By noon the beech leaves stopped whispering and started clicking—drying under a sun that had elbowed its way past morning and now insisted on being seen. The clearing hummed with fly and the quiet clatter of people who had learned to be small. Ryn checked the rope around his wrist, the donkey's lead, the donkey's ears. He counted children—he didn't want to but he did—then ticked the numbers of the ones whose names he knew, letting his tongue form each syllable without sound. Pell. Jarla's boy. Two with the same sandy hair he couldn't tell apart unless they spoke.
He had slept a piece of a night with his ear to the ground of the Warden's warning. He felt no wiser. He felt freshly tired in the particular way that made rope burns sting again. The circle in the gorse hummed low and behaved like a dangerous dog content to watch.
"Move," Hana said. She had slept the length of a breath and now stood with her hair braided back and her eyes bright and cold. "If we don't, we'll argue about food with people who didn't run and that argument will kill us more than swords."
Ryn nodded. He tied the last of the Guild rope to the cart with a neat twist and a hitch and a prayer that wasn't to anything. He'd gotten the salvage writ from the factor wrapped in oilskin and tucked it into the inner pocket of his patched vest. He did not intend to use it on a desk.
"Back to the old toll?" Sereth asked, scanning the cover. "Or keep east along the fell? The road wants us."
"Road gets company," Tamsin said dryly, looking at the ridge where dust lifted in slow fingers. "Garron. Guild. Neither cooks well."
"The fell," Ryn decided. "There's an abandoned tollhouse two miles—if the factor's scribble counts for anything." He tapped his vest where the writ lay. "We take it, lock it, make it ours a day. If we fail, we keep moving. We don't stick too long to any hum."
Ilyon bounced on the balls of his feet. He hadn't slept much; his eyes were dark, but his mouth had that eager quirk of a man who'd read about something and then found it in the world. "Peripheral nodes like the one last night sometimes have—cache boxes," he said hopefully. "Old kit. Old papers. If this tollhouse sat on one, we could—"
Tamsin pointed two knuckles at her own eyes and then at him. "If you say 'we could' without a 'we will,' I cut off your 'could' and throw it to the pigs."
"Yes," Ilyon said meekly. "We will—possibly—" He cut himself off when Tamsin arched one eyebrow. "We will check."
They moved.
The fell was a long back of heath and stunted gorse that ran like a tired mule, gentle at first and then mean. The path had once been packed to hard earth by honest carts. Now it had ruts deep enough to twist an ankle or break a wheel in a finger snap. Ryn kept the cart tight on the crown and let the donkey pick her own feet. He had learned to trust animal decisions half a day ago—someone else's life always paid when he didn't.
The sun made the world brittle. Flies found the blood under Ryn's linen wraps and celebrated. He swatted and then stopped; his hands had better work. The shard under his skin lay quiet and cool, like a coin tabbed to a ledger line that had been balanced for the moment. Good. He liked it silent and hated that he called it good.
"Sereth," he said, without looking back. The older man drifted up along the hedge, light-footed as ever. "Lines today," Ryn said soft, "and then at dusk I need your hands on that… thing I did with the slab. If I do it again, tie me."
Sereth made a small sound that could have been agreement or amusement. "I'll use a nice knot," he said. "One your mother taught you."
"I don't—" Ryn began, then shut his mouth. "Yes."
Hana moved among the walkers like a working dog, returning hands to rope, breaking up arguments with a slap of words. The Guild runner with the yellow sash stuck close to her; he had learned that standing near someone who made sense made other people look at him with more trust than his sash did. He listened when Hana said, "Tie low," and "Put her on the shady side," and "No, you don't get to pick the weight that feels less like your guilt."
It took an hour to top the fell's back. From there, the world opened into a shallow basin where old stone fence lines spiderwebbed and a larger brown band cut across—another road. Near where their track met it, a low huddle of stone promised a building. It looked dead from here: roof slumped, walls leaning, that particular slouch of a place that had kept its last winter alone and did not intend to hold another.
Ryn's hands itched anyway. A door to bar. Ties to set. Windows to string. His mind set lines and he had to bite down on his teeth to not run ahead and be a fool.
