The flag in the corner of his vision burned steady gold.

  Not a pulse. Not the usual four?beat flicker that lived there now like a second heartbeat.

  Steady.

  The next actual heartbeat tried to crawl out through his teeth.

  Pain hit the band at the base of his skull first, and pressure kept building behind his eyes, causing him to yell out. His blood pulsed in his temple, a heady throb beating in a workmanlike hammer blow. It went bilateral in a breath—left and right, eyes and ears, and jaw suddenly wired into the same bad circuit.

  His knees hit the ground.

  The terrace came up slower than it should have.

  Hands caught his arms—Serh on his left, Merrik on his right, their grips the only thing between him and stone. The world doubled, then tripled. The cracked wall, the rope?lines and packs and arguing people—all of it slid out of register, three slightly wrong versions trying to occupy the same space.

  The halo in his sight flared brighter gold, then inverted at the edges, raw red and sour blue.

  A band of static crawled across his vision, cutting through the doubled terrace.

  Behavioral data: Complete

  Subject: Matas (Integrated).

  Probability variance: upward drift.

  Level Index: 16

  The characters weren’t different; they just struck him insistently, like the longer he waited for this level, the worse the backlash would be.

  “Hey,” Serh said, volume too close and too far away at once. “Matas. Talk to me.”

  He tried. His tongue felt like it belonged to someone who’d already had a bad day.

  “Should’ve…put up a sign,” he managed. “No sudden levels on load?bearing terraces.”

  Words scraped his throat on the way out. Metal taste. The skull band squeezed harder in approval or warning; hard to tell which.

  Someone shouted from further along the terrace. The sound took a second too long to arrive, bending around the hammering in his head. The world twitched like a film skipping a frame.

  His eyes wouldn’t pick one map.

  The red?slit left eye flooded with thin, vicious lines, stress paths glowing along stone and wood and flesh. The right eye ghosted everything in grainy gold, wider?angle, less precise. They refused to line up. For a second, everyone was just a bundle of failure vectors walking around inside a vibrating mountain.

  Another crawl of static bit into the halo.

  Skills Unlocked:

  REEVALUATION: Begin.

  Skills Unlocked: ….

  The rest broke apart before he could read it—fragments tearing loose and falling through his vision like ash.

  ART_F_CIAL ME_ORY

  QU_CK SK_TCH

  BARB_D T_NGUE

  F_T_D STR_KE

  Each one left a faint afterimage, bracketed in his thoughts even after the shapes dissolved.

  “Is this it?” Merrik asked. “Is this what it did at the Heart?”

  “Worse,” Matas said. Or thought he did. His voice sounded like it belonged to a room over. “That was…bulk delivery. This is the system checking receipts.”

  The joke wasn’t very good. It still landed harder than he meant. Serh’s fingers tightened.

  “You’re not funny,” she said. “You’re shaking.”

  He was. Not just hands. Legs, shoulders, neck. A tremor that ran straight out from the band at his skull, through his spine, into every place old work and new damage had left their mark.

  The halo finally blinked.

  Gold dimmed to a raw, inflamed red. The steady burn broke back into that four?count pulse, each beat a small, controlled twist of the wedge in his skull.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  On the fifth, his eyes decided there would, in fact, only be one terrace.

  Depth rushed back in. The double images slammed together. For a moment he thought he might throw up, just from the way the angle of the railing decided to commit to a single orientation.

  He clung to the feeling like it was a roof edge.

  “Okay,” he said, which was a lie, and forced his knees to remember their job. “Okay. On your count, let go.”

  Serh didn’t. Not immediately. He could feel her looking past his face, checking pupils, breathing, stance. Guard math.

  Merrik was less subtle. “You went away,” he said. “Eyes did the…thing.” He waggled his fingers near his own face in a vague mimicry of overlays. “Then you went away more.”

  “System rang the bell again,” Matas said. “New notch on the pain scale. Ten’s full roof collapse on your head. This is…someone taking out a support two rooms over and pretending it’s not going to reach you.”

