— Sea-Stone
Saltwhistle sat round on the ridge like a coin the world regretted minting. The palisade wasn’t wood pretending; it was sea-stone hauled up over generations, mortared with a paste the waves themselves respected. The harbor was a grin full of teeth: hulls at anchor, ballista nests on towers, nets ready to cut in three directions, smoke rising thin and disciplined. An independent city that had paid for its stubbornness with practice.
“Sea-stone,” Raptor said softly. “It drinks spells.”
Yara could feel it; her new sight didn’t bounce off the walls so much as sink and come up slow. Sea-stone remembered pressure and forgave shape. Wards nipped it; it yawned.
Water has its own grammar, the Gem murmured. The docks you tamed in Aramore were a dialect. This is a language with lawyers.
“Noted,” Yara said. Her eyes ran the slopes and read purpose: ground that meant to hold, gullies that pretended to be friendly, a lip where carts would roll back if a man breathed wrong. She set her finger on a patch of clay with bedrock under it and said, “Engines here. It looks like mud, but it’s honest.”
Bruno squinted, then nodded, because bedrock doesn’t lie to a man who’s broken his shoulder on it.
They made their first push at the north gate because pride lives there, and because men believe in the geometry of straight lines. Mantlets rolled on axles that complained, ladder teams shouldered up into the teeth. Archers to keep the defenders busy, siege engines to knock, and ladder teams to try and scale the wall. The city answered with practiced contempt ballista bolts that hummed like cold bees; archer volleys timed to the beat of boots; hot sand poured at angles that were geometry’s way of mocking heroes.
She formed her wall—Bear-Knights tight as prayer:
- Left Guard (Stonehide) at her left shoulder, twelve feet of patience with a greatsword for a forelimb, helm quiet, the aura of a decision not yet swung.
- Right Guard (Graveclaw) at her right, halberd-arm cocked, spiked helm already choosing threats two minutes into the future.
- Rear Guard (Shadowfang) offset behind—open helm, dual blades out but low, eyes everywhere, the conductor of a two-bear symphony.
Yara felt Shadowfang at her back like a steady hand counting lanes, measuring angles, nudging the other two bears with a low rumble to shift a foot, lift a blade, hold a breath.
On the flanks, what most armies called animals, and hers called thinking teeth: the fourteen chainwolves under Corvin—chainmail grown into fur, a soldier’s patience inside a hunter’s body. In heartbeats, the pack arranged itself the way water finds its level: Petra and Kael mirroring left and right to catch any slip, Darrin taking the pivot point and refusing to move, Jorick shouldering into a gap a man would have missed and making it a wall. Corvin watched the harbor and placed them the way a mason sets stones in one glance, and the geometry made sense.
Raptor squinted along the ridge. “North gate’s their showpiece—banners, best crews, everything drilled and polished. West gate’s got a hinge band that’s seen too many winters.”
“Then we make noise at the north,” Yara said, “and see if the west remembers how to fail.”
The first push told them precisely what Saltwhistle had ready.
Mantlets rolled forward; the wall answered with ballista bolts and crossbow volleys. Archers kept a steady cadence under Bruno's barked commands, returning fire to keep defenders down. Crews laid planks across the slick approach to keep boots from slipping.
Corvin and Bruno set the other thirteen chainwolves as if they were laying stones. Senna and Mikael slipped out to cover both sides angles. Rhys and Moren hung back from the main line with a single job pulling downed men out fast. Varyn shadowed Yara’s runners and turned hand signs into movement before orders had to be shouted. Darrin held the pivot point for the pack; Jorick shouldered into a gap and made it solid.
Beyond the shield wall, Sam and Harry moved like siege towers with tempers. Sam drove his shoulder into the gate’s outer brace until the wood moaned. Harry stayed in the mud line, using his weight to anchor the front, no ladder, no finesse, just mass and roar. When the enemy’s ballista hit close, he took the impact full in the plates, bellowed, and pushed forward another yard. The fragment inside him thrilled at the punishment; Harry forced it quiet and kept moving.
“Harry, Report,” Yara said.
“Right arm’s slow. Breathing’s tight. I can still fight.”
“Not for pride,” Yara said. “We need you after this, not as a crater.”
Stonehide leaned forward, massive, still, calculating. Graveclaw turned his helmed head toward an upper parapet where movement hinted behind a murder slit. One rumble from Shadowfang and both adjusted a step; the three bears settled into perfect overlap around her.