"Hold," Sereth said softly, catching Ryn's sleeve. He pointed with his chin. Ryn squinted. The basin held movement. Not a column—too few. Not mine scroungers—too fast. A party. Five, six, maybe nine. They moved along the large road at a patient trot. At their head, a man carrying a spear with a ribbon of blue. Ryn's stomach went cold. No—blue, but not the spear-woman's limp, not her rhythm. A different man at the head, a lean figure with a long-hemmed coat and a hat that had been respectful once. He walked like someone who had cut in a city, not a field. He had, at his hip, a short blade that glinted odd in the sun.
Not Garron. Not the spear-woman.
The Guild? No banners. No pikes. The hat. That short blade.
Tamsin breathed, equal parts contempt and interest. "Bluecoat," she said. "Sponsor's men."
Ryn didn't understand the word yet. "Sponsor?"
Ilyon did. His face went suddenly bad. "Someone who isn't the Guild and isn't a lord and thinks that makes him clean," he said quickly and quietly. "He buys from bandits and sells to towns and calls himself necessary. He wants nodes. He wants graft. He's building a… network."
Ryn swallowed the impulse to say a word he'd saved for men like the father he didn't remember. "He wants the tollhouse," he said instead. "We get there first."
"How?" Sereth asked dryly.
Ryn looked down the slope, gauging distance, angle, rope, breath. His body reported its injuries calmly, like line items. He put a hand on the donkey's neck. She flicked an ear, unimpressed. He chose a sin.
"Run," he said.
They ran. The cart clattered. Rope burned palms. The donkey put her head down and did what she had been asked, saint that she was. Ryn cut across the slope at a diagonal, putting a dry stone wall between them and the road where the bluecoats trotted. The wall broke at a stile and he shoved the cart through it with a sound that made his teeth clench, then hauled back into a hedge that embraced them with thorns.
The bluecoats heard the racket; their leader glanced up. His eyes slid past the hedgerow and didn't snag. He was used to cutting noise out when it wasn't on the road. His lot trotted on.
"Left," Ryn panted to Hana and the men at rope. He led them along the hedge's inside line. It was messy. He ripped his sleeve, lost the skin of one knuckle to a flinty stone, nearly stepped in a burrow hole. It was faster than the road. They came out with a last bounce over a fallen section of wall and dove under the shadow of the tollhouse's low roofline like animals seeking a burrow.
The tollhouse was not dead. It breathed. The door swung on leather hinges someone had cobbled recently. Inside, two bedrolls, ash in the hearth that wasn't old, a drip line from the roof catching clean water in a ceramic jar. Someone had been using it. The smell in the corner—a tang under the old damp—said men had taken care to keep it livable. That meant one thing: they would be back.
"Quick," Ryn said. "Rope. Line. Kids in the back, not near the hearth—you'll trip. Jarla, you and your idiot husband lean against the door when I say, not now. Sereth—window. Tamsin—murder hole. Ilyon—stop sniffing and help or I'll throw you at the next man who comes through the door so you can say 'could' at him."
Ilyon jumped into motion, offended and grateful, hands busy. He dragged the water crock to one side, tying it to a bent nail with a promptness that made Ryn forgive him everything for one breath. Tamsin found a square of missing mortar under the window ledge and made it larger with a knife, turning it into a place to stick badness through. Sereth set a line knee-high across the room; anyone stumbling in would clip it and present his throat to the line Ryn was tying at chest height.
The bluecoats' footsteps shifted a hair outside—dull to sharp as they left mud for stone. They slowed. The leader's voice. "Here," he said. He had the voice of a man who had said 'here' in many different rooms. "Check."
Ryn clapped his hands twice. The room went still. He put his fingers on the anchor he'd tied at waist height and let the Linework sense slide into his head like a favorite tool. The world offered him vectors. He chose the ugly ones.
The door pushed. Jarla's husband leaned because Ryn said and was suddenly good at leaning. The door held. The leader laughed, a genuine, amused noise. "Well-kept. Knock," he told someone behind him.
A fist hammered. The leather hinge jiggled. The nail Tamsin had wedged under the sill bounced. Ryn didn't answer. The fist hammered again, polite within its limits. The leader didn't want to bang his face on someone else's work.
"Open in the name of accommodation," he said. The voice oozed a kind of fairness that made Ryn's teeth grind. "We're not here to bleed you. We're here to make things tidy. Let us in and we'll talk like men who pay for firewood."
"Go away," Hana said through her teeth. "Or come in and bleed like everyone else."
