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 against the dark. The water system ran clean, the burner hatch fed and forgotten. The outhouse no longer felt like a punchline he'd paid too much for. Even the workshop, still bristling with bolted-on power tools that had never been meant to run without electricity, had settled into something like routine, a shape in the dark he no longer flinched at seeing.For the first time since arriving in the Shattered Flats, Nathan had a quiet evening with no fire to feed, no trade to close, no tree line waiting to be cleared before dusk.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 properly 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 without ever looking

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

Morning brought no answers, only more silence where he'd desperately hoped for noise, for anything solid he could work with.Nathan checked the channel first thing, scanning for any mention of the dome that had gone dark overnight, half expecting the whole server to be talking about it the way they had after the first culling. A few scattered posts noted a Petak near the eastern grid going quiet, the usual mix of grim speculation and quick pivots back to ordinary trading business, as though nobody wanted to sit with the weight of it for too long.He didn't post anything himself. He'd learned enough in the last week to know that asking the wrong question in the open channel got you either ignored or erased, and he wasn't eager to test which one applied to him specifically, not after RUSTLINE.Instead, he reached out privately again, this time to SALTFLATJOE, another trade contact who'd always seemed sharper than most, quick with numbers, careful with his words in a way that had struck

Silence, when it finally came, felt somehow worse than the light that had swallowed him whole a moment before.Nathan opened his eyes braced for pain, for cold, for the cracked earth of the Shattered Flats hard under his back the way it always was. Instead he found warmth, and quiet, and a strange golden-gray emptiness stretching out in every direction with no ground he could point to and no sky above him at all, just soft light pressing in evenly from all sides at once.He stood, somehow, though there was nothing solid beneath his feet that he could actually feel or name.The journal was still in his hand, though he had no memory whatsoever of grabbing it in that last chaotic second before the light took him. Its pages flipped open on their own, fast, like wind was tearing straight through them, before settling abruptly on a page he had never once seen before in all his reading.Not a blueprint this time. A map.The Shattered Flats, viewed from directly above as though from some impo