The silence after the crack lasted two heartbeats.
Down the service road, the first-years broke into a frantic run, their wooden training swords clattering against their thighs as they scrambled toward the upper barracks.
The lard runner didn't run. He dropped into the mud behind his wagon wheel, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped over his head.
"Something's out," he rasped, his voice thin against the damp air. "Something came down from the ridge."
Inside the Annex yard, no one moved.
James felt the old reflex flare behind his ribs—a sharp, cold itch that demanded he take three paces forward, draw a weapon he wasn't wearing, and bark out positions.
Horse. Students. Wagon. Forest. The answer was already forming in his mind.
His mouth opened to give the order.
He stopped.
He closed his mouth. He looked at his boots, buried three inches in the gray ditch silt, and let his shoulders drop.
"James."
Drake's voice was low, flat, and right beside his ear. His left arm rested dead against his belt, but his right knee was set deep into the embankment, his low center locked against the slope.
"What?" James asked without looking over.
"Stop looking everywhere."
"Why?"
"Because I'm already looking."
James exhaled slowly through his nose. His hands uncurled.
To his left, Kara's right hand twitched. A faint, blue-white curl of heat rose off her knuckles, singeing the wet cuff of her sleeve. She caught it immediately, drawing her fingers back into a loose fist, cooling the spark before the smell of ozone could reach the air.
Too much smoke, her eyes said as she met James's gaze. It'll blind us in the brush.
Xander reached down, grabbed a thick oak wedge from the pile by the gate, and stood waiting.
"I was going to say something more complicated," Xander muttered.
"Tragic," Kara said softly.
Luna didn't look at the trees. She looked at the mud under their feet.
"It's not coming up," she said. "It fell."
Twenty yards past the broken wagon, the hillside had sloughed off.
Weeks of steady autumn rain had turned the clay beneath the pine roots to soup. The heavy vibration of the wagon axle slamming into the rut had been the final push. A thirty-foot section of the timber retaining wall had sheared straight down the grain, taking three mature pines and two tons of wet loam with it.
Pinned beneath the heaviest log, half-buried in red clay and splintered bark, was a timber-hound.
It wasn't a monster. It was lean, starved, its coarse gray hide matted with wet mud and old sap. Its hindquarters were trapped beneath the six-hundred-pound trunk, its ribs expanding in fast, shallow thuds.
When it saw the figures on the road, its dark eyes rolled back in its skull. It bared its yellowed teeth and let out a wet, rattling hiss, thrashing its front paws against the ditch wall.
James looked at it. His eye searched for mana, for Nexus, for anything familiar.
It found nothing. Just a living thing suffocating in the dark.
The runner peeked around his wagon rim, his face pale.
"Kill it," he breathed. "It's loose. Put a spike through it before it gets clear!"
"Xander," James said.
"The wood's rot-heavy," Xander said, stepping forward. "If we pull from the top, the whole slope comes down on the ditch."
"Drake?"
Drake walked to the thick end of the log. He didn't rush in to shoulder the six hundred pounds himself. He crouched until his hips were lower than his knees, setting his feet flat in the mud.
"Base," Drake said. "I take two inches. You place the wedge."
"Wait," Kara said.
She laid both hands flat against the wet bark near Drake's grip. A sudden, controlled burst of dry heat radiated from her palms—flash-baking the mud and sap into a rough, dry crust.
"Now," she said. "It won't slip."
Drake breathed in. Deep, low, into his belly.
He didn't scream. He didn't flex his upper body. He drove his heels into the gravel, shifted his weight into his hips, and rose two inches.
The massive log groaned.
The hound snapped wildly at the air, its jaws clicking inches from Drake's knee.
James didn't jump back. He stepped into the hound's blind spot, placed his forearm gently across the side of its neck, and pressed down just enough to pin its head against the mud without crushing its throat.
"Easy," James muttered.
The hound shivered violently under his arm. James felt the cold, wet coarse fur against his skin and the rapid, terrified thrum of its heart against his palm.
Xander slid the oak wedge deep beneath the lifted trunk.
"Set," Xander said.
Drake lowered his weight. The log settled onto the oak block with a heavy thud.
The pressure lifted off the hound's ribs. It let out a long, shuddering gasp, nostrils flaring as the cold wind hit its lungs.
Luna crouched beside its hind legs. She didn't use light. She didn't cast a spell. She simply ran two fingers down the animal's flank, feeling the line of the trapped leg, and nudged its hip out of the mud trough.
"Go," she whispered.
The hound didn't attack. It scrambled forward on three legs, dragging its injured hind foot through the brush, and vanished into the dark timberline without making a sound.
The ditch went still again.
The rain had stopped entirely, leaving only the slow drip of water from the pine needles above.
James stood up. His sleeve was ruined—soaked through with red clay—and his knees ached from the cold ground. He wiped his hands on his trousers and looked back toward the road.
The lard runner was still sitting against his wagon, staring at them.
His grease pencil had fallen into the mud by his boot, forgotten.
He had watched five kids—armed with nothing but two flat stones, an oak wedge, and a ruined sleeve—move a mountain of wet timber and set a wild beast free in under two minutes.
Nobody had shouted. Nobody had taken credit. Nobody had looked at him to see if he was impressed.
"You..." The runner swallowed hard. "You didn't kill it."
James looked down at his caked boots.
"It was just stuck," James said.
The runner looked at James, then at Drake, who was quietly wiping dry pine bark off his palm, then at Kara and Xander, who were already walking back toward the gate to grab the wagon jack.
The runner's shoulders sagged. He reached down, picked up his grease pencil, and wiped the wet dirt off it with his thumb.
"I've delivered to the East Annex," the runner said softly, almost to himself. "I've delivered to the High Guard barracks. When something breaks there, three people fight over who gets to give the order to fix it. And four people stand around waiting to see who gets blamed if it falls."
He looked up at Squad 7.
There was no admiration in his eyes—just a quiet, unsettling confusion.
"How long have you guys been out here?"
James looked at the low, gray sky hanging over the yard.
"Four months," James said.
They jacked the wagon axle ten minutes later.
It didn't take magic. It took Drake holding the lever, Xander guiding the fulcrum, Kara bracing the frame, and Luna placing the final flat river stone under the iron rim.
When the wheel rolled clear of the rut, the runner climbed up to his bench, took the reins, and nodded once to James.
"Thanks," he said.
He turned his team around and drove slowly back up the service road toward the upper campus, the iron rims humming softly against the wet gravel.
James turned back to the yard.
The wooden gate stood open. The soft, gray dirt inside the perimeter was pristine, save for the five sets of boot prints leading out to the ditch.
On the porch, Master Chawng was still sitting on his low stool. He held his small whittling knife in his right hand. A fresh curl of pale wood dropped from the stick in his lap, joining the pile of shavings around his sandals.
He didn't look up as they walked back through the gate.
"The fence is down," Xander noted, stopping by the threshold. "Thirty feet."
Chawng cut another thin strip of pine.
"Then you have work to do before dark," the old man said softly.
James looked at the open gap where the retaining wall had collapsed, then at the four people standing beside him in the mud.
"We'll need eight posts," James said.
He didn't say I'll get them. He didn't say Xander, count them.
Drake turned toward the woodpile. Kara reached for the mallet. Xander pulled two lengths of hemp rope from the shed.
James stepped into the yard, picked up his corner of the first pine post, and set his feet into the dirt.