Juna reached the old road ridge before dawn with the glaive across her shoulders and Wren wheezing somewhere behind.
The fort squatted in the grey valley below, its chains silent and its bucket lines still asleep.
’Hajin wants a way out for every worker down there, and I want it first.’
Wren staggered up beside her, clutching his satchel strap, "This is it, the high path, everyone ran this way once the fort started taking hands."
"Once?"
"Before the digging started," he whispered, pointing a shaky finger along the crest.
The path ran smooth along the ridge crest, wide enough for a cart and soft enough for any tired feet. Every fifty paces the soil sagged into collapsed pits, and torn packs lay half buried in the broken grey earth.
Juna crouched by the nearest pit, ears flattening at the sour smell, "Something’s hunting the people your fort chased into these hills."
"A digger," Wren squeaked, backing up two steps, "it dragged a mule straight through the ground last week."
"Only the mule?" she asked, eyes narrowing.
"And the man leading it... he crawled home with one foot left."
’It hunts the easy road, so nobody escapes along the easy road anymore.’
She stood and wiped her palms on her thigh, tail held low and perfectly still.
"Then the easy road’s closed, and I’m making a hard one."
She walked the crest slowly, pressing each step down and listening for the soft give beneath the topsoil.
Loose earth crumbled under her heel in long stretches, while bare rock ribs held firm along the cliff side.
Warm breath drifted from a crack beside a split boulder, thick with old meat and wet stone.
"Smell that?"
Wren sniffed hard and wrinkled his nose, "Dirt?"
"That’s its chimney, and it only breathes like that when it’s awake," Juna said, nostrils flaring.
"So we leave?"
"You sit on that slab, and you don’t step off the stone for anything," she ordered, pointing at a broad rock.
"What if you scream?"
"I won’t."
He scrambled onto the slab well back from the trail, hugging his satchel like a shield.
’Waiting lets it choose the ground, and I already chose mine.’
She slashed the glaive across the split boulder, and the first solar anchor burned there in a hot gold line. Then she ran the rock ribs toward the cliff, placing every step on stone and never on the soft crest.
The ground behind the marked boulder burst upward in a spray of clods and pebbles.
A plated burrower the length of a wagon heaved out of the hole, swinging forelimbs like shovels of black horn. It came straight at her back, faster than anything that size deserved, and drove her toward the open cliff drop.
"Shit," she hissed, skidding along the lip.
Her heel found the last rock rib with nothing but cold morning wind behind it.
The digging claw swept in sideways, and she slammed the glaive shaft against it with both her arms locked tight. Horn scraped wood, her shoulders shook, and a whole chunk of the cliff edge broke away under her trailing foot.
"Juna!" Wren yelled from his slab, "the edge, the edge—"
"I see it, stay put!"
She dropped flat beneath the second wide swing and rolled inside its long reach, right up against its plated chest. The glaive blade bit hard into the claw’s wrist joint, and she hauled the cut through gristle with a snarl.
The claw tumbled past her shoulder and clattered off the rocks, still twitching in the dirt.
The burrower shrieked, wheeled away from the edge, and plunged back into its tunnel with its stump flailing.
’Run home, then, and show me exactly where home is.’
She chased the heaving soil along the crest, staying on the rock ribs as the tunnel roof rippled and sagged. Each stride she ran became more traveled path, and pale gold burned faintly behind her feet across the morning stone.
The tunnel bent back toward the split boulder, its roof torn raw where the earlier collapse thinned it.
’There, pale soft hide under the plates, right where my blade already opened it.’
She completed the loop with one final stride and swept the glaive down to meet the boulder’s burning anchor.
[ Daybreak Path | Two anchors joined | Stored solar energy released ]
Stored dawn ripped along her traveled route and plunged through the tunnel roof into the soft flank.
The ground bucked, and the burrower erupted from the earth in front of her with its jaws wide.
Juna planted her feet on stone and drove the glaive straight up beneath its jaw, "Down, you bastard."
It shuddered on the blade, slumped across the crest, and finally lay still across its own broken tunnel.
[ Juna | EXP gained: 30,000,000 | 75,000,000 / 187,500,000 toward Wing Six ]
[ Shared host credit | 30,000,000 EXP | Host pool: 1,077,500,000 ]
Wren crept off his slab, staring at the carcass, "You said you wouldn’t scream."
"I didn’t, you did."
She tied the severed claw to her belt with a strip of hide and walked to the far shoulder.
From the safe ridge she saw straight down onto the fort’s back wall and the platform housing’s slate roof.
A thin worker crouched on those slates with a repair hammer, waving one rag in slow deliberate arcs.
"He’s signing," Wren breathed, shading his eyes, "that’s bucket-line talk, we use it on the river."
"Read it."
"Roof chain, ankle, he can’t come up... small hatch under the housing eaves, he opens it from inside... few people, next dark."
Juna lifted the bloody claw high above her head so the worker could see it clearly.
The rag stopped, then dipped twice, and the worker bent back over his slates like nothing happened.
’Ferra’s joint sits inside that housing, and now we have a door and a road.’
The campfire popped while Hajin hunched over a pot of stew from the resupply packs, broadcast glowing at his shoulder.
He nearly dropped the ladle when Juna thumped the claw onto the folding table beside his bowl.
"Thirty million landed on my head while I was stirring soup, and now there’s a hand on my dinner table?"
"A claw, the rest is on the ridge," she said, dropping onto the log beside him.
"Report, report, gimme everything!"
She told it in blunt order, the pits, the chimney smell, the cliff, the cut, the loop, and the thrust.
[ IronVanguard: She cut the digging arm first, then made it run her own route home, that’s cold. ]
[ Seoul_Tactician: She didn’t just win a fight, she opened the evacuation road for everybody. ]
[ ashley(mod): Same as last time, this is Juna’s report, there’s no footage from the ridge. ]
"And the roof," she added, licking stew off her thumb, "a worker up there opens a small hatch under the housing eaves, next dark, for a few people."
Ferra looked up from her bark sketch with soot on her nose, "Into the housing, where my damned joint is?"
"A goat track drops right onto that roof, rock most of the way."
"Then I’m going down that track if I have to crawl," Ferra growled, jabbing the bark with a charcoal stub.
Didi lowered her cup and set it aside with deliberate calm, "A few people through one door suits me perfectly."
"Your Highness wants the sneaky job?" Hajin blinked, nearly sloshing stew over his knee.
"Her Highness wants the bonds off those workers before anyone tries to use them against us."
He whistled low and ladled a second bowl, warm and steaming, then slid it into Juna’s hands without a word.
"First bowl’s mine anyway."
"I know, I already gave it to you."
Her tail swished softly against the log as she leaned into his shoulder, eating while the fire settled.
"You went off and fought a giant mole without me," he grumbled into her hair.
"It wasn’t a mole, and you’d have fallen off the cliff."
"Rude, accurate, but rude."
’He smells like smoke and stew, and the road out is finally mine to give.’
Below the ridge, a small hatch waited under the housing eaves, and someone on that roof was counting the hours.