I didn't want to go.

  That was the first honest thing I admitted to myself as I dropped through the upper canopy toward the lower branch highways. The turret waddling behind on its stubby legs with the tube pointed at the back of my head like always, and somewhere in my chest — underneath the mana hum, underneath the warmth — something was pulling tight.

  South and down. Toward people. Toward the conversation I'd spent four days building toward and was now, inexplicably, dreading.

  The translation matrix was live. Had been since dawn — an open channel in the directory, ready to process language the moment it arrived. Three days I'd wanted this. The ability to speak, to coordinate, to stop being alone. And now that the distance was closing — the gorilla, the cat, the wolf, the velociraptor, the goat I'd pulled from a paralysis field — now that the branch highways were taking me somewhere with people at the end—

  I wanted to turn around.

  Not because of them. Because four days of cold, functional equilibrium was about to break. Asking *have you seen two humans, one named Chris, one named Arturo* was going to collapse uncertainty into an answer. And the answer might be the kind that didn't fit in any packet I'd stored.

  The capuchin body read the hesitation before I did. My hands gripped a branch and didn't release. My feet planted. For three full seconds I hung there, motionless, sixty meters up, while the engineering brain and whatever the other thing was negotiated in a language that wasn't words.

  Then I moved. Because the alternative was staying, and staying was just dying with extra steps and better justification.

  South and down.

  — — —

  I knew the area from the scouting runs. Secondary growth, lower canopy — a section where the massive trunks thinned and the branch highways widened into something like clearings. Open sightlines. Good for a group that needed to see threats coming. Good for coordination. I'd filed the location two days ago when I'd traced the sounds of the translation matrix's first partial contact — syllables that almost resolved, just out of range. The group had been here then. Consistently. Using this section as a base the way I used my hollow.

  I dropped to the approach altitude I'd planned — upper canopy, looking down through gaps in the foliage, the angle that gave me coverage without exposure. Standard procedure. Tactical patience. The capuchin body moved through the branches with the quiet, fluid brachiation that four days had burned into something approaching instinct, and I scanned the clearing below for movement.

  Nothing.

  Not the nothing of an empty space. The nothing of a space that should have had something in it and didn't. The branch platforms where a group of five Earth animals would rest, would sleep, would organize — vacant. The specific arrangement of bark and foliage that indicated habitation, the kind of wear patterns I'd learned to read from my own hollow — present. But no one in them.

  I stopped. Scanned wider. My ears rotating independently, tracking sounds I couldn't consciously parse yet — the wet chirps, the mid-canopy drone, the layered ambient noise of the forest doing what forests do. All normal. All present. All wrong in a way I couldn't identify, the way a room sounds different when something has happened in it recently even if the furniture hasn't moved.

  Wrong spot. That was the first thought. The rational explanation. I'd filed the location from two days ago and the group had moved, because groups move, because staying in one place too long in this canopy was exactly the kind of pattern the predators learned.

  I was already preparing the course correction — running alternate locations through the directory, checking filed observations for secondary gathering points — when the sound arrived.

  Not words. Not language the translation matrix could process. A sound that bypassed every system I had and hit something underneath.

  Crying.

  Not human crying. The vocal architecture was wrong — deeper, rougher, a frequency that vibrated in the bark I was gripping. Animalistic. A primate's distress call shaped by a throat that could move more air than any human's, and underneath the animal mechanics of it, something the translation matrix didn't need to translate because grief sounds the same in every chassis.

  A child crying.

  My spine went cold. Not metaphor — the capuchin nervous system produced a literal wave of chill that traveled from the base of my tail to the back of my skull, every hair on my body lifting in a cascade that the camo struggled to track. The body knew before I did. The body was already trying to run.

  I didn't run. I looked.

  Really looked. The engineering brain coming online with the specific focus it used when the data mattered and the stakes were binary — the same mode that had activated when the alien with the discharge organelles had shot through a tree. Not scanning. Searching. Processing the clearing below with capuchin eyes that were better at contrast and detail than human ones in every condition, and for the first time using that advantage on something I didn't want to see clearly.

  The bark discoloration registered first. I'd been reading it as shadow — a darker patch across the main branch platform, the kind of variation that the wrong-colored light produced throughout the canopy. But shadow didn't pool. Shadow didn't have edges that stopped where the bark's grain created a natural runoff channel. Shadow didn't catch the amber light with a wet sheen that meant the surface was still damp.

  Blood. A lot of it. Smeared across the bark in patterns that told a story I was reading involuntarily — here, where something had been held down; there, where something had moved fast; a wider pool near the trunk junction where something had stopped moving entirely. The engineering brain catalogued these with the same detachment it used for material properties and branch angles, because detachment was the only setting that kept the rest of me from—

  I saw the head.

  The goat. The one I'd pulled from the paralysis field. The one I'd stuffed into a hole in a tree and held up four fingers to — *stay* — the gesture meaningless but the intention real, a promise made in primate sign language to someone who didn't speak primate.

  The head was separated from anything else. Sitting on the bark platform at an angle that meant it had been placed rather than left. The eyes were open. The expression was—

  I threw up.