  “That was you last week,” Serh said. “With Martuk.”

  He snorted. Regretted it when the motion drove another small spike through the back of his head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Guess we’re all trends now. Lets call it an 8.”

  A crate stack at the far end of the terrace shifted.

  It was a small sound, almost lost under the bigger ones. Wood teeth grinding. Rope fibers catching. Just enough of a scrape to tickle the part of his mind that never stopped watching for wrong loads.

  His head snapped toward it.

  The dual overlays surged before he could throttle them. Red lines spat across the terrace, spider?webbing from the suspect stack into the supporting post, down to the crack at its base. Gold haze chased slower, sloshing around people’s silhouettes, trying to find where this failure wanted to go.

  For a heartbeat, he saw it: the top crate slipping, the lower one torquing just so, the whole column leaning into the path of a rope?hand bent over his pack straps. The man would die.

  “Move!” he barked.

  The word came out sharper than the situation deserved. It hit the rope?hand like a slap. The young man’s shoulders flinched, spine stiffening, eyes snapping up—just in time for him to stumble sideways.

  The stack went.

  The upper crate slid, then dropped, then dragged the next with it. The whole column tilted toward where the rope?hand had been. Instead of a skull and shoulders, it clipped the edge of a pack and burst open on the stone, spilling dried goods and dust.

  The impact went through Matas.

  Not physically. Not in the sense of wood actually touching flesh. But the stress pulse that should have traveled happily through post and floor and into surrounding structure found a new path.

  The band at his skull convulsed. His back seized in sympathetic spasm—muscles along his spine grabbing like someone had wired them straight into the shifting load. His teeth clacked together hard enough to sting.

  Hot tears leaked down Matas’s cheeks as he closed his eyes to rest them for a second. Around him, he could hear villagers clomping to see if the young man was ok, while his eyes were glued to Matas in reverent appreciation.

  “Good Stone Walls, Matas you’re bleeding!” Merrik shouted pressing a hand over his mouth.

  A thin, metallic burn lit the back of his throat.

  “Ch… Childs play.” Matas managed to wheeze.

  The halo spat one more fragment.

  Skill Unlocked: [Barded Tongue] (Passive)

  Then that, too, blurred into nothing.

  By the time the crate settled, he was folded half a step forward, one hand braced on his thigh, breath scraping.

  “See?” Merrik said, a little too loud. “He calls it and the mountain listens.”

  “That’s not what that was,” Matas said. The words rasped. The metallic edge in his mouth didn’t go away. “That was…bad math taking a shortcut through my nervous system.”

  The rope?hand stared at the spilled goods, then at him.

  “Sorry,” Matas said, automatically. “For shouting.”

  “You saved his skull,” Merrik said.

  “Doesn’t mean I get to swing words like a mallet,” Matas said.

  The band disagreed. Or maybe it agreed too much. It pulsed twice, hard, in exact time with the moment he’d barked, leaving a ghost of heat along his tongue.

  Serh’s thumb moved unconsciously against his arm, like she wanted to check his pulse but didn’t want to make it a statement in front of everyone.

  “Can you walk?” she asked.

  “Define ‘walk,’” he said. “Upright? Sideways? Back toward my bunk, which I think is technically downhill from here?”

  “You’re not going to your bunk,” she said. “Tharel wants numbers. Routes. You said you weren’t taking Keth’s off?ramp. That means you show up and work.”

  He almost said, but the way his throat still felt flayed from one syllable made him take the line, turn it over, and set it down instead of throwing it.

  “Right,” he said. “Routes. Let’s go tell everyone exactly how hard this beam’s going to come down on them.”

  The words came out dry. They still made the rope?hand flinch again.

  His tongue tingled.

  —

  He refused a shoulder on the walk to the mapping wall. Pride, yes. Also a kind of experiment. If his legs were going to stop listening, he wanted to know where, not get surprised when they did it under someone else’s weight.

