The rope found its note again; the beast found his eyes.
It dipped the crown, measuring him like a problem that had promised to be interesting and was now late for another appointment. Evan set the Pumpkin orb low, point of the staff a thumb above soil. The Mech Goblin leaned hip-to-hip with him, wrench raised, angle for lever not block. Aurora drifted just high of his right shoulder, lightning combed into a whisper line along their forearms.
"No third gate," he said, because sometimes saying a thing keeps it standing.
The boss came without flourish—two steps of weight, head rolling left to pry the post loose as if it had invented the idea and wanted to see it tried on a human. Wood answered with a keen that meant please don't make me proof of anything.
"Cheek," Evan said.
The Goblin shaved the tusk onto the post, stealing the full force and turning it into an argument about angles. Sparks from iron on ivory scratched the air. The rope sang with terror and duty.
Aurora tapped the eye ridge. Evan slid a sting across the inner foreleg to misplace weight by a finger's width. The beast did not grant him clumsiness; it granted him contempt.
[HIT][STATUS CHANCE: STAGGER—VERY LOW] — [FAIL]
The tusk hooked for Evan's ribs. He gave it sleeve and a twist of waist that made air swallow the hit instead of history. Cloth yawled. Skin remained an unpaid invoice. He kept his feet in the furrow because lines remember you if you stay faithful.
"Slack—then pull," he said, and the rope obeyed like a breath with discipline.
The alpha shoved forward. Carcasses shifted, wedge turning into a sled as if gravity were a favor. Evan ground his heel into the nearest rib cage to roll it ugly-ward, turning the sled back into a hill.
"Post sacrifice," he called. "Jam, don't break. Left—lean with me."
They leaned. The post moaned and dug deeper into the dirt, not across it. The tusk wedged; the head's path narrowed to a humiliation.
"Tap," he said.
Aurora stitched a thin line of blue along the tendon under the jaw. The leg argued with orders. The knee kissed dirt for a blink.
[STATUS: KNEE—BRIEF]
"Again." Wrench bit hinge. Evan laid another sting like a coin placed exactly where a machine demands it. The knee met the earth a breath longer—still a loan, not a gift.
The beast adapted, turning the wedge into forward slide, hooves churning a pale gloss into the soil that told the rope lies. The right post squealed. The fence behind them let out a long, tired groan as if the whole world wanted to sit down.
"Body post," Evan said.
The taller yelped, "What?"
"Hand me the line," Evan said, and took the rope across his forearm for two beats while the boys rewrapped. Heat bit through glove and into teeth. The alpha lunged; the Goblin shaved tusk across wood with a metal cry. Evan felt the rope want to live and told it to, the way a man tells a dog to heel when both of them would prefer to run.
"Back," he gave the rope to hands, then, "Now," to the Mech.
The wrench came up and in, prying under ridge—the ugly, beautiful physics of leverage over muscle. Aurora ghosted a bolt at the jaw seam. Evan bled the staff's charge into the hinge where a skull argues with its past.
The head dipped. The knee touched dirt and stayed.
[STATUS: KNEE—EXTENDED]
"Spend it like it's all we have," he said, because it was. Wrench. Sting. Tap. Wrench. Sting. Tap. He refused speed. He wanted sequence.
The boss tried to stand on arrogance; arrogance is a leg that shakes.
The post screamed in a new key—shear. Evan heard it with his bones.
"Drive," he said to the Goblin. The construct obliged, plate grinding, lens cracked but bright.
A gold-tinged flag blinked at the edge of his vision as if a clerk sought his signature in the middle of a fire.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: QUALITY / REPUTATION] [CHECK]
"Later," he said again; to Aurora: "Kill the show; give me only the pain."
The sprite killed the visible arcs to a breath of blue. The alpha's eye lost a toy to watch. Muscles quit bracing against spectacle and braced against truth. That fraction of relaxation became room for physics again.
"Inside it," Evan said to himself, and stepped in, not out, shoulder grazing bristles hot as wire, staff tip biting under the jaw so close he could smell the animal's breath—grass, bile, and the iron stink of something that thought it was still winning.
The wrench came down. Aurora's unseen tap stitched time together. Evan drove the staff like a key turning against a stuck lock.
The knee hit dirt with intent. The head sagged. The tusk scraped post and found no more argument.
"Finish," he said, voice level as a floor.
The Goblin struck the hinge that ends conversations. Evan poured a long sting along the seam, not flinching as hot air huffed past his cheek.
The alpha spasmed in a way that killed hope rather than habit—and then it went honest with gravity.
[ENEMY DOWN: ALPHA HEDGE-BREAKER (LV?)] [CHECK: formal name/level][LOOT GENERATED]
No one cheered. Good. The field held its breath, and Evan let it, standing inside the quiet as if quiet were a tool.
Flags paged him softly.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: PRIME HIDE / CROWN TUSK / VILLAGE RENOWN] [CHECK: item naming]
"Hold formation," he told the rope team and the villagers. "If something smarter was waiting for this noise, it will come on pride."
The Village Chief stepped to the lane edge—no farther—eyes on Evan, not on the carcass. "Is it done?"
"It's down." He knelt, already working the hide at the system's polite seams. "Done means the hedge agrees."
He cut with economy. The alpha's hide didn't want to be elsewhere; it argued with a dense, rubbery will. He gave it patience and leverage.
[YOU OBTAIN: ALPHA BRISTLE HIDE (PRIME) ×1][YOU OBTAIN: CROWN TUSK ×2][COINS: +?][REPUTATION: +? (Novice Village)] [CHECK: numbers]
He rolled the hide; inventory swallowed it with a thunk that sounded like future arguments paid in advance. He didn't open the flags. He did not even look at them. He kept the story on the ground.
"Mech status," he said, touching the dented plate near the ribs.
