Raif stood near the orb, his palm resting lightly against its surface. The glow pulsed steady, low and slow, like a second heartbeat nested in the roots. Around him, the camp breathed in quiet rhythm. Somewhere behind, a spear was being sharpened. Nearby, someone cleared their throat but didn't speak.
The sky was dim with jungle haze. One hour left. Maybe less.
He hadn't slept, not truly. Just enough to keep moving. The others moved like he did , not frantic, not lazy, just... driven. Four days had passed since the warning. Four days since the orb first named what was coming.
Four days. That's all we had.
He thought first of the scouts, the ones who left the clearing each day, knowing they might not return.
Kael never waited. Not once. He was always the first to leave, vanishing into the jungle mist before dawn most days. Raif had stopped trying to call him back. Kael knew the risks. He chose them.
Naera was always next. She moved slower now, favouring her right leg after a sprain two days earlier. But she never asked to rest. Always said the same thing: "Better I go than someone slower."
Mira hesitated the first day. She didn't join until Syl's fever broke, but even then, her eyes flicked back toward camp with every step she took into the trees. Raif remembered that feeling. Leaving something behind, even if you weren't sure you'd come back to it.
Rix kept his voice low. No more theories or tangents. He scouted like someone collecting debts, taking only what they needed, never more. But Raif noticed his eyes linger longer on the spiral growth when they passed it. Like he was still trying to understand it, even now.
The rule was simple: don't engage if there are more than two. Kael had set it, and everyone had agreed. The jungle wasn't theirs. Not yet.
Some days they fought anyway. A pair of Vielback Mantises came too close to the perimeter, Kael took one down with a blade to the thorax, Rix finished the second with a spear throw that buried deep in the back plate. A pack of Splinterhounds cornered Mira and Naera during a loop back. They climbed trees, waited, then dropped onto the last hound together. Quick, brutal.
The Smogcoil was different. It bled vapour when it died, thick and choking. Rix sketched it with red-rimmed eyes, coughing the whole time.
[Hostile Neutralised – Category: Splinterhound]
[Kill Type: Field Elimination]
[Reward: +5 KE]
[Hostile Neutralised – Category: Smogcoil]
[Kill Type: Tactical Withdrawal Followed by Elimination]
[Reward: +5 KE]
They brought back what they could , hide, bone, fang, chitin, unknown glands pulsing faintly in the light. Mira treated everything like it could be venomous. She scrubbed tools with ashwater, burned cloth wraps, sorted every fragment into bark-lined trays.
By the second night, the crates were half-full. Material gains. Tactical data. Three new blueprint shards. One moss-wrapped. One cracked stone. One etched in old bone.
None yet complete.
The wall came next.
Raif turned the memory over slowly, not the logs, or the dried mud, but the people building it. Eloin's hands never stopped. He moved between tasks without complaint, mixing mud, stacking bark, bracing weak joints. His knuckles split by the second day, wrapped clumsily in moss, but he never asked for help.
Hennick worked beside him more than Raif expected. The old man said little, just carried what was needed, nodded when pointed, and sometimes grunted when something didn't quite hold. Raif caught him humming once, a low, slow rhythm that sounded like a march.
Goss yelled often, though it was mostly at materials. He swore at cracked planks, split poles, a stack of fire-softened bark that curled too much at the ends. But his hands were steady, and when he stopped shouting, his work was always solid.
By the end of the first day, the fence was whole again, stronger, reinforced at the bottom with doubled bark sheets and tar-thickened mud. But that wasn't enough. They started on the interior: a second layer.
Mud walls rose along the inner perimeter, shoulder-height and crude. No artistry, just thickness and weight. Into these, they hammered sharpened sticks at angles, some outward, some upright, a field of teeth just behind the fence line. They ringed the worst breach points with bark-and-mud wedges, pressing bundles of dead vines into weak soil to hold it steady.
Storage became a problem once materials came faster. Eloin's solution was simple: build up. He drafted crude collars, split-log braces that locked woven crates into position without tipping. Three high. Stabilised against the inner shelters. They weren't pretty, but they held.
"Good enough," he said when Raif checked. "Won't topple unless we all do."
They expanded the shelters next. One for Kael and Naera, a larger shared space for Goss, Hennick, and Syl. Another for supply prep, flat bark tables, filtered sunlight, raised sections where Mira and Lira could treat wounds or dry herbs. Rix joked it looked like a jungle apothecary. No one laughed.
Mira constructed the herb rack herself. Layered tiers, each bound with twisted root and padded with curled leaf skins. She lined it with thin strips of bright fungi, washed red moss, pale bark skin. Lira added notations, scratching names and effects into the bark slats.
They hung meat too, bark wolf haunches, spore-touched scavenger limbs, even strips of cooked insect flesh. Rix insisted the chitinous plating sealed in the flavour. Goss told him to shut up unless he was chewing.
Raif checked every post, every beam. Not to lead, but because he couldn't sit still. The rhythm of it all, construction over conversation, held them together. Every new stake in the ground was another reason to hold on.
"We're going to get used to it," Rix said dryly as he turned one with a stick.