  The mountain hummed underfoot with the same off?key undertone as the morning, but closer now. Each step seemed to find a slightly different resonance, like the stone was testing ranges.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  The wall they’d commandeered for route planning had once held festival notices and shift tallies. Now the old chalk ghosts hid behind newer, sharper marks: three main paths twisting down?valley, branches and cross?cuts, circles for staging points.

  Martuk stood there already, chalk in hand, ledger mind working lines and headcounts. Tharel leaned against the opposite support, the writ box resting on a low stool between them like an extra council member. Keth watched from a few paces back, gaze somewhere between the stone and the people moving across it.

  Martuk’s eyes went straight to Matas’s face, then dropped to his hands.

  “You’re worse,” he said. No greeting. “And we haven’t even started moving.”

  “Good morning to you too,” Matas said. “The system decided I needed a performance review.”

  Martuk’s mouth tightened. “Is it…stable?” he asked. “You… Can you do this?”

  The sensible answer was . The structural answer was .

  “Stable enough to be useful, unstable enough to justify rude metaphors,” Matas said. “Which kind of answer makes your ledger happier?”

  “That one,” Martuk said, almost despite himself. A breath escaped him that might, on a different day, have been a laugh.

  The halo ticked once, like it approved of the line. His throat ticked with it, a tiny flare of rawness.

  Barbed, then. And the barb cut both ways.

  Tharel nodded toward the blank section of wall. “We’ve got the three main valleys chalked,” he said. “Elevation guesses, distance, likely water points. What we don’t have is your sense of where the cracks are going to open on the way out. Or where to send people with goats and kids.”

  Matas’s fingers twitched.

  “Right,” he said. “You want ‘here be dragons’ in chalk instead of in my head.”

  “Whatever is below,” Tharel said. “Take the stick and just draw.”

  Matas stepped up to the wall.

  The moment his hand closed around the chalk stub, something in his arm clicked over.

  It wasn’t visible—no glow, no change in the halo. Just a sudden, unnerving sense that the path from his shoulder to his fingers had been greased. Like all the little hesitations that usually lived between thought and motion had been shaved thin.

  QU_CK SK_TCH, the broken text from the level?up whispered at the back of his skull.

  “Any special instructions from your invisible friend?” Martuk asked.

  “Yeah,” Matas said. “Hold still.”

  He put chalk to stone.

  The first line came too fast.

  He meant to start with the main switchback, slow, get bearings. Instead, his hand went straight to the sharp bend halfway down the east route, where the path cut under an overhang they all pretended wasn’t spalling.

  The chalk skated across the wall, tracing the path in one long, unbroken line. His eyes rode along, overlays trying to keep up—red marking the thin places in the cliff, gold sluicing around them, mapping where weight would land.

  His conscious thoughts chased behind the chalk like a man running after his own ladder as it slid.

  He didn’t have to hunt for words. Symbols and shorthand he’d never actually agreed on with anyone spilled out of his fingers anyway: a jagged mark for “no extra weight,” a double circle for “staging only if dry,” a cross?hatched block over one bend that read, in his own head, as .

  The terrace chatter dimmed around him. Not silent, just…distant. His ears decided the scratch of chalk on stone mattered more than boots or voices.

  He finished the east route, dropped to the central, swung over to the west. The chalk stub wore down to nothing between his fingers. He didn’t stop until it snapped.

  Pain arrived late.

  His hand cramped first, fingers locking around the shattered chalk like it was still whole. Then his forearm lit up, a tight, hot knot running from wrist to elbow. Shoulder followed, then the line from there up into his neck joined the chorus the skull band was already leading.

  He sucked in air through his teeth.

  The halo fluttered, just for a second.

  Skill unlocked: [Quick Sketch]

  The text smeared even as he registered it.

  “You’re bleeding,” Serh said.

