Chương 57: Chapter 36.5: What We Have

Halden watched Lysa disappear beneath the Cataract awning, then checked the new fastening against the shield harness.

"Walls are the last visible failure," he said.

"A town starts collapsing earlier, through logistics." Wade groaned.

"Not now."

"Yes, now." Halden tightened a rope brace across a drying frame.

"Boots fail, grain spoils, straps snap, wheels crack, and dry cloth runs out. By the time the wall opens, the failure has already travelled through everything behind it." Harl grunted.

"For once, the mad bridge man is not wrong."

"I am rarely wrong."

"You are often unaffordable."

"That is not the same thing." Bren arrived near midnight with blood on one sleeve and exhaustion carved into every line of his face. He stood beneath the canvas for several moments watching me work by firelight. By then the piles had transformed. Broken salvage had become rows of reinforced straps, marsh boots, shield braces, hook lashings, waterproof wraps, and crude but effective trench harnesses.

My hands had settled into an order: cut against the weakest grain, punch before the hide cooled, thread while the sinew remained flexible, tighten across the load, then seal the exposed edge. Beastcraft shortened the pauses between those decisions, but it did nothing for the ache closing my fingers around the awl. A dark spot had opened beneath one thumbnail where the haft pressed every time I drove it through doubled barkback hide. Bren stepped closer.

"You need sleep."

"So does everyone."

"That was not a clever answer."

"I wasn't trying to be clever." The older guard looked at the finished gear, then at my hands.

"How long since you stopped?" I considered lying, but Hunter's Eye had made me less tolerant of useless answers, including my own.

"I don't know." Bren's gaze sharpened.

"That is worse than a number." Halden spoke from the other side of the workbench without looking up.

"His passive is carrying more strain than it should." I glanced toward him. The half-dwarf continued tightening a brace cord.

"Durability does not mean absence of cost. It means delayed failure."

"That's encouraging," Jory muttered from a blanket near the wall. Bren folded his arms.

"You hear that?"

"Yes."

"You believe it?" I looked down at the half-finished harness in my lap. A younger militia runner needed it before dawn. Without it, the cracked shield frame he carried would likely tear free under the first hard impact. The boy could still die with the repair, of course. Most people could die despite anything I made. But the difference between certain failure and possible survival had become a kind of arithmetic I could not ignore.

"I believe the gear is needed." Bren stared at me for a long moment, then exhaled through his nose.

"Finish that one. Then sleep one hour."

"One hour won't matter."

"It will matter because I said it will." The order should have annoyed me. Instead it steadied something. I finished the harness. Sleep lasted forty minutes. Bren had pulled an empty grain sack across the nearest bundle of bone fasteners before he left, saving them from a fresh leak in the canvas. I noticed it when I woke because the sack had once carried enough flour for a week at the Cataract and now protected twelve toggles and a handful of sharpened rib plates.

I folded it back carefully, checked that nothing had warped near the drying pan, and counted the orders Harl had scratched onto a board while I slept. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. I woke before anyone shook me because the yard had changed while I rested. More men waited now. More damaged gear. More requests spoken quietly by people trying not to sound desperate.

The fire had burned lower, and frost clung to the edges of the canvas where rain finally gave way to bitter cold. I returned to work without speaking. By the second day, Beastcraft had become a rhythm the whole yard moved around. Harl sorted labourers into stripping, cleaning, cutting, and drying. Merris judged which damaged hides could still hold value under stress and which should be reduced to strips. Wade tested gear by trying to break it.

Jory carried finished pieces to militia stations while complaining loudly enough that men started laughing when they saw him coming. Halden redesigned anything that failed under water pressure and argued with Wade over every brace angle as if the survival of Dunmere depended on both of them being correct at the same time. Perhaps it did. The best piece came together near dusk.

It began as a ruined shield harness, a cracked barkback rib plate, two scavenger hide strips, and the remains of a river hauler's shoulder brace. I had intended only to reinforce the harness for a spear guard whose left arm had been injured during the trench collapse. But as I worked, Beastcraft began drawing the materials into a different arrangement. The rib plate curved naturally across the shoulder. The hide strips crossed under the arm without restricting breath.

The old hauler's brace distributed weight across the back instead of hanging from the neck. It was ugly, asymmetrical, and clearly effective before anyone tested it. Halden stopped mid-argument with Wade and walked over.

"That is load-bearing armour." I looked at the piece.

"It is a shoulder brace."

"It is both." Wade took it, pulled hard against the straps, then tried to twist the rib plate free. It held.

"Annoyingly good," he admitted. Jory leaned over the workbench.

"Can mine have less dead smell?"

"No," I said.

"That feels personal."

"It is material reality," Halden replied. The injured spear guard wore the brace that evening. He returned after the next patrol alive. That was when the advancement came. It moved through me not as heat or violence, but as structure. My fingers tightened around the knife while understanding unfolded across every material in the yard. ABILITY ADVANCED Beastcraft has advanced from Iron (mid) to Iron (late).

You now better understand hide tension, bone reinforcement, sinew binding, horn grip, load-bearing carcass materials, wet-weather field repairs, and the conversion of dead beasts into survival equipment. This ability grows through practical preservation, adaptive repair, material judgment, and making gear that keeps the living standing longer than they should. Thickness, tension, grain, and flex settled into one judgement beneath my fingers.

I could feel where each piece wanted to bear strain and where it would betray the wearer under pressure. The shoulder brace returned with three new claw scores across the rib plate and mud ground into every seam, but the leather beneath remained uncut. I turned it over twice and found the first stitch beginning to pull loose near the spine. Iron (late) had not made the repair permanent; it had shown me where the delayed failure would begin. I sat very still afterward. Merris noticed first.

"Grade?" I nodded once.

"Late?" Another nod. The old trader's expression shifted faintly, not surprise exactly, but recognition of a market changing before other men had seen it. Harl swore under his breath, though not unhappily. Wade looked at the piles of gear as though they had personally offended him by becoming better than expected. Bren's reaction was quieter.

"Good," he said.

"Now you sleep properly." This time I did not argue. I slept in the corner of the yard beneath two patched cloaks while the fires burned low and other hands continued simpler repairs around me. In the distance, horns sounded twice during the night, but no full alarm followed. Dunmere held. Badly, narrowly, and with too many dead already buried beneath southern smoke, but it held. At dawn, the first southern rider arrived. The horse nearly collapsed at the gate.

By the time Bren brought the man into the Cataract yard, half the work crew had already gathered around the new salvage piles. The rider wore no proper uniform, only a merchant guard's torn cloak and a face grey with cold and hunger. Mud covered him from boots to waist, and one hand remained tied to the reins because exhaustion had robbed him of grip hours earlier. Bren gave him water first. The man drank too quickly, coughed, and tried to speak before breath returned properly.

"South road's gone quiet." Harl looked up sharply.

"How far?"

"Three crossings at least. No barges. No toll fires. No return carts." Merris' face hardened in a way I had not seen before. The rider swallowed again and looked toward the eastern smoke beyond the rooftops.

"Whole river route's silent below Greybend." No one spoke for several seconds. Halden turned towards the Greywash, measuring the rider's report against the eastern pressure, while Bren's hand closed around the haft of his spear.

"That is not a raid," Halden said.

"No," Bren replied.

"That is a net." The rider's horse stumbled in the lane and had to be caught before it struck the mud. Behind it, rows of ugly reinforced gear waited beneath the canvas for men who could no longer expect another supply cart from the south. I put the repaired shoulder brace with the eastern orders, and Harl turned the empty board over to begin a new list.