On the right flank, Bruno’s voice carried over rain and iron. “Corvin, shift line! Senna—your angles ’ open! Petra, brace Jorick!” The chainwolves obeyed instantly, fourteen armored shapes moving as if by muscle memory precision, not chaos. Rhys and Moren darted in and pulled a wounded man clear of a dropped mantlet, steady as medics who’d done this a hundred times.
The enemy’s walls weren’t just stone, they were sea-stone, built to swallow spells and laugh at flame. Fire didn’t bite. Lightning rolled off into the wet. Yara felt the magic ground itself through the rock, old and deliberate. The place had been made to hate siegecraft.
“Back,” she ordered. “Eat. Oil. Breathe.”
No speeches, just survival. Rosa’s ladle set the rhythm pour, pass, repeat. Corvin paced the line once, checking every wolf, every man’s stance, until the chaos found its shape again.
Shadow and Mist worked the upper dark like ghosts. They slipped between torchlight and rain, scouting wall-crests where human eyes couldn’t linger. Shadow marked two crossbow nests and one ballista crew resetting; Mist cut the rope of a signal bell and left the guard staring dumbly at his silent alarm. Their movement was near-invisible, more absence than stealth, and they returned without a sound, mud clinging only where it chose to remember them.
At dusk, two harbor galleys rowed out far enough to mock them, turning broadside to spit volleys of bolts that hissed through the rain. One clipped the corner of a supply wagon, leaving it coughing smoke. Yara tasted the insult and filed it away.
“We shut their mouths,” Scythe said flatly, watching the ships retreat into fog.
Bruno snorted. “We don’t have boats.”
Yara kept her eyes on the water. “Then we take theirs.”
She glanced back at the line of wolves reading the battlefield like a map, bears holding ground that hated to be held. “We’ve got hunters who see angles better than engineers,” she said. “And bears that make doors think twice.”
Shadowfang rumbled once behind her, patient and sure. Stonehide adjusted his stance with that slow, perfect calculation that came from Garrett’s steel mind. Graveclaw drifted half a pace right, drawn by instinct older than orders, already moving to kill a danger that hadn’t learned it was one yet.
They buried nine before nightfall. The wall forgot them immediately; stone doesn’t keep ledgers. Yara did. The Sapphire’s sight showed her too much the thread each life had pulled, the small futures it had taken with it. She looked away before the knowledge settled into blame.
The Gem didn’t gloat this time. It only stretched along her ribs like a cat too full to move and murmured, You knew the price before you asked for it.
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“I’m starting to wish that didn’t make it easier,” Yara said.
Day 41 — The Morning That Kept Counting
Night had not forgiven them. The rain slid off the tent canvas in thin, patient sheets as if it had nothing better to do than watch suffering hold its breath. Yara woke with the taste of dirt in her mouth and a deep dread colder than anything she’d felt since the first few weeks after the Gem woke. She lay there a second and let the sight the sapphire gave her stitch itself into the day: where the mud would teach treachery, where the ground would take an axle and never cough it back up, where a wall remembered the shape of a body it had not yet caught.
She dressed slowly. The column moved on the soft complaint of leather and wood. Rosa shoved bowls into hands with the same practical tenderness; the men ate like people who had learned not to believe in tomorrow. Voices were low, the kind of quiet that keeps men from rehearsing grief. Weaver sent one clipped line—Aramore stable; Marcus holding—, but it felt like another city and not the one Yara carried under her ribs.
Harry came up like someone rolling toward a fight while the thing inside him practiced strangling the air. The tremor had come back overnight, took longer to hide than before; his breath pulled and worked like a bellows someone had left cracked open. He kept his hand wrapped and loose-fingered under a bandage as if the cloth itself could hold the shards inside him still. When he saw Yara, his mouth tried to tilt and then gave up. He said, “I’m here.”
That should have been enough. It never is.
They made their second push at first light because pride is not patient, and Saltwhistle’s north gate glittered with polished things. Shield-wagons creaked into place; the ladder crews stepped again into the teeth. Corvin set the pack like he was tucking the field into a shape that would not betray them; Corvin’s eyes moved, and the chainwolves became a living hedge, Petra and Kael shadowing the line, Darrin holding the fold that would let men breathe, Jorick shouldering into gaps and turning them to stone. The bears stood where they always did: Stonehide a measured weight at Yara’s left, Graveclaw a restless instrument on the right, Shadowfang behind as the calm that keeps the others honest.
