The bodies lay like the aftermath of a hard winter: scattered, silent, and needing to be put away before the weather turned. Ethan moved through the small clearing with the same measured economy he'd used in the fight—no wasted motion, no flourish. Alpha Sense painted the micro-motions left in the soil, the tiny dust eddies where rifles had been dragged. Shadow Cloak still hummed faintly at the edge of perception; his breathing had already settled into a steady metronome.
The Panel chimed quietly, a private bell in his skull.
PANEL — HOSTILE UNITS (DEFEATED)
Targets: 12 (armed poachers) — Consciousness: mixed (6 unconscious, 6 stunned)
Taming Options: emergency containment (hostile sentient → requires forced containment protocol; ethically logged) OR consent-based binding (requires mental assent).
Recommended: Emergency containment for immediate safety; record and transmit consent prompts when stable.
Ethan looked at the men. They were soldiers of a different sort: practiced hands, a corporate kind of brutality. If the van turned the corner and found these twelve loose, they'd be back to cutting wolves' throats in an hour.
He crouched by the nearest man, the one still clutching a flattened silver baton. The man's chest rose and fell in heavy, ragged breaths; pupil slow and pinned. Ethan felt a small, human tilt of pity—then set it aside. He swiped his thumb across his inner wrist. The Taming Space ribbon folded open like a secret room, not loud, not pretty, but clean and practical.
"Emergency containment," he told the Panel. "Stabilize, don't consume. Mark for later forensic review. Record consent attempt when they wake."
The Panel replied silently with the legalese Ethan had taught himself to parse: the System allowed containment in defense of noncombatants and infrastructure under immediate threat; all forced bindings were timestamped, audit-locked, and forbidden from narrative-altering permanence. Release or formal law-transfer required later verification.
He exhaled and set to work.
---
Binding Protocol — Field Containment (Ethan's Notes)
Mode: Taming Space — Emergency Containment
Effect: Replaces aggressive intent with an anchored compliance loop; temporary sensory damp; motor inhibition to non-lethal threshold.
Duration: Until manual release or verified handoff.
Cost: 0 PP (containment only; evolution costs apply to later modifications)
Audit: Full timestamp, geotag, and witness log stored.
---
He moved like a caretaker. For the six unconscious men he placed a pair of fingers near their temples—not to force anything, but to lay a leash along their neural pattern. The Taming Space accepts a touch and applies a soft loop: stop-thought, keep-breathing, do-not-wake-to-fight. Ethan felt the technique's threads knot cleanly through the Panel's interface—no theatrics, no soul-burning tricks—just a practical rewiring to remove immediate threat. Each bind made a neat little line in his private ledger: time, coordinates, reishi-snapshot, expected release conditions.
For the stunned ones, still blinking and trying to wrestle their wrists free, he used the Panel to speak inside the space between words—the small mental prompt the System could quietly place when a mind was fragile: "You are contained to keep you breathing. Resist and you will be hurt. Consent later. For now, breathe."
One of them, eyes glassy but lucid enough, swallowed and whispered, "What do you want?"
Ethan kept his voice low. "I want you to stop killing what you don't own. For now, be still. You'll get to speak later." His hand rested on the man's shoulder only long enough to anchor the last thread. The man relaxed, like someone finally allowed to sleep.
By the time he finished the twelfth, the clearing smelled of cold metal and forest sap. Suzu—tamed hollow scout folded into the Taming Space—sent a faint trailmark through the Panel: one van approaching, heavy armor, tracked tires, silver mesh reinforcement. The coordinates were close. Too close.
Ethan stood and scanned the ridge.
Alpha Sense painted the vehicle's approach as a low, heavy line moving through underbrush: not a stealth run but a show of force. The poachers' backup had arrived with more firepower than the squad Ethan had dismantled. He had contained twelve men; he had avoided death. That was the point. Now he had to buy time.
He moved fast, but carefully. The bindings were fragile in a bureaucratic sense: temporary, legal, auditable. If he left the men where they were, the van would run over them, crush them, or the van's occupants would exhume the bodies and call it revenge. He needed cover, concealment, and a plan that did not involve violent escalation.
First, he took the command radios still lying near the squad leader and pressed the transmit-open button.
A voice crackled—static and anticipation. "—base, we're in position—"
Ethan slapped the radio to life and spoke in a calm, authoritative tone that sounded more like a ranger than a vigilante. "This is the forest perimeter team. You have a command override code? Identity verification?" He put a rough imitation of the corporate cadence into the mic.
Silence, then a tattered answer: "—safe zone — confirm assets—"
"Affirmative. Enemy engagement in sector nine. Stand down and await sweep confirmation. Repeat: do not engage within the ridge corridor. Command is on-site; we will secure target." Ethan's voice threaded a lie and a half-truth, and the poacher network—slick with hierarchy and discipline—hesitated.
The voice on the radio barked something curt, then the channel went dead. The van's engines continued to growl.
Ethan didn't rely on deception for much, but now deception would make the van's approach measured instead of murderous.
He sprinted to the nearest mud slope and, without shifting his weight into Full Shift (too loud), used Fold Slip to thread half a meter ahead and warp along the lobed roots. He reached the toppled log where the van would crest and set two triplines—thin, easily tripped wires that would snag axles or at least tear at low-hung undercarriage panels. He could also sense the forest's skeleton: a shallow ravine a few meters onward, one he could use. He moved with the operator's instruction—that old man's workbench had taught him crude engineering—cut a length of vines, looped them over a dead root system, and anchored a snare to the log.
