She moved from one side of the rest area to the other, restless, watching the kids clean their weapons and tools on their respective beds. Some had throwing knives, others had small vials that probably contained poison. Jaren sat with Torin in the corner, speaking quietly, probably going over combat strategies or giving the twelve-year-old a crash course in how to kill someone.

  How do you teach a kid to survive a fight he has no chance of winning?

  The door opened and Reth walked in.

  "I talked to Harren," he said, looking at her. "Explained that we needed to go into the forest to train Torin for tomorrow's fight."

  "And?"

  "He didn't like it at first. But I told him the rest of us would stay here as guarantee." Reth's expression was serious. "So I need to know right now if they can trust you on this. If you run, with or without Torin, everyone staying here dies."

  She laughed, couldn't help it, and remembered Senna's words.

  You'd die alone out there in minutes. You need a group to survive. At least for now.

  "I'm not going anywhere," she said. "I'm not letting any of these kids die because I'm a coward. Besides, I have a plan."

  Reth nodded. "Then I'll trust you."

  She'd made another decision while pacing. Someone stronger should carry the dungeon map and documents, someone who could actually defend them if things went wrong.

  She pulled the papers from inside her jacket and handed them to Reth.

  "You and Jaren figure out what happens with that dungeon. Between the two of you."

  She turned to Torin. "Get your things. Whatever you think you'll need."

  She left her bag behind deliberately, so anyone watching would see she wasn't planning to run, and took only what her uniform already carried. The pen loaded with ink. Blank paper. The solid base that detached to support writing. The remaining nano threads she had left. And the battery she'd removed from Napoleon when she'd replaced it with a new one.

  They followed Reth out of the tent.

  As they walked, she moved close to him. "You think the church will spy on us?"

  "The church respects warrior families," Reth said. "They know how to keep secrets, especially when they think you're from The Veil. Everyone knows The Veil are complete antisocials, isolated from the world. They'll understand you're protecting secrets."

  He crouched down to Torin's eye level.

  "The woman who trained me from when I was young used to tell me this." His voice was quiet. "They never see it coming from the one they decided didn't matter."

  He glanced at her, then back at Torin.

  "I've seen this woman defeat someone stronger than me using her tricks. You assassins use tricks too. Just listen to what she says."

  Torin nodded, still nervous.

  Reth stood. "Good luck. I'll bring food in the morning, right at sunrise. Make it last, because that's all you're getting. Can't risk coming back during the day, too many people watching where I go. Only Harren knows you're out here, and we don't know who else might be watching the camp."

  He turned and walked back toward the tents without another word.

  She and Torin went deeper into the forest, far enough that they wouldn't be heard but close enough that she could still see the fence around the church camp.

  As they walked, she asked the question that had been bothering her.

  "Why didn't you take the documents from the uniform before giving it to me?"

  Torin looked up at her. "Please understand, we barely knew you and our training teaches us not to trust anyone. But just now, we all met and decided together that you and Reth are part of our group now. And that what we did won't happen again."

  What they did?

  "What are you talking about? What did you do?"

  Torin took a breath. "Master Vael didn't trust people. Not even other Veil members. She taught us that if we had something important to hide, in our clothes or our sleeping space or anywhere that belonged to us, we should always set traps. Master Vael's favorite was poison. We knew that if she hid important things in her clothes, she put poison in them."

  She stopped walking and crouched down to his height, anger flashing through her.

  "What the fuck? You wanted to kill me?"

  "Miss Operator, you have to understand that's how we were trained." His voice stayed calm. "And the historical documents are more important to us than you or even members of our own group."

  More important than people.

  "But it seems Master Vael didn't place any traps this time, thinking of us, in case something happened to her. Which it did."

  "And Reth? Did you warn him about the uniform?"

  "No. That master was a strategist. He didn't like poison or traps. We knew he'd be fine."

  She stood up, staring at him.

  I've been seeing them as children this whole time. But they're not children. They're sociopaths in training.

  "But we saw how you defended us," Torin continued. "And what you're doing now, and we appreciate it. What happened before won't happen again. Everyone asked me to tell you this, and that's why we decided to be honest if you asked."

  She didn't see that sweet kid from earlier anymore.

  These are weapons being shaped into human form.

  "Let's leave it for now," she said finally. "Focus on surviving tomorrow."

  She needed to compartmentalize this, deal with it later.

  "What level and class are you?"

