Dinner was simple and warm and exactly what the evening needed it to be.

Fay had kept rice and a thick broth with root vegetables and some kind of cured meat that Ray had apparently sourced from the settlement market two days ago, and she served it without fuss or ceremony, just placing it in front of Neil and stepping back with the satisfied expression of someone who has done a thing correctly and does not need to be told so.

Neil ate without rushing.

Ileana sat beside him and ate her own portion with the quiet ease of someone comfortable in the shared silence, occasionally saying something small about the day, about how Magnar had knocked over the water trough in the morning while doing something that Bob described as running in his sleep.

About how Leon had reorganised the patrol rotation to cover the eastern perimeter more thoroughly after noticing a pattern in where the overnight vibrations were coming from.

Jane sat across the table and ate carefully, which was how she did most things in the domain still, the careful quality of someone paying attention to where their edges were and making sure they stayed inside them.

She did not speak much during the meal but she was present in it, which was different from the alternative, and when Fay asked if she wanted more broth she said yes without the particular hesitation of someone who felt they needed to earn the right to accept things.

Neil noticed this without commenting on it.

After dinner, Ileana walked with him to the sleeping area and they talked for a while in the low and easy way of people at the end of a long day who have things to say to each other that are not urgent but are real.

And he told her more about the Realm and the Stone Crawlers and the way the Gold class fights had felt compared to the Silver and Bronze, and she listened with the specific interest she had in things that told her about how he was actually functioning rather than just what he was doing.

Eventually she fell asleep beside him, one hand loosely near his arm, her breathing slowing into the steady rhythm of deep sleep, and he lay in the quiet domain and looked at the ceiling for a while.

He thought about his mother carrying the Analyzer penalty.

He thought about Jackal.

Neither thought resolved into anything clear or actionable, and after a while he stopped expecting them to and let sleep find him instead.

***

In the morning he ate what Fay had prepared without being asked to, told Ileana where he was going and roughly how long he expected to be, received a look that communicated several things simultaneously and did not argue with any of them, collected Magnar from the campfire pit where the familiar had apparently not moved since the previous evening, and left the domain before the morning had fully arrived.

Magnar was in excellent condition.

The scrapes and bruises from the previous day’s hunting had healed overnight in the way that Magnar’s injuries consistently did, faster than they had any biological reason to, and he moved beside Neil with the loose and ready energy of something that had rested completely and was entirely prepared to begin again.

The teleportation to the Mantel Stone Realm waypoint was as unremarkable as it had been the day before, the flat grey platform and the overcast sky and the feeling coming off the landscape beyond the boundary that was not quite a sound and not quite a pressure but was both of those things together.

Neil crossed the boundary and Magnar crossed beside him.

They moved through the Bronze and Silver class territory at a pace that was considerably faster than the previous day, not rushing but not stopping either, because the map of this terrain was already built in his understanding now and the creatures at those tiers were not what he had come for today.

Several Stone Crawlers came at them during the transit and were handled quickly and without particular effort, Magnar’s breath work opening the plating while Neil found the seam, the rhythm of it as natural now as anything they had done together.

The Gold class territory passed similarly.

Faster than yesterday, more efficient, the adaptations from the previous day’s learning already integrated into how he moved and responded.

He was not careless about it, careless in the Mantel Stone Realm was an approach with consistent consequences, but he was economical in a way he had not been able to be on the first visit simply because he had not yet had the information to be economical with.

The Diamond class territory announced itself the way the Gold class had, through the quality of what appeared rather than through any boundary marker or visible change in the terrain.

Neil stopped when he felt the first one.

The pressure was different at this tier, not dramatically, not the kind of difference that announced itself with sound or visible energy, but present in the way that things you had been standing near a lower version of and then encounter at full scale were present.

Like the difference between a contained fire and the same fire without the container.

The Diamond class Stone Crawler that came out of the formation to his left was larger than the Gold class ones by a margin that was meaningful, its stone plating restructured at this tier into something that was not just thicker but differently composed, the plates fused at their edges rather than overlapping, creating an almost continuous surface with only the narrowest of seams remaining.

The skull coverage was essentially complete, the gap at the neck articulation reduced to something that required extremely precise placement rather than just knowing it existed.

It was also faster than the Gold class by a margin that was the other meaningful thing about it, the six limbs working in a coordination that was qualitatively smoother than what he had encountered at lower tiers, covering ground with an efficiency that suggested the processing behind its movement was operating at a higher level entirely.

It tracked him the moment he stopped moving, the flat broad head orienting with the immediate precision of something whose tracking system had been developed to a degree that the lower tier versions were only approximating.

Neil looked at it without moving.

Then he looked at Magnar.

Magnar was already reading the situation, his body low and his head up, the posture that meant he had assessed the threat level and was waiting for the indication of approach rather than the indication to proceed.

Neil drew the elemental bow, pulled to full draw, and aimed at the neck seam.

At Diamond class the seam required not just knowledge of its location but a specific angle of approach that the plating geometry at lower tiers had not demanded, and he took a half-second longer than he would have at Gold class to find that angle before releasing.

The arrow found it.

The Diamond class Stone Crawler did not drop the way the lower tier ones had, because Diamond class creatures did not drop from a single well-placed arrow the way Bronze class ones did, but it flinched, which was real damage, and in the moment of that flinch Magnar’s breath came in hot and sustained against the plating on its left flank.

The differential cracking that followed was more dramatic at this tier than it had been before, the fused plates responding to the thermal shock with a fracturing that ran through the fused seams in lines that opened the surface significantly, and Neil closed the distance in the window that created and drove the blade into the opened section with everything he had behind it.

The Diamond class Stone Crawler fought back with the full version of what Diamond class creatures had available to them, the mid-body limb coming around with a force that he had to actually commit to avoiding rather than simply absorbing, and the tail strike that followed the limb came from a direction that the Gold class version had not used, a high approach over the leading shoulder that was a genuine tactical choice rather than a reflex.

Neil adapted.

The fight lasted longer than any of the Gold class fights had, and by the end of it he had taken one hit across his upper arm that was going to bruise significantly, and Magnar had been knocked back twice from flanking positions by a creature that had apparently developed a secondary threat response that the lower tier versions lacked, but the Diamond class Stone Crawler was dead and the gene material it yielded was the richest thing the Realm had produced by a considerable margin.

Neil crouched beside the body and looked at the composition of it, the fused plating structure and the underlying musculature visible now through the openings from the fight, and added everything he had learned to the map he was building.

"That is the approach." He said to Magnar, partly as information and partly as confirmation for himself. "Breath first to crack the fusing, then the seam from the high angle. The tail comes over the left shoulder, not the right. Remember that."

Magnar made a sound that indicated he had already reached the same conclusions and did not particularly need to be told.

"I know." Neil said. "I am saying it out loud."

They moved to the next one.

The Diamond class fights were the most demanding thing the Realm had offered him, though easy but the number was too high.

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading...