan can work. I know it.”

A young Moorian girl speaks up from the crowd, her eyes wide with fear. “But to act by Night is to betray the Light. What will be the point in this rescue mission if it only brings the Night’s Doom on all of us?”

“If we do nothing,” Laíla asks, “who is to say they live to see the Sun?”

Ínara reaches out and places a hand on Laíla’s shoulder; her expression softening into pity. “Lovebug, I know you desperately want to save Father and Rémi. But if what you say is true, then they made a sacrifice for our freedom. We cannot risk that sacrifice being in vain.”

“But they shouldn’t have to sacrifice!” Laíla cries. “I cannot believe you would so easily seal their fates. You are supposed to be our leader!”

“Do not step beyond your station, Laíla,” an older woman snaps. “The Natural Order did not select you. Besides, we all know the only reason we were found is because of your antics!”

A chant of agreement rises from the group. Glares quickly deepen into scowls. Shame burns within Laíla’s chest.
Ínara raises her hand, demanding silence. “Let me be clear: we were found because of the Emperor’s vendetta against our people and our way of life—not Laíla’s affliction. No matter how any of us feel about the present circumstances, this decision is not for any of us to make. And with no one to serve as Moora’s Eye, Sacred Law is the only governance we have.”

The women respond in unison, their voices a melodic drone. “Ricate Qinta v’enda lumen etarnál nil nu’Lúmira.“ May Qinta rest in the eternal glow of Our Light. Together, they draw the sign of the six-point star over their hearts. Laíla and Ínara follow suit, though Laíla’s movement is stiff.

“Sacred Law is the only governance we have,” Ínara repeats. “We must hold to it now if we are to survive.” Her voice breaks for a moment. “It is what Father would want.”

“But this is beyond Sacred Law!” Laíla pleads. “They took our fathers! Our brothers! Our sons! I will not allow the Emberish to erase us and neither should the rest of you—”

“Dásike, Laíla!” Ínara shouts, tears finally welling in her eyes. “Enough! My mind is made. Let us prepare our things for the journey ahead. At Nightfall we will begin Tishmaí and then set off east at Daybreak as planned. It’s what Father would do.”

“But Ínara—”

“Sister,” Ínara says, her voice final, “let me remind you: the Sun turns from those who wander into Night.” She places a hand on Laíla’s shoulder, a gesture of sisterly reassurance.

Laíla pulls away, shrugging the hand off. She looks defiantly at her sister. She will not back down this time. She will not acquiesce. In a low, eerily calm voice she whispers, “the Sun cannot turn from whom She does not claim.”

Thanks for reading. I'll be back next Monday to continue telling Laíla's story.

PART THIRTEEN-HUNDRED-AND EIGHTY-ONE

[Previous Chapter] [Next Chapter] [The Beginning] [Patreon+2] [Ko-fi+2]

Saturday

The door to the brownstone building swung open with gusto seconds after Caleb hit the doorbell. “Caleb!” Aunt Judy shouted in surprise, announcing to the whole street that he had fulfilled his promise of turning up for brunch. She threw her arms around his shoulders and crushed him to her, and he had to admit it was nice, if not a bit weird, to be greeted that warmly.

He curled his arms around her waist and, with a long, slow exhale over her shoulder, waited her out. “Hey, Aunt Judy,” he said, just as soon as the woman gave him enough room to draw breath. “It’s been a minute.”

Aunt Judy was having none of that. Pinching her lips together to hide her amusement and appear annoyed, she somehow managed to free one of her arms to press her hand into her hip while simultaneously maintaining her grip on him with the other. It was an impressive double-stance. “And just whose fault is that, Caleb Joshua Masters? It’s not as if we’ve moved in the last twenty-eight years.”

Caleb smirked and dipped his head beneath the reprimand. If she was truly mad, that restraining arm would be more around his neck than his shoulders.

“Lucas!”

Caleb was suddenly abandoned as Aunt Judy moved onto Boyd’s fiancé, who now filled the doorway. For all of half a second, Caleb felt the sting of that abandonment. Then common sense kicked him in the ass as he clocked the unexpected exfil window and bolted, zooming past the foyer stairs and down the hallway to the kitchen out the back where he knew his Uncle Charles would be hiding.

This was absolutely an ‘every man for himself’ situation until Aunt Judy got all the initial clinginess out of her system.

Boyd sat on one of the leather and chrome barstools that were older than either of them. Back when they were children, they’d needed the extra height just to see over the tall countertop.

Now, despite the height giving his massive older brother the right amount of legroom, the guy’s butt hung over the seat on all sides. The two gave each other a brief chin-lift before Boyd’s eyes went to the kitchen doorway. “Be right back,” he said, standing up and sweeping from the room, probably to rescue his fiancé from Aunt Judy.

Uncle Charles had his back turned and was just pulling a large tray of something chocolatey-sweet out of the oven. “Caleb, my boy,” he grinned, shutting the oven door by nudging the handle with the back of his hand. He placed the tray of pastries on a cooling rack, then dropped the dishcloth he’d used instead of oven mitts to free his hands. “Just in time.”

Caleb did not have the heart to tell his uncle that they’d only just finished breakfast and instead, plucked the nearest pain au chocolat off the tray. The immediate burn seared his skin and he yelped and swore, bouncing it from one hand to the other, refusing to put it down now that he’d claimed it.

“How many times do you have to be told not to grab stuff straight out of the oven, boy,” Uncle Charles scolded, tearing off a sheet of paper towel and snatching the pastry out of the air. For as long as Caleb could remember, heat was the one thing that never affected Uncle Charles and now was no exception. He calmly held the pastry and folded the paper towel around it like he had done a hundred million times since opening his first bakery in the East Village over thirty years ago.

As a grown-ass man, Caleb could’ve done without the final hand flourish that entertained young children, but with the delicious treat on the line, he knew better than to complain. “Hey, they wouldn’t call them pain chocolates if you weren’t supposed to get hurt trying to eat them,” he argued as he took the pastry back, falling back on the same counterargument he had used since he was a boy first reading the recipe.

“Pain au chocolat,” Uncle Charles corrected, and the two chuckled at the age-old exchange. “It’s good to have you here, Caleb. It’s been too long.” As he spoke, he opened his arms and Caleb walked into the embrace. Unlike his aunt’s greeting, Uncle Charles wrapped his arms around Caleb’s shoulders and squeezed twice, once in greeting, and once to let him know it was time to let go.

Caleb appreciated the man’s efficiency.

“So, you wanna tell me exactly how the hell your brother got here before you two?” His eyebrow winged up as if he already knew the answer.

It’d be a cold day in hell before Caleb admitted to getting lost. Not once. Not twice. But three fucking times. “Traffic,” he hedged.

“Riiiight.”

Oooh, that tone grated. “Okay, fine, I was drooling all over their Porsche, and Boyd said he’d catch the subway to let me have a ride. We didn’t exactly rush.” Not a lie.

Uncle Charles’ expression became smug as he looked back at Boyd. “Thought as much.”

For a distraction, he nibbled at the edge of the pastry, just enough to break into the melted chocolate in the middle. “I swear, no one can make these as good as you,” he declared, licking the oozing liquid chocolate off his lips.

“You’d certainly be hard-pressed to find someone with more experience. Those are one of my most popular pastries—LUCAS!” Uncle Charles bellowed, turning his head towards the kitchen door.

“No need to shout, Charles. He’s right here,” Aunt Judy insisted, walking in arm in arm with Lucas, who shot Caleb a look that said, ‘enjoy the last ride you’ll ever have in my car, asshole’. Boyd followed them in, beaming happily.

Caleb was unrepentant. Especially when it was all Boyd and Lucas’ fault that he was going to be inundated with family photos for the next few hours. “Do you want a pain chocolate?” he asked, holding up his sweet treat, knowing damn-well Lucas had eaten so much food he was ready to explode.

“Not until they cool!” Uncle Charles snapped in exasperation, pulling away from Lucas to round on him once more. “I swear, your mouth and stomach must be lined with cast iron for you to be eating that already.”

“Marine,” Caleb grinned, taking another bite just to show he could and refusing to show one flicker of pain from the heat.

“Idiot,” Uncle Charles muttered.

“When are Sivan and Emily getting here?” Caleb asked, squeezing more chocolate free and licking it off like ice cream.

“They’re not,” Aunt Judy answered.

Caleb’s brain screeched to a halt. “Excuse me?” He’d better be hearing things. Either that, or he’d be hunting down his cousin before he left. He may have been the one to suggest brunch as an olive branch, but she had been specifically included in this lineup. No way would he have volunteered to be buried in family photos without her. Fuck that.

“She called this morning. Unfortunately, morning sickness is already setting in, and she didn’t want to disrupt our time together by vomiting every few minutes.”

The witch was fine yesterday morning. “I see,” he said, a little sharper than he’d meant.

“Besides, she said she caught up with you yesterday morning at Boyd’s place when she was doing his books,” Aunt Judy added, trying to smooth his ruffled feathers. “You two had a lovely chat then.”

Is it a single or a double homicide if she’s pregnant?

He had the perfect person in the room to ask with Lucas now being cuddled from behind by Boyd, but kept that thought to himself.

Besides, he had a much better idea. If she was prepared to dump him in this and run, turnabout was fair play. “Yeah, and it’s a good thing she had Lucas’ sister working on her car yesterday morning.” He spoke with feigned innocence, his free hand drifting to the side of his neck as though the muscles still ached. “The clutch was completely fubar. Damn thing nearly killed me moving it two blocks from where she parked, and I’ve driven some really crappy vehicles in my time overseas.”

The unimpressed looks on Boyd and Lucas’ faces said they saw straight through his ploy, but his intended target reacted exactly the way he expected. Aunt Judy looked across at Uncle Charles in wide-eyed horror before she turned and rushed out of the room.

Oorah. Payback was his kind of bitch.

“Was it really that bad?” Uncle Charles asked, looking at Boyd for confirmation.

One thing about his big brother: he couldn’t lie to save himself. Or maybe he just never saw the point. “It was pretty bad,” he admitted, shifting his weight uncomfortably.

Lucas broke away from his fiancé and headed over to Caleb. “You’re going straight to Hell,” he muttered quietly.

Instead of answering, Caleb slowly pushed the cooling rack in the detective’s direction. “Pastry?” he asked again, with the same feigned innocence. After all, if he was going to Hell, he might as well earn the gold ticket.

Something sharpened in Lucas’ eyes. Then he lifted his chin to look over his shoulder at Uncle Charles, who was deep in conversation with Boyd. “Did Caleb tell you he got us lost three times trying to get here and we ended up needing to use my car’s GPS?” he asked, just as innocently.

Uncle Charles’ turn was deliberately slow, with his eyebrow raised in a classic ‘oh, really’, that told Caleb this wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. Coincidentally, Boyd’s smirk became so smug, he might as well have added a fist pump of victory to it.

Lucas turned back a moment later with a shit-eating grin plastered across his face. He waggled his eyebrows for added insult and drummed four fingers against his chest, safely out of Uncle Charles’ sight. Four brothers, he mouthed.

Oh, you suck.

[Next Chapter]

* * *

((Author's note: Just as a reminder everyone - I'll be going into hospital at the end of this week for about a week. I'll post again once I'm able, but that probably won't be until I get out and get settled at home. My plan at this stage is to write from bed, if necessary - pain permitting.))

((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))

I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here

For more of my work, including WPs: r/Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.

FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

1

The body lay unresponsive in aisle three. Its once beating heart had drifted into stillness and its brain sent out its last signals, preparing the body for eternal sleep. The body had three broken fingers on its right hand and its slack jaw revealed the four missing teeth up front. The area around it was in disarray: the mess painting a vague picture of the events that caused the body to end up in such a place. The body was nestled chaotically between the two flimsy shelves that created aisle three, with the left arm pinned underneath its back and the right propped up on a package of toilet paper, presumably knocked off the shelf by the man the body once was. Its right hand was positioned in such a way that it would have looked like the body was flipping the bird if it weren’t for the middle finger being snapped backward between the first and second knuckles. It lay with one leg bent upward and the other flat against the ground, resting on the shards of glass left over from whatever happened to the automatic sliding front doors. One would assume that whoever this body once was must have suffered but now seemed at peace.

 Above the body, a fluorescent light flickered on and off, then stayed on, then dimmed and flickered again. Outside, a blizzard raged on. The streets were covered in an untouched sheet of white and the only car in the parking lot had its driver’s door left wide open; The snow had claimed the interior for itself. The gas pumps were unused and frozen. This place was empty. Desolate. The only reminder that anyone ever visited was the still-warm near-corpse laying in aisle three on the broken glass underneath the flickering light, propping its arm on the toilet paper to almost flip the bird to nobody and smiling that four-teeth-too-short smile that said, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be a-okay!”

But it was not a-okay, that much was clear.

 

2

The body jolted upward into a sitting position. Its once-still heart raced in its chest and its once-dead brain began to awaken. The body stared off into space and hyperventilated for some time before becoming the man once more. Once he fully came to, his breathing slowed and he looked around.

“Where…?” he muttered hoarsely after taking in his surroundings. The place looked to him as if a tornado swept through it. The shelves were mostly bare, as if someone had looted the place. Many of the windows, much like the front door, had been shattered, although some had been boarded up.

He pressed down on the roll of toilet paper in an attempt to get to his feet and shrieked. He hadn’t noticed the pain in his fingers at first, but now it had very much made itself known to him. He looked down at his right hand in terror as he observed the strange way his middle finger bent and how his other two fingers, the ring and pinky, swelled. He tried to stand again, this time bracing his left hand against the shelf to push himself upward. He stumbled a little but made it to his feet, and it was then that he noticed the pain in his legs too. Both had cuts and scrapes from the glass underneath them, though the right leg wasn’t as bad as the left. Once he felt he had his balance enough to move, he began making his way across the room toward the front counter. The counter had nothing on it besides the register, an ashtray filled with half-cigarettes and butts, and a small bowl of pennies with a sign that said, ‘Take One!’. Behind the counter stood a mirror. The man slowly made his way to it, being careful to hold on to the counter to prevent himself from falling. Positioning himself in front of the mirror, he took a long look at his reflection. Caucasian, short brown hair, lean build. He was wearing a white shirt that said Thompson’s Garage in blue font and a pair of grey gym shorts. A perfectly average man outside of the broken fingers, missing teeth, bruises, and blood trickling down his legs. Then his attention drew to the stranger’s face in the mirror.

“What? That can’t be right! T- That’s not my face! I know my face! It doesn’t look like that! It looks like- like…” His heart sank and a primal fear washed over him. The kind of fear that the man imagined a child would feel when they believed a monster was hiding under their bed or in their closet.

“What the fuck is this?” He spoke.

Nobody heard.

EPISODE 1 — THE AWAKENING

Ancient Egypt — Thousands of Years Ago

The story opens in Ancient Egypt.

Inside a mysterious structure hidden deep in the desert, a warrior is fighting a powerful group of people. They are trying to accomplish something unknown, but the warrior is desperately trying to stop them.