  The capuchin body handled it without my input — a violent contraction that emptied everything in my stomach onto the branch in front of me, the nodule vines and copper-flat water coming back in a way that tasted like copper and biology and the specific flavor of something I was never going to be able to file. My hands gripped the branch so hard the bark cracked under my fingers. My whole body shook — not the controlled tremor from the first kill, not the adrenaline shaking from the alien attack, but something deeper, something that came from the place where the drawers were and suggested that the filing system was not, in fact, capable of containing everything.

  My eyes watered. The capuchin body made a sound — a thin, high whine I didn't authorize and couldn't stop.

  Pieces. On the branch below. The clearing wasn't empty — it was *aftermath*. The shapes I'd been choosing not to resolve snapped into focus — pattern recognition doing its job at the worst possible time. The dark shape near the trunk junction that wasn't a shadow but a body. The scatter pattern that wasn't bark debris but—

  The crying erupted closer.

  Fist-on-bark impact. The sound of something hitting wood with the force of a creature that outweighed me by a factor I'd refused to calculate, and the branch highway below me shook, and a shape exploded from the foliage at the clearing's edge.

  The gorilla.

  Charging. Fists raised. Screaming — the sound was enormous, layered with grief and rage in a way that wasn't human and wasn't animal but was both, a twelve-year-old boy in a body built for war making a noise that meant *I will kill whatever I find next*. His eyes were wild. Face wet. Moving straight toward my position with the speed of something that had stopped calculating outcomes.

  The turret swung. I had maybe a second before two hundred kilograms of grieving gorilla turned me into a component I couldn't reassemble.

  "Wait!" My voice came out as a capuchin screech — sharp, high, the word translating through the matrix into whatever reached the gorilla's comprehension. "Wait — I'm — it's me. The monkey. From before."

  He stopped.

  Three meters away. Both fists raised, knuckles forward, the gorilla threat display that said *I am going to break you into your constituent elements*. Breathing like a bellows. Eyes locked on me — and I watched the recognition arrive. Not fast. Slow, through layers of something that had been blocking input. He saw me. Saw the turret behind me, tube pointed at nothing useful, waddling on its legs.

  Saw the monkey who'd saved a goat.

  The fists dropped.

  His body followed.

  Not a collapse — a surrender. Something structural giving way inside him, a load-bearing wall that had been holding since whenever this had happened finally reaching failure under a force it wasn't rated for. He went down. Knees hitting the bark with a sound like a mallet on hardwood, then forward, curling, his massive arms wrapping around his own chest, and the sound that came out of him was the worst thing I'd heard on this planet, worse than the alien choir, worse than the discharge that shot through a tree, worse than my own voice naming what I'd seen.

  A child. Trying to hold himself together with the literal motion of holding.

  I climbed down. Slowly, because moving fast near someone in this state was a way to get killed even if they didn't mean it. The capuchin body descended the branch in quiet, careful movements — hands first, feet finding purchase, tail trailing, everything soft and non-threatening and four kilograms of trying to be present without being in the way.

  I stopped two meters from him. The bark under my feet was clean here. The blood hadn't reached this far.

  "They killed them," the gorilla said. Muffled. His face pressed into his own arms, the words arriving through fur and grief and the translation matrix doing its best with sounds that kept breaking apart. "They killed them all."

  I didn't speak. Not because I didn't have words. Because nothing I could say was going to be the right thing, and saying the wrong thing to someone who looked like he might come apart at the molecular level felt more dangerous than the alien who'd shot at me.

  "My sister." The words separating now. Coming out in pieces the same way the scene below us existed in pieces. "Mia. The — the cat. She was — she was—"

  He couldn't finish. The grief hit again, a wave, and he curled tighter and the bark under his knees creaked under the pressure of a body trying to make itself smaller than it was.

  "The wolf. The — the little dinosaur one. The goat." A breath that sounded like it was torn from him. "All of them. All of them."

  I stood there. Four kilograms. A turret that had waddled to a stop behind us and was tracking the ambient movement of the canopy with dedicated, useless focus.

  The smart thing to do was leave. The engineering brain ran the analysis in real time: this location was compromised, whatever had done this could still be nearby, a screaming gorilla was broadcasting their position to everything within half a kilometer, and staying here was a list of tactical errors long enough to fill a course syllabus.

  I didn't leave.

  "We need to move," I said. Quiet voice. The calmest thing I'd said in four days, because the alternative to calm was joining him on the bark and I was not going to be useful to anyone from that position. "I have a place. Safe. We need to go there now."

  He didn't move.

  "Hey." I took a step closer. Then another. Close enough to touch him, if touching a grieving gorilla with capuchin hands was something a person chose to do. "We need to go. Right now. Can you move?"

  A long silence. The canopy sounds filling it — the wet chirps, the drone, the ambient indifference of a world that didn't care what had happened here.

  Then the gorilla uncurled. Not all the way. Enough. He looked at me with eyes that were red and wet and twelve years old, and the expression on his face was not one I was going to file. Ever. The directory didn't get this one. This one stayed where it landed.

  "Where," he said.

  "North. Up. Follow me."

  — — —

  He followed.

  The gorilla moved through the canopy behind me like gravity given form — heavy, deliberate, each branch bending under him in a way that made the route I'd calculated obsolete within the first thirty seconds. My branch highways were capuchin-rated. They couldn't hold him. I adjusted on the fly, finding wider limbs, thicker junctions, routing us along the primary growth where the wood was dense enough to carry his weight without complaint.

