The stairs creaked under my bare feet.

  Voices rolled up from below in a messy wave. Laughter, a child’s high cackle, someone thumping a table for emphasis. Under it all, the mouth-watering smell of roasting meat.

  By the second step my ribs complained. By the fourth, my stomach growled loud enough that I was sure the room downstairs must have heard. The smell hit halfway down. Pork, rich and smoky. Fresh bread. My knees almost buckled. I gripped the rail and took the last few steps one at a time.

  The common room had turned into a crush of bodies and plates. Tables pushed together made one long, mismatched spine that ran from the hearth to the far window. Platters of sliced pork gleamed under a glaze, bread loaves sat torn open, steam spilling from their soft guts. Someone had scattered pickles in whatever empty spaces remained.

  Elspeth moved between benches with a tray balanced on one hip.

  She spotted me and jabbed the air with her ladle.

  “There she is. Thought you’d drowned up there. Sit, before Finn eats your share.”

  Finn froze mid-bite, cheeks stuffed, eyes round. His gaze flicked to me, then to the platter nearest him.

  “I was guarding it,” came out around the mouthful.

  “Uh-huh.” Elspeth pressed a plate into my hands. “Eat. Then you can save the village again.”

  I edged into a gap on the end bench, careful of my ribs, careful not to bump anyone. A murmur rippled down the table as people realised I’d joined.

  “The paladin.”

  “That’s her.”

  “Look at that bird, too—”

  Beakly hunched near the open door, just inside the threshold, where the floorboards met packed earth. He had claimed an entire corner with his bulk. A scatter of stripped bones lay between his talons. He watched the room with one bright, predatory eye, feathers sleek, as if he wore the chaos around him like a cloak.

  Up near the middle of the table, a man in a second-best tunic and a tarnished brass chain of office gripped the back of his chair with both hands. His knuckles stood out white. Lines cut across his forehead deep enough to hold dust.

  “Well,” he began, voice pitched to rise above the clatter, “traditionally the south fence has always—”

  A woman with flour on her sleeves cut across him.

  “Traditionally, Mayor, the woods weren’t crawling with beasts big enough to flip Kael onto his backside.”

  Laughter broke out, quick and sharp.

  Across from her, Kael scowled over a tankard.

  “Fence is half-rotten. I’ve hammered those posts ‘til they crumble. What held a goat won’t hold a grumbleboar. You saw them. They pushed through like kindling.”

  He tore a strip of pork with his teeth and spoke around it.

  “We fix it proper, or we build it again next week after the next lot comes through.”

  The mayor’s fingers went to his chain, rubbing the brass links, thumb circling the same spot over and over.

  “There is the matter of timber,” he tried again. “And labor. We can’t pull everyone from the fields on the eve of planting. My father always—”

  “Your father didn’t wake to a pig in his pantry,” a thin man at the far end called out. “If that bird and the woman hadn’t been here, Edda would be burying more than fence posts.”

  A low agreement rumbled along the benches. Heads turned toward me and then away, quick and a little embarrassed. I focused on my plate. The pork melted against my tongue, salted just enough. The bread scraped the roof of my mouth, not unpleasantly. I ate and listened.

  “We got lucky.” A broad-shouldered woman with a baby asleep against her chest tapped the table with two fingers. “Luck runs out.”

  Her gaze moved from the mayor to me, then to Beakly, then back.

  “That bird won’t sit outside our door forever. Nor the lady in plate.”

  “I can’t even lift the plate right now,” I muttered into my bread.

  Kael’s mouth twitched.

  Mayor Brody drew a breath big enough to stretch his too-tight collar.

  “No one is suggesting we do nothing,” he tried. “But we must be measured. A double-height fence around all the fields would take weeks, and we must consider gates, and watch rotations, and—”

  “A plan, Gideon.” The flour-dusted woman leaned forward. “We’re not asking for a charter. Just a plan.”

  All eyes went to him again. He stared at the table as if the knots in the wood might offer bylaws.

  My fork paused over another bite.

  In the game, this would be the part where a quest marker popped over his head. Reinforce Oakhaven’s Defenses: 0/10 Planks Collected. The NPC mayor would plead for help, heroic music would swell, and off you’d go to kill ten more pigs.

  No music. Just the scrape of plates and the soft snore of the baby.

  Brody’s voice came out lower, rough around the edges.

