The ruins were quiet now. Not the kind of quiet that came from peace, but the kind Warren trusted.
It was the kind of quiet that left bodies cooling in alleyways and wet footprints fading into the dark. The kind that marked aftermath more than safety, as if the world hadn't recovered but merely recoiled, too tired or too wounded to scream again.
There was no quiet to be found here, not really, not with snoring that could shake a shelf loose.
Wren slept on the water mattress. Curled in a heated blanket lined with repurposed synthetic quilt padding, thick enough to hold warmth and wide enough to cover her from head to toe with room to spare. The stitching had been done by hand. It was oversized, warm, and wholly hers. She didn't stir. One arm slung over Styll, fingers tangled deep in the creature's fur like comfort had happened mid-motion and never let go. She snored like a chainsaw making sweet love to a bear, loud, unapologetic, and completely at peace.
Styll twitched beside her, chasing something silent through a dream too old to name. Her claws curled. Then relaxed. Then curled again. Each motion precise, animal, real. She snored too, quiet, rhythmic little puffs like she was trying not to be heard and failing adorably. She did not wake. She only endured.
The pharmacy wasn't quiet. Not even close. Power buzzed through its bones, climbing walls and snaking across the ceiling in cable veins Warren had patched and repurposed by hand. The upgraded waterwheel generator hummed out in the open now.
It wasn't clean noise. It was layered, alive, metal clanking, pressure shifting, water moving through patched tubes. The hum of systems that didn't belong together but worked because Warren forced them to. Nothing here was silent. Not the animals on the mattress. And certainly not Warren, who was still in the workroom, finishing a final weld with the kind of focus that made the sparks feel like punctuation.
They'd gotten a nano-forge from the Bazaar. Paid eight fragments and a favor for it. Not a full unit, not even close, just a modular upgrade kit stripped down to its essential components, outdated by Green Zone standards and still tagged as restricted-use tech. But out here, it was priceless. Not a standalone forge. Something else entirely. A bridge between the old and the impossible. A transformation kit designed to retrofit crude fire-forges and mechanical stations into precision workspaces driven by nanite lattices. Not sleek. Not user-friendly. Functional. And dangerous in the right hands.
Warren spent three days tearing his workshop apart to make it fit. He reinforced the walls with scavenged reactor shrouds to limit nanite leakage, burned out four breakers while testing the thermal lines, and finally gutted the forge's core burner to install heat-resistant guide rails capable of withstanding the internal fluid-phase turbulence generated by active nanite behavior during material deconstruction and recomposition.
He bolted down a calibration rail salvaged from a collapsed drone depot, sleeved it in plasteel spacers, and interfaced it with tool brackets he'd rebuilt from scrap and memory. The final step was integrating a stabilization coil from the same drone wreck, wrapped in a ceramic dampener to cut down on feedback spikes and instability.
When it was done, it didn't look like something a scav should own. It looked like something jury-rigged by a mad scientist with too much time and too many spare parts. And it worked.
The heart of the upgrade was a micro-reactor housing: a reclaimed nanite crucible now sitting where flame once roared. Where he used to heat and hammer, he now wielded programmable matter. The kit let him break raw material down to the molecular level. Nanites didn't melt metal. They erased it. Reduced it to particulate fog and rebuilt it from logic outward, forming whole items without molds, dies, or templates. Creation by intent, and by hand.
What tied it all together was the terminal: an old slate-core interface he'd found tucked behind a sealed triage cabinet near the pharmacy's rear service stair. It had been buried in a nest of backup batteries, cracked medical trays, and decommissioned storage crates, coated in years of dust and grit like it had been waiting for someone to find it. By all logic, it shouldn't have survived. But it had. A true stroke of luck, though Warren didn't believe in luck. Finding it was the moment he started thinking of the pharmacy as shelter. It became infrastructure.
The terminal still booted. Still held power. Its display flickered, dim at first, then stable, like something waking up from a long sleep. And more importantly, it could run the legacy OS the nano-forge module needed to operate. That single fact changed everything. Warren hardwired it into the back end of the crucible, bypassing half a dozen corrupted inputs and rerouting its cracked matrix through a jury-rigged cascade of signal bridges built from warped adapter ports and scavenged memory rails.
