A week passed in a blur of routine. Kazuto's life became a series of small, solvable problems.
Wake up. Check the barrier wall. Oversee the brick-forging operation—dwarves would bring rubble, he'd compress it into perfect blocks. Review the daily trade: goblins left foraged food (improving in quality from roots to actual mushrooms and a few scraggly herbs), took bricks. Dig new rooms into the north wall. Mediate disputes (two dwarves arguing over who got to use the better pick). Check on the prisoner (still sullen). Wonder about the package (still silent).
It was exhausting in a deeply mundane way. He was a manager now, not a deliveryman.
The dwarves had started calling him "Master Kazuto" less like a title and more like a job description, like 'Foreman Kazuto.' He didn't bother correcting them. It was efficient.
The goblins, meanwhile, had become a constant, skittish presence. They didn't enter the basin, but their scouts were always on the rim, watching the strange, orderly activity below. The trade was steady. They'd even started leaving small, polished river stones as decoration with the food, a gesture Doom grudgingly admitted was "almost polite."
On the eighth morning, the routine broke.
Kazuto was at the forging area, turning a pile of scree into stackable slabs for flooring. A high, thin scream echoed down from the eastern rim, followed by the familiar, angry chittering of goblins.
He dropped the slab and ran for the cliff, creating his invisible staircase as he went. Doom and two others followed, climbing the old-fashioned way with picks and ropes.
At the top, he found a standoff.
Three goblins had a fourth person cornered against a rock spire. The person was a woman, tall and thin, wrapped in a dark, travel-stained cloak. A wide-brimmed hat lay on the ground nearby. She held a gnarled wooden staff in front of her like a quarterstaff, but her hands were shaking. One of the goblins had a fresh, bleeding scratch on its arm. The woman's sleeve was torn.
"Back, vermin!" the woman hissed, her voice sharp with fear and authority. "I am not some lost pilgrim!"
The lead goblin snarled, hefting a sharpened stone. It wasn't interested in conversation. It lunged.
Kazuto didn't have time for the staircase. He focused on the space between the goblin's foot and the ground, just like before.
« NOTICE: INTER-TRIBAL HOSTILITY DETECTED. »
The goblin's leading foot hit the immovable point and it pitched forward, faceplanting into the dust with a yelp. The other two goblins spun, seeing Kazuto and the arriving dwarves.
They didn't run. They pointed at the woman, jabbering angrily, miming her hitting them, then pointing accusingly at Kazuto as if to say You see? This is what outsiders do!
The woman stared, first at the tripped goblin, then at Kazuto in his stark blue uniform. Her eyes, a piercing violet, widened in shock and something else—recognition?
"You…" she breathed. "You're the one they're whispering about in the ash-towns. The wall-maker. The mercy."
Kazuto ignored her for a moment. He looked at the goblins. He pointed at the woman, then made a 'stop' gesture with his hands. He then pointed back towards their usual foraging grounds. "No fighting. Go."
The goblins hesitated, glaring at the woman. The one on the ground got up, rubbing its nose. With a final, disgruntled hiss, they gathered and scurried off, casting dirty looks over their shoulders.
The woman sagged against the rock, lowering her staff. "You command goblins." It wasn't a question. It was an accusation of insanity.
"We have a trade agreement," Kazuto said simply. He walked over, picking up her hat and handing it to her. "You hurt one of them."
"It struck me first! I was merely surveying the—" she cut herself off, taking the hat. She studied him with an intensity that felt like being scanned. "You are not what I expected."
"And you are?" Doom growled, finally reaching the top, hefting his pick.
"Mavis," she said, straightening her cloak. She had a sharp, intelligent face, pale from lack of sun. "A strategist. Or I was, before the Seat of Ash decided my calculations were a threat." A flicker of old fear crossed her features. "I've been running for a long time. I heard whispers of a place in the Scablands where the rules didn't apply. Where a wall stood that couldn't be broken." She looked past them, down into the basin. Her eyes took in the orderly brick stacks, the tunnel entrances, the dwarves working below. Her analytical gaze missed nothing. "This is it? This… hole?"
"It's a work in progress," Kazuto said. "Why were you surveying?"