All this took only a few minutes. The Panel annotated each action: trap set, lawful nonlethality, risk estimate: medium-high.
When he finished, he took position on the uphill side, a shadow stitched to the trees. The van crested the ridge like a steel beetle and slowed—either because of Ethan's radio trick or because professional drivers were cautious when rolling into new terrain. Its silver mesh glinted, and mounted on the roof sat a bulky cylinder that hissed with the promise of nets or worse.
Ethan watched the driver flick on the searchlight. White slashes swept the clearing and found nothing but still bodies and a log. The van eased forward. Tires whispered against loam.
He tightened his hands.
The van hit the wire.
The snare pulled taut.
The forward axle clipped the tripline and jammed the undercarriage. A grinding shriek of metal. The van lurched—forward momentum met unexpected anchor—and the back end dipped.
Inside, men swore. Outside, rifles came up.
Ethan used the pause. Fold Slip carried him three meters to the van's flank. He reached out, wrapped one hand around the driver's door handle, and yanked the door open in a single, fluid motion.
The driver spun, startled—one hand on the wheel, the other fumbling for a weapon. Ethan stepped in, stole the wheel with a palm to the man's throat and braced his shoulder against the dashboard. The engine strained. The van tried to nose forward; the snare held.
Two men leapt out with silver rifles raised. Ethan didn't wait. He rolled through the open door and slid behind the van's shadow. The first shot slashed a rent through the air; Ethan folded sideways, pinballed along the van's flank, and turned to shove the nearest rifle aside with a hand on the barrel. The weapon snapped from the man's grip, and Ethan applied a brief containment touch—this time not a full bind, just a neural suppress to freeze the trigger finger. The poacher's eyes went wide and blank for a second. He dropped the rifle like a child who'd been told to put a toy down.
The van's mounted cylinder spun and sent a net in a wide arc. Ethan dove. The net wrapped into the trees, snagging on branches instead of human throats. A blast of modified silver dust sprayed, but Ethan's Pressure Guard and the Shadow Cloak dulled its sting to an irritation. It still burned—he tasted it on his tongue—but the worst it could do was slow him.
He moved through the chaos with a surgeon's disinterest. Fold Slip to the roofline to sever the mounts. A precise kick to the cylinder's base and it disentangled, skittering into the underbrush. Metal screamed. The driver tried to gun the van again; Ethan slammed his shoulder into the wheel and turned the ignition. The engine stalled.
The van's hatch opened. Heavy boots landed. Men with reinforced batons encircled, faces masked with the same corporate neutrality. They were trained. Ethan respected efficient competence even in the morally bankrupt.
He stepped forward into the moonlight and let the Panel whisper through him: the legal audit would log any forced binding; he had minutes to make an ethical, non-fatal end to this.
He spoke then, loud enough to cut the field. "Stop. You will be contained for the safety of the forest and your own lives. Resist and you will be neutralized."
One of them laughed, a hard sound. "You can't hold us all, kid."
"Then you'll find out," Ethan said. He didn't mean to threaten—but the Taming Space didn't need threats when it had leverage. He started the containment protocol, not to enslave, but like a paramedic slipping a tourniquet on a bleeding artery. Fingers brushed steel, a braid of will and restraint. The men went still, one by one, until the clearing smelled only of earth and diesel and the small, helpless breathing of contained combatants.
Suzu scouted. Aoi, folded quietly, made small comfort-minded noises in the Suite's shadow when Ethan checked the ledger. The Panel wrote its audit: all forced binds recorded, all nonlethal measures used, all transfers to be coordinated with local enforcement upon extraction.
When the final breath in the field quieted, Ethan let himself breathe properly for the first time since the rain of darts.
The Operator, heartbeat audible at his elbow, came forward on silent feet. "You did it."
Ethan wiped forest sap from his palms. "We did it," he said. "But we need to move them. If anyone else shows, they'll come for bodies first."
He looked up at the van—stalled, wounded, and impotent—and then at the twelve poachers and the handful of van occupants sleeping under the Panel's humane keep.
The forest closed its ranks around them. In the quiet, the Panel chimed a small private line:
PANEL — MISSION NOTE
Poacher squad neutralized. All sentient bindings applied under emergency containment (audit locked). Recommended next step: transport hostiles to local enforcement, or execute secure handoff to Operator extraction team. Reward processing pending.
Ethan felt the weight of the ledger like a small, immediate thing—proof of decisions, proof of ethics in action. He'd kept the wolves safe. He'd kept the forest's living balance intact. He'd done it without becoming the thing he fought.
Above them, beyond the trees, another rumble hinted at movement on a larger road. That would be a problem for another moment. For now, they had van, bodies, and the thin, fragile victory that comes when someone chooses to use containment instead of conquest.
Ethan set to organizing a drag team.
The night wasn't over. The forest had more teeth than silver. But for the first time in hours, Ethan felt like the order he made with the Panel matched the order around him.
He tapped the entry in his wrist: bind logs sealed; transports queued.
And somewhere, two tamed scouts—one ancient hollow and one newborn spirit—sent tiny, grateful signals into the fold.