He drove, and the world tried to call two oaths due at once.
The staff tip bit the hinge; the Mech's wrench fell like logic; Aurora's whisper-bolt stitched tendon. The heavy boar's head dipped that last, stingy width. Bristles crackled along the post. The rope screamed and then found a note that didn't mean surrender.
"Hold," Evan said, to wood and people and a decision.
The post sheared a finger's worth—grain tearing in a sound like cloth sworn to wood. He didn't watch it break; he changed the angle. He shouldered the nearest carcass with a boot, rolling ribs into a jam that turned sled back to wedge. He stepped into the line, let rope climb his forearm for two beats, heat biting like truth, then handed it back to the archer without asking whether the man was ready. He was.
"Cheek," Evan told the Mech.
The Goblin slid tusk to wood, not to stop but to make the boar argue with itself. The spearwoman, still outside the beans, put the spear butt into the lane hard and drew a precise diagonal with the point that touched nothing and told the boar's neck to consider humility.
"Aurora," Evan said.
The sprite's bolt kissed the eye ridge; the heavy head flinched the way a throne flinches when citizens remember numbers. Evan bled the Pumpkin orb across the inside foreleg, a petty insult placed exactly where arrogance trips.
[STATUS CHANCE: STAGGER—LOW] — [SUCCESS]
The knee hit dirt and stayed—longer this time. Long enough to buy letters and turn them into a sentence.
"Spend it," he said.
Wrench. Sting. Tap.Wrench. Sting. Tap.
He denied speed. Speed loses count. He gave the world a rhythm even a beast could learn just in time to hate.
The post screamed; the rope sobbed and then remembered it was a song; the lane bristled with poles like a field pretending to be a forest. The heavy boar's breath fogged the air with heat and the iron smell of pride learning arithmetic.
"Finish," Evan said.
The Mech drove the wrench home at the hinge that ends arguments. Evan fed a long, disciplined burn along the seam. Aurora stitched a last, mean consonant under tendon.
The head slumped to earth. The body made a decision about gravity that did not include getting back up.
[ENEMY DOWN: HEDGE-MATRIARCH (LV?)] [CHECK: formal name/level][LOOT GENERATED]
No one cheered. The rope took a grateful breath. The hedge listened like a room when its loudest person leaves.
Flags blinked—quiet, gold, eager.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: PRIME HIDE / CROWN TUSK / LOCAL RENOWN] [CHECK]
"Later," Evan told the clerk living in his periphery. "Second wedge—set."
He angled the matriarch's head with a heel, rolled weight to make a new wall, shoved a rake of smaller bodies to fill the low spot, and set the broken post deeper so the split grain had less story to tell. The archer held rope without being asked. The knife-man matched the tension with a face that insisted he found this boring; his hands told the truth.
"Row two—stakes," Evan said.
The Chief sent them. Men and women who hadn't farmed this morning learned how fast a village can improvise fences when the beans matter.
A squeal came from the lane—not the hedge; behind them, in the hole where a fence had once been a belief. A small boar, stupid with the smell of blood, trotted along the path like a guest who had mistaken the kitchen for the door.
Evan did not turn his back on the hedge. "Lane line—two paces forward. Points low. Shove, don't stab."
The Chief echoed: "Low! Shove!"
Poles moved. The boar met a hedge of people who had learned rope law in an afternoon. It tested, found a wall, and decided the beans were the problem, not the lane. It peeled off, snorting.
"Eyeline on me," Evan said, voice just loud enough to sit in shoulders. He kept his own eyes in the gap. "Nobody chases."
No one did. The lane settled around its new hole like a mouth deciding to swear later.
"Carry," he said then, when the air felt less temporary. "Edge only. Matriarch head last."
The archer and knife-man moved together, because sometimes work makes strangers into a team even when money plans to ruin it later. The spearwoman stayed with her spear in the lane, point low, a guard that said not today in the precise accent of someone who has said maybe on other days.
Evan knelt, knife out, and found the matriarch's seams. The hide fought him harder than the alpha's had—denser, less willing to sign the papers. He obliged with patience rather than strength.