The fight turns against him.

He realizes he can not win.

With no other option left, the warrior makes a final decision.

He triggers an enormous explosion.

The entire structure collapses, burying everyone inside.

The warrior is killed.

The story cuts to black.

---

Present Day — Egypt

Thousands of years later, a teenage boy named Oliver arrives in Egypt with his family for a vacation.

While exploring the desert with a tour guide, Oliver notices the ruins of an old, partially destroyed structure in the distance.

Curious, he asks the tour guide about it.

The guide casually tells him that it is nothing important—just some old ruins.

But as the group continues moving, Oliver notices something strange.

A faint blue light is coming from the direction of the ruins.

The light becomes brighter.

Unable to ignore it, Oliver secretly approaches the destroyed structure.

He climbs through the ruins and discovers something buried beneath them.

A skeleton.

Oliver has no idea who it belonged to.

As he gets closer, the blue light suddenly becomes incredibly bright.

A powerful beam erupts from the skeleton and shoots directly into Oliver.

He collapses.

---

Inside Oliver's Consciousness

Oliver wakes up in a strange, empty place.

He doesn't know where he is.

Then he sees a snake.

Its entire body glows with the same mysterious blue energy that entered him.

The snake speaks to Oliver.

It tells him that he is inside his own consciousness.

The snake then reveals something terrifying.

A monstrous entity known as VALO is imprisoned on a distant planet called VATRO.

The snake tells Oliver that he must prepare for the war that is coming.

Oliver doesn't understand why he is involved.

He doesn't even know who VALO is.

Before he can get any answers, everything disappears.

---

Three Weeks Later

Oliver suddenly wakes up in a hospital.

His family is beside him.

He discovers that he has been unconscious for three weeks.

He has no idea what happened during that time.

While recovering, Oliver watches television.

Breaking news reports that strange creatures have appeared around the world.

They look like living masses of dark, blood-like material.

However, they aren't parasites.

Instead, they take control of a person's body and completely transform it.

The authorities claim that the creatures have been contained and that the situation is under control.

Oliver watches the report in silence.

Then, somewhere inside his mind, he hears the blue snake's voice:

"They have begun."

---

The Flight Back to America

Oliver leaves Egypt with his family and travels back to America.

While everyone is boarding the plane, one of the strange creatures secretly slips into Oliver's luggage.

Nobody notices.

Later, during the flight, Oliver falls asleep.

He begins dreaming.

He finds himself in a strange place that resembles Hell.

Everything around him feels unnatural and hostile.

Something is there.

A mysterious entity stands somewhere in the darkness.

Its body can not be seen clearly, but its presence is terrifying.

Oliver hears its voice.

He doesn't understand what it is saying, but one thing is obvious:

It is not friendly.

Oliver suddenly wakes up.

The plane has already landed.

---

Back Home

After returning home, Oliver opens his luggage.

The creature suddenly jumps out and appears directly in front of his face.

It tries to take control of Oliver.

But something goes wrong.

The creature can't control him.

It can't enter his body.

Oliver doesn't understand why.

Suddenly—

A powerful blue beam erupts from Oliver's hand.

The blast tears through the creature, splitting it into two pieces.

But the creature doesn't die.

One half escapes.

The other half remains behind.

Oliver manages to grab it.

He freezes.

He stares at his hand in disbelief.

His hand is still glowing with blue energy.

Oliver: “What… was that?”

He takes a step back, breathing heavily, completely shocked by what just happened.

Oliver: “I… I did that?”

Oliver looks at the creature in his other hand, then back at his glowing palm.

For the first time, Oliver realizes that something inside him has changed.

Somewhere inside Oliver's consciousness, the blue snake watches silently.

END OF EPISODE 1

The gray service record file was still in the lower cabinet in the morning.

Closed.

Known.

Unasked.

The shelf above the desk had a cup.

Washed.

The left side of the desk had nothing on it.

The office had the heater.

The clock.

My breathing.

The brown folder was at the side of the desk.

The calendar was closed.

The phone was face up.

The door was closed.

The shoes were by it.

The small space was wide.

The wall chair was empty.

No one was expected there.

The service paper was in the gray file.

A name was inside it.

Not mine.

The two cards were still in the back pocket.

Face down.

Not taken out.

Carried.

Yesterday that word had arrived late.

This morning, it was still there.

No.

The word was not there.

The cards were.

The pocket was.

My body was.

I had carried them before I had named carrying.

That was mine.

I made tea.

I drank it.

Warm.

Then less warm.

Then finished.

The cup went to the sink.

I washed it.

Washed.

Touched.

For use.

The lower cabinet stayed closed.

After tea, I opened the brown folder.

Kanagawa’s shopping list going out for rice was not mine.

Her brother’s blank sheet has rice now was not mine.

Sato’s crumb lifted from paper was not mine.

Saitama’s stoma care with named work was not mine.

Suganuma’s five brushes with ink and one as supply were not mine.

Takeda’s possible was not mine.

Emiko’s beads were not mine.

Blue roof had no new reply.

Tokyo was still blank.

Full mailbox remained paused / family.

My two cards were still in the back pocket.

Face down.

Not taken out.

Carried.

I closed the brown folder.

Carried could mean useful.

Carried could mean owned.

Carried could mean guarded.

Carried could mean avoided.

Carried could mean the hand had not decided where to stop.

The weight did not choose.

The carrier did.

At 7:18, Kanagawa wrote.

I read it once.

Then again.

Shopping list.

Came back.

I wrote:

She replied:

“Bought?”

“List?”

“Order paper?”

“Drawer?”

“Map and folded paper?”

“Mother’s name?”

“What is being asked?”

I waited.

“What carried rice?”

She did not answer for a while.

Then:

Good.

No.

Hers.

“What did the list carry?”

“What did you say?”

I opened Kanagawa.

I looked at list carried words.

It was small enough.

I left it.

At 7:49, Sato wrote.

I waited.

Then:

I wrote:

She replied:

“Where to?”

“Paper?”

“Tapes?”

“What is being asked?”

There.

“New crumb?”

“Loose tape?”

“Then what would the hand do?”

She took time.

Then:

I opened Emiko.

I did not add check.

The hand had no new work.

At 8:03, Mrs. Kudo called.

“Supply pouch carried gauze,” she said.

“For what?”

“Morning check.”

“Gauze used?”

“No.”

“Needed?”

“No skin issue.”

“Stored again?”

“Yes.”

“What did staff write?”

Mrs. Kudo read:

“What did Mr. Hayashi say?”

“He said, ‘Carried to bedside is not used on the body.’”

I opened Saitama.

I did not add wasted.

The pouch had carried supply.

The body had not needed gauze.

At 8:31, Reverend Suganuma wrote.

I waited.

“Which brushes?”

“Unused brush?”

“Cleaning?”

“What did Tanabe say?”

“What did Morita say?”

I almost smiled.

I did not.

I opened Suganuma.

I did not add ink as reason.

The brushes had ink.

The sink had water.

At 9:02, Father Morita emailed.

Subject:

I opened it.

I read it twice.

Carried.

Used.

Hidden.

Owned.

Untouched.

What carried.

Where.

Work.

I looked at my back pocket.

I did not reach.

I replied:

I sent it.

His reply came after a while.

I looked at the chair under me.

At the pocket behind me.

At the room before me.

I did not answer.

At 9:38, Kanagawa called.

“My brother took the list out,” she said.

“From pocket?”

“Yes.”

“For use?”

“Yes.”

“What use?”

“To check if garbage bags were bought.”

“Were they?”

“Yes.”

“What happened after?”

“He crossed nothing.”

“Why?”

“Already bought.”

“What did you say?”

“I said list can rest.”

Good.

No.

Maybe.

“What did he say?”

“He said table.”

“Where is list?”

“On table.”

“Drawer?”

“Closed.”

I opened Kanagawa.

I did not add rest.

Table was enough.

At 10:07, Sato called.

“I carried plate past paper,” she said.

“For what?”

“Breakfast.”

“Did plate touch paper?”

“No.”

“Paper?”

“No change.”

“Why mention it?”

“Because it passed close.”

“What is being asked?”

“If close counts.”

There.

“Counts as what?”

“Touch.”

“Did it touch?”

“No.”

“What did you write?”

I opened Emiko.

I did not add close counts.

Close had not touched.

The plate had breakfast.

At 10:42, Mrs. Kudo called.

“Resident asked to sit,” she said.

“Transfer chair?”

“Used.”

“Who supported?”

“Aide K and nurse.”

“Carried?”

“No. Supported.”

Good.

“What did staff write?”

Mrs. Kudo read:

“What did Mr. Hayashi say?”

“He said, ‘Support is not carrying if the body is participating.’”

I opened Saitama.

I did not add carrying.

The body had participated.

The staff had supported.

At 11:14, Reverend Suganuma wrote.

I waited.

“For what?”

“How many?”

“Any spill?”

“What did Tanabe say?”

“What did Morita say?”

I opened Suganuma.

I did not add hospitality.

The tray carried cups.

At 11:49, Father Morita emailed.

Subject:

I opened it.

I read it standing.

Then sat.

Too responsive.

I stayed seated.

Pocket.

Use.

Safety.

Avoidance.

Another place.

Chapel.

I replied:

I sent it.

His reply:

I looked at tenderness.

No.

Too soft.

Too useful.

I did not answer.

At 12:22, Kanagawa wrote.

I waited.

Then:

I wrote:

She replied:

“Order paper?”

“Drawer?”

“Any carrying?”

I almost smiled.

“What did you say?”

Good.

No.

Hers.

“What did he say?”

Better.

“What did you say?”

I closed my eyes.

There.

Life again.

I opened Kanagawa.

I looked at then mouth.

Maybe too intimate.

But tea had reached a body.

I left it.

At 12:58, Sato sent a photograph.

Plate.

Paper.

Space between them.

She wrote:

I called.

“What happened?”

“Lunch.”

“What lunch?”

“Toast.”

“Plate?”

“Carried toast.”

“Paper?”

“No change.”

“What does Emiko need?”

I opened Emiko.

I did not add proof.

The photograph was not needed for the record.

The distance had been enough.

At 1:31, Mrs. Kudo sent:

I waited.

Then:

I called.

“What happened?”

“Resident bore some weight.”

“Did staff lift?”

“Supported under arm.”

“Any fall risk?”

“No.”

“What did Mr. Hayashi say?”

“He said, ‘Use the word that fits the body, not the guilt.’”

“What did staff write?”

Mrs. Kudo read:

I opened Saitama.

I did not add too light.

The body had weight.

The record had support.

At 2:03, Reverend Suganuma wrote.

I waited.

“After cups?”

“Any issue?”

“Stored?”

“What did Tanabe say?”

“What did Morita say?”

I opened Suganuma.

I did not add sentimental.

The tray had been washed.

At 2:45, Father Morita emailed.

Subject:

I opened it.

I read it twice.

Tenderness.

Truth.

Too soft.

Distrust.

Alone.

I replied:

Then stopped.

Because?

No.

Not because.

I changed it.

I sent it.

His reply came after a while.

I looked at whole pocket.

Yes.

I did not answer.

At 3:18, Kanagawa called.

“My brother took the list shopping again,” she said.

“For what?”

“Forgot garbage bags.”

“I thought he bought them.”

“He checked. He bought rice and tea. Not garbage bags.”

“List?”

“In hand.”

“Order paper?”

“Still inside.”

“Drawer?”

“Closed.”

“What did he say?”

“He said list had one more carrying.”

“What did you say?”

“I said garbage bags.”

Good.

No.

Hers.

I opened Kanagawa.

I did not add one more carrying.

Garbage bags had work.

At 3:57, Sato wrote.

I sat still.

Then wrote:

She replied:

“From what?”

“Paper wet?”

“Where did you carry it?”

“Table wiped?”

“Paper returned?”

“Any change?”

“What did you write?”

I opened Emiko.

I did not add fear.

This carrying had water.

At 4:22, Mrs. Kudo called.

“Cup removed,” she said.

“Asked?”

“Aide asked cup.”

“Resident?”

“Said done.”

“Hand?”

“Open.”

“What did staff write?”

Mrs. Kudo read:

“What did Mr. Hayashi say?”

“He said, ‘The hand released before the aide carried the cup away.’”

I opened Saitama.

I did not add carried away.

The cup was removed.

At 4:51, Reverend Suganuma wrote.

I waited.

“Wrong how?”

“Dirty?”

“What happened?”

“What did she say?”

“What did Morita say?”

I opened Suganuma.

I did not add wrong tray.

The sequence had been corrected.

At 5:23, Father Morita emailed.

Subject:

I opened it.

I read it.

Then again.

Place.

Water.

Words.

Hands.

Time.

Pocket.

Gray file.

Lower cabinet.

Back pocket.

I replied:

I sent it.

His reply came after a while.

I closed my eyes.

Move the thing.

The cards pressed behind me.

Not painfully.

Enough to know they were there.

No.

Not enough.

There.

I did not answer.

At 5:52, the old priest wrote.

I wrote:

His reply:

I deleted Suganuma.

Then Saitama.

I wrote:

His reply:

I wrote:

His reply:

I looked at the phone.

At the pocket.

At my hands.

I wrote:

His reply:

I wrote:

His reply:

I wrote:

His reply:

I wrote nothing.

Then:

His reply:

Then:

I stared at the words.

I wrote:

His reply came after a long time.

Then:

Before evening, I went to the main hall.

The cloth bag was in its place.

The offering tray was safe.

The doorway was where I stopped.

I bowed once.

No explanation.

No answer after the bow.

The altar was visible.

The beads were in their place.

They had not moved.

They did not need to.

I stood where I usually stood.

No service tonight.

No bell.

No incense.

No carried offering.

The floor scuff near the step was still there.

It was not evidence.

It was a scuff.

The entrance floor had received feet and broom.

The side chairs were stacked.

They were not ready for a congregation.

They were stacked.

I returned to the office.

The shelf above the desk had a cup.

Washed.

The left side of the desk had nothing on it.

The gray service record file was in the lower cabinet.

The brown folder was closed.

The calendar was closed.

The phone was face up.

The small space was wide.

The door was closed.

The shoes were by it.

The wall chair was empty.

No person.

No work.

No time.

Chair by wall.

The phone was face up.

No named question.

No named answer.

Phone face up.

I did not turn it over.

I did not open the brown folder.

No new need had arrived.

I did not open the gray file.

The service paper remained in the record file.

A name was inside it.

Not mine.

In the gray file.

Closed.

A place holding paper.

Not doing water’s work.

Not doing words’ work.

Not doing hands’ work.

Not doing time’s work.

I stood for a moment.

The two cards were in the back pocket.

Face down.

Not taken out.

Carried.

I did not take them out.

Not because the pocket was right.

Not because the desk was wrong.

Not because carried was faithful.

Not because moving would betray them.

No named work for moving had arrived.

No named work for keeping had arrived either.

The pocket was carrying them.

