Three days into the workshop's existence, Nathan finally had a night with nothing urgent left to do.The Core sat steady at Level 2, humming its low blue pulse. The water system ran clean. The outhouse no longer felt like a punchline. Even the workbench, still bristling with bolted-on power tools, had settled into something like routine.For the first time since arriving in the Shattered Flats, Nathan had a quiet evening with no fire to feed and no trade to close.He sat on the stool near the Core, pulled his jacket open, and finally took the journal out of his chest pocket.He hadn't opened it since the day he arrived. Not really. He'd flipped past the cover once, seen the blueprint for the Core, and gone straight into survival mode. There'd never been time to actually sit with it.Now there was.He turned past the first few pages, the ones he remembered from his old life, half-finished sketches of buildings he'd designed for IRONVEIL before the project died. A watchtower with a spir

The symbol nagged at him for two full days before Nathan finally admitted he needed to see it again in person, not just from memory replaying on a loop every time he closed his eyes.He geared up properly this time. Boots, jacket, the hatchet on his belt, and the folded map tucked into an outer pocket where he could reach it fast without fumbling through his inventory under pressure. The winch stayed behind at camp, too heavy to be worth hauling on foot for a scouting trip this far.He picked a direction from the map, a mark a little further out than he'd ever gone before, close to what looked like a cluster of low structures sketched into the paper's rough grid.The walk took most of the morning, longer than he'd planned for. The terrain shifted the farther he went, cracked flatland slowly giving way to broken slabs of stone jutting up at odd, unnatural angles, like the ground itself had buckled violently under something enormous a very long time ago, long before the countdown had ev

The attack came three nights later, and it didn't announce itself the way the last one had.No distant howling building slowly to a crescendo. No warning chime from the system giving him time to prepare. Nathan only noticed because the winch he'd left propped against the outer wall of the workshop scraped against stone, a small, wrong sound that shouldn't have happened entirely on its own in the still night air.He was up and moving before he'd fully processed why his body had already decided to react.Outside, in the thin margin between the Core's glow and the workshop's cold steel shadow, three shapes moved low and fast, closer to the ground than the creatures from his first night here. Not the same species at all. Longer limbs, patchy hide the color of the cracked earth around them, moving in a coordinated pattern that felt less like blind animal instinct and more like something closer to tactics."Warning: hostile group detected within camp perimeter."The alert came a full two se