The interface was clunky. Outdated. A relic by any Green Zone metric. But it was his. And it worked. No corporate walls, no license gates, no security protocols to by pass. Just a blank slate, and full control. It let Warren draft schematics by hand, shape curves with keystrokes, build from nothing but concept. No preloaded patterns. No market locks. Just material, intent, and time. And time was something he was learning to carve.
He could build anything now. Not what they allowed. What he imagined.
The transformation was brutal, not just on the space but on his body too. His bench cracked under the pressure of the first calibration cycle, and he replaced it with plasteel ribs from an old railcar strut, each one cut by hand, each one hoisted into place with shoulders already worn raw from hauling conduit and ceramic paneling. The wiring fried twice before he figured out how to ground the emitter properly. The third time, it held. After that, it sang, though the hum came with the scent of scorched fingers and solvent-laced sweat.
But it cost him. When an insulation plate slipped loose and sliced his palm open, Wren had to clean the wound and stitch it shut before infection set in. Another time, the vent shroud buckled during a test pulse and threw him backward into a steel rack, hard enough to bruise half his spine and dislocate a rib. Once, the heat shielding warped mid-pulse, and he caught the full flash of the surge, his arm blistered from wrist to elbow before he could kill the circuit. She reset the rib with teeth clenched and hands steady, quieter than usual but not unkind, and treated the burn with the same precision she used to set bones.
She tried to help with the upgrades. Crawled into the crawlspaces with him. Hauled tools. Braced panels. Steadied ladders when the mounts slipped under their weight. She didn't grasp the forge's mechanics or the strange logic behind nanite control, but her hands were steady and she followed instructions well. She watched him. Mirrored his movements. Absorbed his clipped commands without complaint. She couldn't plan the work. But she could do it. And she did. Her questions came late or missed the shape of what was needed, but her hands never shook. Her presence steadied him more than he admitted.
The nano-forge didn't erase the old forge. It evolved it. The heat tools still hung on the wall, and the manual dies still saw use, but now the bench was something more. A machine-space shaped to his will.
Now it sat in the corner of his station, hardwired into the grid Warren had pulled through the pharmacy wall. An integrated matrix. Not sleek. Not clean. But more than a forge now.
It was his forge still. But sharper. Meaner. Built for war.
He reached into the side rack and drew out the umbrella. It looked no different from any other: a simple black canopy, its curved handle worn and smooth with age. But the balance was wrong for something so mundane. Too dense. Too silent. He remembered crafting it on a whim back when the forge was still just heat and hammer, before the nano-forge, before fragments, before feedback nodes and careful blueprints. No purpose beyond curiosity. He had shaped it like someone sketching in metal, letting weight and form guide his hands more than any plan. It had felt good. Honest. A moment of stillness turned to motion. Not survival. Not war. Just the pleasure of making something strange and solid and his. Just the shape of an idea made real.
[Examine]
Material: Carbon-tempered ribs, ballistic-weave canopy, concealed composite spine
Durability: High
Structural Stability: Rigid with minor flex (tolerates repeated directional force)
Grip/Surface Texture: Worn leather, smooth grip, excellent hold in wet conditions
Weight: 3.8 kg
Balance Rating: Unnatural (Weighted forward on a non-standard axis)
Fatigue Resistance: Excellent Handles strain without deformation
Sound Signature: Minimal (Collapses and opens near-silent)
Modification History: Custom (x4): reinforced frame, recoil-dampened core, impact mesh, bladed tip mod
Origin: Unknown. No registry traces
Notes: Object resists system taxonomy. Caution advised. Further scans ineffective without manual override
Warren held it up and turned it slowly, letting the light catch on the worn grip. It wasn't a weapon by design. That's what made it effective. It slipped past suspicion. Folded clean. Looked like cover. Felt like authority.
It was absurd. It was beautiful. It was his new favorite toy. He placed it back into its rack. He remember the screams and smiled lovingly.