  He didn't speak during the climb. The crying had stopped — not ended, just paused, the way a machine pauses between cycles. I could hear his breathing behind me: deep, shuddering, the kind of breath that comes after something has been torn out and the body is trying to figure out how to operate around the gap.

  The golems ranged ahead. The turret brought up the rear, struggling with branch angles that its stubby legs weren't designed for, repeatedly falling behind and then catching up with a determined waddle that would have been funny in any other context.

  The hollow came into view. My hollow. The bark walls I'd reinforced, the entrance I'd shaped, the space I'd been living in for four days that suddenly looked very small for its new purpose.

  The gorilla stopped at the entrance. Looked at it. Looked at me.

  "I barely fit in there," he said. First complete sentence since the clearing that wasn't about death.

  "You'll fit."

  He fit. Barely. His body filled the space the way water fills a glass — completely, pressing up against every surface, knees drawn up because stretching out wasn't an option. I climbed to my perch on the upper wall and the turret settled into the corner and the golems positioned at the entrance and for a moment we just existed. Two Earth animals in a hole in a tree.

  Then he started talking.

  Not immediately. First: the crying came back. A shorter cycle this time — two minutes of grief that wracked his body and made the hollow shake, followed by a silence that felt like both of us holding our breath, followed by the specific awful thing that happens when a child tries to be brave and can't quite manage it but the trying is visible.

  Then words.

  "There were three of them."

  The engineering brain activated. The rest of me held very still.

  "The fast one came first. It was — it had blades. Not like, weapons. They grew out of it. Its arms were—" He made a gesture. Both hands extending forward, fingers rigid, mimicking something that had haunted him since it happened. "It moved so fast. Like it wasn't even there, and then it was."

  "Chitin?" I said. The word tasting like a material science lecture in a context that had nothing to do with material science.

  "Yeah. Like — armor. But thin. Sharp." A pause. The hands dropping. "It went for Mia first."

  I didn't respond. My tail had wrapped around the branch I was sitting on with a constricting force that was going to leave bruises on wood.

  "Then the big one. Heavy. It didn't — it didn't need to be fast. It just walked through everything. The wolf tried to—" His voice broke. Reassembled. Broke again. "Jay. The — the velociraptor. He charged it. He actually charged it. He was always — he was like that. He just—"

  Gone. The word he couldn't say, sitting in the hollow with us.

  "Then the third one. It didn't fight. It just stood there, and when it — when it *did* something, the other two got... worse. Stronger. Faster. Like it was—"

  "Empowering them," I said. Not a question.

  The gorilla looked at me. Something in his expression shifted — the grief still there, underneath everything, but a new layer over it. Recognition. The specific look of someone realizing that the person they're talking to has already converted their worst experience into data.

  "Yeah," he said. "Like that."

  He told me the rest in fragments. Details out of order, wrapped in emotions that made chronology impossible — the sound of chitin on bark, the blue light that preceded the Empowerer's activation, the way the blade thing moved between targets with a precision that wasn't rage but something worse. Efficiency. Three aliens clearing a campsite the way you clear a workspace.

  The kid survived because he'd been away. Foraging. Came back to what I'd found an hour ago, except fresh.

  The engineering brain assembled a tactical picture. Three attackers. A sequence — blade first, Empowerer last, heavy one in the middle providing pressure. A window before the Empowerer activated. The fast one was fast but fast meant light. Chitin on a speed-optimized frame. Deflection armor, not absorption.

  One shot. From above. Before the sequence completed.

  I had a plan.

  I didn't examine why I had a plan. The drawer was labeled and I could feel its weight — the goat's face, the kid's voice breaking on his sister's name, the smell of the clearing I was never going to forget.

  I filed the tactical picture. Closed the drawer. Looked at the kid, who had talked himself into exhaustion and was staring at the bark wall with the thousand-yard gaze of someone who'd run out of words and grief energy simultaneously.

  "What's your name," I said.

  A pause so long I thought he'd fallen asleep with his eyes open.

  "Sam," he said.

  "I'm Marcus."

  Sam looked at me. Then at the turret. Then at the golems. Then at the hollow walls and the pitcher plant water and the material piles from four days of cataloguing and building.

  "You've been alone this whole time?" he said.

  "Yes."

  Something in his face did something I didn't have the engineering vocabulary for. A kid realizing that the person offering help had been surviving alone for four days in a body that weighed less than one of his fists, and had built this anyway.

  "Okay," he said. The voice very small for a body that large. "Okay."

  He fell asleep less than ten minutes later. Curled into a defensive ball against the far wall, knuckles pressed against his chest. The way a human child holds something they're afraid of losing. Except there was nothing there. Just fists, closed around nothing, gripping what he was afraid of losing and had already lost.

  I watched him for a moment.

  Not with the engineering brain. Not filing the posture, the stress indicators, the way his breathing hitched every few minutes even in sleep. I just watched. A capuchin monkey sitting three meters from a sleeping gorilla in a hollow that smelled like bark dust and grief, and for once the directory wasn't sorting anything into drawers.

  Then the moment passed, because moments do. I opened the workspace and ran through the tactical picture one more time — the sequence, the window, the shot. Confirmed the plan still held. It did.

  I let the kid sleep and went out alone.

  The canopy at first light ran cold. Not temperature — color. The humidity had dropped overnight and the light came through sharper, harder, stripping the amber warmth from the branch highways. Bones of a building with the walls taken off.

