System Report:

  The Mob

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  Their voices arrived first, galloping ahead of their owners like outriders of turmoil. Angry, impatient, and—in the way of all good mobs—carefully harmonized into a bloodthirsty sort of chorus.

  Then came the thunder of boots, dozens upon dozens of them, echoing against cobblestone and silent buildings. The glow of their lanterns followed close behind, casting long, judgmental shadows down the rain-lashed street.

  There was no hesitation in their march.

  “Kain! Kain, you old fool!” bellowed the lead man, pounding on the Clatterwane’s door with a meaty fist. “You don’t have to do this. There’s still time!”

  He’d barely finished yelling before the first impact of a shoulder bounced off the entrance with a wet grunt. Then came a boot, which fared little better. What breached the perimeter was an empty bottle, hurled with the kind of vindictive aim usually reserved for old lovers and young anarchists.

  It sailed through the shop window with a sharp crash!

  A stiff faced woman reached through the broken pane, fumbling for the door’s lock. What she found was a pair of callipers, hurtling her way with all the grace and none of the mercy of a thrown meat cleaver.

  Rune-etched. Spinning. Having seemingly materialized out of thin air and darkness. They embedded themselves in the intruder’s neck with a sound that suggested someone had just stepped on a ripe tomato.

  The woman toppled over the shattered glass, hitting the floor with a sound that was part gasp, part gargle.

  A pair of clockwork tongs followed, spinning through the air, shortly accompanied by a set of tuning forks that hummed with anticipation. They arced, sang, and struck, each finding its mark with eerie precision.

  Another three townsfolk sank to the ground, gurgling for air.

  Little did the invading mob know, but Alana Helensen was one of those rare, one-in-a-million, Delvers gifted with three skills straight out of the Tutorial: Superior Aim, Weakpoint Detection, and Acrobatics.

  What she lacked in charm, manners, and any discernible sense of teamwork, she made up for with sheer lethality.

  Another figure collapsed to the floor, curtesy of an antique etching tool. But mobs, like bad ideas, are hard to dissuade once they’ve gotten started.

  The last, wet gasp had barely faded as a sharp “They’re in here! Find them!” cut through the gloom, and the fallen became footing for the men and women climbing in through the shattered window.

  At the same time, the front door—after one last, mournful creak and heavy shoulder—gave up its hinges and slammed to the floor.

  Five were down. Another thirty shadows swarmed the Clatterwane.

  And where Alana could hold her own, the same could not be said for her “support team.”

  Technically, there had been other airborne objects aside from Alana’s precision-grade implements of mayhem.

  Right around where the etching tool found its target, a generous helping of Alchemical Soldering Paste had attempted to join the fray. Though rather than striking fear into the hearts of their enemies, it had struck mostly shelves, walls, and fused exactly four screws, one bolt, and an innocent workbench.

  Narrative-wise, it was less “helpful reinforcement” and more “thematic background hazard.”

  Mari had been responsible for that part of the “teamwork”. Desmond, on the other hand, had contributed nothing so far except an impressive range of panicked expressions from behind the sturdiest table in the room.

  He stared out from behind it like a pale-faced, nervous ghost.

  Which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely useless as the angered townsfolk came storming inside.

  The first few had barely passed through the door as they spotted him, pointed his way, and immediately began shouting and chasing after him.

  This meant several armed and angry individuals were no longer focused on the person who had just armed herself with a pneumatic riveter.

  “Come on then, you freaky bastards!” yelled Alana, because some people had war cries and some people just said what they were thinking.

  Each rapid squeeze of her fingers sent heavy bolts thunking through the air, every shot punctuated by a solid clank and the hiss of compressed steam, as though the machinery itself was applauding her enthusiasm.

  “This is for my sister!”

  As the air was turned into a whistling swarm of metal, on the other side of the shop, Mari discovered that this wasn’t necessarily a pleasant development. With blood-streaked chunks of metal suddenly redesigning the wall inches from her head, her hurried retreat from the man with the swinging cleaver became twice as frantic.

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  “Stay still!” the man snarled. “Become fodder for the Deepest One!”

  In a frantic scramble, Mari grabbed the nearest thing her fingers could find.

  It was long, metal, humming faintly, and—unbeknownst to her—an arc-welder wand. She swung it with the desperate finesse of someone who’d rather not have her face closer acquainted with the cleaver.

  As far as parrying tools went, it was a poor choice.

  The cleaver sliced clean through the wand. Sparks flew, dancing like excited fireflies, and the cleaver—now glowing slightly—continued on its path until it embedded itself into a metal shelf.

  Which then refused to let go.

  Welding is, at its core, the art of convincing two bits of metal that they’ve always loved each other and should never be apart.

  The man, for his part, was less than thrilled about this development. He pulled. He yanked. The cleaver remained in its committed relationship. What did move was the shelf.

  Overloaded and underappreciated, it detached from the wall with the sharp groan of metal failing—and directly atop it, naturally, was a portable boiler unit that had been not quite falling off for several years.

  It made up for lost time by falling now, loudly.

  The unit descended upon the man's shoulder. He shouted something deeply unprintable, metal smashed against bone, and Mari did the only sensible thing one can do in the situation: she ran.

