That night, the sheets were tangled and warm. Silver-blue hair brushed across Kenji’s chest as Luna curled closer, and Sola dozed on his arm, breath shallow and satisfied.

  They had been untouched. Trained. And now, broken in perfectly.

  Sola let out a quiet sigh. "Our queen trained us for everything—but not this."

  Luna chuckled, tracing lazy circles on Kenji’s chest. "She said the right man could unlock more than mana in us."

  Kenji grunted. "I didn’t realize I was collecting keys now."

  Sola tilted her head up. "We weren’t just a gift, Kenji. We were a test."

  "Test passed then," he said. "Top marks."

  Luna purred. "We’re yours now. Body, breath... and bond."

  He gave her a sideways glance. "That some kind of elf marriage thing?"

  Sola smiled slyly. "It’s a soulmark ritual. Ancient. Elves imprint on their first."

  Kenji frowned. "That sounds clingy."

  "It is," Luna said happily.

  The door cracked open.

  Lira stood there, arms crossed.

  “You said I wasn’t allowed. But they get to?”

  Kenji blinked. “They’re seventy-three.”

  Lira’s eye twitched. “They look like me.”

  “They’re elves,” he said. “Technically older than me.”

  She huffed. “I’ve got more curves than both of them.”

  Kenji stretched with a yawn. “I like ’em all. Curvy, tiny—I don’t discriminate. But you’re still underage in my book.”

  She grumbled and stormed off, muttering about cheating elf genetics and rigged standards.

  Kenji chuckled and closed his eyes.

  Yep. Life was good.

  By morning, the Shack had returned to its usual rhythm. The drone hive hummed through shift rotations, the biomass processors rumbled with low satisfaction, and Kenji nursed a cup of steaming coffee as he scrolled through recon data.

  "Southwest quadrant patrol grid stable," Saeko reported, sliding into the seat across from him. "But take a look at this."

  A flick of her finger and a new map section popped up. Labeled Sector Z-41, it was a blank patch near the western ridge—a zone all scavenger records had left empty.

  "Used to be off-limits. Signal dead zone. No one's ever gone in."

  Kenji raised an eyebrow. "No one's ever come back, you mean."

  She nodded. "Exactly."

  The Shack’s main console pinged. The system had flagged something.

  [WARNING: UNUSUAL EM FREQUENCY DETECTED - SOURCE: Z-41 GRID]

  Kenji tapped the feed. A repeating signal popped up on-screen. Low-frequency. Rhythmic.

  "Not natural," he muttered.

  [Legacy Format Identified - Partial Match: Military Uplink - AI-Command Protocol 02.6]

  Kenji's eyes narrowed. He glanced at the biomass reserve totals, mentally calculating if a long-range drone op was worth it.

  "Send one of the Vultures. Keep it high-altitude, power-saver mode. I want eyes, not a confrontation."

  An hour later, the Vulture-class recon drone zipped westward, feeding footage directly into the Shack.

  Below, frost-cracked plains gave way to a jagged crevice half-hidden by icefall. Something metallic jutted from the glacier. Antenna. Structure.

  The drone hovered. Optical zoom adjusted.

  An exposed tower. Rusted, but still upright. And beneath it, a massive dome shape, half-buried under frost and snow.

  Suddenly, a light blinked.

  Kenji leaned forward. "Power cell still active?"

  [Residual Energy Detected - 3.7% Efficiency - Containment Stable]

  Then something moved.

  A figure.

  Thin. Humanoid. Naked? No—covered in translucent skin, veins dark against pale flesh. It didn’t walk. It floated, barely above the snow.

  [FEED INTERRUPTED]

  The drone's camera glitched. Static. Then silence.

  [CONNECTION LOST - LAST IMAGE STORED]

  The Shack displayed a freeze-frame.

  The thing had looked directly at the drone. Mouth open. No eyes.

  [Threat Classification Pending - Specter-Class Flagged]

  Kenji slowly leaned back.

  "...Well shit."

  Later that day, the Shack’s war room hummed with tension. Saeko, Mirelle, and Flanksteak stood around the main table.

  "Whatever that was," Saeko began, "It isn’t in any slaver or scavenger database."

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  "Elves used to call those areas 'Devourer Zones'," Mirelle added. "Dead gods. Broken time. Places that were never meant to exist."

  Sola and Luna stepped in, exchanging a glance. Sola spoke first.

  "We studied them as children. Devourer Zones were forbidden even to the Queensguard. Whole scout parties vanished centuries ago. No echoes. No remains. Not even bones."

  Luna added, "And some say, in ancient times, those who lingered near such places would forget themselves. Become husks."

  Kenji sipped his soup. "Sounds profitable."

  Flanksteak folded his arms. "Recommend preemptive strike."

  Kenji shook his head. "Nope. We're not poking it. We're watching. If anything comes out, then we wipe it."

  Lira sat in the corner, arms still crossed from the night before. She glared at Luna and Sola whenever they got too close.

  "Jealousy isn't cute when you're pouting," Mirelle teased.

  Lira huffed. "I'm not pouting. I'm monitoring threats."

  "She's not wrong," Elyra murmured, entering with a datapad. "Scanners just picked up something else. Beast migration readings have started shifting. And they're all converging slowly."

  "Toward us?" Kenji asked.

  Elyra nodded. "Like they smell something. Something big."

  Kenji called up the Shack’s long-range sensor grid. Data spiked across multiple fronts. Beasts, previously dormant for months, were starting to roam. Packs were forming. Directional movement.

  [PASSIVE UPDATE: BEAST MIGRATION PATTERNS SHIFTING - CONVERGING TOWARD CENTRAL SHACK COORDINATES]

  "Looks like our little red core's sending out dinner bells," Kenji muttered. He tapped through the Shack's internal diagnostics.

  [SYSTEM NOTICE: Shack Core Sync Drift Detected - Monitoring Initialized]

  [Sync Drift: 0.004% - Fluctuation Unstable - Source Unknown]

  Then the orbital drone pinged. Satellite view. Wide-angle terrain capture.

  The full glacier range came into view.

  And there it was—a shape hidden under the ice.

  A circular vault, reinforced. Colossal. Old.

  Etched into the snow-covered surface: a glyph. Not human. Not elven. Not dwarven.

  Kenji leaned in. The Shack didn’t recognize the pattern.

  [Classification: UNKNOWN | Potential Match: Divine Origin 11.2%]

  "Sector Z-41," Kenji whispered. "Yeah. You're gonna be a problem."

  Behind him, the Crimson Core pulsed slowly. Once.

  Then again.

  And far out across the ice, things began to move.

  Beasts.

  And something older.

  Something watching.

  Far from the Shack, under the boughs of the ever-frozen glimmerwood canopy, Queen Vaeloria Thal’avel sat in quiet reflection. Her fingers traced the edge of a shallow mana bowl, watching the ripples echo through the magic-rich water. A vision of Kenji’s Shack shimmered on the surface—static-prone, unstable, but persistent.

  “His Core flares again,” murmured one of her mages. “The signal reaches beyond the sky.”

  Vaeloria’s lips curved into a slight smirk. “He attracts chaos as easily as he attracts loyalty. The land bends toward him now. Even time seems to hesitate.”

  She stood slowly, long robes of pale blue glistening with frostwoven threads. Her court watched in silence as she approached the viewing pool.

  “If the old vaults are waking, then the world will not wait for elven pace. We must act while there is still balance.”

  A quiet voice answered her. “And if he loses control?”

  Vaeloria tilted her head. “Then we reclaim what we have seeded.”

  Far beneath the Frostbarrow range, surrounded by humming forges and the rhythmic clang of work-song, King Brokkan Stoneheart stared at a glowing adamantine fragment. He held it between thick fingers, veins pulsing with fire-blood.

  A dwarven seer stood beside him, holding a rusted plate with etched runes. “Confirmed, sire. The Shack's Core is shifting again. The old ones—those beneath Sector Z-41—may be stirring.”

  Brokkan grunted. “Figures that bastard truck stirred up another storm. Wasn't enough that he flattened Malloran’s army—now he’s poking ancient vaults too.”