  I moved through the upper canopy with both golems dissolved and Identify running on everything I touched. The mana budget was tight — workspace, turret on standby, the filing system holding more data than it had three days ago. Every Identify ping cost a flat draw I felt as a brief dimming behind my sternum.

  I wasn't cataloguing today. I was hunting. I had a plan, a design. Something far more deadly and evil than the turret.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I needed something that wanted to return to its original shape with force — not flexibility, not bend, but *recovery*. Elastic potential stored in structure. Everything I'd built so far used mana as the motive force. I needed a material that stored mechanical energy on its own. Physics, not magic. The two working together.

  The canopy kept offering me things that just bent.

  Ironbark snapped clean past fifteen degrees. Zero elasticity. Vines lost energy with each flex — stretch, release, get back eighty percent. Stretch again, seventy-five. The vine remembered being deformed and preferred the new shape. A softer wood at a trunk junction deformed under thumb pressure and held the indent. Placeholder Softwood, Identify named it. Good for carving, bad for everything else.

  Two hours. Nothing.

  My hands ached. I sat on a wide branch, ate two nodule vines without tasting them, and groomed the fur on my forearm in short strokes — the stress behavior I'd stopped fighting, the fingers needing to do *something* that wasn't fail at material science. My tail hung below the branch, the tip curling and uncurling in a slow, agitated rhythm the body was running without authorization.

  Sam woke while I was out. I'd told him before leaving: bring back anything that looks interesting.

  He'd interpreted this as bring back everything.

  I returned to the hollow to find half the canopy stacked against the far wall. Branches. Bark strips. Vine bundles. Moss. Three rocks of different colors. A section of root system ripped from a trunk junction with enough force to leave a visible wound in the wood. Something that might have been a fungus or might have been a mistake. And a small pile of leaves he'd apparently thought were pretty.

  Sam was sitting in the middle of it with the contained energy of a bomb that hadn't decided whether to go off yet. His hands — enormous, dark-furred, each one capable of reshaping the interior architecture of this hollow if the mood struck — were picking at bark strips with a precision that didn't match his body. Quick, agitated movements. Not building. Stripping. Destroying things in a way that was almost productive.

  "Did you find stuff," he said. Not a question. A demand for progress. He'd been awake for maybe an hour and was already vibrating with the need to do something, preferably violent, preferably now.

  "Still looking," I said.

  He made a sound — somewhere between a grunt and a whimper, the gorilla vocal system expressing frustration with more bass than any twelve-year-old should produce. Then he went back to stripping bark. Then he stopped. Then he looked at me.

  "When are we—"

  "Not yet."

  He held my gaze for a moment. The expression on a gorilla's face is surprisingly readable when there's a human behind it — the brow ridge conveying something the engineering brain wanted to categorize as anger but wasn't, exactly. Closer to the look of someone who has been told to wait by a person they don't entirely trust but have no alternative to trusting.

  He went back to the bark. I went to his pile.

  Piece by piece. Identify firing on each one, the skill giving me names and sentences while Sam watched with the energy of someone who wanted to be doing something violent and was instead watching a monkey touch sticks.

  Greyvein Ironbark. Already had it. Filed.

  Stonecap Shelf fragment. Brittle under shear. Set aside.

  Vine — generic. Moss — filler. Another vine. Another bark strip. Discarded, discarded, discarded.

  A rock Identify named Calcium Nodule — powdery under impact. Geology for later.

  "This is boring," Sam said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "How long is—"

  "I don't know yet."

  He made the sound again. Hit the wall. Not hard — hard for a capuchin, gentle for a gorilla, but the hollow shuddered and bark dust fell from the ceiling and I filed the reminder that the kid I was sharing a workspace with could disassemble this tree if his emotional containment failed.

  I kept going.

  Another branch. Dense, knotted, wrong grain. Another. Pale, too young, no stored energy. Another—

  The skill fired and the name landed and I went still.

  Springvein Whip. Flexible hardwood with helical micro-grain. High elastic recovery. Mechanical energy storage under deformation.

  I held it in both hands. Dark wood, the color of wet earth, with a grain pattern I could feel under my fingertips — a twist, subtle, running the length of the branch in a spiral so tight it was more texture than visible structure. I flexed it.

  It resisted. Not the gradual bend of normal wood — a loaded resistance, the material pushing back with increasing force at every degree of deformation, like compressing a spring. I held the flex for a moment, feeling the stored energy vibrating through the grain, and released.

  It snapped back. The tip caught my palm and the sting traveled up my arm and into my shoulder and I sat with the sharp heat of it for two full seconds before I flexed it again.

  Same result. Same force. Same recovery. No hysteresis. The grain was helical — coiled at a microscopic level, each fiber wound around its neighbors in a helix that stored mechanical energy the way a compressed spring stores potential. It didn't just bend.

  It loaded.

  I set it aside. Carefully. Separately from everything else in the pile, on a clean section of bark floor where nothing could fall on it or roll against it.

  Sam noticed.

  He'd been fidgeting — hands moving from bark strips to moss to his own knees and back, the restless cycle of a grieving child who couldn't sit still — but when I set the Springvein aside with the deliberateness of someone handling a precision instrument, he went quiet. The hands stopped. The dark eyes tracked the wood, then tracked me, and something in his posture shifted from agitation to attention.