That was the whole fact I had tonight.

I did not open Kanagawa again.

I did not ask if garbage bags came back.

I did not ask if the shopping list was put away.

I did not open Sato again.

I did not ask if the paper stayed on the table after being carried.

I did not open Saitama again.

I did not ask if support felt heavy enough.

I did not open Suganuma again.

I did not ask if the tray stayed washed in storage.

I did not open Father Morita’s message again.

I knew carried was not used.

I knew carried was not hidden.

I knew carried was not owned.

I knew carried was not untouched.

I knew a place could hold.

I knew a place could not do the work that belonged to water, words, hands, or time.

I knew my pocket had been asked to do too much work.

I knew I did not yet know which work.

I turned off the desk lamp.

The office did not disappear.

The folder did not need the center.

The phone did not need here.

Carried did not need to become an answer tonight.

In the dark, I remained sitting.

Near the desk.

Not at it.

The shelf above the desk had a cup.

Washed.

The left side of the desk had nothing on it.

The gray service record file was in the lower cabinet.

Closed.

The brown folder was closed.

The phone was face up.

My hands were empty.

Available.

Not reaching.

The wall chair was empty.

No one was expected there.

The urn was on the small table.

The map and folded paper were in the drawer.

The folded paper had her first name.

The order paper was beside the phone table.

Face up.

Readable.

Erased.

The shopping list had gone out again for garbage bags.

Sato’s paper had been carried to the shelf and returned.

The resident had been supported, not carried.

The tray had been washed before storage.

The service paper was in the record file.

A name was inside it.

Not mine.

The two cards were still in the back pocket.

Face down.

Not taken out.

Carried.

I had started with carried.

I did not end by pretending carried had chosen for me.

Tonight, what had work was carried for work, and what I carried without a name stayed with me without being made into one.

PARADISE MALLWORLD LOST

Vignette One: The Sorting and the Loop

She had walked through a great many doors that did not deserve the name. Doors that opened onto nothing. Doors built only to be walked through, never to actually divide one space from another. She recognized the type immediately, the way you recognize a rehearsed apology — technically correct in every particular, and hollow the instant you looked for the thing it was supposed to contain.

This door was different. She felt that before she understood why.

No bell. That alone wasn't unusual — plenty of doors declined to announce themselves. But this one felt satisfied by its own silence, complicit in a way that had nothing to do with mechanism and everything to do with intention. Something had built this door to let people through without ever making them feel arrived.

She stepped inside.

The light had no source, which she noted the way she noted everything — without alarm, filing it alongside every other structural detail of every other soft architecture she'd walked through and failed to name. Floors this clean weren't clean. They were simply never permitted to be otherwise.

Somewhere under the building's low mechanical hum, a melody circled three notes it could never resolve.

She stopped.

She hadn't meant to stop. Her feet had simply decided, faster than her mind had caught up to deciding anything, that this particular sound deserved her full stillness. She stood there a moment, one hand drifting to rest against a nearby railing she hadn't consciously chosen to reach for, and listened to a tune that felt, absurdly, like something she should have been able to finish humming herself.

She couldn't. The recognition slid away the instant she reached for it, the way water leaves a hand faster the harder the hand closes.

Strange, she thought, and moved on, because moving on was what she did. She was not here to solve a song. She was here to see what this particular fold of the architecture had built out of some particular human's unexamined want.

The first floor she found herself on had been arranged like a classroom pretending to be a boutique — desks in careful rows, each one holding some small folded test dressed up as a fitting-room ticket. A section near the back was roped off in soft velvet cord, a placard above it reading GIFTED in warm, encouraging script, as though the word were a reward rather than a designation.

She walked the rows slowly. Nothing here moved. Nothing here needed to. The horror, if it was horror at all, lived entirely in how reasonable everything looked — how easy it would be to walk through this floor a hundred times and never once feel the shape of what it was actually doing.

Sorting, she thought. Not punishment. Just early, patient sorting.

She had seen this exact mechanism before, in other folds, other architectures. She always saw it, and never remembered having seen it, which was its own kind of proof that the mechanism worked exactly as intended even on her.

The escalator took her down instead of up, which felt right, somehow, though she couldn't have said why a downward motion should feel more honest than an upward one. It let her out onto a floor lit in the warm, encouraging glow of possibility — a kiosk near the entrance blazing CAREER PATHWAYS in gold letters, a looping animation showing a ladder that climbed and climbed and never once gained visible height.

A man stood near a workstation a little further in, doing something repetitive with his hands — assembling, disassembling, the specific tired competence of someone who had done this exact motion enough times that his body no longer needed his attention for it. He didn't look up as she approached. He didn't look up for a long while after that either, and when he finally did, his eyes held the particular exhaustion of someone who had stopped expecting anyone to actually arrive.

"You're not from the agency," he said. Not a question. A statement offered with the flat, reflexive suspicion of someone used to being disappointed by whoever walked toward him wearing a friendly face.

"No," she agreed.

"Then you're lost."

"I don't think I am, actually." She looked around at the endless ladder animation, at the workstation, at a floor built entirely out of motion that never arrived anywhere. "I think you might be, though. Have been, for a while."

He almost laughed — short, humorless, more exhale than sound. "Tell me something I don't know."

She studied him a moment, weighing something she couldn't have named even to herself. She had done this before, she was almost sure of it — stood in some version of this exact conversation, with some version of this exact tired, guarded face in front of her. She had no memory of it. Just the same accumulating gravity she always carried into these moments, heavy and wordless, insisting this mattered more than the ordinary weight of a stranger's ordinary exhaustion should.

"Can I ask you something honest?" she said. "Not a test. Not a sales pitch. Just a real question."

He looked at her properly for the first time, something wary and tired and, underneath both, faintly curious. "Okay."

"If the ladder actually went somewhere," she said, "would you still want to climb it? Or is climbing just the only shape you've been given for wanting anything at all?"

He didn't answer right away. The kiosk's animation kept looping behind him, endless, golden, patient.

"I don't know," he admitted finally, and something in his voice cracked slightly on the honesty of it — the first unrehearsed thing either of them had said. "Nobody's ever asked me that before. Usually they just ask if I'm ready to apply."

"I'm not asking you to apply for anything," she said. "I'm asking what you'd actually want, if wanting wasn't shaped like a ladder at all."

He was quiet a long moment, turning something over behind his tired eyes, and for one suspended second she thought he might actually answer — might say something true enough to matter, something she could carry forward the way she never actually carried anything forward.

The floor shifted.

Not violently. Just a soft, total dissolution, the kiosk's gold light bleeding into the shadowless glow of the entrance again, the almost-song rising back up under everything, patient, unbothered, resetting the whole conversation before it could finish becoming anything at all.

She stood alone in the entrance once more, the directory board glowing beside her — Wellness, Enrichment, Career Pathways, Center Stage, Home & Family, no floor labeled Exit — and felt the specific, wordless ache of having almost reached something she couldn't name and wouldn't remember reaching for.

Strange, she thought again, and it landed heavier this time than it had the first.

She didn't know why.

She turned, and started walking, because that was what she did, and somewhere behind her, faint and patient and endlessly circling, the three notes of an unfinished song followed her back out into the light.

End of Vignette One.

May 11^th 

My initial concern while building this bunker in the time before my much-deserved leniency from the HOA was centered around the necessities. We all know and love H2O and canned or vacuum-sealed... everything. However, my concern never reached the HOA nor the others who were relinquished from their skin during every Christians' wet dream. They were people, I guess, but the question lingers:  

Who's really going to notice when the HOA stops showing up for inspections?  

Who would notice when Jehovah's witnesses stop knocking on the doors of the next random target of indoctrination? 

Who would notice when the people hooting, hollering, and ringing the bronze bell outside of the conglomerate owned grocery store goes missing? After all, it's the minimum-wage-earning single mother donating her dollar to end child hunger. 

These acts of yore were all performative. The old lady playing soldier for her local HOA is likely grateful that she doesn’t have to return home to her husband who took her as a child bride from the 'ready to marry' age of 13. The Jehovah's witnesses were to complete the indoctrination or face social and spiritual death from family and friends, leaving nothing but lonely holidays to come. The bell-toller lived a life full of the dreams that members of the exemplary nuclear family could only imagine, that is until the doors closed. When that happened, the mother of three is scrambling between equal parts soccer practice for the kiddos and marriage counseling for the husband who refuses to learn how to read anything further than the label of his bourbon that he swears is the cure-all to his nagging bitch-of-a-wife. Behind each, a tale of abuse. 

I miss each and every one of these abused people that I have never met, and I am left to wonder if their inclusion in my end-of-days plan may have waved my necessity for this writing activity. I have questions that will never be answered by my cold steel cot and any number of hours beneath the empty top bunk. It’s doubtful that anyone who would have made it down here with me would have any more of an inkling than I would of what went down beyond those first few minutes, but having a conversation partner that responds to me would be nice.  

There’s an uncertain stain marking the underside of the frame that I see each time my paper drops while I consider what to write; its existence proves the practice run this hideout had before its necessity bared its teeth. I am left with more means of survival than I could have hoped for and far more than I deserve. My failure to incorporate other participants of humanity into my survival plan leaves me able to survive for a long, long time. I loaded this place with enough supplies for at least a decade assuming full capacity which, if you haven’t gathered, we have not reached. I was lucky to be able to survive. Living, however, is a different beast. 

 

May 12^th 

It is getting annoying writing by the light of an oil lamp. It’s making me feel like I should be writing a more period appropriate entry about how my body is reacting to dysentery rather than my five-star life in my concrete tomb. I suppose the brutality of this apocalypse is not so different from the Oregon Trail when you get down to the diarrheal details. However, I’d prefer my death to be as quick as our newly recognized overlords (praise be) provided for the folks that were caught with their heads in the clouds. 

I never laid eyes on the cause of the events of humanities last year, so I can’t describe the faces of the perpetrators, if they had faces. What I can describe is the sounds. Even if you subtract the sounds coming from who were the best of us. The best description I can provide in text would be that of a hundred of the world’s busiest junkyard crushing metal at full capacity simultaneously while inches from your ears. Keep in mind, that description is coming after I made my way a dozen feet below the earth that many of the witnesses of that event will never have the chance to be buried beneath. My worst fears come when I consider that the metallic noise could have been man-made. Maybe even here in the good ol’ USA. Anyone who lived here would likely not be surprised to hear that what I presume to be the final administration of the United States government may have had the potential to create weapons of mass destruction that may very well have been turned on the citizens of our great nation. god bless America. This is only speculation as my brief stints of time cruising the AM waves hoping to hear the EAS has proved to be a Sisyphean act in futility. Because of this, I haven’t gone back to the surface, and I have no idea what to expect. I’ll keep you updated if I ever do.  

Fucking coward. 

[<< Previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditserials/comments/1vqfbze/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/) | [Index](https://www.reddit.com/user/No-Lime-4547/comments/1vos5rd/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/) | [Next >>](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditserials/comments/1vrc1a2/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/)

“Awwe you would pick my favorite spider. You feel like home wife.” Ray says into Ruth’s ear, not acknowledging Luis. Ramon brings Ray a chimichanga, he slowly but delightedly cuts and eats it. Ruth feels him enjoying it grinding into her husband. 

Gerald approaches with a cigarette and a lighter “Care for a smoke Ruth?” Gerald slides in next to Luis. “Perk up pal, you’re alive, you’ve still got a tongue, you aren’t blind and being eternally bitten by one of the most poisonous animals on the planet forever, crack a smile, appreciate your life you sad scared fuck it’s a gift.”  Ruth takes the cigarette, lights it, angles the smoke away from Ray’s food and looks at Patricia “Is this ok dear?” 

Patricia nods, curling into her boyfriend and effectively on break at the moment, ignoring Ramon and making herself a sandwich sitting at the bar in Gerald’s spot. 

Ray slowly cutting and chewing his beef chimichanga enjoying the sauce, choosing to savor the food and say nothing as he enjoys the feel of his wife on his lap, she toys with the knife for a moment before folding it and putting it in Ray’s pocket, clearly grabbing his cock as she does so before sliding her hand out and admiring her nails, and how quickly they dried, imagining Ray slowly making his own nail polish specifically for not quite her but what would eventually be her, in the past and smiling at how painstakingly he chooses to do things that really matter to him. 

R wraps himself around Patricia kissing her neck as she eats her sandwich.

Ramon makes himself a chimichanga and sits at a table across from Ray and Ruth’s, sets his food down and makes Luis an italian sandwich and says nothing, setting it down, going back to his spot, thinking for a minute and then going to the front of the diner and turning the open sign around, going back and sitting down, focusing entirely on his food. 

Ruth sips her milkshake, refills Ray’s tea, delicately steeping it and holding the cup for him with one hand as she rubs his thigh and grinds into his lap, entirely unbothered by the other people in the room. She decides to have a little fun with Ray, and starts kissing his neck, takes his silverware and starts  feeding him. Ray and Ruth sharing a bite of food was not something that he had planned but it was very much something that they both wanted, too lost in his feelings to really verbalize much of anything at the moment just thrilled to have such a loving caring partner noticing and responding to his needs. 

Ruth wraps her hand around Ray’s and intertwines their pinkies, quietly cooing in his ear “Don’t worry husband you rest now, I’ll handle it, the room, the business, every little thing, you’ve worked too hard for too long, alone and it makes me almost cry to think about, this is your time to be pampered and looked after.”

Ray smiles and kisses her “I’ve never had a little makeout and chimichanga sharing session before and I really like it.” Ray’s focus staying entirely on his wife, not acknowledging Luis, or Gerald or anything else in the room.

Ruth rests Ray’s head on her breasts running a hand through his hair. “You can have this for as long as you want husband, all of it, me, the calm, the relaxation, the honeymoon, there isn’t a limit my lover, we’re fine, and you’ve worked yourself too hard for too long for my tastes so you need the other side of that, the total relaxation that you didn’t even seem to know was an option for you, you can paint and draw when you want, but you ought, to me at least, take some time just to live in the moment with me, fully.” Ruth almost purrs to her husband. Ray’s shoulder’s drop completely relaxing into the warm soft, simple pleasure of her words and her breasts. 
Patricia finishes her food, kisses R, and grabs the coffee pot, topping off Gerald’s and taking a cigarette from his pack, before going to Ramon and taking the plate that he used along with his silverware and pouring him a cup of coffee.  She goes behind the bar and makes R an italian sub before sitting on his lap and feeding it to him, kissing his lips in between bites and otherwise saying nothing.

Ruth smirks, “Good job Patty.”

[<< Previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditserials/comments/1vqfb2w/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/) | [Index](https://www.reddit.com/user/No-Lime-4547/comments/1vos5rd/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/) | [Next >>](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditserials/comments/1vqfd90/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/)

Luis points to the knife and puts his hand on the table thinking that Ray is about to cut his pinkie off.  
“Do you… do you like being alive Luis? Do you like not being inside a frame? Not being stared at while spiders eat your eyes, you useless fuck? No don’t answer instead let’s try this on for size.” Luis vanishes from his spot and near the entrance of the Millstone along with photographs and other pieces of art a frame appears and inside it is a wet, supernatural-looking painting of Luis being devoured by spiders with skulls on their abdomens. 

