The hedge stirred as if the forest had been listening and wanted to add its vote.
Evan didn't let his eyes leave the gap. "Rope stays," he said. The word carried across posts and people the way a hammer's rhythm carries through wood.
The woman with the cowl—spear in hand—looked past his shoulder into the beans with a professional's concentration. "We'll be quick," she said. "You'll barely see our backs."
"Edge only," Evan repeated, light as advice, hard as policy.
Her eyes flicked to the Pumpkin orb, to the dented Mech Goblin, to Aurora's tight, whispering glow. She measured not just men but the kind of math that had kept a lane alive. The archer smiled because smiling was his work. The third—close-cropped hair, light armor, a knife that had been sharpened more often than cleaned—tilted his head as if listening to a joke the field hadn't told yet.
Leaves rattled without wind. The gap tightened like a jaw choosing the next word.
"Chief," Evan said. "Hands to stakes. No one crosses without my call."
The Village Chief didn't nod; he didn't need to. His people moved like a decision that had already been paid for.
The spearwoman's smile returned, more honest now, which is to say thinner. "You planning to auction courtesy here, Summoner?"
"I'm planning to not get anyone killed," Evan said. "You can help that from the edge or not."
A grunt from the brush answered for her—two bodies, medium heavy, choosing the gate with the arrogance of things that believe in their shoulders. Boars, not brutes—hungry, not patient.
"On my line," Evan said. "Mech—cheek. Aurora—eye seam. Rope—slack then hold. Edge team—" he didn't look at the three newcomers, "—if you really want to prove you can help, poke from outside."
The spearwoman twirled the haft so the point glanced the dirt and settled, not quite threatening, very definitely ready. The archer still had his bow unstrung; he drew it from habit anyway, as if the shape soothed him. The knife-man shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, eyes on the gap like a gambler checking the table for marks.
The first boar broke through, sloppy with hunger. The second tried to outsmart the doorway by hesitating and then choosing the same mistake.
"Carpet," Evan said. The taller newbie threw clean. Glue blossomed low and mean.
"Meet."
The wrench slid tusk to wood. Aurora's bolt kissed the eye ridge. Evan laid a sting across the inside foreleg. The rope sang at his wrist and did not climb his skin.
"Edge," he called, and the spearwoman stepped to her line—not into beans—angle perfect. She tilted the spear to poison the lane the boar wanted after Evan turned it. The point bit shoulder meat and became a suggestion the boar could not ignore. It lurched away from her and directly into the wedge of body and post Evan had built for mistakes.
"Finish," he said. The Mech did the practical work. The boar collapsed inside the geometry like a complaint that had found the right form.
The second boar chose the slick and found it had no vote. Evan bought it a stagger with a sting; Aurora threaded a tendon; the Goblin bullied the head down; the spearwoman's shaft thumped against the post once—not a strike, a steer—and the animal made the bad decision he had wanted. It fell along a line he owned.
[ENEMY DOWN][ENEMY DOWN][LOOT GENERATED]
Gold-tinged flags blinked in the corner of his eye like coins tapping a glass.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: CHAIN DEFENSE / RENOWN] [CHECK]
"Not now," he told the UI, which took the hint badly and blinked anyway.
The spearwoman's gaze touched the carcasses, then Evan's hands, then the rope. "Clean," she said. "I've seen worse done by richer."
"Edge only," Evan said, because repetition is a boundary.
The archer's smile didn't leave, but it changed species. He tiptoed along the rope, careful as a man reading a line of law he planned to breach without touching. The knife-man's eyes flicked to the alpha's tusk heaped near Evan's boots—a heavy, white promise.
"That's guild quota," he said lightly. "We'd hate to see it rot."
"It won't," Evan said.
The knife-man lifted his palms in a what-can-you-do. They stood a foot outside the rope and made a study of patience. The hedge made a small sound that wanted to be a cough and failed. Evan imagined the forest embarrassed to be interrupting humans.
"Close the tear," he called to the lane. Stakes came, thick and thin, a salad of wood. "Row by row. On my count. Edge team—if you're here to help, help hold the rope."
The spearman—no, the knife-man—took the line with a shrug that tried to read as generosity. The archer leaned his bow against his leg and put both hands on the rope without looking happy about it. The spearwoman didn't touch the rope; she kept her spear angled to police the porch of the gate.
"Three in," Evan said. "Set. Pull." The rope bit into posts like a belt finding a new hole. Stakes aligned. Bodies canted. The hole in the hedge shrank from a mouth into a tight, ugly vowel.
"Again," Evan said. "Set." He felt the Gate becoming less a thing they were holding and more a thing that wanted to hold itself.
The archer said, casual as rain, "Rules are funny. In the city, 'first touch' is rights. In the field, 'last man standing' is rights. Which one do you like today?"
"In the field," Evan said, "work is rights."
"A sermon," the archer said, cheerful. "Chief, you hear that? The priest wants the plate."
The Chief didn't move. "I hear a man saying my fence sings. And you're on the right side of the song."
The archer's smile put on a coat. The knife-man adjusted his grip on the rope, bored on purpose. The spearwoman watched Evan watch the hedge.
The hedge obliged. Two more shapes shouldered shallow into the gap—one small, one awkward, both tired of field geometry. "Meet," Evan said for the third time, and they did, like a team that had learned a language by necessity.