[YOU OBTAIN: MATRIARCH HIDE (PRIME) ×1] [CHECK: item naming][YOU OBTAIN: CROWN TUSK ×2][COINS: +?][REPUTATION: +? (Novice Village)]
He rolled the hide. Inventory thunked with quiet wealth. He did not open the flags.
"Log it," the Chief told the boy with charcoal. "Prime hide—one. Crown tusks—two."
The boy's letters came out taller now; victory improves handwriting.
The knife-man breathed laughter through his nose. "You really mean to count in public."
"In the lane," Evan said. "Counting belongs to lanes."
"We have a form in the city—" the archer began.
"Edge," the spearwoman said without looking at him. It sounded like an instruction she'd given him before.
They carried, they logged, they kept the rope a rule. A small rhythm—work's hymn—rose: haul, mark, wedge, breathe. Evan's thigh burned an honest ache he promised to pay later with rest he didn't believe in.
The hedge changed its breath. Not weight, not numbers—texture. The air at his teeth cooled with the taste of stone rather than earth, then sweetened with a smell that had no right to be here: dry silk, like a corner of a cupboard no broom had argued with in years.
He straightened, staff in his left hand, knife still in his right because bad habits have value. Aurora's hum shifted—a higher, thinner note—as if lightning had been asked to thread a needle. The Mech took one small step and planted, cracked lens bright and stubborn.
"Feel that?" Evan asked. He didn't need an answer.
The spearwoman breathed once through her nose. "Not boar."
The archer's mouth said huh and then chose not to say more. The knife-man went still the way a man does when he realizes he has opinions about spiders.
Inspect rose like a reflex and found the same wall it had been kissing all afternoon.
[INSPECT][SCAN FAILED: THRESHOLD EXCEEDED]
"Hands," Evan said. "Same rule. Rope sings. Lane holds. Edge only."
He didn't move his feet. He watched the gap and the little movements inside it—the way leaves turned their pale, the way small stalks trembled without contact. The smell of silk grew a fraction, threaded with something mineral, like a wet rock hidden under winter.
A strand light as hair ghosted across the Pumpkin orb and stuck. He felt it with his thumb—a drag that remembered the web it wanted to be. He didn't flinch. He lifted the staff an inch, the line stretched, and he saw it glisten—a clean, wrong geometry in a world of beans.
The archer leaned in, curiosity fighting fear.
"Edge," Evan said, softer than before, because whispers travel better than shouts when threads are listening.
The strand parted with a small sound that didn't belong to plants. Something in the hedge tapped the rope—not with hoof or hide—with a joint. A light, careful touch. Testing the song.
The spearwoman's spear inclines a fraction. "We have a problem," she said, not proud, not afraid—just accurate.
"Chief," Evan said, eyes on the glisten caught on his staff. "You ever see webs in the beans?"
"Not like that," the Chief said. "Forest, yes. Fields, no."
"Then the forest wants to learn new words," Evan said. "We keep ours."
He slid the staff's butt onto the dirt and let the strand drape there like a law. Aurora compressed, lightning pulling so tight the air itself looked stitched. The Mech's fingers flexed around the wrench with a scrape that sounded like a church trying to be a forge.
The hedge breathed again. The sound of it changed—quieter in the way of silk moving, louder in the way of leaves giving way to something that didn't respect their grammar. The rope under his wrist hummed at a pitch he hadn't heard from it before—tense, expectant.
"Edge only," Evan said for everyone who'd ever needed a rule. The raiders, the villagers, the field, the hedge.
From the gap came a pale, deliberate point—too thin for bone, too jointed for wood—touching the rope once, then twice, then beginning to pluck.
The line sang, and whatever was in the hedge listened.
He did not move. He watched the rope and the point and the bit of silk on his staff. He felt the field trying to persuade him that boars had been a simpler faith.
"On me," he said, and meant: do not panic, do not step, do not break the song, do not give the thread a reason to learn our names.
The jointed tip tapped a third time and settled, as if taking a measure.
Aurora's hum went sharp as a pin. The Mech set its feet. The spearwoman's point lifted the height of a thought.
The thread on Evan's staff grew colder against his thumb.
He did not blink. "Edge," he said again, and the rope learned a new note.