[ALLY STATUS: MECH GOBLIN — INTEGRITY 44%] [CHECK]
"To the line," he told the Goblin. To Aurora: "Read the hedge."
The sprite drifted higher, a pale hum outlining a body that could be mistaken for light. They made the air taste like a coin you've held in your mouth too long.
The hedge… did nothing. No bulge. No clever laugh without a mouth. Leaves turned the right way up again. A cricket remembered its job. Three breaths, then five, then ten.
"Stand down half," he said. "Rope stays. No one puts a foot in the beans without me saying the word."
Villagers exhaled like people who had been holding their lungs for other men's lives. Someone in the back made a small sound that wanted to be a cheer and died correctly.
The Chief's jaw flexed. "The fields will eat tomorrow because of you."
"They'll eat today if we stop talking and start closing holes," Evan said without acid. "Send hands with stakes to the lane edge. I'll call them in row by row."
The Chief nodded once and began moving his people like parts of a tool. The line formed—stakes, ropes, men and women with set faces. Nobody stepped where he didn't say.
Evan set about turning bodies into furniture—rolling carcasses to plug the worst of the tear, nudging the broken post to lodge deeper, threading the rope in a way that made straight lines into choices. Aurora kept watch, humming low. The Mech Goblin stared at the hedge through a cracked lens like a faithful dog considering the door.
The two newbies watched his hands. The taller swallowed. "You, uh, always do this much math for pigs?"
"Only when the pigs try to major in geometry," he said.
He was half through the second tusk when the forest changed temperature without moving. Not colder—closer. Steel made a sound in the brush, small and deliberate. Laughter rode it—quiet, shaped, the kind of amusement that measures distance in debts.
Evan did not turn. "Rope," he said, calm. "Stay."
Boots slid out of the gap—the light step of people who believed in themselves the way a blade believes in a neck. Two figures, then a third behind them—a woman with a cowl thrown back, a man with a bow he kept unstrung out of arrogance, and a third who carried a spear like a walking stick he had no intention of sharing.
Armor: better than Novice; not rich; practiced. Emblems on shoulders that meant guild if you knew the guild. Evan filed the shapes without giving them the dignity of a name.
"Afternoon," the woman said, voice pleasantly bored. Her eyes took in the gate, the rope, the villagers at the lane, the Summoner with a glowing gourd who looked like he had been doing arithmetic while other people slept. "Nice work."
"Thanks," Evan said, because courtesy is cheap.
"Field boss?" the archer asked, already knowing, smiling like a man who enjoys being right.
"Something like," Evan said.
The spearman glanced at the alpha's head, at the clean cuts along the seams, at Evan's inventory gesture he had not made. "Loot rights," he said, as if the phrase had ever cured a fever. "We'll handle them."
Evan finally looked at them directly. Charisma 95 puts weight on silence. He let it. The woman's smile thinned in the way good smiles do when they taste their own teeth.
Behind him, the rope creaked a warning—just a shift in the post, nothing alive. The villagers held the lane because a man had told them a rule. Aurora drew their lightning in, small as a conscience. The Mech Goblin tested its wrench against its palm and made a small cathedral of sound.
"Hands off the beans," Evan said softly. "Edge only."
The archer tipped his head. "Friend, we're not peasants. We're here to help."
"You're late," Evan said. He did not raise his voice; he did not have to. "And we don't split help like coin."
The woman's gaze flicked to the Chief, to the villagers, to the rope, to the three boar bodies that had become furniture. She measured charisma with the quiet speed of a predator arriving at a different sort of hunt.
"Listen," she said, pleasant again. "We've got a turn-in for Boar Hide quality just opened. There's a quota. And your hands are, what, busy with gate duty? Let the professionals make sure it doesn't go to waste."
Professionals. He admired the word's courage.
Evan didn't move. He kept the alpha tusk in his hand and the staff's butt planted in soil. The Pumpkin orb glowed, patient, as if the gourd were amused by how often humans tried to turn courtesy into theft.
"Chief," he said, as if discussing weather. "What's the village stance on strangers harvesting inside your fence?"
The Chief did not lift his staff. He didn't need to. His voice reached the lane like a tool reaching a bolt. "Strangers don't cross the rope when the rope sings."
The spearman chuckled. "That's quaint."
"Quaint keeps fields," the Chief said.
The woman's smile folded at the edges. She took one step closer, not into the beans—she was not a fool—but just enough to let everyone measure how long her spear was. "We can make a problem out of this," she said in a friendly tone that had never met friendship.
"You could," Evan said. "Or you could help me close the hole you plan to use to run when something bigger comes through it."
The bowman's grin cracked. "Bigger than that?" He flicked his eyes at the alpha's carcass.
Inspect rose in Evan's mind like a reflex looking for a wall and found one.
[INSPECT][SCAN FAILED: THRESHOLD EXCEEDED]
He let the refusal sit in his chest like a coin he would not spend yet. "Fields remember mistakes," he said. "And they charge interest."
The woman cocked her head. "And what do they pay for good behavior?"
"Sometimes," Evan said, "they let you keep what you earned."
Her smile did not return, exactly. It moved. "Loot rights," she repeated, softer now, like a teacher letting a child try the correct answer again. "We'll handle them."
He set the tusk down carefully and straightened, staff in his left hand, rope close enough to catch his right wrist if he needed a reason to stay. The Mech Goblin rolled its shoulder with a scrape. Aurora narrowed, lightning a thread.
Evan looked at the space between the woman's boots and the beans and then back at her eyes. "Hands off the beans," he said again, gentle as a promise. "Edge only."
The archer's fingers toyed with his unstrung bowstring like a man deciding whether to remember manners.
The hedge, traitor to timing, stirred as if the forest had been listening and wanted to add its vote.