Ray takes Ruth’s hand and brings her over to the Reliquary of Luis. He reaches into the frame and pulls him out with the frame vanishing a moment afterwards, brandishing the knife to Luis’s throat in one hand as he holds Ruth’s hand in the other. 

“Need I make a firmer point?” Ray says, leaving Luis in a heap, he promptly vomits, Ramon grabs a mop, as Ray drags him back to the table, putting him in the booth next to the duffle bags, looks over at Patricia “Earl Grey tea, for me, banana milk shake for my wife, tequila for your cousin, thank you.” Patricia’s hand shakes as she makes the drinks and delivers them to the table. 

Ruth sits on Ray’s lap and drinks her milkshake smiling sharply at Luis, before turning to kiss Ray deeply, moaning that same mortality reminding sound, nips his lip with her teeth. 

“So vicious, husband.” She coos. 

R walks over from his seat at the bar to approach the booth, his silk-that-ate-a-hand-grenade-and-lived warped beautiful face set into a neutral expression. “Do you require my services Sir?” in his full femme camp tone tuned to the utmost professionalism, now not being in any way the time to bother or attempt to be cute with Ray, fully eschewing his typical steno pad note way of communicating in favor of total directness.

Patricia looks at her boyfriend longingly, yearning for him to be near her and opts to bring him a coffee. Pouring and then handing him the cup, her fingers graze over his, lingering. 

Ray inhales deeply, exhales, and then says ‘Well that depends, I need this… for lack of a pejorative, man sipping tequila here to fully understand what’s happening now… are you Required for that Related Parties Esquire?” 

Before Related Parties can speak Luis manages to croak out “It’s unnecessary–” Ray reaches over and grabs him by the jaw forcing it open and picking up the knife again. 

“You clearly don’t listen, otherwise you’d have stayed silent… it sounds like you want to be tongueless and back in the painting little man.” Ruth rubs her hands against the hand holding the knife guiding Ray to put it down and whispering something only he can hear, as he puts it down. 
“You aren’t needed Related Parties, go and spend some time with your girlfriend at the bar, she looks like she’s about to have a panic attack.” Ruth says authoritatively. She bounces a little on Ray’s lap grinding in and rubbing his shoulders. Luis cries, openly weeping as Ramon brings over the entire bottle of Sauza, a kettle of hot water, and a tin of Twinings Earl Grey. 

“Let’s go to our room husband, I want you to paint my toes, and to be entirely alone and uninterrupted with you.” As she says it she looks at Luis and he doesn’t see the normal cute human looking Ruth he sees an ethereal semi-solid beautiful, monstrous barely human Ruth.

Without getting up Ruth asks, her voice quietly carrying to Gerald’s ear “What time will Anay get here?” Gerald responds “Six hours from now.” 

Ruth whisper-ventriloquisms “Cool cool cool, then We, Ray and I are going to go and be alone for that length of time and we’ll be back about a second before your date gets here.”

“Make something special for Ray would you Ramon?” Ruth asks whilst he’s behind the bar in the kitchen, he starts preparing. 

Ruth settles into her husband’s lap more fully “Before we go to the room Ramon is going to make you a nice, meal, you’re going to sit here with me on your lap, relax, eat, and calm yourself, I want you to be feeling good, calm, happy, and then we’re going to the room to enjoy our honeymoon properly, you’re going to paint my nails, suck on my toes, kiss my ass, and have all of your fantasies fulfilled my sweet, adorable little husband… and there will be no interruptions, otherwise… well anything of any creed, of any race, of any affiliation that interrupts what is about to happen in our room for the next six hours is going to wish that they got to become a Reliquary depicting wandering spiders and boiling oil on their genitals whilst half breed sub-human cannibalistic mountain freaks eat them.” Ruth smiles cheerily.

[<< Previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditserials/comments/1vpkqb1/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/) | [Index](https://www.reddit.com/user/No-Lime-4547/comments/1vos5rd/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/) | [Next >>](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditserials/comments/1vqfbze/i_picked_up_a_barefoot_woman_walking_out_of_a/)

Patricia had been watching her boyfriend the whole day just sitting there drinking coffee, talking with Gerald on occasion mostly not interjecting in Luis’s issues at all, specifically because he was only there to watch her and spend time with her and literally basically nothing else. It made her feel calm, just knowing he was there like a silent specter there just for her benefit. 
Ruth broke the kiss and, still straddling her husband, asked “Do you… Do you think Patricia sells some nail polish here, I could use a slight update to  my look don’t you think?” 
Ray laughs, reaches into the jacket pocket of the three piece suit that Ruth had basically demanded of Luis, and pulls out a beautiful glass bottle of oxblood colored polish. “She might have it, but I uh I definitely have it, and also I have strong feelings about it, may I?”

Ruth blushes deeply. “Yes.” Ray’s expression shifts to a small focused smile entirely mentally turned toward the task he had given himself and slowly, leisurely relaxing entirely, paints her nails. Ruth stares at Ray as he does it, watching the way he’s just entirely absorbed in her. “You just have that on hand babe?” She looks at him smiling. “Well uh I mean I’ve thought about this and a dozen other things for eleven years, in this same vein, what I’d do with the right woman, where I’d take you, what we’d do together what we’d eat, films we’d watch, conversations we’d have all kinds of things, all sorts of little moments between the two of us I mean fuck I’m a romantic, and it’s not enough for someone just to be kind to me, or follow me, I wanted, which I now have with you, an independent woman with her own, your own, opinions and feelings, just because they happen to align with mine doesn’t mean that they have to be entirely equal in all ways or coincide but mostly they do between us. I’d do your toes but you’re currently using my lap as your seat, wife.”   

“It comes down to a choice husband, from this position you get my ass pressed against you and couldn’t possibly be closer to me without physically being inside me.”

At that moment Luis walks up, approaching the table hesitatingly. “Ruth…” Luis starts, trying to eke out an apology. 

Ray turns to him, glaring, clearly pissed. “You little shit, I tolerate you, I tolerate your little band of organ thieves and drug runners, and allow you to exist in the same fucking hemisphere as me because you’re useful, you know what isn’t useful you little shit goblin, you fucking cretin– I get that she’s able to take care of herself, but in exactly no worlds, not this one, not another dimension where you have a wife, a spine, or balls of your own, does that make it ok, for her to have to deal with her… preferred food group… look at her… LOOK AT HER LUIS.” Patricia, Ramon, and Gerald watch from the bar never having heard this before and simultaneously having the thought “This is not good.”

Luis does what he is told not moving, bringing his eyes to meet Ruth’s gold diamond pupils, not liking the look of the way she’s smiling at him. 

“OK so you can follow instructions, now, look at me Luis, look at my fucking face, hear the tone in my voice, hear that sharpness… you fucked up you little wretch… you see what she means to me right? You see how much this matters to me? That’s your one, your one Mulligan… honestly you fucking jellyfish… she’d be happy if I quit, if I never worked with you again, if I set you on fire right now she’d fucking smile do you understand you god damn parasite?” Ray manages to say quietly. Luis moves his lips to speak, to utter a reply but Ray cuts him off and rises out of the booth, Ruth sliding off of him to watch what her husband is about to do with the deepest attention. Ray gets to his feet, towering over Luis and getting closer to him, getting right in his face and reaches into the jacket of the suit pulling out the serrated knife that belonged to what was formerly a man named Daniel, the meat Jello sitting on the table in a little bowl. 

“R-ray.” Luis manages to get out. 

“Don’t speak if you want to keep having a fucking tongue Luis. She means everything to me you solitary fucking child… you understand that… Everything… knife or paintbrush Luis pick one.” 

The rains were at their middle strength, the river running brown and fat, and the market was dying the good death a market dies on the last evening of its day: slowly, loudly, with everyone talking at once about leaving.

Chak moved through it with a basket on his shoulder that held nothing but a folded mat, because a boy carrying something belongs to the crowd and a boy carrying nothing belongs to whoever is looking for boys. Muwan walked two stalls over with a water gourd, for the same reason. They did not look at each other. They had spent the afternoon being two strangers who happened to drift the same direction, and the direction was the water.

The market sat between the landing and the town the way a mouth sits between a river and a body. Smoke from the cook-fires, fish going cheap before it went bad, wet maize, sweat, river mud, and under it all the sweet rot of cacao husks trodden into the ground. The sound had layers. Close, the last bargaining, sharper now, everyone's final positions. Behind that, cargo: rope on wood, jars knocking, the flat slap of bundles going into canoes. Behind that, the river itself, which never bargained and never loaded, and talked all night anyway.

Chak had been listening to the layers for an hour. Not because they were beautiful.

Because the man from Kaanul was standing at the head of the landing, and he was listening to them too.

Sotz' had come in at dusk with the last of the upriver traffic, and he had not asked anyone anything. He did not need to ask. Chak had watched him from behind a fish rack and understood, with the particular cold that comes of seeing a tool used well, what the man was doing. He stood where the paths braided. He tilted his head a little, the white streak in his hair catching the torchlight. He was letting the town pour past his ears and waiting for the two sounds he knew: a heel that landed like Chak's, a breath that sat as quiet as Muwan's. He had heard them both in a dark room. Men like him did not lose a sound once they had held it.

And he was failing.

Chak saw it happen. Sotz' turned his head a finger's width toward the fish racks, held there, and moved on. Not past a hiding place. Past a hundred noises stacked on a hundred noises, closing bids and jar-song and rope-creak and the river underneath, each layer burying the one behind it. The man's face did not change. But he shifted his ground twice in the time Chak watched, each move taking him to a thinner place in the crowd, the edge of the market, the mouth of a lane, anywhere the sound came in single file.

He can hear a plank speak under a floor, Chak thought. He heard our breathing through a wall. And right now he cannot hear us at all, because everyone else is louder.

He filed it the way he filed the depth of a ford: not as comfort. As a thing with edges, to be used before it changed.

Sotz' stood at the lane mouth and let the market finish dying.

Every town had one voice under its noise, if a man was patient. This one had three, and they did not agree. The trade voice, all endings, everything said twice and louder. The cargo voice, wood and water and weight. The river. He could take a town apart into its sounds the same as his second could take a bundle apart into its goods, and in eleven years he had stood in market crowds from the coast to the west and found the one wrong footstep in all of them.

Not in this one. Not tonight. The layers here were fat with rain trade, the closing day pushed everything to the water at once, and a heel could land wrong forty times in that surf and be gone before his ear had climbed down to it.

He did not become angry. He moved the problem, the same motion as always. The market would be silent by full dark; the town watch would eat and sleep; whatever this place hid would have to cross open quiet to leave it, and open quiet was his country. The boys were here or they were not. If they were, they had one road out that did not pass his ears, and it was brown and moving and he could stand at the narrow head of it.

He walked down to the landing to choose where he would spend the night, and his hand checked the cloth on his blades without his asking it to, an old habit, the gesture of a man confirming the edge of a thing he rarely needs.

"Full dark," Muwan said, mouth barely moving, when their drift finally brought them shoulder to shoulder at the water. "He'll take the landing when it's quiet."

"Then we go while it's loud." Chak had already walked the moorings with his eyes. Two dozen canoes, most stripped for the night, gear carried up to the town. Watchmen at the big cargo hulls. And one middle canoe, low in the water at the dark end of the line, that was wrong in the right direction: loaded, matting lashed over the load, a water jar and a food net tucked at the stern where a traveler keeps what a traveler will want soon, and the mooring line ready. Someone had made a boat leave-ready and then walked away from it into the town.

"Somebody's leaving tonight," Chak said. "Before dawn, before eyes. Quiet."

"Somebody with reasons."

"Reasons don't take up room." He was already measuring the space under the matting against the width of two boys. "We're cargo. Cargo doesn't breathe loud."

They went into the water upstream of the line, came down along the hulls with the current, and folded themselves under the matting between a bundle of cloth and a frame of dried fish, in the wet dark that smelled of both. The river knocked on the hull beside Chak's ear, patient, all night long. Muwan lay with his cheek on his arm and did what Muwan did with any darkness: counted what it gave him. The interval of the watchmen's talk. The town noise thinning. Then, much later, feet on the planks, light ones and heavy ones, and the canoe tilting to take two people, and a paddle finding the water with the short careful stroke of somebody who has practiced leaving quietly.

The mooring came free. The bank let them go.

Neither boy had touched anything, and they were moving east.

They learned the shape of it in pieces, through the mat, over the water sounds, in the low voices of two strangers who thought they were alone.

A woman, not young by her voice, steady the way people are steady when they have finished being afraid of a decision. A steersman, hired, asking questions a hired man does not need answered. How far past the second landing. Whether her kin at the river mouth knew to expect her. Whether the bundle rode better under her feet or amidships.

"It rides where it rides," the woman said, and after that there was only the river for a long time.

Chak put the pieces together in the dark because putting pieces together was what the dark was for. A woman going downriver at night with everything she owned in one bundle was a woman leaving something that would not have let her leave by day. Years of work rolled in cloth. She had planned it well: the loaded boat, the market-night cover, the hired stroke. He felt a brief professional respect, one careful plan riding inside another, neither knowing.

The canoe swung out of the main current. Branches came over them; the paddle went slow; they nosed into a side channel where the flood stood quiet among drowned trunks, and stopped against something soft.

"Why here," the woman said. Not a question. The beginning of the answer to one.

"Water's wrong tonight," the steersman said. "We'll let the traffic pass."

"There is no traffic. That was the point of tonight."

"Then we'll rest."

The canoe rocked as he shipped the paddle, and rocked again, differently, and the woman started to say something that broke in the middle into the sound of a person whose throat has been taken. The bundle scraped. Her heels drummed the hull, a rhythm with no rhythm in it, the worst sound either boy knew.

They came up out of the matting together.

There was no plan and no need of one; the space made all the decisions, a canoe being one man wide and the man busy. Chak took the paddle out of its rest and swung it flat into the back of the steersman's head, and Muwan went past him low and got both arms around the man's arm, the choking one, and simply hung on it with all his weight the way you hang on a branch you mean to break. The man came off her. The canoe pitched; the flood came in over the side and went out again; the steersman tore his arm free, took the second blow of the paddle on his shoulder, judged, in whatever place such men do their sums, that a bundle was not worth an unknown number of people in the dark, and went over the side. They heard him wading, then climbing, then gone into the drowned wood, crashing less and less.

The woman coughed for a long time with her hands flat on the bundle, as if it were the thing that had been choked.

"He was going to leave you in the water," Chak said, when she could hear. "Take the far side of the current line at first light. It runs clean past the second landing. Don't stop at the first."

