I put the armor on and went still, listening to the way it felt on my body. It was strange. Clothes are usually just a layer of fabric—you stop noticing them after a minute. But this homemade cuirass, fashioned from boiled troll hide and wolf bone plates, behaved differently. It hugged my torso tightly, and with every movement the leather gave off a faint, damp creak. It felt as though I’d crawled inside someone else’s skin, not yet cold.

  I drew a deep breath. My ribcage expanded, and the bone plates overlapped, distributing the pressure. The system worked—but something about it was wrong. The armor didn’t just protect; it constrained. I felt like a component forced into a mechanism with critically tight tolerances. One mistake in movement, and the edge of a plate would bite into my ribs.

  Zeno sat by the entrance, sharpening a small knife. His motions were steady, almost soothing. He didn’t look at me, but I knew he was assessing every attempt I made to adjust to the weight.

  “Well?” he asked at last, setting the whetstone aside. “Too tight in the shoulders?”

  “Within acceptable limits,” I replied, flexing my hands. “Balance is slightly shifted to the right because of the pauldron’s weight, but I’ll compensate with posture. The calculations suggested this would improve inertia distribution on impact.”

  “Calculations,” Zeno snorted dryly. “You keep trying to turn everything into a chart, boy. But the body isn’t wood or iron. It has a habit of giving out at the worst possible moment. You sure your ‘Will’ won’t burn you out before that hide saves you from claws?”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure myself. Every time I activated the skill, I felt something inside me splinter. It wasn’t magic in the pure sense—it was biological overdrive, pushing the body past its limits, a debt that would be paid in years of life later on. If that “later” ever came.

  “Let’s go,” Zeno said, rising with the help of his staff. “The forest’s twitchy today. We’ll see what your ‘exoskeleton’ is worth before you freeze up inside it.”

  We pushed deep into the thicket. The farther we moved from the cabin, the denser the air became. Not metaphorically—I could physically feel the mana pressing against my eardrums. The birds had gone silent. Even the insects seemed to have abandoned this sector. Everything smelled of ozone and rotting leaves—the scent of a magical anomaly beginning to leak into reality.

  “Here,” Zeno stopped in a small clearing gouged with strange furrows, as if the ground had been plowed by enormous claws. “Small, but aggressive. Looks like a spontaneous surge.”

  [Will to Live] flared at the base of my skull—a short, sharp impulse. Like static discharge. The system was warning me: threat ahead, outside standard parameters.

  It stepped out from between the trees.

  If I’d been an artist, I would have called it a wolf. But I was an engineer, and all I saw was a glitch in the matrix. The creature flickered constantly. Its outline blurred, its paws left smoky trails, and its muzzle looked as if it had been stitched together from several different beasts. It didn’t growl. It made a sound like metal scraping against glass.

  “Movement vectors unstable,” I whispered, activating the skill.

  The world drained of color. Time thickened into syrup. I saw the creature tense its hind legs for the leap. It didn’t move by the laws of physics—it micro-teleported, closing distance in violent bursts.

  I raised my left forearm, protected by the thickest plate.

  The impact was so powerful I felt blood vessels burst in my ears. I wasn’t merely thrown—I was slammed into the old pine behind me. The armor held, but inertia didn’t vanish. Something shifted inside me. The air blasted from my lungs in a ragged wheeze, and heavy red blotches bloomed before my eyes.

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  The creature didn’t let me recover. It leapt again.

  I rolled aside, my left shoulder burning with dull pain. The armor along my flank creaked—one of the sinew bindings holding the plates snapped. Articulation compromised. Every movement of my left arm now came with harsh bone-on-bone friction.

  “Critical load on left sector. Armor integrity—82%,” my mind reported coldly.

  I needed to catch it during stabilization. Every anomaly had a cycle—a moment when it fully “rendered” into our world before the next burst. I pressed my back against the tree and began building pressure in my palm. It hurt. Mana burned through my channels like boiling oil.

  The shadow-wolf froze three meters away, preparing for the decisive strike. Its hollow eye-sockets locked onto mine.

  “Come on…” I rasped.