He rolled up his sleeves and let out a slow breath. His hands were already moving.
[Crafting Skill: Activated]
A quiet tick echoed through his thoughts: a system tone, faint and cold, like distant clockwork. It didn't speak in words or pop-ups. It didn't guide. It simply acknowledged him. The world sharpened. His hands felt faster, surer. His thoughts segmented into layers: material integrity, balance weight, strain tolerance, structural bleed.
Passive Buff Applied: Focus Node (Crafting)
+30% precision for manual assembly
+20% material diagnostic recall
Warren's workshop had its own gravity, something dense and precise, drawn inward like the calm eye of a storm. Reinforced plasteel panels covered the floor, set tight over broken pharmacy tile in a geometry too exact for accident. Every line mattered. Every gap sealed.
Along one wall stretched the tools: mounted, racked, and labeled in clean block letters. Warren's handwriting, clear, sharp, and brutally legible, spelled out exactly what each tool was for. CURRENT. PRESSURE. EDGE. FUSE. TORQUE. Each label was etched on worn steel tabs, bolted into place like permanent warnings. The most-used tools bore their history openly: grips smoothed from repetition, handles darkened by oil and time, wrappings replaced with wire, tape, or twine. Whatever held.
The trays beneath the bench weren't random salvage piles. They were curated layers: raw circuitry grouped by conductivity, stripped wire categorized by gauge and tensile memory. Solvent tins gleamed beside pressure vials. An old ceramic blade lay central, resting on a cloth square that hadn't moved in weeks. Every item had a place. Every piece had a function.
The air buzzed faintly with charge. It smelled of ozone, steel, old polymer. An alchemy of labor and heat. This wasn't comfort. It was control. A warded circle inside the storm.
This was Warren's forge, his sanctuary, his machine-space.
This was where the future learned to obey.
Stage One: Yellow Raincoat Upgrades
He laid the coat flat across the bench, its yellow surface bright and whole. Not glossy, not loud. Just bright like a flare before the dark. It was more than clothing, more than insulation or armor. It was his second skin. A warning made visible, a relic made real, a symbol of something that shouldn't have survived and did anyway. He peeled back the lining, exposing the rib seams and shoulder frame, hands moving with slow, deliberate intent.
First came the armor. Warren worked mesh into the fabric with careful stitches, each loop tight, each thread double-checked. Composite riot plating, salvaged from a collapsed checkpoint, was cut and shaped to nestle beneath the outer shell. It added weight but not stiffness, and it wouldn't stop a lance. But it might slow a blade. And hesitation was all he ever needed.
Then came the foil. Stealth tech pulled from a shredded glider suit, warped but functional. It had cost him five fragments to trade for the parts. That was more than most weapons fetched in the open market, and he hadn't flinched. People knew what this was. More importantly, they understood what it could do. Reactive to moisture, designed to fracture heat patterns and smear visual outlines, it was a perfect ghosting layer.
In dry air, it did little. But when the air turned heavy with rain, rolled thick with mist, or whispered cold with snow, it bloomed. Not into light or shimmer, but into absence. It collapsed thermal readings, blurred silhouettes, broke up movement so cleanly the eye simply failed to follow.
While he moved, he vanished. Not vanished like a cloak or flicker-field. Vanished like memory fading. Like a figure misremembered the moment it was seen. Only when he stopped would the world snap back. Stillness became betrayal. And out here, stillness didn't last long. He pressed the foil into place, locking each edge down with chemical heat from a cracked med-kit, his hands working with the certainty of ritual.
Crafting Skill: Alignment Phase Triggered Material properties analyzed: mesh plus foil compatibility: 78 percent Environmental trigger: can be activated in precipitation and condensation-rich environments
He sealed the whole layer with ash-wax, waterproofing every bond, watching the coat take on its new shape.
Mod Installed: Ghost Veil Mod Installed: Light Armor Reinforcement Item Update: Yellow Raincoat [plus two Mods]
He held it up. It looked no different. That was perfect.
This wasn't protection. This wasn't concealment. This was defiance sewn into fabric. A myth tailored by his own hands.