  "Fighters. All of us, level 1." He picked at the ground. "We were supposed to evolve in the dungeons. Everything they taught us back at the base... it was just setup. So the system would know what to make us when we got here."

  "Show me what you have for tomorrow's fight. Your weapons and assassin tools."

  They both sat on the ground and she called Napoleon over for light.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Torin removed his jacket and she saw he wore a wrist guard on his right arm with four small openings, probably for firing something.

  He pulled out six silver spheres like the ones she'd found in Master Vael's uniform. Four metal vials. And a dagger.

  "Tell me what everything does. Not including the dagger."

  "The wrist guard fires four bullets," Torin said. "For surprise attacks. Activated by a button in my palm."

  He picked up one of the spheres.

  "These have two uses. Click the button once and throw it, it generates a smoke screen. Good for escaping. Click twice and throw it, it shoots poisoned needles in a fifteen-foot radius around where it lands."

  He showed her the vials.

  "Poison. The bottom of each vial has a colored dot. That determines the toxin type. The one with the black dot is for killing."

  Mental note: be very careful with that one.

  She looked at everything laid out on the ground. The wrist guard, the spheres, the vials. A twelve-year-old's chances of surviving tomorrow, spread out in the dirt.

  Not enough. Not even close to enough.

  "Leave those things with me. I'm going to work with them." She pointed into the forest. "Go about a hundred feet that way. You can rest or train, whatever you want. I'll call you when everything's ready. Trust me."

  Torin started to stand, then stopped.

  He was quiet for a moment, looking at the ground, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked exactly like what he was. Twelve years old. Sitting in the dark, about to go sleep on dirt while someone tried to build him a chance at surviving tomorrow.

  "Do you think I'll lose?" he asked. Not scared. Just asking.

  She looked at him. "I don't know yet."

  He nodded, like that was the honest answer he'd wanted, and walked away.

  Please let this work. Please let what I'm planning actually help.

  She pulled out the pocket watch from Master Vael's uniform and set it aside. Better for Torin to have every weapon possible for tomorrow.

  She took out paper, placed it on the solid support so it wouldn't touch the dirt, and got the pen ready.

  Okay. Which one first?

  The watch. The flash is an excellent tool for confusing an enemy.

  She brought her hands close to the watch and activated Machine Reading.

  Blue filaments emerged from her fingertips and made contact.

  Information flooded into her mind. Every gear, every spring, the mechanism that produced the flash, every single component down to the structure of the metals used. She wrote everything on the paper as fast as she could process it, hand moving fast across the page.

  Three minutes later she stopped and waited.

  No pain. No nosebleed. No headache.

  She sat there for a moment, genuinely confused. Every time she'd used Machine Reading on something that belonged to this place, Napoleon, the alpha spiders, the gates, it had cost her something. Pain, disorientation, minutes of not being able to think straight.

  But this watch was old. Advanced for its era, maybe, but nothing compared to what this evolution zone had built into everything around her.

  She went through the rest without stopping, the smoke grenades with the needless, the wrist gun, and each time the information settled clean and complete with nothing left behind.

  I have more time than I thought.

  An hour gone. She looked at the sky through the canopy. Still dark, but the kind of dark that had maybe four hours left in it.

  She pulled out the small black sphere she'd been carrying since the alpha spider and opened it. Inside, a stone the size of a bean.

  First, the forge.

  She activated it and dropped four of her daggers inside. She was certain she wouldn't use them, didn't have the skill to fight with blades anyway. Being far from camp and with Torin at distance meant no accidents like last time.

  When she increased the temperature to melt the steel, the vents opened and started pulling air.

  She felt it working, the forge doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

  Then something moved in the tree above her.

  Not a branch. Not wind. Something with weight.

  She looked up just as a man dropped, not jumped, dropped, like his body had simply stopped obeying him. He hit the ground two steps away and lay there blinking at the sky, trying to push himself up and failing. His hands found the dirt but couldn't seem to coordinate with the rest of him.

  What the…

  She was on her feet before she'd decided to stand, every instinct she had screaming that she was exposed and something had just gone very wrong.

  She left everything running and called Napoleon and Torin.

  "Napoleon, did you see him?"

  "No, Operator. I did not detect him. His abilities are more advanced than mine."

  She looked at Torin as he approached and kept her voice low. "That man was spying on me. He probably saw everything I was doing."

  Torin recognized the brown leather armor immediately. "He's from Prince Carin's intelligence team."