The city had learned how to be a harbor for war. Ballista bolts sang wrong against sea-stone and sometimes, impossibly, left no answer at all. The first ladder team shouldered up, and a bolt bit the rope above them. Man after man slid; a man’s scream clipped off like a snapped string. The ladder came down in a collapse of limbs and a smell of wet leather and blood. Two defenders dove and ripped a man out from under the timbers; they worked as one, welded into a single movement, and pulled him free. He lived because someone would not leave a body in the mud, and several others did not.
They buried three before noon. The line did not stop. It could not. There is a business to war that cares less for mourning than it does for momentum.
“Harry,” Yara breathed when she saw him stagger his left leg staggered, and he fought himself upright. Sam’s forearm plates smelled slightly of salt and oil; the big beast shifted to take weight, not to dance. Harry took the shove and kept moving.
He broke forward like a battering ram when the line needed a shove. Impact pleased the fragment; every crash it ate made the silence inside it louder. Yara felt that hunger at the edge of her sight: not thought, not voice, but appetite. The Sapphire showed her, in the way only it could now, the little futures the fragment nibbled every time it was fed an older man’s hands that would never carve again, a mother’s wrist that would not soothe a cough. The knowledge knifed under her sternum.
A ballista's bolt found the open flank. The chainwolves reacted before a shout could form; Petra lunged sideways, taking the hit meant for the gap. The bolt punched through the shoulder and chain, the shock throwing her a full body length before she folded. Corvin's head snapped toward her, and for a heartbeat, the pack's rhythm faltered, then stitched itself back together through discipline alone. Darrin and Jorick dragged Petra clear. Moren held the pack's shape with a growl that shook mud loose from armor.
"Renn! Ilan!" Yara shouted.
The healers were already buried in their work, four regulars under wet canvas, gut wounds and shattered ribs, blood pooling faster than prayer. Renn had both palms pressed to a chest, sweat and rain mixing on his face, teeth clenched against the dying man's pain flooding into him. Ilan knelt beside another, fingers glowing faint gold, shaking with the effort of holding a life together by will alone.
They couldn't stop. The binding wouldn't let them. When flesh screamed, they had to answer.
Yara skidded down beside Petra. The Sapphire's sight opened like a wound: the wolf's futures collapsing one by one next winter's hunt, the pup she'd train, the space beside Corvin in every sleeping circle. Minutes. Not hours.
She looked at the four soldiers. Looked at Petra. Did the math.
Enhanced wolf. Trained, bonded, intelligent. Tactically irreplaceable.
Four regulars. Brave, yes. Dying, yes. But replaceable.
The Gem whispered Or you could keep them all.
"Renn. Ilan." Yara's voice cut through the rain and screaming. "Stop."
Renn's head jerked up, confusion breaking through exhaustion. "I can't—they're dying—"
"Petra," Yara said, pointing. "Now."
"But the men—" Ilan started, horror dawning.
"I'll handle them. Petra. NOW."
Her will snapped through the binding like a fist closing. The healers' hands moved before their minds could protest, pulled away from the soldiers, stumbling toward the wolf. Renn sobbed once as he pressed his palms to Petra's bloody shoulder, forced to abandon dying men for a wounded animal because his General commanded it, and the binding made obedience the only answer his body knew.
Ilan followed, tears cutting through the grime on his face. The four soldiers watched them go, still conscious, still aware they'd been set aside to save a wolf. One tried to reach out. His hand fell.
Yara knelt in the mud beside them. "You're not dying today," she said. "But it's going to cost."
The Sapphire showed her what inadequate sacrifice did when you didn't have time to find something meaningful, something personal, something *enough*, the Gem took what it needed from wherever it could reach. And the closest reservoir was always the person being changed.
Their armor wasn't enough. Worn plate and mail, functional but not loved, not personal enough. The transformation would work. But it would be hungry. She laid both hands on the first soldier's cuirass. The Gem rose eagerly. The armor gave what it could—the memory of duty, the weight of service, the shape of the man pressed into metal over years of wear. Not enough. The Gem reached deeper.
