We stop about forty feet from the pyre. Far enough that the firelight doesn’t reach us. Close enough that I can still see Boris’s silhouette hunched over his al.
Oliver reaches into his waistband and pulls out a pouch. Small. Leather. Heavy for its size.
He holds it out like it’s evidence at a trial.
I take it. The HUD flickers.
[Scales: 1,241]
I stare at the number. Then I stare at Oliver.
"They’re not collecting them," he says, his voice still tight. "Maybe twenty, twenty-five percent at most. The rest just sit there in the sand like gravel. Dryden... that doesn’t seem right."
I weigh the pouch in my hand. Over a thousand Scales from a single battlefield’s scraps. I take my cut and hand Oliver the rest.
"Split it evenly among everyone."
[Scales: 360 -> 609]
I look past Oliver toward the battlefield.
The pyre casts a shifting orange glow across the carcass field, and in that light I can see the soldiers. Dozens of them. Moving between the dead monsters with the practiced efficiency of butchers on a production line.
They’re not collecting Scales.
They’re stripping everything else.
Hides peeled in long, clean sheets. Tendons coiled. Teeth sorted by size. Bone plates cracked free from carapaces and stacked. Bioluminescent glands removed with surgical care and sealed in clay jars.
Every piece of organic material—catalogued, separated, preserved. The Scales sit untouched.
The understanding clicks into place like a bone snapping back into its socket.
Closed economy.
No external trade. No rchants. No exit. Currency is worthless when there’s nothing to buy. But raw materials—armor, weapons, tools, dicine—those keep you alive.
Scales are just OXI supplents here. Breath mints for a population drowning in them.
"Keep looting," I tell Oliver. "But shift focus. Materials first. Scales second. Grab everything the soldiers leave behind."
Oliver nods. His mouth opens like he wants to ask sothing bigger—about the fragnts and the tattoo and everything that doesn’t add up.
He swallows it. Turns and walks back toward Brendon, who’s elbow-deep in a Wiver carcass. Oliver looks back twice before he gets there.
I walk back to the pyre.
As I approach, I toss the pouch into the air and catch it. The Scales rattle inside like a maraca—a satisfying, percussive sound that makes Boris glance up from his al.
I don’t kneel this ti. I sit down beside him. Equal footing. Sa fire.
Lola has arrived. She’s crouched near the flas with her hands stretched toward the heat, palms open, fingers spread wide. The gesture of soone who just walked through a long winter and found a hearth. Her eyes are half-closed, her expression sowhere between ditation and hibernation.
I hold up the pouch. Give it another shake.
"That’s a lot of Scales sitting in the dirt out there. Why doesn’t anyone pick them up?"
Boris glances at the pouch. A grin cracks through the exhaustion on his face—the first genuine one since the Tide broke.
"You’re as sharp as old Alden," he says, and lets out a laugh that rumbles in his chest like distant thunder.
"I can’t disagree with you," I reply.
Boris chuckles. Wipes his hands on his knees.
"Think about it, kid. What would we buy with them? There’s no market out there. No traders sailing in. Scales are just OXI to us—chew a handful to top off after a fight, and the rest pile up. We’ve got mountains of the things gathering dust in the storerooms."
Lost Ark isn’t just surviving. It’s manufacturing.
I point toward the horizon. Toward the twisted coral structure barely visible against the starlit dark.
"And that thing you showed . What is it?"
Oliver arrives before Boris answers. Sits down near Rhayne, who has been quiet this whole ti—her particular brand of quiet, the kind that cos with listening so hard it looks like sleeping.
But she speaks now.
"There’s an energy." Her voice is thin. Careful. Like she’s describing sothing she can feel pressing against her skin but can’t see. "Coming from that direction. Going up." She looks down at her bare hands, turning them over slowly in the firelight. "I can feel it... like standing next to a generator. Except it doesn’t stop."
She stares at her palms like they belong to soone else.
Boris’s expression shifts. The humor drains. He looks at Rhayne with the sharpened attention of a man who just heard a civilian describe classified information without knowing what it ans.
"She’s right," he says. His voice is different. Heavier.
He raises his hand and traces a line from the tower’s silhouette straight up into the sky, his thick finger drawing an invisible column from the horizon to the highest point of the sky.
"That structure is radiating energy directly upward. Continuously. It’s what creates this."
He sweeps his hand across the canopy of stars above us.
"The first people to arrive here—the ones who built Lost Ark from nothing—they said they could still see Thirstfall’s ocean sky. Blue. Open. Now all we get is this." He lets his hand drop. "A black ceiling full of stars that aren’t real."
The shape of sothing enormous presses against the edge of my understanding. Not fully ford yet. But I can feel its weight.
"The crimson pulse," I say. "During the battle. It ca from there."
"You’ve got sharp eyes, kid." Boris nods. "The tower creates the Red Tide. Every monster you fought tonight was born from that thing.
Boris lets out a heavy sigh before continuing.
"And it’s responsive... the more people in Lost Ark, the bigger the Tide. Proportional. Like it’s asuring us. Testing without being unfair about it."
Proportional. Responsive. Adaptive.
Then Chaos Theory almost broke that equation the second I walked through those gates.
"There’s more—" Boris starts.
"Commander!"
A soldier appears from the darkness at a dead sprint, snapping the chest-covering salute before the dust settles. Young. Breathless.
"Report," Boris says.
"Ammunition reserves are critical, sir. Black thorn bolts—completely depleted. The Tide burned through everything."
Boris’s jaw tightens. He looks at the dark horizon where the Red Tide vanished. Where Phase Two is gathering.
"We need munitions before Phase Two hits," he says. Not to the soldier. To himself. The specific cadence of a man doing math that doesn’t work out.
Then he looks at .
Doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t need to. The question is written in every line of his face: Are you in?
I give him a single nod.
Boris turns back to the soldier. "Prepare seven Ferredons. We ride now. Get Jacob."
The soldier salutes and disappears into the dark.
Boris stands. Dusts his hands. Looks at with sothing between a grin and a grimace—the expression of a man about to hand you exactly what you asked for, knowing full well you’re going to regret asking.
"Looks like you’re visiting that tower sooner than you thought, kid."
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