  The instant it lunged, I struck. Not with fire. Not with magic. I simply released the accumulated mana as focused vibration. An acoustic shock at impossible frequency. The air between us cracked.

  The creature slammed into the invisible barrier and, for a fraction of a second, became solid. That was enough. It hit the ground and shattered into black flakes that dissolved before they touched the grass.

  I remained standing, fingers digging into the bark. [Will to Live] was still running at full output. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. My pulse roared in my temples.

  “Shut down…” I forced out. “System reset…”

  The skill didn’t respond. My body, shocked by impact and pain, had locked itself into survival mode and refused to disengage. Stress hormones flooded my brain. My muscles were strung tight as guitar wires, ready to snap. I felt my temperature rising.

  “Iron!” Zeno’s voice cut through the ringing in my ears. “Breathe, damn you! Dump the pressure!”

  He struck the ground beside me with his staff. The vibration traveled through my boots, disrupting the rhythm of panic. I forced a slow, agonizing inhale. Then exhaled.

  Gradually, color seeped back into the world. My vision widened. [Will to Live] withdrew reluctantly, as if offended, sinking back into the depths of my mind and leaving behind a savage, draining exhaustion.

  I slid down the trunk to the ground. My left arm hung limp. The troll hide at my side was torn open, exposing a cracked wolf plate.

  “The armor…” I looked at the broken bone. “It didn’t hold. The attachment nodes are too rigid. No shock absorption at peak loads.”

  “The armor’s not the issue,” Zeno crouched beside me and pressed a palm to my forehead. “You’re burning up. You nearly cracked, Iron. You revved your engine so hard another minute and your brain would’ve boiled.”

  I closed my eyes. The pain was everywhere—not sharp, but thick and heavy, like molasses filling my joints.

  “You don’t live,” Zeno said quietly, helping me to my feet. “You’re in a constant state of war with yourself. If you don’t find balance, one day you won’t be able to switch off. And then you’ll become an anomaly—just like that wolf.”

  We made our slow way back to the cabin. The path that had taken half an hour in the morning now felt endless. I felt every gram of the armor’s weight. It seemed unbearable now—a pile of junk I’d chosen to carry.

  Once inside, I shrugged it off. It hit the floor with a dull thud. I stared at it—damaged, filthy, reeking of ozone and sweat. In places the skin beneath had been rubbed raw, and a massive bruise was already darkening my shoulder.

  Zeno silently set a mug of bitter brew before me.

  “Drink. It’ll steady the tremors.”

  I drank, feeling warmth slowly anchor me back to reality. My hands still shook—the aftermath of neural overload.

  “It all needs redesigning,” I said, looking at the armor on the table.

  “You’re hopeless,” Zeno sighed, sitting across from me. “You almost turned yourself inside out, and you’re thinking about rivets.”

  “Not rivets. Force distribution. If I can’t make the body stronger, I need the outer shell to absorb ninety percent of the impulse. It only took sixty. The rest went into my spine.”

  I picked up a knife and pulled the damaged breastplate closer. Despite the fatigue, new schematics were already assembling in my mind. Replace rigid sinews with braided structures. Add a layer of soft moss or wool between plates to dampen vibration. Most importantly, make the armor breathe with me when I activate the skill.

  “You hate your weakness,” Zeno said softly, watching me work. “That’s dangerous. It makes you forget you’re human.”

  “Weakness is just the absence of the right tool,” I replied, cutting away the snapped binding. “I’m building that tool.”

  That night I didn’t sleep. The pain kept me from sinking deep, and my mind replayed the fight again and again, analyzing the exact point of failure.

  [Will to Live] stirred quietly in the depths of my subconscious, like a well-fed predator. It didn’t frighten me as much anymore. It was part of the equation—a complex, unstable variable I needed to tame.

  There was no place for the weak in this world. You either build your protection—or you become part of something else’s diet.

  I made another incision in the troll hide. Tomorrow I’d rebuild it. And tomorrow I’d be one step closer to making this armor stop being a cage—and start being my skin.

  Zeno is right: this skill isn’t meant for living. But as long as I’m alive, I’ll use it to reach the end.

  No matter the cost.