The soldier had hummed while he worked—a cobbler's son, rhythm of the hammer still living in his bones, the satisfaction of a neat stitch, the small pride in work done well. The Gem took that. Left the memory of cobbling. Took the *joy* of it.
Light hissed between plates. The man arched once, gasped, and his eyes snapped open clear, aware, himself. But when his fingers flexed, they didn't remember why they'd wanted to make things.
She moved to the second. The Gem found a red-haired girl waiting in a coastal town, not the memory of her face, but the warmth when he thought of her, the ache of missing her, the reason he fought to go home. It took the feeling. Left the fact. He'd remember she existed. He wouldn't remember why he'd loved her.
The third: hands that knew soil, the patience of growing things, the way green shoots felt like a promise kept. Gone. He'd know farming. He wouldn't care about it.
The fourth: half-finished songs, melodies that lived in his throat, the need to hum. Taken. Music would be sound now. Just sound.
The smell of burnt oil and something deeper, something like memory turned to ash, rose in the wet air. Four soldiers arched, breathed wrong, and sat up. Their wounds were closed. Their eyes had a faint green tinge. They looked at Yara with understanding: orders, duty, purpose.
Bruno stood three paces off, jaw working, hands opening and closing like he wanted to hit something but couldn't find a target. He'd seen transformations before. This one tasted different.
Harry watched the four soldiers stand and form up. The fragment in his chest pulsed once, eager, and he looked away fast like he'd seen his own future and it had green eyes.
One flexed his hands. Frowned slightly, like he'd forgotten something and shrugged it off.
"Orders, General?" His voice was steady, professional, empty of everything but competence.
"Form up with Hook's reserve," Yara said, and they moved without hesitation—professional, competent, empty of questions."
They were still themselves. Still capable. Still *them*. Just... narrower. The extra things that made life worth surviving for the hobbies, the loves, the small reasons to smile burned as fuel because the sacrifice hadn't been enough, and the Gem had to take its due from somewhere.
Ilan took a step back, trying to be horrified. "What did you do?" But the link to the Gem and her will made the words sound more like acceptance, his tone flattening even as his eyes screamed the question.
Yara didn't answer. The Gem purred, pleased. You made them better. You made them useful.
The Sapphire gave her the bill: four futures unwritten, four names she'd burned out of the world to patch her line. She could still see their faces steady, obedient, hollow where the joy used to be.
She pressed a hand to Petra's chain-plated side and whispered, "Hold, girl. We're not done paying yet."
The wolf's breath steadied. The men rose. And Yara felt the ache of every life she had just stolen to save.
The Gem purred deep in her chest, pleased and drowsy. Better, it said. Efficient.
Renn looked up, barely keeping his eyes open. "You can't just—she's not—these men—"
"I can," Yara said. Her voice shook. "And I did."
The Sapphire cooled, leaving her knees weak. Around her, the wounded regulars sat up one by one, breathing wrong, their skin humming faintly like iron cooling too fast. Petra stirred, eyes glassy but aware. Her chest moved. Corvin pressed his muzzle against her neck and didn't move.
The healers slumped where they knelt. Renn fainted sideways; Ilan caught him and followed. Yara knelt too, not from reverence but exhaustion, and felt the Gem whisper through her: Every mercy is a theft. Every theft writes your name in the debt.
She looked at her hands, trembling from what she'd forced through them, and said to no one, "Then start the ledger."
by FrankG
No memory. No name. No idea who she was before the crash.
A mechanical spider rebuilt her dying body on an alien planet.
When the System gave everyone combat classes, she got Engineer. In a forest full of warriors where only fighters survive.
They want her dead. The System locked her at Level 0 to guarantee it.
But something hacked her evolution.
Now she's leveling in secret. Every level makes her sharper. She sees patterns in alien technology others miss. Reads systems they don't understand. Turns broken machines into traps that cut through enhanced flesh.
She remembers nothing about her past. But she's learning this forest runs on ancient tech nobody else can touch.
The warriors hunting her have strength to shatter stone and speed she'll never match.
They're faster and stronger. She just needs them to step in the wrong place.
What to expect:
? Underdog engineer vs combat-class warriors
? Intelligence, preparation, and problem-solving
? LitRPG progression focused on strategy and invention
? Fast-paced survival and escalating danger
Novel Cover Drawn by: Dagmara Gaska ()