Building Zoids in a World of Titans

Thorn didn't argue. She didn't negotiate. Chair legs scraped as she pushed back from the table, the slow deliberation of someone who had made this walk before and would make it again.

"Come with me."

She led them down a narrow stairwell behind the council chamber, past storage rooms smelling of dried grain and oilcloth, to a heavy iron door set into the Oldfoot foundation itself. The lock was old. It took three turns of a key that looked like it had been forged before the Sundering. The door groaned open on hinges that hadn't seen grease in years.

Cool air rushed out. Dust motes drifted in the lantern light Thorn carried.

The vault was small. Maybe four meters square. Stone shelves lined three walls, most of them bare. A few worn tools hung from pegs: a hammer with a split handle, a wrench set missing its largest size. A folded wool blanket. A ceramic jar with a chipped rim. Nothing that caught light the way value should.

Something. A component cache, a forgotten core fragment.

Thorn set the lantern on a low shelf.

"This is it. What Millcross has that isn't land or sols."

Keeper Mara stood in the doorway behind them, arms still crossed. Master Rowan hadn't followed. He'd stopped at the top of the stairs, one hand on the wall.

Alex moved along the shelves. He picked up the hammer, turned it over. The steel was good, old-forge work, but the face had mushroomed from decades of misuse. He set it back down.

The blanket was moth-eaten. Dried herbs filled the jar, nothing more.

Ziya's breathing stayed even. Alex didn't need to ask what she was doing behind it. She'd already run the numbers, and by the look of things, they didn't clear a month's fuel.

He didn't turn around.

"Thorn. This isn't necessary. We didn't do this for payment."

"Sit down, Alex."

He didn't sit.

"Millcross doesn't do charity. Not giving it, not taking it. You saved our river. You saved our town. We pay our debts. That's how we hold our heads up when the Confederacy comes asking why we're still here. You take something. Anything. Or you insult every person who stood in that square today."

Alex's fingers brushed the blue stone at his throat. He exhaled.

"Fine. Let me look properly."

He started at the bottom shelf and worked up. Ziya moved to the opposite wall, her stylus tapping against her palm, a habit now, not a calculation. Near the door, Rhian stayed quiet, watching.

The back corner of the top shelf held a wooden crate, its lid warped from damp. Alex pulled it down. Dust cascaded.

Inside sat Warden gear. A hairline crack split the chest plate's left pectoral. A visor spiderwebbed at the edge. Harness, straps frayed. A shield generator housing, its mounting brackets bent. All of it old, none of it fit for field use.

He lifted the chest plate. The alloy was high grade, military spec, not settlement manufacture. Worth something, this. He could weld that crack. He could cut and reshape the metal, fold it into a Zoid's frame. Cracked as it was, the visor's crystalline lens held a density of optical-grade material he couldn't buy anywhere in Veridia. The shield housing carried copper windings and a flux-capable core mount, the kind of part that took him weeks to source.

Scrap to anyone else. Components to him. His hands sorted it that way before his mind caught up: what needed a forge, what would slot straight into the Liger's next upgrade.

"Where did this come from?"

Thorn's shadow fell across the crate.

"Dov's gear. From before the leg injury. He kept it after he retired. Said he might need it again. He never did."

Alex set the plate down carefully.

"Dov Sutter. The junior miller."

Mara hadn't moved from the doorway.

"He was a former Rank 8 Warden. Three winters back, he donated it to the town stores. He said Millcross might need it more than his closet did."

Alex ran a thumb along the harness strap. The leather had cracked, but the stitching held. Good work. The kind that lasted.

"He's still alive?"

"Limp and all."

Mara's mouth twisted.

"Stubborn as the stone. He won't let anyone help him onto the roof to fix the beacon. Every storm season, he climbs it himself."

He picked up the visor, turning the cracked lens to the light.

"I'll take the lot."

Ziya was beside him. She didn't touch the gear, just looked at Thorn, then at Mara.

"That's everything of value in this vault."

Not a question.

"It's near enough."

Mara uncrossed one arm, tapped her fingers against her elbow.

"There's one more thing, in the back of the crate. Dov's personal effects. He left a few things when he cleared out his Warden kit."

Alex reached past the harness. His fingers brushed paper, thick, oil-treated, folded small. He pulled it out.

A map.

The paper was military issue, not a settlement survey or trade route, gridded in faded red ink with coordinate markers along the edges. Hand-drawn notations covered the eastern quadrant: the Stonefang approaches, the Great Chasm, the foothills where the Obsidian-Wing Petras nested.

But someone had added more. Warden-briefing symbols marked the map. Triangles for confirmed sightings and circles for suspected territories dotted the page. Double lines marked the no-go zones. Rank notations in a cramped hand: B-rank, A-rank. One S-rank symbol, drawn in different ink, newer than the rest, a question mark beside it.

The notations clustered around a single location deep in the mountains. A circled X, and three words written beside it in careful script.

Sleeping. Waiting. Hungry.

His mind was already cataloging. A-rank territory meant A-rank components. S-rank meant materials that didn't exist in any market anywhere on Terrax. Real components. The Petras Titans in the foothills carried mineralized carapace plates perfect for CAS armor. In the Chasm, the Tyrannosaurus-types had bone density that could reinforce a Zoid frame past standard specs.

He folded the map. Slipped it into his satchel.

"Dov marked this?"

Mara nodded.

"He never talked about what he saw out there. He came back slower to meet anyone's eye, quieter than before. He kept the beacon lit year-round instead of seasonal."

Alex looked at the crate again, at the gear and the map and the dust already resettling in the corners it had waited in for years.

"Thank you."

To Thorn, and to the empty air where Dov Sutter wasn't standing.

Thorn's shoulders dropped a fraction.

"We should go. The town will want to see you off right. Even if you'd rather they didn't."

Alex picked up the chest plate, the visor, the harness, the shield housing. The map sat heavy against his hip, heavier than anything else in his arms.

"Later. Right now, I need to check the Liger's actuator. The left hind. It took a hit from the Colossus."

He didn't wait for a response. Crate contents cradled against his chest, he climbed the stairs, Ziya and Rhian falling into step behind him, Thorn and Mara following at a distance.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.

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