The leader laughed again. He liked people who talked back. He probably thought it made them interesting. He tapped the door with the butt of his spear politely. "Half-elf," he said. Ryn went cold. "We can use your hands."
"Oh, good," Tamsin whispered harshly. "Everyone wants your hands. You should rent them."
Ryn swallowed and placed his palm on the line. He whispered, "Anchor," and the line answered in his bones. The System slid a small clean note onto his table because it couldn't help itself.
[Approach: 8. Disposition: Assertive. Equipment: Mixed melee. One alchemical implement (unknown).]
[Advice: Ambush in the door; break morale with first blood.]
"Break," Ryn breathed to Sereth.
Sereth nodded minutely and stood to the side of the door, bow held low, arrow nocked, vision set just past where a man's chest would be if he pushed in first.
The leader slid the spear tip into the crack, testing. Tamsin slapped the shaft with her palm and pushed. On the other side, he didn't let her push it out of his hand. He had hands that knew how to play at doors. He smiled again. Ryn could hear it through wood. "Last chance to be agreeable," he said.
Hana spat and didn't bother to put words to sludge.
The door hit the decided moment. It came when the man behind the leader got impatient and when the leader decided he liked his own patience more than the door's strength. He stepped aside. "Jorr," he said, and Ryn heard the tone that men used when they preferred other men to bleed first. Jorr kicked.
The door swung inward hard. Jarla's husband stepped aside at the last breath. Sereth's arrow went in clean under the first man's collarbone and stuck against bone with a meaty thunk. He screamed in a perfect open-throated sob. Tamsin's knife left her hand and licked across the lead man's cheek, scoring skin and muscle. He swore when blood surprised him and stumbled into the jangle line. The tin sang one long pure note. Ryn jerked the chest-high line. It caught him just below the jaw. He gagged. Hana shoved the water crock. It slammed into the shin of the third man in with all the momentum of a household making a point. He fell hard on his face.
"Now," Ryn said, and the room moved as if it had been practicing for an hour. Sereth followed the first arrow with a second into a thigh. He didn't waste breath on clever shots. Tamsin flowed through the gap and stabbed the leader's forearm where tendon ran. He dropped his spear with a short exclamation and picked it up with the other hand; he was trained, then, not gutter. Ryn swung the pry bar in a tight arc. A blunt weapon steamed when it hit cheekbone. The leader's hat went flying; the man staggered.
Behind him, the bluecoat with the alchemical bag fumbled and came up with a flask that was not oil. It frothed blue. He pitched it high. Ryn stepped under and out on instinct; it broke on the wall and hissed a vapor that made the eyes water and the chest want to cough. Ilyon shouted, "Down!" and slammed his cloak over the flask. It stuck, drank. The cloak smoldered, then went black. Ilyon coughed, eyes running, and smiled idiotically at his own sense. Tamsin grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back out of the line of a machete like he was a child caught reaching at the hearth.
The leader—hatless now—had a cut on his cheek that had gone oddly stiff. It glittered. Ryn's stomach turned. Graft-juice. The cut didn't bleed right. It crystallized a fringe where blood should have come. The man's eyes stayed calm and mean. He stepped in with a short sword—shorter than Ryn's bar; he would want the bar to come out first—point low. Ryn pulled the bar back like a feint, then shoved it down onto the man's foot. He grunted. Ryn threw his shoulder into the leader's chest. They jammed together and for three heartbeats the room became too small for two grown men and the donkey snorted like she was deciding whether to bite someone's skull through.
"Back," Sereth said in a careful voice that meant he needed them not to move for a heartbeat while he took a shot. Tamsin was already out of the way; she saw the arc and the archer and the leader's neck and moved a hair. Sereth's arrow passed so close to Ryn's ear he felt the feathers graze his skin. It punched the alchemist in the jaw. The alchemist's hand spasmed. Something he had held fell. It broke. A flash of light like summer lightning blinded half the room. The second bluecoat's knife came up at Ryn's side; Pain Gate dulled the bite and left the heat. He twisted, hooked the man's wrist, and bent and broke without art. He cried like a man who had never known exactly what part of him made his hand grip until it didn't.