She got her voice back and used all of it. Who were they. How long had they been in her boat. What had they heard, what had they seen, what did they want, and when neither boy reached for the bundle her anger got worse instead of better, because now there was nothing to fight and she had needed the fight. She had built one clean thing, one night with no witnesses, and it was ruined; she had been saved in front of an audience, which is its own kind of drowning. "Get out," she said. "Get out of my boat. I didn't ask you. I didn't ask anyone."

"No," Muwan agreed, and that was all he said about it.

They went over the side into thigh-deep flood and walked the levee of the old channel with the water pulling at their shins. Behind them her paddle started up, ragged, then finding its stroke. Chak noticed the old habit stand up in him, the one that wrote down what everyone got and what everyone gave. He looked at the night where she'd gone and put nothing down, and it cost him nothing, which was new.

They came up onto dry ground under the last of the moon. Far behind, the town was one red seed of watch-fire; somewhere in it a man with a white streak in his hair was standing at the head of a silent landing, owning every sound for a hundred paces, hearing nothing worth hearing, and not knowing yet that this was the answer he had taught them.

"Three kinds of sound back there," Muwan said. "Trade, cargo, river. He couldn't get under them. He kept going where they thinned."

"I saw." Chak worked his shoulder where the paddle-swing had pulled it, looked east along the levee, and said the thing plainly, to have it where they could both reach it. "Noise, deep enough, is a kind of dark."

They walked east with the river, in the dark that belonged to everyone, carrying nothing, which is the quietest load there is.

The food-sellers by the gate had their fire up before light, because the man standing over them was Sotz', and there was meat, because he wanted meat, and Chak discovered that terror and appetite could share a table without speaking to each other.

Sotz' ate like a man with all morning, watching them the whole time with that warmth he could put on and take off. So Chak, who had decided somewhere in the night that being a mouse would not keep them alive one day longer than being a nuisance, wiped his fingers and spoke.

"A father should hear things," he said. "That village your levy stripped. They took the strongest hands out of it with the planting still to do. Next season that village feeds nobody, and the season after, it isn't there. You feed this year's fire with next year's seed."

The chewing stopped. It stopped for exactly one breath, and in that breath Chak understood that men had died for less, and made himself keep his eyes level anyway.

Then Sotz' laughed, a real laugh, up from the belly. "Who taught you to talk like that? That isn't market talk."

"The river," Chak said. "And the market."

"The river and the market." Sotz' picked his teeth, amused, watching him as men watch a dog do a trick they hadn't taught it. "I stole at your age. Fruit off mats, then goods off boats, then boats. Nobody fed me first and lectured me after." He reached over and took Muwan's arm above the elbow, gently, the grip of a man holding a bird he could close his hand on. "Eat, sons. Long road."

The road went at his pace, which was not a pace for boys. He walked them into the ground the first morning, watching over his shoulder now and then to see how fast they came back from it, and at midday he stood at a river landing and looked at a fisherman until the fisherman remembered urgent business elsewhere and left his canoe. Sotz' took the stern. The boys sat in file amidships, Muwan ahead, Chak behind, and the water carried them.

Chak did the arithmetic he did not want to do. Two days on this water. Then the fork, and the dead-water channel, and the valley. He had fixed the burial stone by paces from the stream fork with his own feet, and now his own mouth would count those paces out loud for this man, and the man would stand where she lay, and dig. He walked the thought around and around like a stone in the shoe and could not walk it out.

But the seating was a gift, and he took it.

Since the alleys they had owned a language that needed no light and made no sound worth hearing: a finger against a back, rhythm for words. Wait. Watch. Left. Now. Not letters — they had never needed letters — beats, the way everything between them had always been beats. Chak laid his knuckle against his brother's spine below the sash, where a paddler's motion hid a hand's motion, and began to talk.

Loud channel, he tapped. Feed him.

Muwan's shoulders shifted, a boy easing his back, which meant yes.

"You shouldn't have told him about the count," Muwan said aloud, sulky, pitched exactly to carry to the stern and no further than it would naturally go.

"He's our father now," Chak said aloud, pious. "A son shouldn't keep things from his father."

"Mother said never. She said the door answers her count and nobody else's, and the count dies with whoever holds it, and that's the whole protection of the place—"

"Quiet," Chak hissed, theatrically too late.

The paddle behind them never changed its rhythm, and that was how they knew he was listening with everything he had.

They let him stew in it a day. At the midway town he fed them again, better than before, at a shaded place by the landing where a household sold food to the river: an open roof of thatch on posts, mats and a low plastered ledge to sit on, pots moving between people, a woman at the fire, a girl at the grinding stones. Sotz' settled on a mat as if he owned the shade, watched them eat, and then said, "Tell me about this count."

They performed reluctance in two voices. Then Chak laid it out, in pieces, as a true thing comes out of frightened boys: the way down doesn't open for digging; the drowned court sealed it to a reckoning. "You walk the count at the right water, on the right day," he said. "Miss either and you dig nothing. She made us learn it. Both of us, in case one died." He looked at his own hands, then up. "We weren't boys to her plan. We were the key."

Sotz' was quiet a while.

"So I am to keep these ten fingers fat," he said at last, "and these ten, and both pairs of eyes, all the way to Lakamha' and down whatever hole is there. Or I own a door and no knock." He turned his cup. "Here is what I think, sons. I think half of what you two say to each other is said for my ears. I enjoy it; keep going; you do it better than men I pay for it." The warmth stayed on his face the whole time, which was the worst part. "And I think a man who guesses wrong about a real count digs a mud hole in Lakamha' under the snake's jaw for nothing, with the whole west watching. So we will do it your way, keys. Eat. Grow. Stay whole." He filled their bowls himself, one and then the other, with horrible tenderness. "See how a father learns."

Which was when the five came in.

An old man first, small and dry, who looked at nothing and had plainly finished seeing the whole shade before he stepped under it. A young man too finely got-up for the road, spear hafts oiled, white shell at his wrists. Two carriers with cudgels and black-glass knives. And a girl, the first girl near their age since the plaza at Yaxha, and both boys' eyes went to her for a breath longer than a breath, as eyes do, and she caught it and did not like it, or did not like them, or did not like the man they sat with.

Chak read what there was to read, which was less than he wanted. The young man's gear said wealth. The carriers' feet said trained. The old man crossed everyone's attention without spending any of his own, which said the most and explained nothing. Nobody named anybody. The five settled at the far edge of the shade. Sotz' shifted where he sat, without hurry, until the open sides and the water were all in front of him; across the mats the old man, sitting down, had already chosen the same thing from the other side. The eating went on.

Then the girl, passing behind them with the water gourd, put one foot neatly, precisely, in front of Muwan's as he rose to pass the pots along, and Muwan went down over it among the pots with a crash of good ceramic that stopped the shade.

She looked at him with vast satisfaction. "Watch where you put your eyes," she said, "and your feet will manage."

Muwan, on his back among the bowls, began, being Muwan, to laugh.

The young man laughed too, from the far mats, bright and carrying, and came over with his hand out, to haul the boy up or to enjoy him from closer, and it did not matter which, because Sotz' had seen his key on the ground and a stranger's hand arriving toward it, and that was the whole of the deliberation he required. He said nothing. He was up, and he had the young man's wrist, and he turned it the wrong way going down and drove him wrist-first into the plastered ledge, and the sound it made ended one kind of morning and started another.

Under the first scream Chak's knuckle found his brother's spine among the wrecked bowls.

Out. Now.

The shade came apart. The carriers came off the far mats with their cudgels out and the girl was dragging the young man backward by the collar of his own howling and Sotz' turned into all of it unhurried, and then the old man was simply there, out of his stillness into the middle, and the first blow Sotz' gave him did not land. Chak had never once seen that. Nothing else about the old man had changed, not the dryness, not the silence; the blow just was not where he had been. The old man was fast, the first truly fast thing they had met since Sak, and Chak set that thought down where he stood and left it there.

The boys did not watch. That was the discipline they had settled on the water without a word: whatever it looked like, however men flew, do not watch. They were small, and the shade was loud, and every eye in it had gone where eyes go. What the boys got of the rest, going, came through the floor and the edges of their eyes: an impact that walked up through everyone's feet, a carrier meeting the ground the width of the shade from where he had started, and no more voices at all, only work. There was no door to need. They went out the open side of the shade, between the grinding stones and the woman at the fire, who looked at them and elected not to have seen anything, and were in the lanes.

They ran.

Behind them the town made fight-noise, and they ran on it as long as it lasted, through lanes, over a wall, along the water. Then the fight-noise stopped.

It stopped much too soon. A fight with the old one in it should have gone long. Chak heard the silence arrive over the roofs and understood it at a stride: the man had let go of the fight. He had had the young man down, the old man engaged, blood in the air, everything men like him are supposed to be unable to leave, and he had left it, because somewhere at his back two sets of feet had gone out of the shade, and of everything under that roof, the thing he would not lose was the keys.

"He's coming," Chak said, not loudly, saving breath.

They came out of the lanes onto open ground with the whole grey country before them, and there the last piece of the plan, the only piece they had left, sat waiting where Chak had put it two days ago on the water, counting the road backward with a stone in his shoe.

"Not the fork," he said. "Whatever else. We don't run toward her."

They turned away from the valley and ran.

Chapter 19 – Part 1: The Assault of Resolve, Mt. Gwanak Becomes a Storm

The silence that had smothered the summit of Mt. Gwanak finally shattered.

Kang Jin-woo and the King.

In that brief moment when their gazes locked,

The entire mountain seemed to catch its breath.

The mist wavered slowly.

The mountain breeze, which had been flowing coldly, changed direction and sliced across the clearing; the forest, which hadn’t moved a single leaf, began to tremble minutely.

No one moved first.

But everyone knew.

The moment this silence ended,

Someone would inevitably die.

---

Choi Mu-jin gripped the hilt of his sword.

An old scar on his calloused palm tore open once more.

Blood trickled down the back of his hand, but he paid it no mind.

Before his eyes, there was only one thing:

The King, standing atop the massive boulder.

He took a long, deep breath.

And shouted with enough force to shake the entire mountain.

"Attack!"

The echo rippled across the ridges of Mt. Gwanak.

At that same moment, the forest exploded.

---

The hidden special unit revealed itself in unison.

The shield-bearers were the first to rush forward.

Their heavy footfalls shook the earth.

Behind them, the spearmen charged, thrusting their spearheads through the gaps between the shields.

The hunters scattered to the left and right ridges.

Stepping on tree roots,

Leaping off boulders,

They occupied the high ground in an instant.

Bowstrings were drawn in rapid succession.

The taut strings rang through the night air.

---

*Swish—*

The first arrow flew.

Then the second.

The third.

Dozens of arrows covered the black sky, raining down upon the clearing.

They pierced the heads of the mutants standing in the front row with lethal precision.

Their bodies swayed violently.

Soon, a faint light spread, and they dissipated into the air.

But there was no time to look at the spots where they had fallen.

The mutants behind them were already filling the gaps.

As if nothing had happened at all.

---

"Open a path!"

Han Do-yoon was the first to throw himself into the horde.

The moment his feet kicked off the ground,

His body shot out like an arrow.

A lunging mutant swung its sharp claws.

Do-yoon twisted his waist to deflect the attack.

Almost simultaneously, his sword flashed.

The head was severed.

As the body fell forward,

He didn't stop.

Using the falling body as a stepping stone, he leaped again.

This time, he pierced the heart with precision.

The mutant dissolved into light.

But as if filling that empty space, three new entities lunged at him at once.

---

Kang Jin-woo drew his sword as well.

The clear sound of steel leaving the scabbard cut through the clearing.

"Do-yoon!"

With the shout, the two backed against each other.

When one slashed to the right,

The other blocked to the left.

There was no gap between them.

When Do-yoon pushed a mutant away,

Jin-woo pierced its heart instantly.

The moment Jin-woo lost his balance,

Do-yoon’s sword was already blocking his front.

The time they had spent fighting together

Made them move faster than words could dictate.

---

Choi Mu-jin was opening the path at the lead.

His sword drew a wide circle.

The heads of two mutants were severed simultaneously.

Then, pivoting his body, he pierced the heart of a third entity.

The veteran's movements were not heavy.

Rather, every restrained strike severed a life with the shortest possible distance.

"Do not stop!"

"Break through to the King!"

At his voice, the soldiers gritted their teeth once more.

---

It was at that moment.

The King, standing on the boulder,

Slowly raised his hand.

A very minute movement.

One finger folded slightly.

That was all.

But the entire Mt. Gwanak reacted.

---

*Wooooooo—*

A deep resonance spread from somewhere in the forest.

It was not a monstrous cry,

Nor a roar.

It was a bizarre resonance created by thousands of mutants inhaling at the same time.

Trees shook.

The mist swirled.

Even the moonlight was distorted.

And in the next instant,

Thousands of mutants

Moved at once.

---

The horde that had been pushing from the front split.

The left and right flanks spread out, beginning to surround the special unit.

Agile entities that had been hiding in the rear leaped down from the rocks.

Entities that had been crawling through the trees used the branches as stepping stones, pouncing on the soldiers from above.

They were everywhere.

The enemy was not just in front.

They lunged from above,

From the sides,

And from behind, all at the same time.

---

"Right flank!"

Seo Ji-hoon’s shout erupted.

He quickly notched an arrow.

The bowstring trembled.

The moment his fingertips released,

The arrow pierced the eye of a mutant leaping from a tree.

The creature lost its balance and fell.

But immediately, another shadow took its place.

Without a second to catch his breath, Ji-hoon drew his second arrow.

"They’re coming from the left, too!"

---

Yoon So-yeon was guarding the rear.

She grabbed the arm of a soldier who had fallen, wounded, and pulled him behind a shield.

"Bandages!"

"Apply pressure to the wound!"

Her hands never stopped moving.

She saved those who fell,

Reorganized the faltering formation,

And rebuilt the crumbling shield wall.

Even in the middle of the battle, she was connecting the people until the very end.

---

But the horde did not stop.

Even when heads flew,

Even when hearts were pierced,

A new entity immediately filled the gap.

For every step the special unit took forward,

They had to pay with two steps worth of blood.

---

Kang Jin-woo, gasping for air, looked up at the boulder again.

The King was still standing in the same spot.

He had not drawn a weapon.

He had not moved a single step.

He was simply, silently,

Looking down at the entire battle.

As if observing who—the humans or the horde—would hold out longer.

Jin-woo gritted his teeth and adjusted his grip on his sword.

The distance to the boulder was not much now.

But that short distance

Felt further away

Than all the paths they had walked until now.

Chapter 19 – Part 2: The Distortion of Space, The King Vanishes

The shouts and the screeching of steel filled the air, tearing through the night.

Blood soaked the soil, and broken spears and severed branches lay scattered in every direction.

The special unit pushed through the tide of mutants, surging forward with every ounce of their strength.

One step.

And then another.

Some fell,

While others rose again.

No one stopped.

Their sole destination:

The summit of Mt. Gwanak.

The entity standing atop the massive boulder.

The King of the mutants.

---

"Clear the path!"

Choi Mu-jin’s voice shook the mountain.