  “We post more watchers along the south line. Anyone with a horn keeps it by their bed. If beasts gather, we drive them off together as we did yesterday.”

  “And if there are more next time?” The thin man shook his head. “If two come, Kael and the bird can manage. If twenty come?”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  A boy on the bench opposite—couldn’t be more than twelve—piped up, nose still sunburned from the morning.

  “We could dig a ditch. Like a moat. Pigs hate climbing.”

  The boy’s moat idea hung over the table for a moment.

  A few people chuckled. Someone at the far end muttered about pigs that swam better than his cousin. The boy’s ears went red but his chin stayed up.

  I kept my eyes on my plate.

  If I kept quiet, they would muddle along. Post more watches. Pray the pigs stayed small and stupid. Maybe I would be gone by the time that gamble failed.

  My fork pressed a groove into the bread’s crust.

  I had almost died in the starter woods.

  In the game, this valley had glowed on the minimap. Safe zone. Chill music. You smacked a couple of boars, looted five tusks, learned how to turn them into combs or something. You didn’t crack ribs falling out of trees, choke on your own blood, and wait for a bird to drag you to safety.

  My chest remembered each breath from that night. The way it grated along the fractures. The way the UI blinked “DIVINE CONNECTION: FAILURE TO CONNECT TO HOST” in neat, uncaring font while I ground my teeth and tried to remember a single low-level heal.

  “Light, mend—” Nothing. No warmth. No white flare across my skin. Just air and my own thin voice.

  If the tutorial zone did that, what would the midgame look like?

  A woman scraped her knife along the last of the fat on a platter.

  “We can’t just keep chasing beasts off,” she grumbled. “Fence or ditch or something, but it has to hold.”

  Kael wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Stone wall solves it.” His mouth twisted. “We haven’t stone for that. Not unless we pull down half the houses.”

  My fork hovered over my plate.

  Stone.

  My brain flipped through menus that didn’t exist anymore. Crafting tabs, little icons I hadn’t seen in years. Cooking, done. Herbalism, done. Alchemy, maxed. Enchanting, abandoned halfway through because the dust grind turned into a second job. All those nights in med school where I ran circles in some digital forest, vacuuming up herbs and leveling up alchemy to relieve my anxiety.

  Meanwhile, my ex wanted to go raiding. I had gone along because I needed a distraction and this was as good a way as any to spend time together. Because watching green health bars tick upward felt close enough to medicine to count as studying. Because the crafting trees hooked into the same part of my brain that liked anatomy diagrams.

  Combat had always been something other, something he handled. I stood where the ground wasn’t on fire and hit the glowing buttons on my bar when the health bars went red.

  Out here, no one called the shots. And I still might not have holy magic, but I had something he never cared about.

  Recipes.

  An old icon slid into focus in my mind. Amber droplet, tiny hammer symbol tucked in the corner. Wood-Hardening Resin – Alchemy (Journeyman). I could almost see the tooltip if I closed my eyes.

  +100% Durability. Resistant to fire and impact. Used on structures.

  My heart gave a hard, painful thud against my ribs.

  The recipe unpacked itself step by step, as clean as a procedure list in the OR.

  Base: thick sap, the sticky kind that glued your fingers together and never quite washed out. Catalyst: fine ash from hardwood, sifted. Binder: rendered fat. You heated it slow until it turned to something between glue and varnish. In-game there had been a rare reagent—silica dust from some low-level elemental—to push it from “pretty good” to “stone-like”.

  Glowgourd pulp had shared that little sparkle icon.

  I glanced toward the kitchen doorway. A faint orange wash flickered from within where Elspeth and a girl darted around each other. The memory of the glowgourd’s slick weight in my hand came back, the way its light had bled through my fingers.

  Ash, fat, sap, glowgourd. All things this village had or could get without marching into a dungeon.

  My fingers curled around my fork until the metal dug into my palm.

  I could keep quiet. Eat my stew, limp up to my room, let them argue about moats until midnight. None of this had been my problem before I woke up on a living siege engine.

  Across from me, the boy who had mentioned the ditch watched the adults, jaw tight. His heel bounced under the bench. Every so often his eyes flicked toward Beakly at the door, like he weighed how fast he could run if those talons turned his way.

  Mayor Brody’s thumb kept wearing the same path over that brass chain.

  “We’ll set more watches,” he repeated, weaker. “We can move some of the old carts to brace the south fence. It will… help.”

