Somewhere far from Iron's forest clearing, a completely different landscape stretched out.
Emerald meadows, scattered with vibrant flowers, swayed gently in the light breeze, while a mountain range loomed on the horizon.
A young man was strolling unhurriedly down this path. He wore simple white pants and a loose t-shirt, his hands shoved into his pockets.
Right in front of him towered a massive three-story house.
The tranquility of nature was rudely interrupted by the sounds coming from within: crashing, the shattering of glass, and angry shouting.
The young man grimaced, walked up the porch steps, and threw open the front door.
Inside, someone was slinging spells, someone else was throwing punches.
"Kai, stop bothering Nivea," a young man said calmly, cutting through the noise.
Kai spun around, throwing his hands up in indignation:
"I haven't even had time to copy her magic yet! I need time!"
Before he could finish, a tall young man with long white hair and cold golden eyes materialized silently right behind his back.
"Did you hear what Abel said?" he spoke. "You'd better go help Seraphina."
Kai shrugged his shoulders and tried to brush him off:
"She's just washing dishes! Do you really think I'm going to..."
Snap.
Space warped for a fraction of a second, and the next moment, Kai found himself standing in the kitchen next to Seraphina, clutching a dirty plate and fumbling with a sponge.
The young man calmly walked over to an empty table in the corner of the room and took a seat. Abel followed him and sat down opposite.
Leaning his elbows on the tabletop, he looked at Abel:
"Well? Did you find a suitable one?"
Abel nodded, the corners of his lips curling into a faint smile:
"Yes. His name is Iron Everfall..."
The scene of the cozy mountain sanctuary instantly dissolved, giving way to a noisy, sun-drenched clearing.
Iron stood in the middle of the camp, hands on his hips, staring with deep skepticism at the wall of intertwined trunks and thick branches towering before him.
"Elyria," Iron slowly turned to the spirit hovering in the air. "I know I told you to do whatever you wanted... but why the hell did you build a fence?"
Elyria guiltily clenched her little fists and shuffled her feet in the air:
"Well... um..."
"Do you seriously think our future state is going to be the size of this clearing?!" Iron swept a stern gaze over the wooden "palisade."
At that moment, Eliza walked over to them from the direction of the felled trees. She wiped her forehead with her palm, looked at the disgruntled Iron with a slight smile, and stepped between him and the embarrassed spirit.
"That's enough," Eliza said calmly and turned to Elyria. "She gets it now, right?"
The spirit nodded vigorously and repeatedly, hiding behind Eliza's shoulder.
Iron let a short pause hang in the air, sighed heavily, and shook his head:
"Fine. Get rid of it all."
"Okay!" Elyria exhaled with obvious relief.
She immediately flew over to the fence and gently touched the wood with her palm. In that instant, the tightly woven branches softened, turning into green energy, and noiselessly dissolved back into the earth.
Iron evaluated the clean look of the clearing, grunted, and beckoned her over with his hand:
"Fly over here."
"What now?" Elyria thought to herself in annoyance, but obediently flew closer:
"Yeah?"
Iron pulled out and unrolled a thick sheet of paper in front of her. Drawn on it was a clear, detailed blueprint of a future house: with precise proportions, floorings, windows, and load-bearing structures.
Elyria stared at the blueprint, her eyes widening in amazement:
"Already?! I only gave you the paper and charcoal this morning!"
"Yeah, look. These are our future houses. You're supposed to be a spirit of nature... or the forest, whatever. You should know how to make houses."
"Well... probably," Elyria muttered uncertainly, studying the complex diagrams.
"So you just need to make it happen. Can you do it?"
"I'll try!" she grumbled determinedly.
Elyria hovered above the ground and squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating her magic. The earth beneath the clearing hummed, and with a creak, thick roots and ready-made wooden planks began to emerge from it. The spirit tried to lift them with the air and assemble them into a single structure according to Iron's blueprint.
The trunks started falling into place, but the moment one plank went in crooked, the entire structure lost its balance. A loud crack rang out, and the unfinished frame collapsed onto the ground with a crash.
"Alright," Iron said reservedly. "Let's try that again."
Elyria gritted her teeth. Attempt number two: the roots crept upward again, the planks tried to interlock, but under their own weight, everything skewed again and came crashing down.
She tried a third time, a fourth... But no matter how hard she tried, assembling a proper, stable house out of this just wasn't working out.
Not far from the clearing, in the thick coniferous forest, a completely different kind of work was in full swing.