  Alana’s voice cut through the din—the continued thunk-thunk-thunk of the pneumatic riveter, screaming townsfolk, breaking shelves, and Desmond’s panicked wails—like a whipcrack, ragged and furious:

  “Get upstairs! Tell that bastard shopkeeper to hurry up!”

  There was no telling if the message was meant for her or Desmond, but Mari was nearest to the stairs, and Alana was occupied with proving that one woman and a swarm of flying metal could hold back the apocalypse.

  There wasn’t much room for discussion.

  So, Mari continued to run. She scrambled over work surfaces and shattered trinkets, crashed into tables and fumbled through the dark, silently praying that Yenna would be more alive than the last time she’d seen her.

  They—or in other words: Alana—couldn’t hold on forever.

  ***

  Yenna was back in the one place she had vowed never to return to: Home.

  Not the sweeping, ancestral manor sort of home, nor the warm-cottage-by-a-lake variety featured in the delusions of city folk. No, this was the real kind of home—the kind with rusted hinges, too many cousins, and a faint but ever-present smell of wet cabbage, even in summer.

  The breeze was doing its best to be pleasant. The creek murmured politely as it threaded past the same worn-down houses that had stood—lopsided and judgmental—on the edge of nowhere for generations. And there, in the middle of it all, stood Aunt Margret.

  “And look who’s back,” the woman huffed, hands on hips in the traditional Battle Aunt stance. At her feet sat a laundry basket large enough to double as a canoe, the linen flapping in the breeze.

  “I told you that silly adventuring stuff would never get you anywhere,” she continued. “Now, get inside and feed your baby sister. Go on then, what are you waiting for?”

  Behind her, the rest of the family made their presence known with the subtlety of a battlefield. Screams, shouts, laughter, arguments about whose turn it was to milk what, help who, and go where—it all rolled over the fields like seasonal weather.

  The buildings creaked and leaned toward one another, as if sharing a joke about how many generations it took to fix a roof around here. (The answer was none. It never got fixed. It just... adapted.)

  “Cat got your tongue, girl?” Aunt Margret pressed on, voice still wrapped in that special brand of maternal impatience that could shear wool at ten paces. “You know how it gets this time of year. We cannot—”

  “I’m not coming back, Aunt Margret,” Yenna said. Quietly. Firmly. From across the creek, which might as well have been a river, wide and ancient and full of frogs with nothing better to do than croak in anticipation.

  “Huh?” her aunt said. As if she hadn’t heard. As if the wind had picked up Yenna’s words and carried them somewhere more convenient.

  But of course, she’d heard. Aunt Margret could pick up gossip through three walls and a thunderstorm. She could hear your intentions before you’d quite finished having them. She knew everything that happened here.

  “Lost your mind, girl?” her aunt continued. “How well has your little adventure been treating you so far? Word is you had to beg Farmer Olsen—twice, mind you—for a ride to the city, and that you worked your fingers to the bone on some cargo ship just to make it to the capital. Then you get there, and what do you find? Ten thousand fools just like you, all answering the call for this year’s Grand Tutorial.”

  She folded her arms. The air grew heavier. Somewhere in the distance, a chicken decided now was a good time to panic.

  “Here, even if you’re one in a hundred, you’re among family. Friends. People who’ll still yell at you when you’re old and grey. Isn’t that better?”

  And there it was.

  The kind of logic that wrapped around you like a patchwork quilt full of holes and memories and the faint scent of goat. The sort that made you wonder if maybe being one in ten thousand was worse than being one of a hundred—and then reminded you that at least strangers didn’t assign you chores while you were still unpacking your trauma.

  Yenna didn’t answer yet.

  The creek burbled between them. And then, she tried like she had so many times before, “There, I—”

  “You have a future?” Aunt Margret rolled her eyes. “Yeah? And how’s that working out for you? Went and got yourself killed, didn’t you? What would your mother say if she saw you now?”

  Yenna lowered her gaze, slowly, to the torn mess at her side. Her jacket was soaked in blood—her blood. The red kind. The leaking kind.

  “You couldn’t even save that ‘friend’ you fooled into following you along,” Aunt Margret pressed on, her voice growing sharper, like a knife being honed against a whetstone made of family expectations. “Here or there, you always try to swallow more than your share. Always reaching. Always wanting. If you’d just once learned to keep your head down, girl, and be grateful for what you were given—”

  Yenna touched her side, fingers coming away wet. It didn’t hurt. Not yet. But the pain was there, like the smell of something sour beneath the floorboards.

  It had always been there. All those years, dull and patient, like rot in the beams. The ache of being one more cog in a homestead machine that never noticed you until you stopped turning.

  “I’m not coming back, Aunt,” Yenna said, lifting her eyes to meet Margret’s. They weren’t defiant. They weren’t pleading. They were simply… done. “Not now. Not ever.”

  There was a sound, faint but unmistakable, rumbling just over the horizon. A great, mechanical whir, like gears turning in a story far too big to fit on one page. She didn’t know what it was. But it was calling her.

  She wasn’t dying. Not yet.

  Not until she’d found a place that needed her. Not just a place to be in, but a place where being Yenna actually mattered.

  She took a breath, let it settle in her chest like a promise, and said:

  “Thanks for raising me. But this is goodbye.”

  And somewhere, far beyond the fields and the judgment and the endless laundry lines, something heard her.