  He set the shard down and looked toward the sealed gate that led to the ancient deep-road—uncharted, unexplored, and dormant for generations.

  “Prepare the golems. Pull back the trading caravans. I want our siege units fully oiled. If the old world stirs, we’ll hammer it back into sleep—or forge its bones into something useful.”

  The dwarves cheered with fists over chests.

  Brokkan raised one hand, his gaze unblinking.

  “And someone bring me more beer from the surface stash—Kenji’s trade crate, third barrel. This is gonna be a long season.”

  Back in the Shack, Kenji returned to his private quarters. Luna and Sola stood behind him in their new maid uniforms—black and white, trimmed with lace, and purposefully scandalous. Their short skirts swayed with every breath, their collars gleaming with embedded mana nodes that synced to the Shack’s passive alert system. They stood in silence, like ceremonial attendants, occasionally stepping forward to serve him bits of hot food or refill his tea without a word.

  They didn’t speak unless spoken to. They didn’t sit unless ordered. When Kenji moved, they moved. When he stopped, they waited.

  His shadows.

  Lira was curled up in the corner, half-dozing with a blanket over her legs, her brow furrowed even in sleep.

  For a moment, he simply listened. To the hum of the systems, the faint pulse of the Crimson Core, and the muffled wind outside. To the hum of the systems, the faint pulse of the Crimson Core, and the muffled wind outside.

  Then he moved to the weapon rack.

  The Shack had barely recovered from the last attack. Turrets were running hot, some half-melted from sustained overload, and the biomass stockpile had dipped dangerously low. Core repairs were ongoing. Kenji had pushed the system hard, and it showed.

  Even so, he couldn’t afford downtime. A new storm was brewing—worse, maybe, than the last. He routed commands through the interface and kicked the drones back into full operational mode.

  He began sorting gear. Checking Astarion loadouts. Reviewing combat logs from the last battle.

  A war was coming. Not the kind with politics and shouting nobles. No, this would be the silent kind. The creeping kind. Monsters that didn’t announce themselves.

  He loaded another magazine into the drone rifle and tossed it onto the prep table.

  "Three days," he murmured. "Signal pulses are accelerating. Beast migration speeds are spiking. Sync drift on the Core is ticking up every hour. If I’m right, we’ve got three days before something tries to tear the door off its hinges."

  The Core pulsed again. It had started after the signal from Sector Z-41 was first detected. Subtle at first—small sync fluctuations and momentary hums—but growing more regular with every hour. The Shack’s internal systems had begun adjusting power routing automatically, as if preparing for something. Kenji suspected the Core wasn’t just reacting to the signal... it was resonating with it. As if it remembered it. The Crimson Core was a divine construct—placed in his Shack by the same gods who abandoned this world. Whatever lay in Z-41, it pulsed on the same wavelength. That shouldn’t have meant anything. The gods gave it to him like a joke. A leftover. Or so he thought. Maybe it wasn’t so random after all. Maybe the gods gave him the Shack because they didn’t want to deal with what was buried out here. The signal wasn’t just noise—it was a handshake. A call-and-response protocol, buried deep in the code. The Core wasn’t reacting... it was answering.

  Kenji opened a new tab on the console. Turret grid diagnostics. East line was holding steady, but two nodes in the south zone had dropped to 62% efficiency. Not ideal.

  He pulled up the Astarion readiness roster. Flanksteak’s team had been running drills on the north perimeter. Razor’s squad was still calibrating their thermal cloaks—wasteland snow didn’t just freeze, it burned. Brisket had been testing kinetic suppression shields with one arm still in auto-repair mode.

  Kenji sighed and messaged them all.

  [New Directive: Defensive Formation Grid Alpha – 3 Day Rotation Protocol Initiate]

  Next, he checked the Shack's core diagnostic feed. Sync drift had increased again. That made it the fifth incremental uptick since morning. With every pulse, the Core was calling attention to itself. Not just to beasts.

  To anything out there that still remembered what it was.

  Luna stirred. “Master... is the storm coming?”

  “Yeah,” Kenji replied, not looking back. “And we’re the lighthouse.”

  He locked the console.

  Outside, across the frozen plains, something howled.

  End of Chapter