  “And when the carts rot?” The flour-dusted woman shook her head. “Gideon, you’re stuffing straw in a leaking roof. It keeps the rain off for an hour and then it comes through twice as hard.”

  My mouth moved before I had a plan for what came after.

  “Or,” I cut in, “you stop the roof rotting in the first place.”

  Forks paused halfway to mouths.

  Mayor Brody blinked at me as if I’d slapped him with a herring.

  “Stop the roof… rotting?” His fingers went to the chain again. “What do you mean, Miss Easton?”

  I pushed my plate away a little so I could rest my elbows without jarring my ribs.

  “You’re treating symptoms, not the disease,” I went on. “You can nail scrap carts to that fence until the sky falls. The wood still splits. The posts still rot. Or—” I tapped the table. “—you change the wood.”

  A low murmur moved along the benches. Brody stared, caught between intrigue and dread.

  “Change… in what manner?”

  “In my world we had a recipe.” I chewed the inside of my cheek for a second, lining the steps up. “You take thick tree sap, hardwood ash, rendered fat. You cook it together with a certain kind of… plant. It turns into a resin. You paint it on fences, beams, whatever. It seeps in. When it cures, the wood takes a beating like stone.”

  Kael’s brows climbed.

  “You’re talking about… some kind of pitch?”

  “Closer to varnish.” I glanced toward the kitchen, where a faint glow from the pantry hinted at stacked glowgourds. “The plant makes the difference. Glowgourd. Its pulp binds the mix. In the right ratio,” I added, because I couldn’t stop myself.

  The flour-dusted woman let out a sharp breath.

  “If that works, we could coat the south fence, the barn doors—everything.”

  The boy who’d wanted a moat thumped both hands on the bench.

  “And the pig-snouts would just bounce off?”

  “Not bounce,” I tempered, though part of me enjoyed the image. “But the rails won’t shatter the first time something big leans on them. Less patching. Less panic.”

  Brody’s eyes had lit for a heartbeat. The light dulled.

  “That sounds… remarkable.” His gaze drifted toward the ceiling, toward whatever ledger lived in his head. “But thick sap means tapping the tall pines north of the brook. And this late in the season, the only glowgourds left grow high in the old groves. Ash and fat we have some of, not in endless supply. Who goes into those woods to gather all this? With the beasts as they are?”

  Finn’s chair scraped as he twisted toward me and Beakly both.

  “Well, Emily will, won’t she? And Count Chocobo.” His grin showed a missing tooth. “You saw her. She knocked that boar flying in one—”

  Elspeth’s palm met the back of his head with a soft thwap.

  “Don’t you go volunteering other people’s skins,” she snapped. “Mind your plate.”

  He hunched over his stew, rubbing the spot, though the hopeful look never quite left his face. Around him, others wore the same expression, just better hidden.

  The broad-shouldered woman with the baby shifted forward.

  “If this resin holds like you say,” she ventured, “I’d put in a week’s labor. So would half the village. Beats waking to squealing in the pantry.”

  Kael nodded once, slow.

  “You draw up how it’s done,” he rumbled toward me, “I can rig vats. Fires. Brushes. We get the stuff here, I’ll see it on the wood.”

  Dozens of eyes settled on me then, a physical weight more solid than my armor. Expectation. Fear. A thin, stubborn thread of hope.

  I could hear my old attending in the back of my skull. If you know how to fix it and you walk away, that’s on you.

  I swallowed. The stew sat like a stone behind my breastbone.

  “Gathering the ingredients won’t be simple,” I warned. “I’m still banged up. The woods aren’t a tutorial zone anymore.” No one blinked at the last part; of course they didn’t understand. “But… I know the recipe. I can test a small batch. If it works, we scale up.”

  Finn’s fist hit the table.

  “Knew it.”

  Elspeth shot him a look that could curdle milk, but her shoulders loosened a fraction.

  Brody exhaled, a long, frayed sound.

  “Then we shall… we shall organize parties. In daylight.” His hand dropped from the chain. “Miss Easton, if you are willing, Oakhaven will be in your debt.”

  Willing.

  That was doing heavy lifting.

  I glanced toward Beakly. He regarded me, one golden eye steady, as if to say, Of course you involve us in village infrastructure now.

  I dragged a hand down my face.

  “Fine,” slipped out. “We’ll try it your way.”

  A cheer went up—small, ragged, but real.

  I stared at my empty plate and wondered what I had gotten myself into.