He moved to the mirror Wren had salvaged. Warped, cracked, but good enough. The coat bright and hungry. In the rain, it would disappear entirely. The hood framed his face just right, shadowed, sharp, unmistakable. A glimpse of someone you'd forget the moment you turned away. Or try to. But never could.
Stage Two: Forging the Truncheon
He turned to the nano-forge.
It was already active, humming as nanites swirled in its chamber. Warren fed it lengths of raw blacksteel traded for in the Bazaar, watching as the material deconstructed into particulate fog. Blacksteel couldn't be forged the usual way. Flame didn't melt it, pressure didn't crack it. Blacksteel flexed, but even twisted, it seemed to remember its shape, as if the material itself refused to forget what it had once been. Even the best industrial presses couldn't shape it cleanly. Only a nano-forge, with its molecular breakdown and controlled nanite layering, could reshape the substance.
That was why he needed this setup so badly. Most scavs thought blacksteel was junk, only useful if you got lucky and found a piece already shaped like something you needed. Anything more than that was hopeless. They didn't know what he did.
He'd long suspected blacksteel wasn't just alloy, it was corruption made solid. The substance grew in some Broken, forming when their chips got damaged. Instead of shutting down, the chips spun endlessly, building microscopic nanite colonies that spiraled out of control. Useless. Nonfunctional. But over time, they hardened into something else, dense, self-reinforcing, and nearly impossible to break. A kind of tumor the System didn't acknowledge, a legacy of failure turned weapon in the right hands.
He set parameters manually, inputting dimensions from memory. The forge began reshaping the blacksteel, layer by layer, atom by atom, guided by intent more than interface.
Styll stirred and stretched, her tiny claws clicking faintly across the counter as she approached. She didn't mewl or interrupt, just sat beside the bench, watching with a strange, unmoving focus.
Wren shifted in her sleep and murmured something unintelligible. The hum of the forge filled the room, subtle and soothing. Warren's hands didn't stop.
Minutes passed. Then hours. The shape formed in silence.
When it was done, he pulled it free. Still warm, but solid. A weapon, not from a factory, but from him.
Item Created: Black Metal Truncheon Origin: Unknown
It felt good in his hands. Weighted. Balanced. Not just an extension of his will, his will made manifest.
Stage Three: Retractable Spike Mod
The spike, spring, and trigger assembly had all been shaped during the forging process. Warren had built the housing directly into the blacksteel during the layering phase, aligning the cavities and reinforcements atom by atom. No carving, no cutting, just pure design. He wired the thumb switch from a drone kill-switch and tested the release.
Snap. Spike out. Again. Retracted smooth. No sound, no shine, just function.
It was brutal, clean, and it solved the problem that had always gnawed at him. He hated blades. They just didn't work. Not out here. You cut something and it bled, sure, but too many things didn't stop bleeding. Some came harder when they were cut. Some things didn't bleed at all. A clean slice didn't mean a clean kill. But blunt force, breaks slowed things down, gave you a window, made things hesitate. That mattered. This wasn't a knife. It was a mechanism, a tool with rules. just a single violent truth delivered and withdrawn. If he had to, he could cut with it, sure, but that was the point. It gave him the option. To finish. To end. It was closer to a reaper's scythe than a soldier's blade.
Stage Four: Tactile Sensor Coil
He cracked a scavenged sensor unit and rewired its core with salvaged circuitry. Tight solder lines and steady hands. He embedded the assembly into the grip of the truncheon, sealing the contact points with a thin layer of melted lead-alloy.
He gave it a test swing. In his vision, the table lit with soft fracture lines. Weak points. Stress zones. With a slight shift of grip, he could control the force arc, direct the impact to fracture or crush. It was elegant. Precise. Terrifying.
He stood up. The upgraded pharmacy surrounded him: power humming softly, tools arrayed with purpose, the forge still humming. He looked around and, for a moment, he marveled at his work.
Wren stirred, sitting up slowly. She rubbed at her eyes and looked across the room to the truncheon, then to him. She didn't ask questions. Just watched.
Styll jumped into her lap and settled again, her fur rising slightly at the smell of metal and energy in the air.