  I didn't explain what I was building. Sam stopped asking after the second hour.

  The workspace opened with a mana draw I felt as warmth leaving a room. Not catastrophic — not yet. The pool was lower than I liked, the turret on standby all pulling its maintenance, and adding an active workspace to the draw meant I was operating close to the ceiling before I'd shaped a single component.

  I dissolved the turret. Felt it come apart in the directory — the mechanisms releasing, the mana returning to the pool with a warmth like unclenching a fist I'd been holding for days. One golem followed. The ceiling rose. I had room.

  The base came first.

  Inside the workspace, I pulled Greyvein Ironbark from Sam's pile — the heaviest piece, the densest grain, the one that had Identified as moderate compression resistance and meant it: I'd pressed my thumb into it and felt nothing give. I shaped it in the workspace rather than by hand, because what I needed here was a precision that Stonecap edge tools couldn't reliably produce. A flat platform, wide and stable, slotted on its underside to accept the rotating disc assembly I was going to build underneath it.

  The mana cost of shaping was significant — every millimeter removed from the Ironbark was mana spent, intent converting to physical modification through a process I'd stopped trying to understand. Pushing something uphill. Small pushes, many of them.

  I worked with my eyes closed, hands on the wood's surface, the design space filling with a clarity the physical world didn't offer.

  I talked while I worked. Not to Sam. The murmur had developed around day two — half engineering notation, half something that lived in the part of me the engineering brain didn't govern.

  "Platform needs to be wide. Wider than it looks like it needs to be. The force transfer on firing is going to want to tip it."

  The workspace confirmed this, the stress simulation showing me the torque vectors. I widened the base by another three centimeters and the numbers settled.

  "Rotation has to be smooth. Not fast. Smooth. Jerk in the rotation and the whole aim picture shifts."

  I thought about the Blade Master. The way Sam had described it moving — the fold, the precision. Something that understood efficiency the way I understood efficiency. Something that had looked at five Earth animals in a temporary camp and calculated.

  My hands pressed harder against the wood than the work required.

  Sam picked up a bark strip. Started stripping it — rolling vine fiber between his palms, the restless motion of someone containing themselves. He watched my hands and copied the rhythm without copying the output.

  Strip. Roll. Twist. Discard.

  I shaped the rotation disc below the platform — the same bearing architecture I'd used for the turret, clay ball bearings in a grooved channel, but larger now, the tolerances tighter because the load was going to be larger. The mana cost of the bearing surfaces ground steadily at the pool. I shaped them anyway. Each one smooth. Each one exactly seated.

  I ran the first mana veins.

  Into the bearing groove first — thin channels, the pipe architecture I'd learned from studying the original golem template. The same hydraulic language: pressure in, material moves. I visualized the expansion function, compressed the concept into a packet the way I'd learned to, and pushed the packet into the vein. The bearing groove could now rotate the platform above it on command.

  "The rotation function goes into the vein as a single concept," I murmured. "Not a sequence of individual pressures. Not assembly language. A compiled call."

  I tested it. Sent the command.

  The platform rotated. Smoothly. Twelve degrees — I stopped it, reversed, stopped it. The bearing surfaces were clean. The function ran without jitter.

  Something in my chest recognized what this was. I kept working.

  Sam made a sound — not words. The gorilla equivalent of noticing something without having language for it yet.

  The structural arms were the next problem and the place where I needed him.

  I'd split the Springvein Whip into two matched sections by feel — finding the balance point, flexing until the resistance told me where the material was equal, then pressing down across my knee until it snapped. Both halves the same length within a tolerance I was satisfied with. Inside the workspace I tapered them: thick at the base for the joint, thinning gradually toward the tip, the taper smooth enough that the stored energy under load would distribute along the full arm rather than concentrating at a single point.

  I shaped the mortise slots in the platform's forward face. Cut them physically with a Stonecap edge — the workspace had already told me the dimensions, I was just executing. The slots were precise. The arm bases dropped into them with a friction fit that was already good before I opened the workspace to bond them.

  The bonding cost hit hard. Mana dropping in a way I felt as cold rather than heat — the pool giving up reserves to compress wood-to-wood contact into something closer to a single structure than two pieces touching. The joint held. I tested by pressing down on each arm tip. Firm. No movement. No creak.

  "Sam."

  He looked up immediately. Something in my voice, maybe. The murmur had gone quieter in the last hour and he'd been tracking the change without commenting on it.

  "I need these lashed. Every joint. I'll show you once."

  He crossed the hollow in three careful steps, the space reorganizing around him. I showed him the pattern — vine over and under, alternating direction, each pass pulling the previous tighter, the knot at the end that locked without slipping. I showed him once.

  He did the second joint without being asked, his enormous fingers moving with a delicacy that his body didn't suggest was possible. He modified the knot ending — a small change, cleaner than mine, the vine end seated flush rather than proud. Better. I didn't mention it.

  He went back to his bark strip with the contained satisfaction of someone who'd done something useful and wasn't going to make a big deal of it.

  The vines came next. And this was where the design became something I hadn't built before.

  I strung Canopy Sinew between the arm tips — braided, three strands twisted and wrapped, the tensile math worked out in the workspace before I touched a fiber. Standard engineering. The kind of thing with a correct answer if you did the arithmetic.

