The clang of hammers had become the new heartbeat of Laos. From sunrise to long after the stars emerged, the sound never ceased: iron striking wood, picks splitting earth, wheels grinding against stone. The death zone was not yet visible as a fortress, but already the plain was carved by trenches, wooden ramparts, and the skeletons of watchtowers.
But the work was far from smooth.
Two days earlier, a trench had collapsed, burying three men waist-deep in muck before the soldiers pulled them free. An ox, spooked by the hiss of a rune-flare test, had bolted and overturned a wagon, breaking a woman's leg. Blisters, fevers, and brawls spread through the work crews like fire through dry straw.
At the center of it all was Logos.
He moved from site to site with a ledger in hand, his voice carrying sharp commands. "Crew 7, double pace. Crew 14, your ditch is too shallow. If the Crawlers can crawl out of it, you might as well line up and kiss them one by one. Overseer, correct it."
He paused only to sketch improvements in the dirt: new angles for trenches, revised placements for rune-flares, adjustments to the slope of a wall. Strange contraptions rolled alongside the workers—crude engines of his design, powered by rune-stones and levers, dragging carts or drilling holes into stone for stakes. Each machine was half-wonder, half-monstrosity, its gears shrieking as though the land itself protested the violence done to it.
The refugees hated him. They whispered curses under their breath as they worked, calling him a tyrant, a demon-child, a black-eyed crow. But they obeyed. Because each night, rations were tallied, and those who worked hardest received the most. Those who slacked went hungry. Logos' cold mathematics had become their law.
And so the camp grew.
Beyond Laos, however, words had wings.
It began with the merchants. Peddlers and caravans who passed through the borderlands carried news with their goods: "The boy baron is digging up the plains." "He's building trenches like a madman." "He's making refugees work like soldiers."
At taverns, travelers argued over mugs of ale.
"No fortress ever stopped Crawlers," one scoffed. "Their numbers are endless. What can some boy and his half-baked machines do?"
"Aye, but they say his frame—his prototype—out-fought four veterans in trial."
"Lies. No child can beat Masen, Bal, and Kleber together."
"I heard it from a soldier who was there."
Rumors twisted with every retelling, growing sharper, stranger. Soon, Laos was not merely digging trenches but raising walls of fire. Logos was not a boy but a sorcerer-engineer descended from the ancients.
Nobles began to hear of it.
At a banquet in the capital, a lord of the western marches waved a goblet dismissively. "Let the boy play. Trenches and toys will not save him when the Crawlers come."
Another, a younger count, leaned forward. "Yet the reports are consistent. He's mobilized hundreds of refugees into a labor force. He's building something massive. If nothing else, the child has wit."
"Wit? Or arrogance? We shall see which survives four months hence."
Still others listened in silence, considering.
And in the east, another name was spoken alongside Logos'.
Sous Angelus.
At sixteen, he was already the empire's golden prodigy: a knight who had mastered three sword schools before his voice had deepened, a commander whose tactics turned skirmishes into victories, and the pride of his noble house. He was everything the realm worshiped: handsome, gallant, unyielding.
Sous was at that very moment leading imperial knights in a desperate campaign against the Crawlers pressing the borders. Wherever he went, victories followed, though always bought in blood. Ballads already sang of him.
And now, whispers dared to compare.
"A youth rises in the east, with sword and steel. A youth rises in the west, with gears and runes. Two stars in the same sky."
Was it rivalry? Fate? Or nothing but idle fancy? No one could yet say.
Back in Laos, Logos had little time for such talk.
That evening, Lucy found him bent over blueprints lit by lamplight, circles under his eyes, hands ink-stained. "You've eaten nothing since dawn," she scolded, sliding a plate toward him.
"I'll eat after I finish this calculation," he muttered.
"You'll collapse before the Crawlers even arrive if you keep this pace."
He ignored her, scratching new lines into the parchment: angles of fire, distances between trenches, calculations for how long a burning pit would last before fuel ran dry.
Lucy sighed, then asked quietly, "Have you heard the rumors?"
"Which ones?"
"That you're building a fortress the Crawlers cannot breach. That you're… being compared to Sous Angelus."
Logos' quill paused for only a moment before scratching on. "Sous Angelus fights with a sword. I fight with stone and fire. There is no comparison."
"But people love stories," Lucy pressed. "They need heroes. And heroes come in pairs—rivals, foils, legends. You and Sous… they want to see which star shines brighter."
Logos finally set down the quill, eyes heavy with exhaustion yet cold with certainty. "Then they are fools. Stars do not shine brighter when Crawlers devour the sky. I care nothing for rivalries. Let Sous play his role. Mine is here."
Lucy studied him, torn between admiration and worry. She wanted to call him harsh, blind, arrogant. But instead, she only said softly, "You're not wrong. But one day, Logos, the world will care how you stand beside the other star."
He didn't answer.
Instead, outside the tent, the sounds of picks and hammers continued into the night, the chorus of a land preparing for war. And far beyond, in the halls of nobility and the fires of taverns, the whispers grew louder. A boy in black eyes and a prodigy in shining steel—the two names began to twine like fate.