  He blinked down. A fine spray of chalk dust coated his knuckles. Beneath it, a thin red line where the stub had cut into his skin when it broke. Not much. Enough to make the dust stick.

  “Wall looks good,” Merrik said, awed despite himself. “Like you’ve been practicing for this your whole life.”

  Matas tried to open his hand. His fingers moved in jerks, like badly set nails coming free one at a time.

  “Feels like I’ve been practicing for it on someone else’s nerves,” he said.

  Tharel studied the new marks. His eyes moved with more difficulty than Matas’s hand had, pausing at each symbol as he translated.

  “These here?” Tharel pointed to the cross?hatched bend.

  “Loose rock overhead,” Matas said. “It was already bad. After this morning’s tremor, it’s a question of ‘which hour’ not ‘which day.’ You send anyone under that with weight, they’re gambling with their spine.”

  “And this?” Martuk tapped one of the double circles.

  “Stage light packs there if you have to,” Matas said. “Don’t linger. Stone wants to slide, not fall. You treat it like it’ll hold if you don’t argue.”

  Martuk’s throat worked. “How sure?” he asked, voice low. “On all this?”

  “How sure are you when you write a number in your ledger?” Matas shot back. “Because this is my version of that.”

  The line came out harder than he meant. It landed like a blow; Martuk flinched, just a fraction, eyes narrowing.

  The band at Matas’s skull pulsed. His tongue burned, a tiny line of fire under a word he couldn’t unsay.

  He squeezed his jaw shut to not speak more.

  “I asked,” Martuk said after a moment. “You answered.”

  “Yeah,” Matas said. “Sorry. I’m…spiky today.”

  “Today?” Martuk muttered.

  That earned him a look from every eye in the room.

  —

  Questions. Adjustments. Corrections and verifications. Honestly some of the most boring work to Matas but he was familiar with its importance. Adding side notes where goat herds would balk at steeper cuts, or where water access could buy them room to slow down.

  Every time he caught himself about to hedge— —something in his mouth leaned instead toward Toward lines that slammed decisions into place. Each time, the band gave him a little twist to match, a quiet, unpleasant confirmation that he’d pushed.

  Tharel ended one such exchange with a slow nod.

  “All right,” the elder said. “We move the first wave on your central route, then. Children, injured, those who can’t make up time if a path goes bad.”

  “That’s what you do when you believe your brace is good enough,” Matas said. “Put the load you care about most on it first.”

  “See?” Merrik said. “This is why I want him talking and not under a rock somewhere.”

  “Want me talking now?” Matas said. “You’re going to hate it later when half those phrases echo back at you.”

  Merrik opened his mouth. Closed it again.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  —

  They gave him a break when his hand refused to close on the next stick of chalk.

  “Sit,” Serh ordered, dragging a crate over for him. “Drink. If you fall over, it’s not going to help anyone’s confidence.”

  He satin a privet terrace overlooking the shrouded peaks beside him. The crate complained under him. His legs hummed with that fine, unpleasant tremor that meant his muscles were still arguing with whatever rewiring the level?up had done. The pain in his arm had dulled from acute to a deep, occupying ache.

  Somewhere behind his eyes, something tugged.

  ART_F_CIAL ME_ORY.

  The broken label rose out of whatever corner of his skull the system had stuffed it into. Brought with it a feeling like standing at the lip of a skylight, knowing you could see yesterday’s weather if you just leaned in far enough.

  In a rush Tharel ran though the carved threshold behind him.

  “Matas!” Tharel exclaimed, “The east storage wall. Before the last quake, you said it had three hairline cracks, no spall. After, you said five, dust at the base. Do you remember where they were, exactly?”

  “Yeah,” Matas said automatically. Then, “No. I remember enough to not sleep easy. Details…they kind of blur.”

  “We need the exact,” Tharel said. “Martuk wants to risk a lighter route there for the third wave. I’ll let him if you tell me the wall can be walked. Not otherwise.”

  Martuk grunted but didn’t argue.

  Matas closed his eyes.