  But I also ran mana veins through the arms.

  Not just through the sinew. Through the Springvein wood itself — thin channels pressed into the helical grain, following the coil of the micro-structure, each vein sitting inside the grain pattern like a wire in a spring. The mana cost of laying them was per-millimeter and significant. I paid it.

  The function I loaded into these veins was contraction.

  The Springvein grain already stored mechanical energy under deformation — the helical coil tightening when bent, releasing when lifted. Physics. What I was adding was a mana layer on top: at full draw, the vein contracts with the grain. Not against the material. Amplifying the release. Mana as multiplier, synchronized to fire at the exact moment of snap.

  An engineer doesn't want a better tool. An engineer wants a better workshop. But sometimes the workshop is a weapon, and you build it anyway.

  I compressed the amplification function into a packet and loaded it into the arm veins. Tested it at partial draw — felt the mana engage as the release point approached, the contraction synchronized, the workspace confirming the timing was correct.

  Sam watched me press my hands against the arms with my eyes closed for three minutes and said nothing. He'd learned, sometime in the last two hours, when the silence was working.

  "Sam," I said. "Draw this. Both hands. Straight back."

  He looked at the sinew. Gripped it. Pulled.

  The arms bent. The helical grain loaded — I could hear it in the wood, a compressed creak that wasn't failure but accumulation, potential energy stacking in the microscopic coils. The arms drew to full flex and the sinew went taut and Sam's arms weren't shaking.

  "Hold it," I said.

  He held it. Easily. His breathing unchanged.

  Through the mana connection I could feel the stored energy in the arms — the physics layer and the mana layer both loaded, both waiting, the combined potential sitting in Springvein wood like a thought about to be spoken.

  "Let it forward," I said.

  He did. The arms released. The crack of returning Springvein moved the air in the hollow, and the mana contraction fired simultaneously, and the combined snap was loud enough that Sam blinked.

  He looked at his hands. Looked at the arms.

  "Again," I said.

  He drew. Full draw. The crack again. Louder than the first — I'd adjusted the timing slightly, shaved a millisecond from the contraction delay, and the synchronization was better.

  "What is this," he said. Quiet voice.

  "Still building," I said.

  The mechanisms.

  Three Conditional Automation slots. I'd been running the math for an hour and it was tight: each slot was a continuous mana draw, maintained in parallel, competing with the vein network and the golem infrastructure for a pool that was already doing work.

  The Mana Leaf was the reason I could afford this at all.

  I connected its root network to the weapon's vein system in the workspace — carefully, the junction bonding organic channels to construct channels at three anchor points. The cost of the connection peaked and then settled, and the Siphon's root system spread across the wood the way roots know how to spread. The leaves settled.

  The pool reading shifted. A trickle. Slow and continuous and not mine.

  "It feeds itself," I said. Not to Sam. To the workspace, almost. To the problem I'd been carrying.

  "What does," Sam said.

  "The plant." I touched a broad leaf with one finger. "Same vein structure as the golem channels. But reversed. Pulls mana in from the air instead of pushing it out."

  Sam stared at the plant growing from the wood. His hand came up without him deciding to — two fingers resting on a leaf. Touching without gripping.

  "We have to keep it alive," he said.

  First time he'd said we back.

  The trigger pin formed from the first CA slot — small, precise, positioned behind the sinew's draw position. One function: extend to catch, retract to release. I set the retraction condition: mana pulse through the connected touch plate on the platform surface. My hand. A single pulse.

  The ratchet mechanism used the second slot. Five catch positions along the upper structure, each a mana tooth that allowed the string forward and resisted it going back. Sam could draw in stages — catch at the first tooth, reposition, catch at the second, continue. The mechanism held whatever progress had been made and asked for nothing until he moved again.

  The third slot. I used it for something I hadn't planned until I was building it.

  Elevation.

  Two vines, run from the forward face of the platform to the arm assembly above the barrel channel. A mana vein through each one. Contract the upper vine: the channel angle increases. Contract the lower: decreases. Release both: hold.

  I compressed both concepts into packets. Loaded them. The channel could now aim. Not freely — constrained by the vine lengths, the arc limited to thirty degrees each direction — but controlled. Golem-controlled. Part of the same infrastructure as the rotation, the amplification, the trigger, all of it speaking the same hydraulic language through the same network of veins.

  I opened my eyes.

  The structure on the hollow floor was complete except for the bolt and the eyes. It sat on its four Ironbark leg stubs — short, wide, jointed with mana-veined flex points — and it was ugly. The Mana Leaf spread broad leaves across the platform like something that had chosen to grow there. Vines ran down the arm structures in thick bundles — some lashed, some running mana, some both. The bearing disc showed at the base. The arms rose from the forward face and curved away from each other like things reaching, Canopy Sinew strung between them.

  The whole assembly breathed. Not literally — but with the quality of a thing maintained by mana, alive in the way System constructs were alive. A pulse at the junctions. A readiness.

  I was proud of it. That was the first honest thing. The second was that no one should have needed to build it.

  I added the eyes last. Two pebbles from the hollow floor, the mineral density that Identified as optimal for sensory nodes, seated in sockets on the forward face. They activated immediately — the low-resolution motion-priority visual that I'd come to know from the turret, the image fragmenting at the edges, shapes and trajectories resolved rather than details. The workspace registered the sensory input and added it to the golem's processing allocation.