  Without hesitation, Torin pulled out his dagger, grabbed the man's head while he was still semi-conscious, and cut his throat.

  She flinched but knew internally there was nothing else they could have done.

  Torin was still crouching next to the body, the dagger in his hand, not cleaning it. Just holding it. He was staring at the man's face.

  "Torin."

  He looked up. His expression was steady but his breathing wasn't.

  "You did the right thing," she said.

  He nodded once and stood up, and didn't say anything else.

  "Now please go back where you were before. Double the distance this time. If my calculations are correct, I'm going to use more heat than before."

  Torin started walking back, then stopped and turned around.

  "At least the mystery of what happened in the forest is solved now." A small smile. Then he walked away.

  Shit.

  She turned to Napoleon. "We need to find a way for you to detect these invisible enemies. The forest is apparently full of ninjas."

  She looked at the sky again. Three hours. Maybe less now.

  She continued melting the daggers and studied her blueprints as the metal liquefied, planning the tiny components she needed for Torin's weapons. What she intended would push everything past its original design capacity. The factory tolerances on these tools weren't built for this. Every single part would need to be stronger, more precise, redesigned from the mount points up.

  If I get this wrong, the wrist guard fires once and jams. The spheres don't arm. Or worse, they arm wrong.

  She kept working. Focused. Didn't let herself think about that.

  She could see Torin in the distance, meditating with his back against a tree, then later moving through knife forms in the dark. By hour four he was asleep on the ground, curled on his side with his jacket pulled over him.

  Okay. Now comes the complex part.

  She looked at the energy stone and placed it carefully in the forge.

  Here goes everything.

  She increased the temperature.

  The forge pulled more air than before, the vents straining, and she could feel the difference in the heat even from where she sat. The stone began to glow. Faint at first, then brighter, shifting from orange to white at its center.

  Then the forge started shaking.

  A crack appeared along one side of the black metal, thin as a hair, running from the base to the rim.

  No, no, no.

  She didn't pull back. Pulling back meant the stone cooled, and she had no way to know if she could get the temperature back up with the forge already compromised. She held position, watching the crack, watching the stone, watching both at the same time.

  If this fails, I have nothing. The components I've already made are useless without the upgraded material. Torin goes into that fight with exactly what he has now.

  The crack widened slightly. She could see faint light through it.

  Hold together. Please hold together.

  The stone liquefied finally, a brilliant white pool at the center of the forge, and she pulled her hands away immediately and let it float, damaged but still functional. The crack had stopped spreading. For now.

  She stayed still for a long moment, just breathing.

  That was close. Too close.

  She looked at the crack. It hadn't gotten worse, but the forge was compromised. Whatever work she had left, she needed to finish it before that crack decided to become something worse.

  Move. No time.

  Dawn was starting to suggest itself at the edges of the sky, a faint gray lightening between the trees. Torin was still asleep in the distance.

  She pulled her hands back from the forge for a moment, letting it float, still active. Her fingers ached from the hours of work before, the joints stiff, protesting every time she tried to flex them fully.

  The dead man was still lying two meters away, one arm stretched toward her at an angle.

  I should move him. It's distracting.

  She grabbed his arms to drag him further away, and her hand closed around something she hadn't noticed before. A holster at his hip. She pulled the jacket aside.

  A pistol.

  She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It looked old. If she compared it to Earth weapons, the design matched something from the 1800s or early 1900s, single action, steel frame, solid in a way that suggested it was built to last.

  She had no skill with a sword. She'd known that since the first day, known it clearly every time she'd watched warriors move and felt no recognition, no instinct, nothing that suggested her body had ever held a blade for fighting. Knives felt weird in her hand. The dagger she carried was purely for emergencies she hoped would never come.

  But a firearm.

  She understood the mechanics without even thinking about it. Trigger, hammer, cylinder, barrel. She could see exactly how it functioned just by looking at it. Not learned knowledge, not something she was working out. Just known, the same way she knew combustion temperatures and circuit tolerances.

  If everything goes wrong tomorrow, I can't just stand there watching.

  She turned the pistol over again and activated Machine Reading.

  The filaments came out and the information followed, the complete internal architecture of the weapon, every tolerance and dimension, every mechanical relationship, and alongside it the beginning of ideas.

  If I have time, I can do something with this.

  She set the pistol down and got back to the forge. The sky was getting lighter. She could hear birds somewhere in the canopy.

  Two hours. Maybe less.

  She kept working.