The leader grunted and gave ground. He could give ground without being a coward, Ryn saw; he would retreat and kill later if it was the better choice. Ryn hated him for it. Tamsin stepped in to finish the throat with her knife. The leader's eyes went to her like he was checking the color of something before buying. He twisted, fast, and knocked her wrist with the back of his hand in a precise motion that said he'd trained with someone who had enjoyed hurting children. Her knife flew. It stuck in the mantle. She hissed like a cat. Then she smiled like a cat too and stepped under his arm and put the heel of her palm into his ear with all the love in the world. He staggered. Dazed.
Hana's foot came down on his instep with that particular ferocity only women who have carried toddlers possess. He cursed beautifully and lost balance.
"Out," he said to his men, suddenly crisp. They obeyed. The alchemist stumbled blind, hand to his jaw and mouth bleeding around an arrowbase. A boy barely old enough to shave grabbed his sleeve and yanked him by memory. The leader let the withdraw be untidy; he could tidy later. He counted the weight of the door in the movement of his eyes. He looked at Ryn as if measuring a tool. "Later," he said, and spat blood. It didn't look like blood. It had fine grit in it, glittering. The spit sizzled on the hearth rock. Ryn's gorge rose.
"How much graft?" Tamsin breathed. Sereth made a small sign with his free hand.
The leader stepped backward out of the door with the spear he had dropped now back in his off-hand; his boy had handed it to him while he fought, quick and quiet. He was a good teacher. A bad man. He called out into the daylight without turning, "We talk later, guild dog. He belongs to me."
The factor stood ten paces off to the side, soaked through with a kind of sweat that had nothing to do with heat. He had pikes behind him in a half-willing line, spears at ready. He had his hands open and down like a man trying to settle a spooked wagon team. "No one belongs to you," he said mildly. "They belong to bread."
"Bread belongs to those who hold it," the bluecoat leader said, amused again, and then the amused dropped and something colder showed under it. "Stop playing at papers. There's work." He turned to Ryn. "This place is mine. You use it, you rent. Fair price." He smiled as he said it and for a second looked like a real man in a market. It frightened Ryn more than the graft glitter.
"Your price is breath on children," Hana snapped.
The leader shrugged. "I could tax that too." He lifted his hand in a small, precise signal. His bluecoats backed away, smooth. He flipped his hat up with the spear butt, caught it, put it on, and looked whole again.
He left. The room exhaled in jagged pieces. Ryn went to the door and put his palm on it and felt the lines hum. He breathed and didn't fall down where his knees wanted to.
The System took the moment to set out its ledger and Ryn didn't slap it away because he had no slaps left.
[Encounter: Sponsor's Crew (Scout/Enforcer).]
[Experience gained: +26.]
[Improvised Bomb II — Practice small increase.]
[Hook-and-Break (Basic) — Thresholds reached: Upgrade eligible.]
"Later," Ryn grunted.
The factor stood in the doorway like a man who had not been invited and stayed anyway. He looked at Hana and Jarla and the children and at Dorran asleep against the wall; then his eyes found Ryn's. "He's building something," the factor said quietly. "He'll ask for papers. I don't like when men use papers better than me."
"I don't like when men use knives better than me," Tamsin said. She wiped her blade on the leader's hat-hair in the doorway and then flicked the blood-grit to the hearth. It sizzled again. "He's had things done to him." She looked at Ryn. "His surgeon is worse than him."
"Chitin graft," Ilyon said softly, half to himself as he peered at a smear on the floor. "Not like Garron's—this is finer. Infiltrative. Augmented blood too. Nasty. When it fails, it will be… crunchy."
"Crunchy," Tamsin repeated, horrified and delighted.
Ryn let their voices move and went to the back where the hearth smoked. He lifted the cloak with the chemical splash under it. The cloth had hardened, glassy and thin. He tapped it with a fingernail. It flaked into blue dust. He had never seen that before. He didn't want to again.
He went back to the table—such as it was—and set the salvage writ on it. He cracked the seal with the edge of his knife. The paper inside had that satisfying weight good paper has—a thing rare in these years. The writing was neat and irritating and mercifully short. It said: Salvage rights to the tollhouse east-of-fell granted to the bearer, under Guild protection provision 17. It had a seal that looked like someone had pressed it with care. He had hoped it would give him joy. It gave him indigestion.
He looked at the factor. "He said rent," Ryn said. "Will paper make him blink?"
"Paper has made worse men blink," the factor said. "We'd need men behind it."