Warren gave the weapon another glance, then moved to the coat. He slid it on, adjusted the weight across his shoulders. It moved quieter now. Denser. Closer to something real.
He stepped back, took it all in. The storm still whispered outside. Nothing human on the sensors. No heat trails in the far alleys. Only cold.
He smiled. It wasn't joy. It wasn't pride. It was alignment. A part of him felt like it was back where it belonged.
Wren didn't speak, but she reached out and nudged a ration bar his way.
Styll lifted her head, eyes glinting.
Warren sat down beside his tools. He didn't rest. Not yet. He still had work to do.
He leaned back, eyes half-lidded, listening to the storm tapping against the reinforced windows. The city beyond was still crumbling, still soaked in its own ruin. But here, inside these cracked walls and repurposed bones, Warren had built something that held.
He opened the side drawer of the workbench and sorted through what they hadn't used. A chipped ocular lens with a built-in thermal filter. A rust-pocked cylinder with the remains of a plasma node: potentially useful for a breaching torch. Even a compact pressure capsule, intact. One of the few things that could have detonated half their stockpile if mishandled.
Styll crawled over the truncheon now, her small form moving with measured grace. She didn't sniff at it or paw curiously. She simply curled against the haft as if recognizing the weapon the same way she did Warren: as something sharp, dangerous, and hers by proximity.
Wren had risen by then, not to speak, not to interrupt, but to move with her own rhythm. She checked the side vents for leaking condensation, replaced the spent cells in the generator socket, and lit a short-circuit indicator panel above the sink. She moved like a medic treating a space, keeping it alive.
Warren watched her in the reflection of a dented steel pan. The way her brow furrowed in thought, the way she adjusted straps and seals: every motion practical. Not unlike him.
When she finally spoke, it wasn't about the fight or the forge.
"Do you think anyone will come looking?"
He didn't answer right away. "Not yet. But they will."
She didn't ask who. She didn't have to. Between the warlords, the clans, the ghosts of what they'd both done, someone always came eventually.
She nodded, more to herself than to him. "Then we should keep building."
Warren turned back to the forge, running diagnostics through the nanite flow. He still had enough blacksteel for two minor fabrications. Maybe another mod. Maybe something for Styll. He looked toward her, and the creature's bright eyes met his for a moment: unblinking, aware.
Outside, thunder rolled softly, distant but inevitable.
He picked up a fresh coil of filament wire, heat-treated for precision etching. Already, his mind began to shape the next tool, the next mod, the next layer of armor between him and the world.
The work never ended. And Warren wouldn't have it any other way.
The sound lifted higher as he continued to work.
The world was quiet, the kind of quiet that hummed with motion, with storm, with breath held just beneath the surface.
Warren Smith — Level 6
Class: Scavenger
Alignment: Aberrant
Unallocated Stat Points: 0
Attributes:
Strength: 8
Perception: 12
Intelligence: 15
Dexterity: 10
Endurance: 8
Resolve: 12
Skills:
Examine (Passive)
Description: Allows visual inspection of system-integrated objects. Reveals basic stats such as Rarity, Durability, Weight, Material, Balance Rating, Modification History, System Integration, Origin, and Value.
Effect: Can evaluate the properties of items, fragments, and weapons, giving him insight into their potential value, strength, and usability.
Scavenger's Eye (Passive)
Description: Detects salvageable items rapidly in a given environment.
Effect: Highlights objects with functional or modifiable components based on user knowledge and recognition patterns. Activates an internal system overlay.
Quick Reflexes (Passive)
Description: Heightened Dexterity allows the user to react quickly to threats and dodge incoming attacks.
Effect: Increases evasion and reaction speed in combat, allowing the user to avoid attacks more effectively.
Crafting (Active)
Description: Can repurpose materials and fragments to craft weapons, tools, and other useful items.
Effect: The crafting process is influenced by both Perception (for the precision required in delicate tasks) and Intelligence (for understanding the functionality and possible combinations). Can craft or upgrade tools and weapons, enhancing the ability to adapt and survive in the world.