Mavis met his eyes. "To see if it was worth hiding in. Or if it was a tomb waiting to be filled." She nodded towards the east, the direction of the distant, oppressive power of the Seats. "They know a mine overseer and its guards vanished. The Black Phoenix doesn't lose assets. She sends investigators. Then she sends cleansers. They will burn this entire region to find what's hers."
A cold silence fell. Doom's knuckles were white on his pick handle.
Kazuto felt the weight settle back onto his shoulders. He'd been managing a small business. Now he was facing a corporate takeover. A hostile one.
"How long?" he asked, his voice flat.
"A week. Maybe two. They move slow, but they are thorough." Mavis tilted her head. "You have a wall. I'll give you that. Can it stop the Entropic Hellfire that unravels the very concept of 'wall'?"
Kazuto didn't know. He looked at his hands. "It can try."
Mavis let out a short, humorless laugh. "'It can try.' The rallying cry of the doomed." She looked back at the basin, her strategist's mind clearly whirring. "You have thirty-two dwarves, a trade deal with vermin, no sustainable food source, no military, and a magic wall. Against a Seat of the True Monarchs." She shook her head. "The numbers are laughable. The probability of survival is zero point zero—"
"Do you want to come inside or not?" Kazuto interrupted her.
She blinked. "What?"
"You're here to hide, right?" he said, turning to start climbing back down his invisible steps. "The rules are simple. No stealing. No harming others. Everyone works. You can strategize all you want, but if you eat our food, you contribute. We need a better latrine system."
He began descending, leaving her speechless on the cliff.
Doom snorted, following Kazuto. Mavis stood frozen for a moment, then scrambled after them, her dignity fraying. "A latrine system? You're talking about sanitation while a walking apocalypse is heading this way?"
"Yep," Kazuto's voice floated up. "Threats are tomorrow's problem. Today's problem is everyone not getting sick."
Back in the basin, Kazuto gave Mavis a quick tour. He showed her the water cache, the brick forge, the tunnels. He pointed to the golden cube. "That's our prisoner. Don't touch it."
Mavis stared at the contained overseer, her face pale. "You kept one alive? As a… pet?"
"As evidence," Kazuto said. "And a reminder."
She was silent for a long time, watching the dwarves work, watching the goblins peek from the rim. She saw the order, the fragile trust, the complete lack of military preparation. She saw Kazuto walk over to two dwarves arguing over a sleeping spot and solve it by drawing a line in the dirt with his foot and saying "You're on this side, you're on that side. Done."
Finally, she walked up to him. He was using a sharp brick to scratch a crude map of the basin into a flat stone.
"Your wall," she said. "Can it be bigger?"
Kazuto looked up. "Maybe. Why?"
"If the cleansers come, they won't just attack the wall. They'll surround this basin. They'll camp on the rim and rain fire down on everyone inside. Your wall is a door, but the basin is still a bowl." Her violet eyes were calculating. "You need to roof the bowl."
Kazuto followed her gaze up to the open sky. A roof. A barrier over the entire settlement. The concept made his head ache. The wall was one thing—a flat plane. A dome was… complex.
"I don't know if I can do that," he admitted.
"You have a week to learn," Mavis said, her tone grim. "Or you'll learn what it feels like when the air itself starts to burn."
She walked away, finding an empty spot against a wall, sinking down with her staff across her knees. She wasn't one of them. Not yet. But she was inside the walls.
Kazuto looked back at his stone map. He added a new element: a curved line over the top of the basin. A roof.
« NOTICE: NEW LONG-TERM OBJECTIVE REGISTERED: SETTLEMENT-WIDE PROTECTION. »
« WARNING: HOST MENTAL PARAMETERS MAY BE INSUFFICIENT FOR MACRO-SCALE DOMAIN MANIPULATION. »
Thanks for the vote of confidence, he thought.
He looked at the package, sitting in its usual place by his sleeping scrape. It was just a box. It couldn't help him build a dome.
But maybe, he thought, looking at Mavis's sharp, worried face, and then at Doom directing the brick-making, and at a goblin on the rim curiously dropping a wild onion into the trade pile… maybe the box wasn't the delivery.
Maybe he was.
And his next delivery was a dome. He had no address, no postage, and the client was thirty-two dwarves, a tribe of goblins, one cynical witch, and a very angry lizard in a box.
He picked up his sharp stone and started sketching again. One problem at a time.