Ethan had no idea he'd just been added to two separate hit lists.He walked Felix to the door. The new round of crops came ripe as he watched, and he pulled everything into his inventory, then pressed a second bag of produce on his friend. Felix tried to refuse, checked the item description on his comms—Common. No stat bonus, no effect—and gave in."Boss, I gotta run. My family's got a training regimen lined up. I'm A-rank Swordsman, sure, but my actual strength is still under a hundred kilos. That's embarrassing. I've got a month of hell before the academy. I won't be able to come around.""Don't let me slow you down."Felix drove off. The sun went down.Ethan sat in the dark of his yard and audited.Twenty seeds in. The tenfold yield spit out a mountain of food he hadn't known he was missing: carrots by the score, daikon, pumpkins, a sack of corn, broccoli, cilantro, heads of cabbage and napa, snow peas, ginger, scallions, garlic, sweet potato, peanut. The inventory read like a groc

He checked the gate, walked the perimeter, and confirmed the intruders had climbed in and out without damaging anything. Then he went to bed.He slept through the rest of the night.He was up before dawn, same as always. Three bottles of paste. Twenty laps around the block. A shower. He checked the plot on the way back in.The thirty seeds he'd planted were up, and among them were three plants he hadn't seen before.A mango sapling. A lychee. A longan.They were fruit. The system had tagged them as permanent—they wouldn't vanish after the first harvest. But they were going to need room, and his single square meter was already crowded. Worse, their maturity clocks were not forty-eight hours. They were half a month, even with Growth Nutrient poured on them. Without the nutrient, sixteen days.Compared to a real fruit tree, that was nothing. To Ethan, it was an eternity.He knelt beside the little saplings, and for the first time, he felt a problem that felt good to have.He could not ke

He didn't relax. Not for a second.The deeper he walked toward the center, the quieter it got. No birds. No insects. The air itself hung still, as even the wind was afraid to make a sound.At the middle of the valley lay a lake. Ringing it were wide flats of meadow grown to waist height, and across the meadow bloomed flowers — each one ringed with petals that ended in little needle teeth. Nothing about them was pretty. Everything about them was wrong.He stopped well short.Every instinct he had said the lake held something enormous. Close enough, and even his twenty seconds of invulnerability wouldn't be enough. Twenty seconds to outrun something that probably moved faster than him. He didn't like those odds.The flowers bothered him too. Not the teeth — those were obvious. It was the silence around them. Nothing touched them. Nothing nested in them. Whatever pollinated them was either extinct or not on the menu.He wasn't here to fight it. He was here to farm. The place was safe eno

Ethan had no answer for that.Humans were weak. A hundred years of fighting the Aberrations and they hadn't reclaimed a single inch of their own soil. Against Song and her people, they wouldn't be a fight.And it didn't matter anyway. He was a farmer. His traditional skills put food on a fire and money in a bank. Planetary problems were above his pay grade.He roasted more. She ate until she was satisfied, then announced she was going back to the lake to rest.At the edge of the water she stopped, tilted her head, and studied him for a long moment. She murmured something he couldn't understand, lifted one hand, and flicked a finger at his forehead.A needle-prick of pain.Then her voice landed right inside his head, clear and girlish: "You're too weak. Leave this valley and the ugly things out there will eat you. So I'm leaving a mark. Now they'll smell you and not touch you. I'm going back to sleep. Stay alive, human."She waved, and sank into the lake like a stone.Ethan stood very

"Then kill me."Ethan looked straight at the killing intent on Hank's face and closed his eyes.He couldn't beat this man. If Hank swung, fighting back was noise. He was too weak to even be a problem. If Hank ignored the law, the precinct and the Enforcement line could show up and it wouldn't matter.He stopped caring.It was the cleanest choice he'd made all week. If he panicked, begged, or tried to run, he'd lose his dignity and still die. If he just stood there and let the old man make the call, at least his last expression wouldn't be fear.Hank studied him, cold and still.He wouldn't be punished for it. But he'd rather not swing at all. The White family leaned on him. They hadn't produced a talented heir in years, which was why he'd come charging out here for Brandon. And honestly? He almost liked the kid. How many people looked at Hector White without blinking?He smiled. "Kid. You really aren't afraid to die."He started to move."Hector White. Hands off."A voice cracked acro