Thick, acrid smoke drifted slowly up through the narrow gorge, settling over the carpet of charred chitin and scattered insect remains. The last echo of cannon fire had faded into the mist, leaving nothing but the faint, hissing crackle of cooling metal and the distant drip of moisture off basalt walls. Tobias stood frozen beside the half-buried artillery emplacements, his mouth still hanging half-open, his mind struggling to catch up with what he'd just witnessed.
He'd grown up surrounded by the finest artifact smiths in the empire. He'd watched master runesmiths spend months carving a single precision-grade divine barrel. He'd heard his father complain a hundred times that ranged weaponry was a dead end, too fragile, too prone to wear, too costly to mass-produce. And yet this fourth-tier academy student had dragged a few crates of raw explosive powder and scrap ore out into the woods, and built a functioning automated artillery line and aerial drone net in three days, out of nothing but scrap and raw divine energy.
"Look, I barely did anything here," Tobias said, shaking off his shock and turning to Laia, his tone earnest. "I just hauled the raw materials out and held up a shield. You cover the material cost, and all the merit payout is yours. I don't need the extra."
Laia paused mid-kick, prodding a half-intact vescover drone carcass with the toe of her boot to check if its venom sac was salvageable, and glanced up at him, one eyebrow raised.
"That's ridiculous," she said, plain and simple. "You held the front line the whole fight. You brought the barrier core that kept the acid spray off both of us. Fifty-fifty split. End of discussion."
Tobias blinked. He'd offered to take just material costs fully expecting her to agree—most people jumped at free money, especially hunters scraping by on merit bounties. He'd half assumed she was here because she was broke, same as half the new recruits.
"Fifty-fifty is way too much," he protested. "I barely pulled my weight. The whole plan was yours. The artillery was yours. I just stood there holding a shield."
"Shields aren't free. Materials aren't free. Split is fair," Laia said, bending to heft a large chunk of intact chitin onto the salvage pile. She wasn't about to accept a handout from the heir to the Liu artifact empire. She didn't do debts, not to noble houses. The last thing she needed was to owe the richest family in the empire a favor that would come back to bite her later. Clean split, no strings attached. That was how she liked it.
Tobias gave up arguing after a minute, and knelt to help stack salvageable carcasses, his mind still turning over the artillery emplacements half-buried in the dirt. He leaned in to study the runes carved into the barrel of one cannon, and shook his head. The carvings were rough, almost crude, done in quick, broad strokes with raw divine energy rather than the precise, layered etchings master smiths spent years perfecting. They held together, but barely.
"These will only hold for one more deployment, tops," he said, running a finger along the scorched rune channels. "The wear from repeated fire will erode the channels completely after that. It's the same problem every smith runs into with ranged artifacts. Every shot wears down the runes a little. A blade only takes wear along the edge. A gun takes it in every single internal component, every time you fire."
Laia hummed thoughtfully, not looking up from her work. She'd noticed the wear, of course. Her Ideal Heaven divine skill—passed up to her by King Theron after the human kingdom's research breakthroughs—let her reshape raw materials into any design she fully understood, as long as she had the energy and components to spare. It was perfect for cobbling together temporary, one-off contraptions on the fly. Making them last, though? That was a different problem entirely.
"Can the wear be fixed?" she asked.
"People have been trying for three hundred years," Tobias said, shrugging. "My grandfather's generation spent a fortune on research. You can reinforce the runes with star-iron, but the cost goes up so much it's not worth it for mass deployment. Ranged artifacts will always be luxury toys for rich nobles, not standard field gear. Everyone says so."
He paused, glancing at her, and the thought lingered. Everyone had said it was impossible. But everyone had also said you couldn't clear an entire outer-ring gorge in six weeks, or take down a fifth-tier tiger king as a fourth-tier solo hunter. If anyone could crack the problem, it might just be the girl who'd turned a treasure-hunting compass into a bug lure and built a cannon line out of scrap ore.
"If you ever want to mess around with proper forging equipment, my family's main workshop has every tool you could ask for," he said, casual, like it was no big deal. "Master smiths on staff, every grade of rune-carving chisel, star-iron stockpiles. You'd be welcome to use them, whenever you want."
Laia nodded, noncommittal. "I'll think about it."
Tobias smiled to himself. He knew what "I'll think about it" meant. It meant no, not right now. That was fine. He'd brought it up once. He'd bring it up again later. A talent like this wasn't something you let slip away.
They finished stacking the last of the salvageable carcasses an hour later, tying the bundles tight with abyssal sinew rope for the walk back to the outpost. Laia did a rough tally in her head as they walked: even with half the carcasses too badly mangled to turn in for full price, even split fifty-fifty, her share would come out to just over six thousand merits.
Thirty-two thousand starting balance. Plus six thousand from the hive. That put her at thirty-eight thousand total.
Twelve thousand left to go before the Box of Avarice was hers. She'd hit the mark before the week was out, easy.
A faint, barely perceptible spark of satisfaction flickered across her face, gone so fast anyone else would have missed it.
Tobias rambled beside her about workshop equipment and alloy formulas, and she listened with half an ear, her mind already turning over the next plan. A few more third-tier dens. A quick sweep of the remaining outer-ring beast packs. Maybe one more small hive trap, if she could find the right narrow gorge.
She was so close she could almost taste it.
Half a mile back, near the outpost perimeter, Liora stood at the edge of the ward wall, holding a sealed letter in her hand, and watched the two of them approach through the mist.
She'd made her decision. The letter to Lyra was already written. She'd hand it to the first courier heading for the academy at dawn.
They were leaving the clan. It was over.