"You brought some," Sereth said, nodding to the pike line.
The factor didn't puff. "Not enough for a man like that and his surgeon. Not today. I can give you a day. After that—" He lifted his hands, palms up. "After that, we do mathematics with blood."
Ryn didn't argue the poetry because he had no breath for it. "A day is enough," he said. He looked at the hearth, the lines, the door. "We'll make this into a mouth with teeth and hold it. We'll collect people who come through, give them rope and bread and keep their names. Then we'll move. He will move too. Gerron will find out about him if he hasn't already."
"He knows," Tamsin said softly, certain. "He hates being second. He hates needing surgeons."
Ilyon made a hungry noise. "If they fight each other," he began.
Ryn held up a hand. "If they do, we step aside and we cut ropes on the ones who want our ankles." He looked at the factor. "You can make this official for a day?"
"I can make this official as long as my column exists," the factor said quietly. "I don't know how long that will be."
"You're honest," Ryn said, surprised.
The factor's mouth flattened into something that might have been a smile on a heavier day. "That's not what they call me in town," he said.
Hana rolled her shoulders and went to the door. She shed welcome like a snake. "Go," she said to the factor. "Bring us flour and salt and keep your men between us and his man's surgeon. Let us feed people. That'll be enough to feel like heroes if you want to feel like that." Her voice made the word taste like a slab of bone gone bad.
The factor bowed his head and left, pikes on his flanks.
The door closed. The donkey fetched a mouthful of hay from a corner because she expected the world to give her what it always had. Ryn sat with his back to the wall and then forced himself to his feet. "Lines," he said. "All the lines. We make this into a tooth. Then—" He looked at Sereth. "We go fetch those at the eel-bend who ran the wrong direction. We do it by dusk. I don't want to fight the bluecoat in this place after dark. If the Warden wasn't lying, the wood doesn't like that."
"The Warden doesn't lie," Sereth said calmly. "He burns liars. That is different."
Ilyon shivered happily and muttered into his little book about the Warden. Tamsin flicked dust off the mantle and caught Ryn's eye. "You're getting faster," she said, not entirely approving. "Careful. Fast means you forget to trip on purpose sometimes."
He nodded. He felt it too. The System flowed in beside his breath with a ledger he could tolerate.
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper I
Level: 5
Strength: 7
Agility: 11
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 10
Tenacity: 10
Corruption: 3% (Shard Sync: 12%)
[Skills:]
Makeshift Trap II (efficiency 10%+)
Improvised Bomb II
Linework II
Quickstep I (92%)
Hook-and-Break (Basic) — Upgrade available
[Techniques:]
Snapline Step (55% stabilized)
[Title:]
Ropehand (local)
[New Objective: Fortify Tollhouse (Day Hold). Reward: Stabilization (temporary), Reputation (Local). Risk: Sponsor attention.]
He rubbed his hands. They hurt. He set that aside. He lined his palms against rough wood. It hummed. He breathed.
They set teeth.
He ran rope across the hearth mouth, high enough to catch a neck. He tied it with a knot he had learned when he was twelve and hauling wheels onto axles without a proper jack. He hung a bell from a rafter and tuned it so it would ring low at two beats and high at one. He spread sand across the smooth floorboards near the door so men wearing city boots would slip and men in field boots would not. Tamsin smeared lampblack into a quiet triangle in the corner where she intended to be invisible and violent. Sereth set a line of three small nails in the door that would catch a sleeve and make a man stop for half a heartbeat and read his fate. Ilyon built two little clay cups and poured thin, thin skunk-water into them as kisses to be thrown into the faces of ideas.
They ate. Bread tasted like rope. Water tasted like hooks. Ryn checked on Dorran. The old guard slept through the noise like men dying do, with a peculiar calculation of breath. He had not died yet. They had nothing to do with it and everything.
They moved again before the sun sulked. Ryn took the salvage writ with a little guilt and left Hana guarding the rope with two women who had decided they liked yelling at men. Sereth took the right-hand path along the hedgerow. Tamsin loped left, quick as thought, knife in hand. Ilyon trotted behind Ryn muttering about angles and men's foolishness. The donkey looked at them with disinterest and then nosed Ryn's vest for an apple he didn't have. He promised her one again and hated how much the lie reminded him of every other.
