Chương 60: Chapter 59: Hard earned ore

The technology to splice genetic material across species has existed for eight thousand years. What changed in the last century was precision - the ability to take not just a trait but the full biological expression of it and transfer it intact. A creature that previously existed only in oral tradition can now be rendered in flesh with reasonable fidelity. The question of whether the result is the mythical creature or merely a very good copy remains, as far as this office is concerned, outside our remit."

- Internal assessment, Office of Biological Records, 6th Head of the First Brain's Faction The iron deposits were where Isamu had said they would be - near the peak, in the rock face below the final ridge. Finding the cave system that housed them took the better part of the morning. They worked along the rock face in sections, checking the stone where the colour changed - the dark reddish-brown staining that indicated ore-bearing rock beneath. Waggy moved ahead of them, investigating crevices with his nose.

Kohaku swept the upper face from above. The entrance, when they found it, was a gap in the rock face wide enough for two men to squeeze through side by side, the ceiling just high enough to enter without much ducking. Beyond the first few metres, the passage became completely dark. Kara stood at the threshold and looked into it, and everything in him objected to going in. There was no apparent reason for alarm apart from his instincts.

"Let's be careful," he warned. Ren nodded. Kohaku dropped to his shoulder. They moved in with umbrellas partially open, the canopies angled to give them a tentative feel of the space as their eyes adjusted. The cave widened almost immediately behind the entrance, the ceiling rising to perhaps ten feet before the passage narrowed again further in. The walls were close enough that the umbrellas required constant small adjustments to keep from dragging.

The iron staining was visible almost immediately - thick veins of dark reddish ore running through the grey rock, exactly the mineral composition Isamu had described, the cold of the cave having done to this rock what decades of compressed winters had done to the cedar.

"Here," Ren said quietly, running a hand along the nearest vein. Kara checked the depth of it. Isamu had been precise - gather enough ore to fill two pouches of the size he had provided, no more. The weight would be manageable over the descent. They unpacked the tools and began. The sound of metal on rock in an enclosed space was not pleasant, to say the least. Kara felt it in his back teeth. He had been working for perhaps two minutes when his Sixth Sense activated. Something was coming. No, multiple somethings.

The direction was imprecise - somewhere ahead and to the sides, the cave's angles confusing the signal. This reminded him of the dungeon. He had spent weeks in there learning how to be prepared when the threat had no fixed direction - weight forward, awareness spread, reading the surroundings through his hands and feet as much as his eyes.

"Stop." Ren stopped. Silence. Then from somewhere deeper in the rock, came a sound, low and rhythmic. Then another, from a different direction. Then a third. They burst through the ore vein with their forelegs. The interface tagged them in the half-second before they closed the distance: Vorrkai. G grade, Tier 2. They were pale with broad, heavily muscled forelimbs built for breaking stone, the claws short and dense.

Their eyes were reduced to small dark points that tracked movement rather than shape, and while they were not fast, they were precise which more than made up for speed in this enclosed space. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Four emerged from the left wall and the forward passage simultaneously. And then a fifth - larger, Tier 3 - came from directly above, dropping from a shelf of rock that neither Kara nor Ren had thought to check.

Sixth Sense caught it a fraction before it landed. Kara stepped left, the canopy coming up on instinct, and the Tier 3 hit the edge of the umbrella rather than his shoulder and went sideways into the cave wall with an angry screech. Waggy was already moving. He came in low on the nearest Tier 2, hit it from the side hard enough to send it into the wall, and was gone, retreating swiftly into the shadow at the cave's edge, circling for the next angle. The geometry problem arrived immediately.

The cave was wide enough for two umbrellas but only just, and the Vorrkai were moving between them, using the gap between Kara and Ren's canopies as a corridor. The first time one came through that gap Kara had to pull his canopy back to avoid fouling Ren's, and in the space that created, a Tier 2 landed two solid strikes on his left arm before Waggy drove it off. The jacket had taken most of it, the thick material blunting the force of the Vorrkai's dense claws, but not all.

He felt the sting of torn fabric and a surface level tear below it.

"Tighter," he called. They closed the distance between them, canopies overlapping at the edges, and the corridor closed with it. The Vorrkai adapted soon enough, but the adjustment bought them just enough time to isolate and deal with one of the Tier 2s. It had been caught at Kara's left side when his ferrule came down on its foreleg which allowed Waggy and Kohaku to finish the job. The Tier 3 came back with another furious screech.

It was faster than the others and knew the cave better - it moved along the ceiling rather than the floor, using the stone above them as a road. Kohaku dropped to the cave floor, Ren reading her movement and giving her the space on his right. She came at the Tier 3 from behind the canopy at ground level, rising up quickly from her position, catching it off guard and landing a strike on its rear leg. Before it could retaliate, she jumped back. Ren and Kara ended up back to back.

It happened because two Tier 2s drove them there simultaneously, one from ahead and one from behind. Kara felt Ren's back against his and oriented on it. Waggy was to his left behind his canopy, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. Kohaku was similarly at Ren's right. His Sixth Sense gave him the Tier 3 a half-second before it came down from the ceiling again, directly between them.

"Up!" Both canopies came up at the same angle simultaneously, and the Tier 3 hit the overlapping edges and dropped to the cave floor between them upside down. Ren's ferrule did the rest. The cave went quiet. Kara caught his breath and counted. Three Vorrkai had retreated into the stone. The Tier 3 was down. One Tier 2 was out early. He checked his left arm. It was surface level damage, the cold air already numbing the area. He'd need to dress it once they were out of this cave.

Ren rolled his right shoulder in a slow circle, winced, and then grinned, a silly smile on his face.

"Still attached. Can't complain." Kohaku pressed herself against Ren's leg and he put a hand on her back without looking down. Waggy appeared from the shadow at the cave's edge and sat between Kara and the forward passage, facing outward. Watching the dark. They collected the ore in the quiet that followed - working in shifts, one mining while the other stood watch. The Vorrkai did not return. The ore came free in the dense, cold-forged chunks Isamu had described, and by early afternoon both pouches were filled.

Kara lifted his. It was dense but manageable. They left the cave. They noted the location of the Yamaarashi shelf from a distance as they worked back along the traverse, giving it a wide berth as they descended toward lower ground. Waggy ranged ahead of them as the light faded, picking the line, and he stopped at a broad flat section of rock well below the shelf - sheltered on two sides with clear sightlines in the open directions. They made camp there, the shelf invisible above them in the dark.

The last hour of light went to light training. The cedar shafts were set aside, the ore pouches stacked against the rock. The cave has given them something to work upon. Waggy overcommitted to a turn twice in ten minutes. The second time Kara held his position and let the gap open and simply waited. Waggy stopped. Looked at him. Ran the movement again, tighter, the turn completing cleanly inside the canopy line. The geometry problem was harder.

It required Kara and Ren to read each other's canopy angle in real time, and the solution they found worked at half pace and dissolved at full pace. They ran it until the light was gone and it still dissolved at full pace. Ren lowered his umbrella and looked up at where the Yamaarashi shelf was somewhere in the dark above them.

"Still got the overlap to sort. And those six up there waiting for us." He paused, turning it over.

"Not great odds." Kara looked at his hands in the dark. The arm was stiffening slightly where the Vorrkai had caught him, and the canopy geometry was still unresolved, and somewhere above them was a flock of Yamaarashi led by a Tier 5.

"We'll get there," he said. Neither of them looked entirely convinced.