"Speak for yourself," Goss muttered. "I'm not eating anything that used to have antennae."
[Optional Objective Complete – Equip 6 Units with Enhanced Equipment]
[Reward: +5 KE Earned]
The orb pulsed once. Quiet. Raif read the message aloud and no one reacted. It wasn't celebration. It was proof they were still moving.
They didn't have enough. But they had more than before.
They hadn't just built walls. They'd built weapons.
The gear came together slowly, bone by bone, sinew by sinew. Most of it was ugly. Crude. But it worked.
Hennick crafted by feel more than sight, using instinct and pressure to test balance. He shaped a fang-tipped club that looked like it belonged to a monster more than a man, but it hit like a warhammer. The shield, made from spiral chitin and rimmed with barkwolf hide, didn't splinter when struck. That alone made it valuable.
Goss made lighter tools for sparring. Blunted spears. Split-bark shields. Raif had watched him adjust Naera's grip mid-swing, correcting her like a grizzled old trainer who'd seen one too many green recruits swing wide.
Even Lira joined in, testing strap tension on wrist-guards, rolling her eyes when things didn't fit. "I didn't sign up to be an armourer," she said. "But I do love making things bite back."
Raif remembered watching the others test them. Mira adjusted the grip of her spear with a grimace. Goss tapped the edge of a shield with his knuckles like testing fruit for ripeness. They weren't perfect, but they were better than anything they'd held before.
They didn't just forge weapons. They unearthed possibilities.
The orb pulsed one morning when Rix returned from a solo scouting detour. He dropped a moss-wrapped fragment on the ground and said only, "New shape."
[Blueprint Fragment Discovered – Structure Category]
[Watchtower – Progress: 1/3]
Kael gestured to the design with two fingers then pointed to the treeline. The meaning was clear: height meant time. Time to see what came.
Another fragment followed. Etched in bone. Rix studied it long into the night. The sketches showed twisted bark limbs pulled taut by jungle vine, anchored with bone notches, a crude, powerful ranged launcher.
[Blueprint Fragment Discovered – Utility Category]
[Slingbow Rack – Progress: 2/5]
Raif hadn't seen anything like it before, coiled tension lines and locked branches designed to hurl sharpened bolts or weighted stones. Primitive ranged power.
"It's not pretty," Rix had said, "but it might just give us reach."
The final fragment for the kiln came in on Kael's return the next evening.
[Blueprint Fragment Detected – Structure Category]
[Clay Kiln – Progress: 2/2 – Complete]
They didn't build it. Not yet. No one said it aloud, but they all knew, it would take time and focus. And right now, they had neither.
The orb registered their finds without fanfare. Another trickle of KE. Another step forward.
[Daily KE Accrued – Shrine for the Dead: +2]
[Total Days Passed: 4]
[Total Passive KE: +8]
Kael offered Raif a sharpened chitin blade that night. No words. Just a nod. Raif took it slowly, as if it might vanish. Kael gave no speech, no gesture. He didn't need to. This was enough.
[Loyalty Milestone Reached: Kael]
[+10 KE]
Hennick followed the next day, offering no gift, but volunteering for the late patrol without being asked. Said only, "Not the first time I've held a line." Then, quieter: "I've seen what happens when you don't finish the job. Not again."
[Loyalty Milestone Reached – Hennick]
[+10 KE Earned]
Their KE sat at 135. Enough to summon. More than ever before.
Raif stood at the orb more than once that week, hand hovering.
"Not yet," Mira had said one night beside him. "They'd never survive out there."
Raif didn't answer. He imagined them, five figures stepping out of the light, blinking in confusion. What would they see? A camp barely holding together? Wounds not yet healed? It wasn't time. Not yet.
He hadn't argued. Just stepped back.
They were already protecting too many.
Now.
Raif stood where he had at the start, hand resting against the orb, but the stillness felt heavier now, like the air itself was holding breath. The jungle beyond the clearing pulsed with quiet tension. No birdsong. No rustling leaves. Only the occasional crack of bark underfoot and the whisper of someone adjusting their grip.
Around him, the camp had grown quiet. Not from fatigue, but readiness. Goss sat near the firepit, sharpening his club with slow, deliberate scrapes. Naera rolled her shoulder, adjusting the strap of her makeshift armour. Mira stood over Syl, one hand resting on the girl's shoulder as if to anchor her.
Kael knelt just outside the perimeter, fingers pressed into the soil. Watching.
Raif didn't call them to attention. He didn't speak. There was no rally cry. Just a single breath drawn deep into his chest.
Then the orb pulsed , not soft, but sharp, the glow flaring bright red.
[System Alert – Minor Jungle Assault: Imminent]
[Estimated Time: 1 Hour]
[Suggested Action: Defend the Perimeter]
[Potential Reward: Moderate KE Bonus]
The message vanished as quickly as it came.
Raif lowered his hand.
He looked around once more, at the faces, the hands gripping weapons, the scars, the work.
Four days, he thought again.
From the edge of the trees, something watched. It did not blink. It did not move. But it was waiting.
And they waited.