Clerk and his men hacked away at the pine trunks, their axes biting into the wood with a harsh grinding sound. Their arms ached, sweat dripped from their foreheads, and their muscles burned from the heavy physical labor. But fatigue wasn't what weighed on the former bandits the most.
Walking past them was Noah. Resting on his shoulder were three giant logs at once, each of which Clerk and his guys would barely be able to budge even with four people. He walked at a calm pace, as if carrying a bundle of dry twigs.
Clerk stopped, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and, breathing heavily, followed Noah with his eyes.
"Where the hell did we end up?" flashed through his mind.
Realizing how weak he was compared to Noah instantly spurred Clerk on. He gripped his axe tighter, exhaled, and barked at his men:
"What are you standing around for?! Keep working!"
Clerk started hacking at the wood with redoubled fury, trying to at least remotely catch up to Noah's pace.
Meanwhile, Noah moved steadily toward the camp with another batch of building materials.
Suddenly, his ear twitched ever so slightly. About a hundred and fifty meters to the right, there was a light rustling of dry leaves and the brief snap of a branch.
Noah immediately shrugged the logs off his shoulder, snatched up his sword resting nearby, and simply vanished. His speed was so high that the space where he'd just been standing gave off a soft pop from the pressure drop.
The next second, Noah was already soaring in the air right above the source of the noise. Lurking in the bushes below him was a massive creature with dark skin and huge horns. The monster didn't even have time to look up before Noah came down on it.
As he fell, he adjusted his grip on the hilt and, with one precise motion, drove the blade straight into the beast's neck.
Khh...
With a short wheeze, the giant horned monster collapsed nose-first into the dirt, instantly going still.
Noah landed smoothly on his feet, yanked out his sword, and looked around. At that exact moment, another rustle came from the neighboring bushes—a second monster was preparing to pounce from ambush.
"Too many of them," Noah thought, making another dash—and the second monster collapsed with its head split open, never having had the time to realize what happened.
Noah flicked the dark blood off the blade, sheathed his sword, and froze for a second, surveying the carcasses.
"Whatever... Consider it the same as regular training," he thought calmly to himself.
Meanwhile, back in the clearing, another bundle of branches scattered across the grass with a crash.
"Why isn't anything working out for me?!" Elyria cried out, stomping her little foot right in the middle of the air.
Iron silently watched her struggles, then mentally summoned Lumon:
"Run an analysis. Why isn't it working for her?"
[Subject "Elyria" is attempting to utilize the surrounding environment by extracting raw roots and branches from underground. To construct a complex object from a blueprint, she must not pull pre-existing raw materials, but generate the matter herself, having first completely rendered the entire structure and joints of the house within her consciousness.]
"Got it," Iron said aloud and turned to the spirit. "Look, Elyria. You're trying to forcefully pull roots out of the ground. To build a house, you need to create everything from scratch yourself and clearly picture every single detail in your mind first."
"I... I'll try," Elyria exhaled, gritting her teeth.
She hovered in the air and focused completely. The strain was so intense that a glowing magical vortex began swirling around her. Gradually, a dense, glowing sphere formed in the air. The sphere began to expand, stretch, and take on the visual shape of a small house...
But just a couple of seconds later, the magic flared up and evaporated.
Elyria started panting heavily, barely staying aloft on her wings, and wiped the sweat from her forehead in frustration:
"It's still not working..!"
"That's just because you're tired," Iron stopped her calmly. "Rest up, and then you can try again. Here, take the blueprint."
Iron held out the sheet to her. Elyria took the paper and, grumbling something under her breath, flew off toward the shade of the trees to rest.
Left alone, Iron shifted his gaze to the pile of branches and logs that Noah and the others had hauled in.
"Alright, since the house is on hold, I'll at least make a proper bed," he decided.
Iron walked over to the pile of timber and stretched his hand forward.
He forced the air molecules around the branches and trunks to vibrate at a frantic speed. A microscopic but colossal friction force was generated. In a fraction of a second, all the bark, knots, and rough patches crumbled onto the grass as pure, dry dust, exposing perfectly smooth wood beneath.
Obeying the directed pressure vectors, the branches flew into the air on their own. They sheared off to the right size and aligned themselves—the rectangular frame dropped to the ground, four thick blocks slotted into the corners as legs, and thin planks formed a neat grid inside.
To avoid using nails or metal brackets, Iron triggered a localized gravity force of a hundred atmospheres at the joints between the frame and the legs for a couple of seconds.
