Building Zoids in a World of Titans

The Liger Zero slowed to a walk. Beside it, the Arosaurer fell into step. Alex brought both machines to a stop twenty meters from the nearest wagon.

Three guards lay motionless beside the overturned lead wagon. A fourth sat propped against a wheel, one leg bent wrong, breathing shallow. Two more huddled behind crates, uninjured but frozen. The merchant, a woman in dust-stained travel clothes, knelt beside a fifth body, hands pressed to a chest wound that had already stopped bleeding.

The second wagon listed on a broken axle, its canvas cover burned away. Scorch marks blackened the frame.

Smoke drifted. The Liger's cooling vents hissed.

A woman stepped forward from the cluster of survivors. Mid-thirties, maybe. She kept her dark hair cropped short, pulled back. Sun-weathered skin, a lean frame built for endurance rather than power. A worn leather ledger rode a strap across her chest, ink-stained fingers resting on its spine. She wore practical traveling clothes in neutral colors, with no guild or faction markings anywhere on her.

Her eyes moved between the Liger Zero and the Arosaurer, measuring them both, calculating something Alex couldn't yet read. He read the rest of it plainly enough: wariness, open and unmasked, the look of someone who had no idea yet whose side these machines were on.

Behind her, the guards trembled. The kneeling merchant pressed her hands tighter to the dead man's chest. One of the uninjured guards made a sound, half a sob.

She turned her head slightly, enough to be heard without raising her voice. "Keep still, all of you, unless you'd like to find out whether that thing decides we're worth its attention."

The trembling stopped.

Her thumb pressed flat against the ledger's cover, a fraction of pressure, there and gone, the only crack that showed through the calm.

She took another step forward and stopped where she'd clearly judged a safe distance, head tilted, studying the white armor and the blue frame, emerald caps ringing the Liger's joints, then the Arosaurer's cobalt plates and its silver claws.

She's assessing threat vectors, sizing up a weapon.

Her people waited behind her. She hadn't given anyone permission to move.

Alex keyed the comm. "We're not a threat. We're just passing through."

The Liger Zero's canopy hissed upward. He swung down, boots hitting dirt. Rhian followed from the Arosaurer, smaller but moving with the same deliberate calm.

"I'm Alex, Rank Seven Warden. This is Rhian."

The woman's gaze snapped between them. Her thumb flattened against the ledger again, half a heartbeat, gone as fast as it came. Pilot-operated, then, which made them tools in her eyes instead of threats. Her shoulders settled, some of the weight going out of her stance.

"Sela Vantram. Vantram Freight and Logistics. I run this caravan."

She inclined her head once. "Thank you for the intervention. Truly."

Sela Vantram has spent fifteen years turning three wagons into the most trusted freight operation east of the Stonefangs, built on a rule she's never once bent: haul for anyone, answer to no one. She reads a contract better than most Council lawyers and a person almost as well, and she carries her own ledger everywhere, a battered leather thing that's half account book and half the only diary she's ever kept.

The guards and servants stirred behind her, murmuring their own thanks. One pressed a cloth harder against his leg.

Her gaze swept the Liger Zero's white armor, then the Arosaurer's cobalt plates. "Where in the world did those come from?"

Alex tucked a loose cable back into the Liger's undercarriage housing before he answered. "I built them."

Her ledger hand went still, the thumb pressing flat and staying there. "You built them. Yourself."

"From Titan components. Piece by piece, over a long time."

She studied him longer this time. The calculation in her face shifted, threat assessment giving way to something else, interest maybe, her thumb pressing harder against the ledger's spine and holding there a beat longer than before.

"Nobody builds machines like that. Not in Xylos, and not anywhere I've hauled freight in fifteen years."

"Then you've been hauling for the wrong people."

A ghost of a smile touched her mouth. Her eyes stayed flat, still assessing him.

The Iron Mule's engine rumbled closer. Ziya climbed down from the cab and crossed to stand beside Alex and Rhian, her gaze already moving over the damaged wagons, counting losses.

"Good work, both of you. I mean that."

Sela's eyes moved to her, and the ledger hand twitched again, a shorter flicker this time. "And who's this, then?"

"This is Ziya Stonehand, my engineer and my partner."

"Where are you headed?"

"We're bound for Ironwood Junction."

The ledger hand finally relaxed all the way. "Oh, what a coincidence. So are we."

Sela laid it out without dressing it up. She'd lost three guards outright, and two wagons had taken damage, one of them beyond repair. The four guards she had left were competent, but they were stretched too thin for the road still ahead, and the route through the Stonefang foothills had only been getting worse all season. She needed this caravan to reach Ironwood intact and on schedule.

She proposed a contract. Escort in exchange for payment or materials, terms they'd settle once they arrived. A trade between two people who each had something the other needed.

Alex weighed it. The Liger's damaged leg would need careful handling on rough terrain. Both the Arosaurer and the Lanstag were still combat-ready. Folding the caravan into their formation changed the shape of the group without breaking it.

"Agreed."

Sela inclined her head. "Good. Then let's not waste the daylight we've got left. We move within the hour."

As the two groups sorted themselves out, a young guard, barely twenty, checked over his rifle, hands still unsteady. He muttered to the man beside him that this made the second pack this month that had hunted with that same unnerving precision. He caught the look his partner gave him and waved it off, blaming nerves.

Nobody pressed him on it.

Alex filed the comment away next to his own suspicion from the fight. He thought again of the herding, of the chokepoint tactic the pack had used, and how he'd told himself at the time that it might have been instinct sharpened by desperation. Two data points existed now instead of one, and neither of them proved anything by itself.

Something is directing them, and he let it go for now. He could do nothing with a hunch that had no evidence behind it, not yet.

The Iron Mule pulled forward, Sela's wagons falling into line behind it, the surviving guards repositioning on foot and horseback. On either side, the Liger Zero and the Arosaurer took up flanking positions.

Rhian drifted over to Sela's lead wagon within minutes. "So, what's actually in the crates? Please tell me there are books in there somewhere. Ziya says you've got the best maps east of the Stonefangs."

"I have maps. Whether they're the best depends on who you ask." Sela nodded toward the wagon bed. "The crates are textile shipments, bound for the Millworks district. It's boring, heavy work, but it's exactly the cargo that pays on time, and these days that's all I ask of a job."

"Wait, boring cargo actually exists?"

"It's profitable, boring cargo, and that's the best sort of cargo there is."

Rhian grinned. "Alex would call that a contradiction in terms."

"Then your Alex sounds like someone who's never had to make payroll in the middle of a guild dispute."

Ziya fell into step beside Alex, wiping the last of the grease from her fingers onto a rag. "I like her, this broker of yours."

"She's practical." Sela's wagon rolled past, steady on its wheels despite everything. "So are we."

Shoulders loosened across both groups as the fight fell behind them, wheels turning steady beneath the wagons as they rolled on toward Ironwood.

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

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!