  It was looking at me.

  I set it rotating. A slow sweep — the bearing disc engaging, the platform turning through sixty degrees and stopping. The eyes tracked the motion, adjusted, resettled. The arm structures turned with the platform. The channel turned with the arms.

  It could aim itself.

  I wrote the targeting function: if pointed-at command received, rotate to bearing. If elevation command received, adjust channel angle. If fire command received — the packet I'd been building in parallel while everything else assembled, the full firing sequence compressed into a single concept — execute protocol.

  I loaded it into the vein network and sent it to the golem.

  The platform rotated to face me.

  I pointed at the far wall of the hollow. The platform rotated to the far wall.

  I pointed at the entrance. The platform rotated to the entrance.

  I pointed at Sam.

  The platform rotated to Sam.

  He went very still.

  "It's not going to fire," I said.

  "I know," he said. He didn't move.

  "It knows you," I said. "I've given it your image. It won't aim at you as a target."

  Sam looked at the pebble eyes. Looked at me. Looked at the pebble eyes again.

  "It can know things?" he asked.

  "Simple things. Shapes. What to aim at. What not to."

  He crouched in front of it. The pebble eyes tracked him — not threateningly, just tracking, the sensory nodes doing what sensory nodes did. He was a gorilla looking at a mechanism the size of a piece of furniture with the patient consideration of someone who'd been underestimating things for four days and had decided to stop.

  "Okay," he said. "So what does it need."

  "A bolt. And you."

  The bolt.

  I gave this the most time. Sam had stopped moving entirely — he'd settled into a crouch near the entrance, the way he settled when something had grabbed his attention completely, his enormous hands resting on his knees and still for the first time all day.

  The shaft was the bamboo-analog I'd been sitting on for two days. Hollow, segmented, rigid. Light and straight in ways I hadn't been able to explain until Identify had fired on it and given me properties that amounted to: exactly what you need, and you didn't know you needed it.

  The tip: Stonecap Shelf, shaped by knapping.

  I'd gotten better at this. The capuchin hands found fracture planes faster now — the pressure application controlled, the flake removal deliberate. The Stonecap fractured cleanly along lines I could predict. That property had eliminated it from structural applications on day two. The same property was the reason I was building a projectile from it now.

  I shaped the tip blunt.

  Sam watched me work a point into a dense, flat-ended cone and said nothing for a long time. Then: "It's not sharp."

  "No."

  "Why not."

  I turned the tip over in my fingers. "What do you want it to do?"

  He thought about this. The grief underneath the question, the way it always was.

  "Kill it," he said.

  "Which one."

  "The fast one."

  "Describe the armor again."

  He described it. The details contaminated by everything that had surrounded them, but present — chitin plate, thin, the way it moved between targets. Fast and precise.

  "Thin chitin is optimized for deflection," I said. "A sharp tip glances off plate at any angle that isn't perfectly perpendicular. Even perpendicular, it penetrates without stopping." I held up the blunt tip. "This hits flat. Force transfers into the plate on impact. The plate cracks rather than deflects."

  A pause. "You want to crack it."

  "I want to knock it out. You finish it."

  "Oh," Sam said. The word arriving with the weight of something much larger.

  I thought about the Blade Master. Efficiency as a weapon more frightening than speed — the kind that removes variables methodically. It hadn't been angry. Sam said that without knowing he was saying it. It just worked. And something that works methodically has a method, and methods have assumptions, and assumptions have gaps.

  The gap was: it assumed nothing was going to hit it from above before the Empowerer activated.

  I was going to put something in that gap.

  Behind the tip, in a cavity I drilled into the shaft: a small charge. The pressure-release membrane I'd catalogued on day three — a plant that dispersed seeds with percussive force, the pods detonating with a violence wildly disproportionate to their size. A pinch, packed tight, sealed with Waxcatch Film. On impact: membrane ruptures, pressure releases forward through the sealed shaft cavity, additional force drives the tip into the plate at exactly the moment of contact.

  Two-stage impact. Bolt's kinetic energy first. Plant's chemistry second.

  I compressed the firing sequence into a packet and loaded it into the weapon's targeting architecture: wait for visual lock confirmation, confirm elevation angle, fire amplification vein contraction synchronously with trigger pin release.

  I held the finished bolt in both hands. Turned it in the amber light.

  The engineering brain ran the numbers. The other thing in my chest ran something else, something that didn't have a formula, and both of them came back with the same answer.

  I handed it to Sam without ceremony.

  "Don't touch the tip," I said.

  He took it in both hands. The gorilla that had ripped a root system from a trunk junction with casual force, holding a projectile the size of his forearm like it might break.

  He understood it was heavier than it looked.

  I stepped back.

  The golem sat on its four leg stubs, the platform level, the arm structures rising from the forward face in their loaded curve, the Mana Leaf spreading broad leaves across the wood. The vines. The mana veins running through the vines. The bearing disc. The pebble eyes. The CA mechanisms sitting in their slots — invisible, present, a faint shimmer where mana density was high enough to affect the light.

  It was the most sophisticated golem I'd built. It was also the worst thing I'd made since the drop — not in quality, not in function, but in what it represented. Four days of learning to build on this planet, channeled into something that existed because five people were dead on a branch in the secondary canopy and a twelve-year-old couldn't sleep without gripping the air where someone used to be.