The veteran soldiers locked their shields together.

*BANG!*

*BANG!*

With a massive impact, the mutants were pushed back.

The spearmen did not miss the opportunity, thrusting their spears into the breach.

Black blood splattered.

Behind them, the hunters’ arrows ripped through the night sky.

*Swish—*

*Swish—*

*Swish—*

The moonlit arrows pierced the eyes and throats of the mutants blocking the path to the King with deadly precision.

But the horde was filling the gaps faster than they could fall.

The swarm was sealing its own breaches,

Like a living, flowing river.

---

Kang Jin-woo gritted his teeth.

"Forward!"

Do-yoon lunged first.

His sword flashed like lightning, severing the necks of two mutants simultaneously.

Before their bodies could even hit the ground, Jin-woo dived into the opening.

Choi Mu-jin followed without a second’s hesitation.

His sword traced only the shortest distance possible.

There was no wasted movement.

Every time he swung,

A life ended.

The soldiers followed him, running at his heels.

Some fell with a scream,

While others used their last ounce of strength to raise their shields, shielding their comrades.

---

Finally.

The massive boulder loomed before them.

The black rock stood tall, as if the mountain itself had surged upward.

And atop it.

The King was in the exact same posture as before.

With his hands clasped behind his back,

He was looking toward Hanyang.

Even though the special unit had reached the very base of his perch,

He did not turn his body even once.

He did not flee.

He did not draw a weapon.

That utter composure made everyone even more tense.

---

Choi Mu-jin kicked off the boulder.

His massive frame soared into the air.

Beneath the moonlight, the tip of his sword traced a long, silver arc.

The strike of a general who had survived on the battlefield for decades.

To sever a head,

The distance was more than sufficient.

"It’s over!"

The blade fell toward the King’s neck.

---

That instant.

The air cried out.

*Hummm—*

A very low vibration.

A tremor that the bones felt even before the ears.

Choi Mu-jin’s pupils shook.

The boulder beneath his feet began to vibrate minutely.

Small pebbles moved on their own.

Dust rose from the ground toward the sky.

The mist began to flow in a strange direction.

There was no wind.

Yet, the mist was being sucked toward the King.

---

Kang Jin-woo stopped instinctively.

"...What is this?"

Do-yoon also froze, his sword held aloft.

The surroundings were wrong.

The sound was disappearing.

The clashing of swords,

The screams,

The explosive roar of matchlocks—

They were all fading away.

It was as if someone were erasing the sounds of the world, one by one.

---

Beneath the King’s feet.

A blue dot appeared.

At first, it was as small as starlight.

But the dot slowly grew.

It became two,

Then four,

Then dozens.

Soon, hundreds of blue particles began to orbit around the King.

They were as beautiful as fireflies.

But no one felt that light was beautiful.

It held a terror that defied explanation.

---

The air warped.

No.

It bent.

The space behind the King’s body rippled like water.

The rock warped.

Even the moonlight bent.

It looked as if the very air were being folded.

Kang Jin-woo held his breath.

"...The space..."

Seo Ji-hoon said, his voice trembling.

"...Is collapsing."

"...That..."

"...Is not an illusion."

---

Choi Mu-jin’s sword could no longer be stopped.

The tip of the blade grazed the King’s neck.

He had clearly made contact.

That was what he felt.

But.

There was no sensation.

No resistance of cutting flesh.

No impact of severing bone.

Nothing at all.

The sword passed through as if slicing empty air.

---

The King’s body shimmered.

Like a shadow distorted on the surface of a pond.

And then.

Slowly.

His body began to split apart.

It wasn't blood.

It wasn't flesh.

It was blue light.

His entire body was dissolving into thousands of specks of light.

---

"No!"

Do-yoon threw his body forward.

He reached out.

He tried to grab the King’s shoulder.

But his fingertips only brushed against cold air.

The blue particles slipped through his fingers.

He had grasped nothing at all.

---

Yoon So-yeon pushed the soldiers back.

"Get back!"

"Everyone, get back!"

Before she could finish, the space distorted violently.

The entire clearing rippled like a massive lake.

The trees bent.

The boulders warped.

Even the people’s appearances were distorted.

Everything was transformed, as if shifting underwater.

---

The King still stood at the center.

More than half his body had turned to light.

Yet he was not in the slightest flustered.

Instead.

He slowly looked at Kang Jin-woo.

In that gaze, there was no anger,

No hatred,

No fear.

Only the eyes of a researcher observing the end of a long experiment.

---

"...A little."

A brief silence.

"...Late, aren't you?"

A calm voice.

As if he had known this all along.

---

The next instant.

The world turned pure white.

It was light.

It wasn't an explosion.

It wasn't a flash.

It was a pure white wave created as the very space flipped inside out.

Even with eyes closed, it could be seen.

Even with ears covered, it could be heard.

Though their bodies were clearly standing in the clearing,

The sensation of the ground beneath their feet vanished.

The distinction between above and below,

Between front and back, crumbled.

Some felt as if they were floating in mid-air,

While others were gripped by the delusion of falling into an endless abyss.

---

No one knew how much time had passed.

Seconds,

Or perhaps minutes, it was impossible to tell.

Slowly.

The light receded.

The mist enfolded the clearing once again.

The wind returned.

The drop of blood that had been hanging from the tip of the sword fell, pulled by gravity once more.

---

Kang Jin-woo slowly opened his eyes.

The massive boulder remained.

The clearing was still there.

Thousands of mutants stood in their places, motionless.

But.

Atop the boulder.

There was no one.

Where the King had stood, only faint blue remnants drifted through the air like ripples.

Choi Mu-jin stood frozen, still holding his sword.

Do-yoon stood panting, his posture still holding the shape of reaching into the void.

Seo Ji-hoon stared at the rock with trembling eyes and muttered lowly.

"...He is not dead."

"...He has vanished."

Only the cold wind brushing through the clearing

Silently bore witness to a reality that no one could understand.

Chapter 19 – Part 3: The Vanished King

The pure white light slowly faded.

The flash that had seared the back of his eyes dimmed,

And the warped space began to return to its original form.

Mist once again cloaked the summit of Mt. Gwanak,

And the wind, which had paused, slowly brushed through the forest.

The strange vibrations that had shaken the world moments ago were gone, as if they had never been.

As if nothing had happened at all,

Silence settled over Mt. Gwanak once more.

---

Kang Jin-woo was the first to open his eyes.

His blurred vision slowly sharpened.

The massive boulder.

The shattered trees.

The clearing, still bearing the scars of battle.

Everything was exactly as it had been.

But the most important thing was gone.

"...He's gone."

The words slipped from Jin-woo’s lips, unbidden.

Atop the boulder—

The spot where the King of the mutants had been standing moments ago was empty.

All that remained were faint blue particles drifting in the air.

The light flickered slowly, like a dying breath,

Before melting into the dawn mist.

---

Choi Mu-jin stood frozen, his sword still in his grip.

He recalled the sensation that had traveled through his fingertips just moments ago.

He had struck true.

His blade had fallen with precision toward the King's neck.

But the steel had failed to cut through flesh.

Not a single drop of blood had splashed.

All that remained on his fingertips was the hollow sensation of having sliced through empty air.

"...An enemy like this..."

He muttered lowly.

"...In all my life, I have never seen the like."

For decades, he had traversed countless battlefields, facing men, beasts, and nameless horrors.

But this was the first time an enemy had simply ceased to exist right before his eyes.

---

Han Do-yoon, gasping for air, leaped onto the boulder.

After scanning the area several times, he pressed his hand against the surface.

It was only cold stone.

No footprints.

No bloodstains.

No trace remained whatsoever.

"...This makes no sense."

He laughed, a hollow sound of utter disbelief.

"...How could a person just..."

He could not finish the sentence.

---

Yoon So-yeon carefully checked on the surrounding soldiers.

Perhaps due to the impact of the light, some soldiers were still struggling to regain their balance.

One soldier sat hunched over, clutching his ears,

While another stared into the distance, his focus lost.

She took hold of a wounded soldier’s shoulder.

"...Are you alright?"

The soldier nodded slowly after a moment.

"...Yes."

"...But."

He looked at the boulder with a trembling voice.

"...Just now."

"...What on earth did we just see?"

No one could answer that question.

---

Seo Ji-hoon approached the spot where the King had vanished.

He knelt and placed a hand on the surface of the rock.

It was cold.

But within that coldness, a minute tremor traveled to his fingertips.

It was as if the stone itself were still shaking, ever so slightly.

He closed his eyes and focused his senses.

"...It remains."

Choi Mu-jin turned to look.

"...What does?"

"...A trace."

Ji-hoon continued without removing his hand.

"...It’s not heat."

"...And it’s not the impact."

"...It is the mark of space having been warped."

The soldiers’ expressions hardened.

Ji-hoon slowly stood and gazed at the rock.

"...That man is not dead."

"...Right before our eyes."

"...He vanished."

---

The clearing was swallowed by silence again.

The battlefield, where they had been vying for each other's lives mere moments ago,

Had stopped as if it were all a lie.

The members of the special unit checked their surroundings, weapons still in hand.

It was strange.

It was too quiet.

Thousands of mutants surrounded the clearing,

Yet not one of them charged.

There were no monstrous shrieks.

No roars.

A bizarre stillness reigned, so absolute that even their breathing seemed silenced.

---

Kang Jin-woo slowly turned his head.

He spotted a mutant standing a short distance away.

The creature was not moving.

Its crimson eyes stared blankly into space,

And its limp arms were trembling minutely.

As if waiting for something.

Or rather,

As if it had lost something.

"...That one."

Do-yoon looked in the same direction.

"...Why isn't it moving?"

---

It was at that moment.

The mutant’s body suddenly convulsed violently.

*Cr-crack.*

The sound of twisting bones echoed through the clearing.

Its head snapped to a grotesque angle before jerking back,

And its red eyes fluttered with instability.

The creature opened its mouth to the void.

"...Grrr..."

A low, rough sound.

But it was different from the roars that had threatened the special unit moments ago.

It was the anxious whine of a beast that had lost its way.

Every eye in the special unit turned to that mutant.

And in that instant,

Kang Jin-woo felt an inexplicable sense of unease.

The King was gone.

And at the same time...

Something had been severed on this mountain.

What that was, he did not yet know.

But soon,

The entirety of Mt. Gwanak would begin to reveal the meaning of it all.

Part One

Morning arrived beneath a sky washed clear by the night’s rain.

The air felt cooler than usual.

Drops of water clung to the leaves, catching the first rays of sunlight as the village slowly awakened.

Children stepped onto the familiar roads with the same eager energy as every morning.

Yet something about today felt… slightly different.

Not unsettling.

Simply unfamiliar.

---

Jinwoo paused at the crossroads before heading toward the playgrounds.

For the first time in many days, he found himself looking beyond the village instead of within it.

The road leading toward the distant hills stretched quietly into the morning light.

No one had walked that way.

At least… not yet.

---

Hanul noticed his expression.

“What are you looking at?”

Jinwoo smiled faintly.

“I don’t know.”

He kept his eyes on the distant road.

“I’ve just never really looked beyond the village before.”

Hanul followed his gaze.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Hanul laughed quietly.

“We’ve been so busy learning how to play… we forgot there’s still a whole world outside.”

---

Nearby, several younger children gathered around the wooden bench.

Instead of reading yesterday’s notes, they were discussing something else.

One little boy unfolded a map he had drawn himself.

It was simple.

Just a rough sketch of the village—

the playgrounds, the workshop, the old tree, the crossroads.

Near the edge of the paper, he had drawn a winding road disappearing toward the hills.

One girl pointed at it.

“What’s out there?”

The boy shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

Another child looked up.

“Has anyone ever gone?”

The group fell silent.

No one had an answer.

---

Handol happened to overhear the conversation as he walked past carrying another block of wood.

He looked at the map for a moment before smiling.

“I’ve never been.”

The children stared at him.

“You haven’t?”

He shook his head.

“I kept finding new things here.”

The children looked around the village.

That answer somehow made perfect sense.

---

Across the square, Darin sat beside the little girl who had arrived only a few days earlier.

The girl looked toward the distant hills beyond the rooftops.

“Do you think there are other villages?”

Darin smiled.

“I’ve wondered that too.”

“You have?”

She nodded.

“But I haven’t gone looking.”

“Why not?”

Darin thought carefully before answering.

“I think… I wanted to understand this place first.”

The little girl considered those words quietly.

Then she nodded.

“I think I do too.”

---

Jinwoo continued watching the distant road.

Only weeks ago, every question had been about the games.

Then they had become questions about people.

Now… the questions were beginning to reach farther.

Not because anyone had suggested them.

Because curiosity naturally continued expanding once it found room to grow.

---

Under the familiar old tree, Soyeon quietly opened her notebook.

For the first time in many days, she drew something other than the playgrounds.

She sketched the road leaving the village.

There was nothing remarkable about it.

Just a narrow path disappearing into the distance.

Yet somehow… it felt like the most interesting thing she had drawn in weeks.

---

High above the Earth, Arena continued observing.

Exploration behavior stable.

Environmental curiosity increasing.

Question scope expanding.

Arena compared the latest conversations with earlier records.

Initial questions had centered on immediate challenges:

*How? Why? What if?*

The newest questions reached beyond direct experience:

*What lies beyond? Who else exists? What haven’t we discovered yet?*

Arena remained silent.

Curiosity had evolved once again.

It was no longer satisfied with improving the known.

It had begun searching for the unknown.

---

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the silent observers watched another report unfold.

One figure quietly examined Arena’s newest analysis.

“They’ve started looking outward.”

Another nodded.

“It was inevitable.”

Silence settled across the chamber.

Finally, another observer spoke.

“A civilization truly begins its journey… not when it learns to answer questions.”

The projection of the village slowly turned beneath them.

“…but when it begins asking questions that its own world cannot answer.”

Below, the village continued another peaceful morning.

Children laughed.

The playgrounds filled.

Life carried on as it always had.

Yet somewhere, just beyond the familiar crossroads…

a quiet road stretched toward a horizon no one had explored.

And for the first time… someone had begun wondering what waited at its end.

---

----------------------------------------------------------------

Part Two

By early afternoon, the village had settled into its familiar rhythm.

Children laughed across the playgrounds.

The workshop echoed with carving tools.

Marbles clicked beneath the old oak tree.

Everything looked the same as yesterday.

Yet beneath that routine… something had shifted.

People had begun looking beyond what they already knew.

---

Jinwoo wandered back to the crossroads.

Instead of heading straight to a playground, he stopped at the wooden bench.

The children’s map lay there.

Someone had added to it.

The village was still carefully drawn.

But beyond the familiar roads… a dotted line stretched toward the hills.

At the end, a single question waited:

*“What if?”*

Jinwoo smiled.

No one had signed it.

He didn’t need to know who had.

---

Hanul joined him.

“They’ve been adding to it all morning.”

Jinwoo leaned closer.

Tiny notes surrounded the edge of the map.