  “You want exact,” he said. “Let’s see what that costs.”

  He leaned.

  Not physically. There was no motion, no Omen?Step shift. Just a deliberate push of intent toward the memory of that wall—the angle of the terrace, the way the morning light had hit the stone, the pattern of chalk marks he’d already laid down there.

  For a second, nothing happened.

  Then the present thinned.

  Sound dropped out first. The terrace noise faded from full to muffled to somewhere?else. Smell went with it a heartbeat later; dust, stew, sweat all stepped back. He felt the crate under him, but only in an abstract way, like he’d been told it was there.

  The world behind his eyelids snapped into focus.

  East storage. Two mornings ago. The wall, as he’d seen it then. Every fissure. Every chalk line. The exact fan of dust at the base of the third support. The scuff mark where someone’s boot had slid on loose grit.

  He walked his gaze along it, careful, like inspecting a seam he’d have to bet his life on. Counted.

  “One,” he said, out loud in a place that was not there. “Two. Three. Fourth is at shoulder height, hand?span left of the drain. Fifth is lower, near the joint, runs…half a palm before it dies.”

  His own voice sounded wrong, thin and far away. He didn’t care. He checked again. The memory didn’t blur. It stayed pinned, like a drawing on a board.

  He let go.

  Coming back hurt.

  The band went from tight to crushing for a heartbeat, like the wedge at his skull had been hammered in the rest of the way. Pain spilled forward into his face. His nose stung; when he opened his eyes, the world jumped, then resettled a split second later than it should have.

  Someone pressed a cloth into his hand. He realized he’d bled a little onto his lip.

  “Five cracks,” he said, voice thick. “Two growing. That wall’s not your friend. You send people under it, you’re trusting luck more than stone.”

  Serh’s grip found his shoulder.

  “What did you just do?” she asked, low.

  “Went back,” he said. “Pulled the earlier view up. Like walking into my own head and taking notes off the wall.”

  “Side effects?” Keth’s voice, from his peripheral.

  “Besides this?” He dabbed at his nose. The cloth came away with a faint smear of red. “Everything now feels half a step behind. Like the world’s trying to buffer.”

  The halo obliged with one more flicker of text.

  Skill Unlocked: [Vaultic Memory]

  He grunted.

  “System’s very proud of itself,” he said. “Memory is a win, though.”

  “Can you walk?” Tharel asked again. Practical, not unkind.

  “Define..,’” Matas started, then stopped. The joke had already had one outing. Reusing it would be…too much. He rolled his shoulders out instead.

  “I can get where I need to,” he said instead. “Not fast. Not straight, if the mountain decides to tap me again.”

  “Then sit when you can,” Tharel said. “We’ll use your brain and Martuk’s legs.”

  Martuk snorted. “Always wanted to be part of the infrastructure,” he said. “Didn’t think it’d be this literal.”

  —

  They argued once more, later, about who went in which wave.

  Tharel wanted more elders in the first. Martuk wanted more rope?hands. Merrik wanted to be where the worst cracks were. Serh wanted to be where Matas wouldn’t be asked to haul his own body weight and someone else’s.

  Matas watched them for a while, pain humming steadily in his skull, arm a dull ache, hand still unreliable.

  When he finally cut in, he didn’t plan the words.

  “You send all your leaders out first,” he said, “and you leave panicked people on a mountain with no one who can do math. You send all your strongest first; you leave nothing behind to pull idiots out of holes. You pretend you can have both, you get crushed between an avalanche.”

  Four heads turned.

  “What do you suggest?” Tharel asked.

  The line that came to tongue wasn’t one he’d rehearsed.

  “You load this like a real roof,” he said. “You stagger your supports. Old, young, strong, weak. One elder, one rope?hand, one hunter, one cook. A preset number of families. The first wave gets enough of everything to stand up when they reach the valley. The second and third waves get the same. You don’t build one perfect brace and two garbage ones unless you want the whole thing to twist when it settles.”