The spearwoman's spear kissed a shoulder and then retreated out of the beans. The archer didn't shoot—he couldn't with the bow unstrung—but his hands on the rope were the kind of help men rarely celebrate. The knife-man took a step he shouldn't, heel ghosting the bean line. Evan turned his head a fraction.
"Edge," he said.
The heel pulled back like a hand from a hot pan, all innocence.
They finished the last two with less poetry than the first four. Sometimes work is a broom. Evan moved carcasses into furniture, stakes into insistence, rope into a rule the world could see.
[ENEMY DOWN][ENEMY DOWN][LOOT GENERATED]
The spearwoman—still outside the beans—pursed her mouth. "You can't hold this all day," she said, tone neutral as a ledger.
"I don't plan to," Evan said. "I plan to close it."
"You and your… choir?"
Evan ignored the choir and the insult. "Edge."
She tilted her head, a tiny concession. "Edge."
Then she tried it. It was soft and almost admirable. While Evan bent to roll a carcass into the wedge, the archer's foot drifted forward as if check-marking space; the knife-man loosened his hold on the rope with the casualness of a pickpocket; and the spearwoman let the spear fall a thumb's width toward the beans—enough to give her reach in another heartbeat, not enough to trip a rule.
Evan straightened without hurry. The Pumpkin orb threw warm light along the rope, along her boot, along the tusk near his heel.
He didn't lecture. He didn't threaten. He looked at the boot and then at her eyes and then at the Chief.
"Strangers don't cross the rope when the rope sings," the Chief said, voice level, like a man repeating a weather report he believes.
The spearwoman's mouth did not smile or frown. She lifted her toe back the thumb's width and tapped the spear haft once on the dirt to say I could have. Then she didn't.
"Help us finish," Evan said.
The archer sighed and began to knot a second rope to the first like a man performing a sacrament he doesn't respect but believes in because it keeps him from being poor. The knife-man hauled stakes like a peasant for thirty seconds and discovered he was still a man at the end of it. The spearwoman set her butt-spike into the lane and meandered the point across air in a lazy guard that meant not today to anything with a brain.
They worked. Evan didn't praise. He used hands and posts and a language of small corrections. Aurora hummed high and watchful; the Mech Goblin stood like a statue with a headache.
The hedge tried once more—half-hearted, two little brutes with more sound than plan. Evan didn't even call glue. Rope, wedge, lever, tap; the bodies joined the furniture set.
[ENEMY DOWN][ENEMY DOWN]
"Set," he said, and the last stake bit into dirt like a dog finding bone.
The gap shrank to something plants could be ashamed of. The hedge's breath returned to wind's, not weight's. The field exhaled; the rope sagged into a companionable curve.
Gold flags insisted again with the grammar of a clerk checking his list.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: LOCAL RENOWN / DEFENSE CHAIN PAYOUT] [CHECK]
"Later," he said for the third time.
He took his hand off the staff and, for the first time since the alpha fell, let his attention widen. The villagers had done what he'd asked: lane lined, points out, faces set. The two newbies were flushed with the kind of exhaustion that teaches. The raiders looked like people who had come to steal a story and found themselves stuck in a lesson.
"Now," Evan said to the Chief, "we harvest what we cut, in order, outside the rope. Edge team, you can help carry to the lane. Not one toe into beans."
The archer looked at the alpha tusk again, then at Evan's hands, then at the villagers. Numbers moved behind his eyes; he didn't like their shape. The knife-man's boredom became a snarl and then corrected itself into a yawn. The spearwoman spun her spear once and sank the butt-spike into the path again, a gesture that said she did not mind waiting for a better day.
Evan knelt, hands on the alpha's second tusk, and felt the weight the UI would later reduce to a number. He kept his body between raiders and loot—not to hide, just to make the line physical.
A leaf fell wrong. Not a metaphor—wrong color for the season, wrong patience for the air. It landed at the rope's edge and did not bounce.
Inspect rose and hit the wall.
[INSPECT][SCAN FAILED: THRESHOLD EXCEEDED]
The spearwoman cocked her head. "You feel that?" she asked nobody and everybody at once.
"Edge," Evan said automatically, because rules make hands do the right thing even when heads don't know why yet.
From the hedge came a pressure that wasn't weight this time—it was attention. Not a beast in a body. A line pulled taut from something deeper in the trees, checking whether the world had learned manners. It wasn't a surge. It was a presence doing a count.
Aurora's hum narrowed to a thread. The Mech's cracked lens flared, then steadied. The villagers' line did not break; the rope remembered its song.
The spearwoman's toe touched the rope, not stepping, only measuring. "Guild will say," she murmured, conversational in a way that tried not to be threat, "that this lane is ours from the treeline to the village if the Chief can't defend it next time."
"Good thing," Evan said, "we defended it this time."
"Claims don't care about tense," the archer added, cheerfully spiteful.
The knife-man stretched his neck until it popped. "We'll file it after we help you carry your… what did you call it… work."
The spearwoman let her toe slide a hair over the rope—less than a step, more than polite.
Evan turned his head. Not much. Just enough to make the space between her boot and the beans become the whole conversation.
"Edge only," he said. The hedge breathed in.