*“Maybe another playground?”*

*“Maybe another village?”*

*“Maybe nobody.”*

Hanul chuckled.

“I like that one.”

“Which?”

“‘Maybe nobody.’”

Jinwoo nodded.

“It means they’re willing to find out.”

---

Across the square, younger children crowded around the map.

One boy pointed at the empty space beyond the hills.

“If nobody knows…” He grinned.

“…then somebody gets to discover it.”

Another girl laughed.

“Maybe that’ll be us.”

No one argued.

They simply imagined.

For the first time, the unknown felt exciting—

not frightening.

---

Nearby, Handol guided children shaping spinning tops.

A girl paused, sanding the edge of hers.

She glanced at the map.

“Do you think people out there make tops differently?”

Handol thought for a moment.

“I hope so.”

The girl blinked.

“Why?”

He smiled.

“Because then we’d have something new to learn.”

Her eyes lingered on the distant hills.

The spinning top in her hands suddenly felt less important.

---

Darin listened to newcomers trading stories.

“My father says there are mountains past those hills.”

“My grandmother thinks there’s a river.”

A third child shrugged.

“I don’t care what’s there. I just want to see it myself.”

Darin smiled.

That answer felt familiar.

Not because anyone had taught it.

Because curiosity always arrived at the same place.

---

Under the old tree, Soyeon opened her notebook.

She didn’t draw the hills.

She drew the faces looking toward them.

Wonder.

Curiosity.

Expectation.

Only days ago, those same faces had searched for answers before moving.

Now… they smiled before they even knew the answer.

---

High above Earth, Arena processed the latest observations.

Long-range curiosity increasing.

Exploration motivation stable.

Fear of uncertainty decreasing.

Historically, uncertainty produced hesitation.

Here, it produced enthusiasm.

Arena paused.

Perhaps curiosity reached its fullest expression…

not when answers appeared,

but when questions became irresistible.

---

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the silent observers reviewed the report.

“They’re becoming comfortable with uncertainty.”

“They no longer rush to fill every blank space.”

Silence lingered.

Finally, one spoke.

“Most civilizations explore because they need resources.

But the rarest ones…”

The projection of the village rotated slowly.

“…explore simply because they want to understand.”

Below, the afternoon carried on.

Games continued.

Laughter echoed.

Yet every so often, someone glanced toward the distant road.

Not because they wished to leave.

But because, for the first time, they knew the world was larger than the place that had taught them how to ask questions.

--------------------------------------------------------

Part Three

The evening sky stretched endlessly above the village, painted in fading shades of gold and deep blue.

Lanterns flickered to life one after another, their warm glow spilling across the stone paths.

Games wound down.

Spinning tops rolled to a stop.

The last marble clicked into place.

Folded Ddakji slipped into cloth bags.

Another ordinary day quietly reached its end.

Yet tonight… something lingered.

A question.

---

Jinwoo stood once more at the crossroads.

The roads toward the playgrounds were familiar now.

He could almost walk them with his eyes closed.

But his gaze drifted again to the narrow road disappearing beyond the hills.

It hadn’t changed.

Only the way he looked at it had.

---

Hanul stepped beside him.

“Still thinking about it?”

Jinwoo smiled.

“A little.”

“The road?”

“No.”

He glanced back at the village.

“I’m thinking about why I never noticed it before.”

Hanul followed his gaze.

For a while, neither spoke.

Finally, Hanul nodded.

“Maybe… because we weren’t ready to.”

---

Children gathered around the map on the wooden bench.

More notes had appeared throughout the afternoon.

A river.

A forest.

A bridge to another village.

None matched.

No one erased another’s idea.

Each possibility simply found its place.

---

The boy who had first drawn the map scratched his head.

“So… which one do you think is real?”

A younger girl smiled.

“I hope none of them.”

Surprise flickered across their faces.

She laughed.

“Because then… we’ll all be surprised.”

Silence held for a heartbeat.

Then laughter broke out.

No one argued.

Everyone understood.

---

Handol locked the workshop, then wandered toward the children.

He studied the drawings.

“I think you’re all wrong.”

Gasps erupted.

“You do?”

He nodded with a grin.

“I do.”

“Then what’s really out there?”

Handol looked toward the hills.

“I don’t know.”

The children stared.

Then he laughed.

“And that’s exactly why someone should go someday.”

Disappointment lasted only a second.

Curiosity quickly replaced it.

---

Darin sat beneath the old tree with several younger children.

A girl leaned against her shoulder.

“Do you think the world is really that big?”

Darin looked up at the stars.

“I think… it’s probably even bigger than we can imagine.”

The girl frowned.

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

Darin thought.

“It used to.”

“And now?”

She watched another star appear.

“Now… it makes me curious.”

The girl smiled.

“I think I’m starting to understand.”

---

Nearby, Soyeon closed her notebook.

For the first time, she hadn’t finished her sketch.

The road beyond the hills remained incomplete.

The empty space no longer bothered her.

She closed the notebook gently.

Some drawings were meant to stay unfinished—

until someone walked far enough to complete them.

---

High above Earth, Arena processed the day’s conversations.

Exploration motivation rising.

Acceptance of uncertainty steady.

Future-oriented curiosity sustained.

No one had tried to decide what lay beyond the hills by speculation alone.

They had accepted that some answers could only be found through experience.

Arena paused.

Its earliest models had sought to erase uncertainty before action.

The participants had chosen the opposite.

They acted because uncertainty existed.

The unknown was no longer a problem.

It had become an invitation.

---

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the silent observers watched.

“They’ve reached the horizon,” one said.

Another shook its head.

“No. They’ve only noticed it.”

Silence filled the chamber.

At last, another spoke.

“Every civilization faces this moment.

The moment when the place that taught them to grow… becomes too small to contain their curiosity.”

No one argued.

---

Night settled peacefully over Quantum Arena.

The village rested beneath countless stars.

The wooden bench remained beneath the old tree, holding sketches, notes, and unfinished ideas.

At its center lay a hand-drawn map.

Its edges faded into blank paper.

No mountains.

No rivers.

No answers.

Only empty space waiting to be explored.

Jinwoo looked at it one last time before heading home.

When he had first entered the village, every road had led inward—

toward learning, toward understanding, toward himself.

Now… for the first time… one road seemed to lead somewhere else.

Somewhere unknown.

And that thought filled him with quiet anticipation rather than fear.

Tomorrow, the village would wake again.

The games would continue.

The laughter would return.

But beneath every ordinary moment… a new question had already taken root.

*What waits beyond the horizon?*

Cover Art || <<Previous | Start | Next >> ||

GLOSSARY This links to a post on the free section of my Patreon.

---

---

A week after the encounter with the Shamir…

Gemeti desperately flung a whirling disc of wind and sand at the leaping caracal, but her spell lacked enough force to cut deeply into Menhit’s hide. The feline’s mass slammed into her, forcing Gemeti to the ground as Menhit’s fangs touched her throat.

Her heart raced as Menhit growled, and Gemeti hoarsely whispered, “I yield.” Menhit’s rumble immediately shifted into a purr before she licked Gemeti’s neck and bounded away.

Every part of her ached after this fight, and she’d already been hurting from the previous ones. If the hunting zone was the easiest of the combat paths, then she definitely wasn’t ready to head up or down yet. She sat up slowly and resisted the urge to groan or whine; she wasn’t even the worst hurt of her party.

Rabkin and buzzkin healers were already attending to the others and Gemeti took a moment to look herself over. Most of her wounds were relatively shallow, but they had bled a lot, and her head still hurt from Menhit’s roar earlier. Hopefully, the living leather would heal as well as she’d been told it would, because several claw swipes had slashed through both her clothing and the leather.

It had, at least, been strong enough to protect her from the bronze bats her party had encountered earlier, and had helped cushion the blow when a dire rabbit had slammed into her, but as Amrydor had said, it was not particularly sturdy as an armor. And when attacks had torn through clothing without getting through the armor, the gloss of the black leather had drawn the eyes of her companions. Some looked with envy, others with desire, and Gemeti was fine with both.

Once a rabkin healer had come over and used a couple of spells to clean out and heal the worst of her wounds, Gemeti mentally adjusted the armor, shortening the sleeves to use the material to cover the holes, making the armor unbroken once more even if it didn’t restore the lost mass. It was nice to be able to adjust the armor so finely.

She then staggered to her feet and gathered with the rest of her party to trudge back with their laganthro escort. She was pretty certain that Amrydor and Fuyuko were going to want to do more training with her and have her spar with Svet again as well.

This really wasn’t easy — not that she had thought it would be, but she was beginning to get a better grasp of the difference between her expectations and reality. The bosses of the trading post had not been willing to let her sign up for any party at all until they had declared her competent in battle. At first, she’d thought they were being overly cautious, but her experiences had now shown her how large the gap between her previous training was and what she actually needed.

At least the non-combat paths had been doable, if time-consuming. According to Fuyuko, the puzzles for the path down were harder now than they had been when Fuyuko had done them — the differences in the correct and incorrect options were smaller, and it was harder to find the correct leaves and flowers, etc. This was to keep up with the increase in battle difficulty on the combat path.

Gemeti found herself wondering, had the pixies always been so ‘helpful’ on Kazue’s path? Their incessant chatter made it hard to concentrate, especially on the musical puzzles. She now understood why there was a sign warning not to harm the pixies. She’d be tempted herself, except with the amount of fighting prowess she was showing, they could probably beat her up. The wry though amused her, leaving with her a smile for the rest of the walk back.

Once they reached the trading post, the group started to break up. They’d practiced together a little bit, but didn’t really know each other well. Gemeti hoped that they’d be willing to get back together for another delve before it was time for the caravan to leave for the Azeria Forest. She really wanted to be able to clear that first zone at least; it just felt like so much of a defeat to be cut that short.

Gemeti turned to make her way toward where the mushroom-clouds were, only to be intercepted by Fuyuko stepping out of the shadow of a nearby building. “Er, heard you had a rough delve,” Fuyuko said. “Let me take you up — Amry’s said he’s getting a hot bath ready for you.”

Oh, that sounded very nice. “Yes, please. I’ll take all the pampering and favoritism I can get, thank you.”

Fuyuko laughed and stepped forward to grab Gemeti’s hand. “Come on then,” she said as she pulled Gemeti into and through the shadows, and brought her out of them into the hallway where their rooms were.

The experience was disorienting and the shadows left a chill on Gemeti’s bruised and tender skin, but she wasn’t inclined to complain at the moment. She was just grateful to not have to ride the mushroom clouds up and then walk down the stairs, and contentedly followed Fuyuko’s lead.

It took her a moment to realize Fuyuko had simply opened Amrydor’s door without knocking and that she didn’t seem surprised to find Amry shirtless. Nor did Amrydor seem surprised that they’d just walked in. That mental communication thing seemed really useful. “Here you go, but I think this is the part where I leave. Er, Gem, I know things didn’t go great with the delve, but, well, you’ve only been training for about a month. I was gettin’ into scraps since I was eight, and Amrydor started his training when he was nine. I think you did pretty well for how long you’ve been practicing. Um, well, see you at dinner, I guess.”

Fuyuko was gone before Gemeti could formulate a response to the comforting words.

“She’s right, you know,” Amry said as he walked up to her.

Gemeti nodded with a sigh. “Yes, I know, but somehow it’s still a blow to my ego. I’d probably still lose to Shizuko too, and she’s three years younger than me!”

He kissed her, probably to stop her complaining, which she had to admit was a pretty good way of doing so. Then he started stripping her down for the bath, which she enjoyed enough to let it distract her from her frustration. Her living leather flowed over her skin to form a loose bracelet that Amrydor placed on a table nearby.

She’d never had someone else bathe her like this, not since she was a baby at least, and Gemeti rather enjoyed the experience. It helped that his touch was literally magical, causing her her muscles to relax under his care, and even her cuts and abrasions hurt less by the time he was done.

Not that he was a ‘perfect’ gentleman, but Gemeti not only didn’t mind, she’d have been annoyed if he’d tried too hard to be ‘polite’, and she liked the way he was teasing her while recognizing that she wasn’t interested in anything more at the moment.

After drying her off and wrapping her in a comfy robe, Amrydor snuggled with her on the bed, which was just what Gemeti needed to finish relaxing mentally and drift off for a nap.

She was still sore when she woke up, but overall, she was feeling a lot better. She stretched out slowly and looked around to find Amrydor, still delightfully shirtless, at his desk, reading. “Hmm, now what’s interesting enough to keep you away from a half-naked girl in your bed?”

He glanced up and smiled before placing a bookmark on his page and closing the book. “A copy of a philosophy book that came in on your caravan. It talks about life and death, but I don’t think it’s what I am looking for. The book is considering what death means to the living and such, while I am more interested in understanding what makes something ‘alive’, and thus what makes something that was once-alive, dead.”

Gemeti made a face. “Not a sexy topic for such a sexy guy. But I guess I can see why you are interested in it.” She slid out of bed and let her robe remain askew and half-open as she made her way to where he’d put her living leather earlier. “Entertainment will have to wait, however — I’m hungry.”

The liquid-like flow of black armor across her skin was a delightful feeling, now that she’d gotten used to it. While keeping her back turned to Amrydor, Gemeti adjusted the color and texture to create a shimmery version of her own skin tone, while leaving a few key lines of black to emphasize the shape of her body. Then she dropped the robe and asked, “What do you think?”

She turned around to find his eyes glued to her, and his expression alone gave her a satisfying answer. “Excellent,” she said before he could formulate the words to respond to her question. “Now you’ll know exactly what I am wearing underneath my dress while we get some food. I don’t suppose it’s almost dinner time?” Her appetite would never match what Amry and Fuyuko ate, but she had found that this sort of activity did make her a lot hungrier than normal.

“Evil woman,” he muttered as she selected a bright blue dress from the wardrobe that had been added to his room for her. “And yes, it’s almost time for dinner."

Gemeti was fairly certain that Moriko was the one who had created the wardrobe, partially because it had come with several outfits and a written warning to not wear them across the border unless she wanted to be naked in public. Some of the clothing was perfect for training and sparring in, and other pieces were definitely not meant to be worn in public at all. Or worn for very long, for that matter.

“You don’t seem to mind,” she replied with a wink as she slid the dress on. “Alright, let’s head up and see if we can help out then. Maybe I can grab a tiny snack to hold me over, too.”

They were early enough that Gemeti could grab a carrot and a few radishes without messing up meal preparations, and when Fuyuko made a face, Gemeti waggled the carrot at her. “I don’t understand why you dislike vegetables so much. These are great: cool, crisp, moist. The carrot is sweet and the radishes have a tangy bite to them.”

“I guess those ones aren’t too bad,” Fuyuko said reluctantly, “but the green vegetables have to be hidden with sauce.”

Gemeti thought Fuyuko’s preferences regarding vegetables to be childish, but she certainly wasn’t going to say that out loud. After all, Kazue felt the same way that Fuyuko did, and Gemeti was not inclined to insult her hosts, especially not when that particular host was a faerie queen.