  The words hit the air with more force than his volume justified. Martuk’s eyes widened, like he was seeing the ledger columns rearrange themselves in his head. Merrik actually straightened, as if the metaphor had physically grabbed his spine.

  His throat flared, sharp and hot.

  Skill Upgraded: [Barbed Tongue] (Passive) – Rank 2

  “Fine,” Martuk said. “Staggered waves. It makes ugly sense.”

  “Ugly’s what we have,” Matas said. “Pretty roofs collapse first.”

  Serh’s gaze on him was complicated.

  “What did that cost?” she asked later, when the others had peeled away to start sorting names.

  “Throat feels like I swallowed sand,” he said. “Head’s worse. Also, I get to live with the part where people do what I say because the system likes the way I phrase a brace analogy. So that’s fun.”

  “You were already good at that,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now it’s helping.”

  —

  He made it to night by doing what Tharel said: sitting when he could, standing when he had to, letting other people’s legs do more of the carrying. His own muscles never quite stopped jittering. The world’s lag eased a little as the Artificial Memory burn faded, but the baseline strain stayed worse than the morning.

  By the time he finally lay down on his bunk, the band at his skull still hadn’t fully relaxed. It had just stopped tightening.

  “That’s new,” he muttered to the rafters. “I remember when level-ups came with at least a few hours of feeling like less of a dropped tool.”

  No one answered. The barracks around him thrummed with tired voices, restless shifting, the rustle of packs being repacked even in the dark.

  He closed his eyes.

  Sleep didn’t so much come as drag him under like he’d slipped on loose gravel.

  For a while, his dreams were the usual: roofs that went on too long, ladders that bowed more than they should, the Heart’s crystal humming under everything like a buried transformer about to blow.

  Then the noise changed.

  Static pushed in at the edges. Not the muted hum of the Heart. Not the familiar four-count pulse. A different kind of interference—thin, high, like the hiss between stations on a radio.

  The halo blinked in the dark behind his eyelids.

  DIMEN_ION_L LI_K

  The last character flickered, never quite settling.

  SKILLCHANNELLISTLISTLISTLIST

  LISTSKLS….

  The text wasn’t in stone or on a wall. It was just there, printed across the nothing he was falling through.

  His stomach flipped in a way that had nothing to do with gravity.

  The dream shifted.

  Not Samhal.

  Not the monastery. Not the Throat. A low ceiling made of something too smooth to be stone. Light that didn’t come from fire or crystal. A rectangle of brightness on one wall that hurt his eyes in a different way.

  And a woman, sitting on the edge of a bed he recognized and didn’t, elbows on her knees, head in her hands.

  Alea.

  Hair shorter than it had been. Shoulders tenser. Same curve of her neck where it met her shoulder blade; he’d know that line even if the rest of the world had been scribbled over.

  She said something.

  The sound came through the static, broken and wrong?timed, syllables slipping past each other. He caught fragments—his name, maybe, or something that shared its shape. Another name he didn’t know. A curse. A laugh that was more of a gasp.

  He tried to move toward her. His feet had no say in the matter. His perspective stayed where it was, locked at a fixed angle like a camera bolted to a wall.

  “Alea,” he tried to say.

  Static answered.

  Skill Unlocked: [Dimensional Link] (Passive)

  The band at his skull squeezed, hard enough to snap the dream in half.

  He woke with his heart pounding, throat raw, eyes burning. The barracks ceiling loomed over him, stubbornly made of wood and smoke?stained rafters, not plaster and paint.

  His hands shook.

  He scrubbed them over his face, laughed once without humor.

  “Of course,” he whispered. “Can’t pick one mountain to fucking climb. System gives me two.”

  The halo in his vision pulsed, slow and sour.

  No new text. No explanations. Just the lingering taste of static in his mouth and the memory of Alea’s hunched shoulders burned into a part of his mind that already had too much load on it.

  “I need a cigarette.”