At the eel-bend they found two bodies tangled in rope at the creek edge, one living and angry, one not living and still. The living one was a man Ryn had pushed earlier against his better sense. He had made the wrong turn. He had decided to run to the road alone and found his own math wrong. Ryn hauled him up. The man swore and then sobbed and then tried to run again. Ryn tied him to the cart and let him pull until he found the idea of not dying preferable. People are rope too.
They moved them back, half a dozen more, mouth set, eyes too big. They collected a pig that had decided to think itself a dog and made Jarla laugh for real. They collected a girl whose arm had been broken at the elbow and set it with a scream and a splint; Ryn said the word "sorry" six times and meant it six different ways.
By the time they came over the low rise back to the tollhouse, the light had gone yellow and then slid toward red. A shadow stood at the door.
Hat. Clean coat. Blue ribbon on a spear.
The leader leaned against the doorpost like a man waiting for his bread to be pulled from an oven. He looked at the line of rope Ryn had tied and admired it. He did not go near it. He looked at Ryn and said, "Your hands look busier than my ledger. You ready to rent?"
"I'm ready to spit in your ledger," Hana said from inside.
His mouth did the thing of a man trying not to be charmed. "Ma'am," he said. He tipped his hat; blood grit had dried on his cheek in a crystalline web. It looked wrong in the light. It made Ryn's stomach flip.
Ryn did not say yes. He didn't say no. He put the writ on the doorpost, just to spite himself. The leader tilted his head and glanced at it and made a face like a man who had bitten a fly. "Papers," he said. "Adorable."
"You can't eat them," Ryn said, and raised the short sword. The leader's eyes slid to the buckler. He watched Ryn's hands the way Garron had, as if men's hands were the only honest part of them.
"I can feed a man to make them," he said. "And I can take your donkey while you watch and make you write a paper about it."
The donkey snorted and pulled at Ryn's vest. Ryn fought a smile and lost. He stepped forward to the line. The leader's eyes dropped to it with genuine respect. "You do your work well," he said. "It's almost enough to make me want to pay you. Almost."
"Try later," Tamsin said, hidden, cruel.
"I will," he said cheerfully. He looked at the forest, at the moor, at the rising dust far off. "By tomorrow night, this piece is mine. I'll take rent in coin or blood, your choice." He looked at Ryn as if trying out ownership on his mouth. "Half-elf, do you want to survive or do you want to pretend you're going to write your own road?"
Ryn wanted to say, I want to hold a wheel in a shed and forget your face, then felt some other mouth open in him. "I want you to have to cough up a tooth every time you bite," he said, surprised at himself.
The leader laughed like a man who had not heard that before and liked it. The laugh had no humor. "Then we'll see how many I can spare," he said, and stepped back into the dusk.
He left. Ryn stood with his hand on the line and felt it hum. The System slid a line in his head like a chalk snap.
[Upcoming Event: Assault (Sponsor).]
[Window: Night (high risk) or dawn (moderate).]
[Recommendation: Layered defense; misuse Snapline Step at your peril; practice Hook-and-Break (Intermediate) during initial clashes.]
Ryn breathed. His ribs ached. His wrists burned. He felt the donkey bump his shoulder with a dry nose and wanted to weep, then laughed soundlessly instead.
"Lines," he said. "Faster."
Sereth nodded. Tamsin twitched her coin. Ilyon uncorked something that smelled like regret and hope. Hana rolled her shoulders. Jarla set her jaw. The Guild runner with yellow sash asked where to stand and Ryn told him, and the boy held there until his legs shook.
The sun dropped. The lip of the world turned iron. The tollhouse now theirs hummed with their knots. The Warden's wood held its breath, because it had been asked to in a tone even oaks respect. Ryn put his hand on the line and counted.
One. Two.
Dusk answered.
And then the first of the bluecoats came out of shadow, and the tollhouse bit.
The night wasn't going to be long enough. The night was going to last forever. Ryn could feel both truths and the weight of the pry bar and the rope and the donkey's trust and the shortcut the shard offered in his head like a coward's road. He didn't take it. Not yet.
He grinned a skeleton grin he would hate in morning light and whispered, "Anchor," and the house answered, and the line sang, and his hands knew what to do.
The door shuddered. The tin sang. He pulled.
The system chimed in his ear with cold calm.
[Combat Initiated.]
And then the work began.