Under the wild, concentrated pressure, the wood at the connection points literally pressed into itself, the fibers interlocking firmly.
"Right..." Iron ran a hand over the perfect, smooth wood. "The frame is done. But there's no mattress."
He'd have to find some sheep.
With that thought, Iron lifted off the ground and shot into the air, heading out in search of livestock.
While he was searching for a solution in the sky, work continued down below.
Eliza was helping out with the lumber harvesting. She swung the axe with ease, showing the vagabonds the correct angle of attack and how to better use their body weight.
Clerk and his men exchanged silent glances and, with grudging respect, started copying her. The labor went significantly faster.
A while later, Eliza and Clerk were dragging another load of logs to the center of the camp. Eliza walked beside him, squinting slightly against the bright sun, and then asked softly:
"Mind telling me why you're... dressed like that? And what connects you to them?" she meant Iron, Noah, and Elyria. And then quickly added: "If you don't want to talk about it, you don't have to."
Clerk hesitated for a second, tightening his grip on the wood on his shoulder, but then exhaled:
"We're from the village of Nara... And, unfortunately, that village is gone."
They took a few more steps. Eliza listened to him carefully and in silence.
"We were attacked by a mage," Clerk continued. "Although... it was more like he just decided to show off what he was capable of, and..."
"...and destroyed your village?" Eliza interrupted quietly, but immediately looked embarrassed. "Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Keep going."
"It's fine," Clerk gave a sad shake of his head. "You're right. Under the effects of his magic, our village was burned to the ground. Along with my family..."
His gaze grew completely heavy and hollow.
"Those ten people are exactly like me. In a fit of rage, we decided to get revenge and swore to kill every mage we crossed paths with. But..."
Clerk's face twisted with pain and deep regret. They had just reached the center of the camp and dropped the logs to the dirt with a dull thud. Clerk froze, clenching and unclenching his own hand as if trying to wash dirt off it.
"We took it too far... We completely forgot what we started all this for in the first place. And that's exactly when we met them. Iron made me realize what a horrific path we were heading down."
Eliza heard him out in silence. She rested her hands on her hips and said gently:
"That's... really sad. You know, if you guys ever need help—come to me. I'll try to help in any way I can."
Clerk looked at her and smiled slightly. A small tear rolled down his cheek. Noticing it, he immediately turned away in embarrassment and hurried back toward the forest:
"Uh... I think I'll go get some more wood."
"Okay," Eliza watched him go.
Turning around, she looked down. Right in front of her stood a wooden bed.
"Wow... Did they make this already?" she whispered in surprise.
Noticing Elyria nearby, hovering in the air and just panting heavily to catch her breath, Eliza called out to her:
"Elyria, did you make this?"
The spirit looked at the frame with tired eyes and shook her head:
"No... Iron probably made it."
Eliza ran a hand over the wood one more time and quietly said to herself: "Iron... I see."
Meanwhile, Iron's gaze remained fixed below.
A grid flickered before Iron's eyes. In the right section of the forest, red dots—signals of local monsters—were lighting up and instantly winking out with astonishing speed.
He slightly narrowed the radius of the grid and gave Lumon the command to run a more pinpoint analysis:
"Lumon, scan the entire forest. Are there really no sheep here? Horses? Geese... ducks?"
[Livestock and poultry are absent in this sector. The location is oversaturated with hostile organisms.]
One of the markers caught his attention. A particularly strange creature was moving through the thick undergrowth. It was fluffy, completely round, without a normal head, but with a short tail. Because of its thick, lush fur, its paws were practically invisible.
"Well... it'll do as an alternative," Iron reasoned.
He squeezed his fingers slightly, collapsing the space in front of him, and in that very instant, materialized right in front of the round monster.
Iron extended his right hand and sharply pulled it back.
In a fraction of a second, the monster's entire coat of fur was cleanly ripped away and flew straight into Iron's hand.
Hidden beneath the fur was a scrawny body on long, spindly legs with tiny front limbs.
Iron, holding the fur in his right hand, made a short swipe toward the monster with his left.
A clean cut sliced the monster perfectly in half.
A moment later—and Iron vanished again, reappearing in the middle of the camp.
With a loud "poof," he dropped the armful of fur right onto the grass next to the newly created bed.
"Got the wool. Just need to find some springs..." he muttered, activating the interface once more.
Iron squinted slightly and said:
"And as for the springs..."
Iron collapsed space once again and, in a second, teleported to the other side of the forest.
He looked the monster over and finished his sentence:
“You’ll do too.”
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