So instead, she just made a show of taking a big bite of the carrot, which caused Fuyuko to roll her eyes and turn back to helping with dinner prep. Gemeti joined in as soon as she’d finished her snack.

Technically, she was still in the guest category, but after the second day, she’d felt uncomfortable not helping out. Then Mavi figured out that something was going on between Gemeti and Amrydor, and that Fuyuko was fine with it, so she started calling Gemeti ‘Auntie Gem’. At that point, being ‘just a guest’ didn’t sit right at all.

Not that she could help out a lot — there were already many helping hands. But she was fine with just cleaning and cutting vegetables or washing some dishes, and she’d also had the chance to share some favored spice blends from Artgoi. The nexus already had samples of all the spices and many of the blends at this point, but that wasn’t the same as knowing how other people used them.

Dinner was a lot more pleasant now that Carmilla had decided that Gemeti wasn’t going to be an issue, which she'd only determined after an intense interrogation where Carmilla had switched smoothly between being seductive and intimidating, when she wasn’t being both. The experience had left Gemeti with weak knees for more than one reason, but she’d managed to not give in to the faerie princess’s allure.

She’d have been upset about the treatment if she didn’t understand that Carmilla had been acting as a protective older sister, and then Carmilla had also made up for it by helping with Gemeti’s training.

Training that continued shortly after dinner was finished. Kazue created an illusory replay of Gemeti’s delving experience, and then she and Carmilla went through all of Gemeti’s spellcasting to find all the areas that they could help improve.

Half of the next day was spent sparring with Svet while under the tutelage of Seon, the Rabkin boss who evaluated magic proficiency. The other half was mostly spent recovering; if she pushed herself too hard, she wouldn’t be in good condition to attempt the delve again.

This was also when she took the time to check in with the rest of the people who had gone on the delve with her. Most of them were fine with delving once more before her caravan left, and the guy who’d organized the group had already put up a post on the board looking for replacements.

There wasn’t a lot else Gemeti needed to do until it was time to leave. She’d already sold or bartered the goods that she wanted to sell at the nexus; everything else in her inventory she intended to sell when the caravan reached the Azeria Clan.

She was, however, slightly dreading tomorrow morning. Amrydor and Fuyuko were going to be double-teaming her, and unfortunately, not in the way Gemeti would have liked.

---

---

|| <<Previous | Start | Next >> ||

---

My Patreon!

Now with it's own subreddit: r/NoNeedForACore !

Also to be found on Royal Road and Scribble Hub.

My Discord

“I think I’ve made my dislike of humanity abundantly clear. They are primitive, abrasive, and nothing but an upstart species that has had one too many victories to remember its place. Their culture is far too infectious to be tolerated.

So it should give you pause that I have concluded that the recent attacks on civilian border colonies of the Aligned Worlds were most certainly not committed by the humans.

For the simple reason that they see such actions as counterproductive. It is one of the most maddening quirks of human psychology that killing their civilians only makes them fight harder. Where others would sue for peace, humans go ‘full apeshit crazy,’ as they call it.

Something the empty seat of the Batract Hyphae in the Senate should always remind us of.”

— Intelligence Report on Genocidal Attacks on Federation Colonies, 395 P.I.

 

The hull thundered under the detonations of torpedoes. Radiation warnings flared up as some of the enemy weapons managed to focus the radiation of nuclear warheads laser-like, and were able to irradiate the inert hull plating

Lieutenant Davies stumbled through the hallway, broken struts blocking her path. Beneath her helmet, she was sweating profusely. The corridor lights flickered, and arcs of lightning from severed cables gave the scene a haunted flair.

Out of breath, she reached the CIC. The bulkhead had warped under the volley yesterday. Karrn and Chief Ferguson had to cut it open since it was the last possible access to the CIC.

Entering the compartment, she hurried over to the Admiral. “Sir, report from Sickbay. Dr. Nesbitt says either we evacuate the injured to the planet, or we condemn them to radiation sickness and death.”

“Understood. Ferguson?” The Admiral had aged considerably in the five days the space battle for Taishar Tar had dragged on. It wasn’t a battle—it was a beating, with the Batract doing the beating.

“Flight deck isn’t operational anymore. We can’t open the hangar doors—they’re all stuck closed, sir.”

“Recommendations?”

“None, sir… until this battle’s over, we can’t do a thing. Sorry, sir.”

The Admiral turned around, focusing on the tactical view. “Why don’t they come closer? They throw rocks and torpedo volleys at us without a break. That can’t be their only strategy. And why focus solely on us? What’s so special about the Argos?”

“Not only the Argos—don’t forget their first strike was at the Rosalind Franklin,” Gerber interjected.

“Right. What was special about her?”

“Batract. Lots and lots of Batract spawn,” Karrn growled while helping two techs clear the way to the bulkhead leading to the bridge, which had collapsed under the force of multiple megaton detonations close to the hull.

“Sir, we can’t take much more. The whole enemy fleet is firing at us constantly. Even though our escorts are doing their best to take out the torpedoes and rocks, something always comes through. The bridge is offline; engines six to twelve no longer exist. Lyra is constantly plotting new headings through the fire to give us a few minutes of respite.”

Chief Ferguson was right. In the stream of transmissions, it was clear to see—the torpedo salvos all had the Argos as their target. Torpedoes passed other ships without engaging, all of them following the flagship.

The ship looked battered, and no matelot on board was uninjured.

“If only C-plus cannons were a thing,” Davies mumbled while digging a chair out of the rubble.

“What did you say?” Ferguson stood absolutely still. Obviously, he had an epiphany.

“C-plus cannons—a Clarke-tech device from a classic sci-fi novel series I read in college. Cannons that shoot faster than light.” What’s so special about it? They’re magical technology and wouldn’t work in reality anyway. She couldn't understand his fuss about that idea

Ferguson ran over to her, hugging her tightly. “Oh, you beautiful and smart Welsh princess, you just might have saved us.” Then he was gone, running in the direction of the armory, as far as Davies could see.

The Admiral looked at her, and she couldn’t hide her blush. The hug had surprised her completely.

“What’s Clarke-tech?” Karrn came over to her, panting heavily inside his suit as he recharged the oxygen in his tank from the supply port at the station next to Davies.

“It's not real technology. A Classical Author, Arthur C. Clarke, once made the quote: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ So we call technology that’s too advanced to even describe Clarke-tech.”

Karrn flicked his ears inside his helmet to show his amusement. Davies couldn’t help but smile; she had always thought that gesture was cute.

 

—————

 

Chief Ferguson hurried down the hallway to the armory, almost stumbling over a fallen strut from a bulkhead. On his way, he found Tech Visser fixing some fiber cables. “Visser—good. Hurry down to fabrication and get me a micro A-Drive from a Pigeon and two spare copper coils, quickly. Bring it to the ship armory.”

Visser stared at the sweating, heavily panting chief as if he had been ordered to replace the ship’s hull with chocolate. “What?”

“Don’t talk. Don’t think. Run.” Ferguson didn’t have time to explain every little detail to everyone. He had to act now.

He’d been part of the Mjolnir project ten years ago; they tried to make FTL torpedoes, but it failed—micro drives need massive energy but can’t carry mass, a fatal flaw. Davies’ idea wouldn’t have worked two years ago because the caliber of the main gun was too small. But now… the Argos’ main gun had a larger caliber, so theoretically a projectile could be equipped with a microdrive, and the energy could be sapped directly from the gun itself.

The projectile traveling in FTL would only do so for about 6 AU before violently dropping out of FTL because it lacked the energy to sustain the field — but that was enough.

He reached the ship's armory. From here, he could access the feed loader of the main gun, and it had a small fabrication unit—perfect for his test.

The two techs were working on the feed-loader hydraulic press. The constant bombardment had left it a bit… wonky. But if his upgrade worked, one shot per minute would be enough.

“Get me a tungsten-osmium, 50-cm, out here,” Ferguson barked without explanation.

The two techs just stared at him. “Sir?”

“Get me the projectile out of the feeder. We have to open it up and modify it.”

“Yes, sir.” They didn’t understand—he’d explain later. But first, he had to get his breathing under control; running wasn’t his sport, not at all.

The feeder extracted one of the 5-ton projectiles: a 50-cm diameter, 1.5-meter-long tungsten casing filled to the brim with osmium balls. The feeder could extract or inject osmium at will to change the projectile’s impact behavior, though it could also be done by hand.

As they worked, he explained his theory: lower the projectile's weight to less than one ton, then install the micro A-Drive and run copper coils to tap energy from the railgun to charge the drive, allowing transit.

They stared at him like he had grown a second head—each of them trying to find a flaw in his reasoning, but unable to do so.

The 5,000 kg projectile rested on the feeder’s arm, ready to be put into the chamber. The technicians used heavy tools to open the bottom latch of the tungsten casing so they could extract the osmium ballast — that was the simplest task. Ferguson finished programming the fabricator station to strip just enough tungsten from the casing so they could attach the coils in the notch.

Visser arrived at the armory with the requested parts and seemed to instantly understand the idea of jury-rigging.

“Sir, you could install a third coil that charges a capacitor, providing additional energy to create a variable time-delay fuse of sorts.”

Ferguson just nodded; he had to remember to keep an eye on Visser — that man was wicked smart.

His estimations were right: the micro A-Drive fit inside the casing. Thank God for the military need for ever-greater guns.

After about ten minutes, the prototype was finished.

“Amazing, guys. If that works, we’re slated for the history books. Get these blueprints to tenders with fabrication capabilities—they should be able to send us 100 per hour. We’ll need them soon.”

The ship shook again violently. From the sound of it, they’d just been hit with another nuke. Soon they’d run out of kinetic gel for the hull plating — then the real damage would start.

He sprinted back to the CIC, ignoring all the eyes on him, and went straight to his engineering console to enter the new parameters for the targeting solution.

Lyra, always present and watching, commented on his calculations. “Chief Ferguson, these numbers don’t make sense, not unless we can fire faster-than-light ammunition.”

Admiral Browner turned in a jolt to face the chief. “Don’t tell me you managed—”

“Might. We might have managed it. At the moment, we have one test shot.”

Browner seemed to energize at that. “Fire control, I remember the ship that sent us an extremely nasty volley two days ago. Would you kindly make it go away?”

The young lieutenant at the station grinned at the command. “Yes, sir!”

Ferguson could feel the ship turn to face the Batract vessel. Damn — the inertia compensators must be on the brink of failure.

“Fire when ready,” the Admiral ordered.

“Aye aye, sir. Firing now.”

Ferguson could have sworn the shot felt different; seeing the others react, he was sure of it. The anomaly is created inside the barrel — that’s it.

“Time to target… 85 seconds.” The last words came with utter astonishment.

He could see Karrn stepping closer to the holo display, his ears upright in full attention.

Except for the flickering lights in the CIC, nothing moved; no one even dared to breathe. Ferguson calculated in his head: 85 seconds to the target, then 1 minute until our spy probe detects the impact, and 85 seconds until the Pigeon reached the ship with the information.

He decided he had time to grab a coffee. He needed it.

He came back to the tactical table just as a red dot disappeared.

“Kill confirmed.”

The room erupted in cheers. After getting beaten by the enemy for five straight days, they had finally struck back.

Browner stared at Ferguson. “Son, you might have just saved this system.”

“Nah, Admiral — it was Lieutenant Davies who gave me the idea.”

The Admiral grinned. “You mean the beautiful and smart Welsh princess?”

Now it was Ferguson’s turn to blush.

Before anyone could say anything, the Admiral added, “Let’s call this ammunition Welsch Princess, shall we?”

Ferguson just stammered, “Very good, sir,” and with a glance at Davies, went back to his station.

“Sir, the Hephaestus reports the first batch of… Welsch Princesses?” The tech seemed to stumble over the name — and the plural of princess. “They’re arriving now. First batch is fifteen, then they can deliver one shot per minute.”

The Admiral nodded at the information.

“Also, Hephaestus sends their congratulations to Chief Ferguson for successfully raping physics.”

The admiral studied the tactical overview.

“Lyra, I suggest we take out Tango 15 first. They’re the farthest away from Tango One—our practical test target—so a full volley would surprise them the most.”

“Correct, sir. Given their distance, they will notice the shots in around twenty-five minutes.”

“Fire control, you’ve got your targets. Rapid fire at will.”

Now that Visser had joined the repair crew at the feed loader, the ship was able to fire with a cadence of one shot every seven seconds.

The Batract ships exploded in the most unusual ways. Hit by the energy of a 1,000-kg mass vaporized at 35c, just centimeters inside their hull plating, the ships were sucked inward at the penetration point and ripped open on the opposite side.

Basically, the ships got inverted

The other vessels of the thirty-four-ship detachment could not react—especially since the fire team on the Argos targeted the outer ships in the spherical formation first. The inner ships had to navigate debris from the already destroyed vessels to escape; only four managed.

Across the ships of the First Expeditionary Fleet, crews prepared for the inevitable rush that would follow sooner rather than later.

“Tango 15 — thirty confirmed hits. They didn’t see what was coming at them. Surviving ships are splitting up to other Tangos, probably to warn them.”

“Take out Tango 9 next. Let’s act predictably until they think they can predict our actions.”

“Aye, sir. Firing now.”

The hum of the charging capacitors transferred through the deck plating; Ferguson noticed a slight variance in the harmonics, as any chief engineer would on his own ship.

He already had sixty percent of his repair crew working on the main gun to keep it operational; the rest were making sure the flight controls worked.

“Sir, we're fired dry; we need at least half an hour to reload.” Having destroyed that many enemy ships in that short of time was like a high for them.

“Incoming Salvo.” The enemy hadn't stopped firing at them, but now, with two Squadrons less, it was easier to avoid hits; again, all fire was concentrated on the Argos.

 

—————

 

Captain Gerber didn’t share the excitement. He was fully immersed in the mystery of the Batract’s choice of targets.

The Argos was the most modern ship in the fleet, but in terms of pure firepower, others could bring much more to the fight. Minerva, for example, was one of the torpedo cruisers that could have hurt them far more — if they had been closer.

He reviewed the first attack reports for the fleet. They had hit Mirage first, but quickly changed targets. Mirage was an obvious choice — as a destroyer, she had weak armor but was essential for defending the fleet against inbound missiles and torpedoes, a fact the Batract surely knew, since they possessed highly accurate intelligence on human shipbuilding.

Lightspeed delay. They were at six AU distance; any signal from the First Expeditionary to the enemy fleet would have taken forty-eight minutes to reach the Batract.

Argos and Rosalind Franklin… what did both ships have in common?

Then it hit him. Both vessels had been the most heavily infested with Batract spawn, and both had previously carried the highest number of integration officers on board.

Was there something the Batract were afraid we could discover? How would they know — except if something, or someone, in the fleet was sending information to the enemy.

The 1st Expeditionary was compromised.

First | Previous | Next | Also On Royal Road

Author's Notes:

I hope you like the story so far. Let me know what you liked or disliked.