  I shouldn't have built it.

  I'd built it anyway. Sometimes that's all there is.

  Sam stood at the hollow entrance and looked at it. Whole, for the first time. He'd seen pieces all day — the disc, the arms going in, the vines, the plant settling onto the wood — but not the assembly. Not the completed thing. Not what all of it became when it was finished.

  He went still.

  The restless cycling that had been running him all day — grief to fury to impatience to grief — went quiet. Not resolved. Just overtaken by something that was looking at the golem and understanding what it was and what it was for and what it was going to do, and all of that arriving at once was apparently bigger than the cycling.

  A long quiet. The canopy outside doing what it did. Wet chirps. The amber light shifting.

  "What do I do," Sam said. Quiet voice. The one underneath everything else.

  "You draw it," I said. "Both hands, straight back. The ratchet catches — you can go in stages, it'll hold wherever you've gotten." I touched the draw surface. "When it's fully locked, we aim. I fire." I pointed a finger to my furry head. "I give the mental command, and it fires."

  He looked at his hands. At the draw surface. At me.

  "You built something you can't use," he said.

  "I built something we can use."

  Something in his face moved.

  "Show me how to draw it," he said.

  I showed him. He gripped the string and pulled — click, click, click, the ratchet catching through its five positions, the arms bending to their full arc. The amplification veins loaded alongside the mechanical draw, both layers of stored energy coiling in the Springvein grain. The trigger pin engaged. The golem locked.

  The hollow held its breath.

  Sam let go of the grip. The string held. The ratchet held. The pin held. The pebble eyes looked at the entrance and waited.

  Sam looked at it for a long time. His hand came up slowly and rested on the Mana Leaf — two fingers, just touching.

  "Okay," he said. The voice that meant something had been decided. "Okay."

  — — —

  The hollow dark. Stars emerging in patterns I hadn't bothered to file until now.

  I filed the position of the brightest three. Calculated angles. Dawn was closer than I'd expected. We were ahead of schedule.

  Sam was asleep. Not the curled-tight defensive ball from this morning — he was leaning against the wall with one hand on the crossbow's draw grip, fingers loose but present. His breathing was even. Not hitching.

  He'd been crying an hour ago. Three minutes, maybe four — a sudden detonation of grief that arrived between one breath and the next and ended the same way. He hadn't tried to hide it. Just sat there with his face wet and his enormous hands clenched and let the thing happen the way weather happens.

  I'd sat nearby and let it pass. Didn't reach for him — my four-kilogram body would have been absurd comfort for a creature that outweighed me by fifty. Didn't speak. Just occupied the space. Present.

  Then it was over and he'd wiped his face and picked up the draw grip and the silence came back, different than before.

  I looked at the crossbow. At the gorilla. At the stars through the entrance. My tail had coiled around the branch beneath me — tight, the grip of something that wanted to pace but wasn't allowed to. My fingers were grooming the fur on my wrist in quick, repetitive strokes, the body self-soothing during a decision it could feel the weight of.

  The approach route was clean. High ground up on the junction I'd scouted days ago, south and down. A firing angle that put us above and behind. The math worked. The weapon was functional. The bolt was ready.

  I wasn't ready. That was different from not being prepared. Prepared was a checklist, and the checklist was complete. Ready was something else.

  I build things. It's what I have. Tomorrow, the thing I built finds out whether it's enough.

  The hollow was quiet. The gorilla was asleep. One hand on the draw grip.

  I didn't wake him. There was time.

  [SYSTEM PROFILE]

  Name: Marcus Body: Capuchin Monkey Class: Automator — Level 9

  [TRAITS]

  Micro-Scale Pigmentation — Fur passively shifts to match surrounding light and surface patterns. Automatic. No cost.

  [SKILLS]

  Advanced Schematic Synthesis — Level 5 Evolved from: Golem Governs all golem construction, maintenance, and command. Two resource pools run continuously: Mass Pool — total weight budget across all active constructs, currently around 12kg — and Processing Pool — cognitive allocation split across constructs, each drawing a percentage based on complexity. Exceed either pool and something dissolves.

  — Sub-skill: Design Workspace — Eyes-closed mental environment for designing constructs before physical assembly. Materials are shaped, bonded, and vein-mapped here first, then built by hand to match. Shaping and bonding costs mana. Cannot be used while moving.

  — Sub-skill: Mana Vein — Channels laid into golem materials that carry mana as pressure. Expansion pushes. Contraction pulls. Sequences of both produce movement. Veins also carry signal pulses, allowing them to trigger Conditional Automation constructs. Pressure sequences can be compressed into packets — compiled commands that execute a full behavior from a single instruction without step-by-step management.

  Conditional Automation — Level 2 Creates simple persistent mana constructs running on if-then logic. 3 slots active simultaneously, each a continuous mana draw. Constructs must be mechanically simple — springs, pins, catches, contact plates. Interfaces with golem veins through shared mana architecture.

  Identify — Level 2 Physical contact returns a material's name and 3-4 properties. Names encode meaningful information. Rare or high-tier materials may return partial data locked behind level requirements. Small flat mana cost per activation.

  [MANA NOTE] Two moderate golems sit near 70% of the processing pool. The Mana Leaf offsets roughly 60% of one golem's upkeep passively. Everything else competes for what remains.