The people of Uleis were more than happy to have access to a sudden source of cheap wood, especially given the recent tightening supply of their national specialty.

Calvin made out like a bandit, Exchanging bulk wood for normal glass from Uleis and ores from the mountains of Iletha, even a little lace from Boles, albeit in exchange for glass, since the Bolesians had no need of wood.

In a single season, Calvin made more money than most people could conceive of.

Except maybe Murak.

The old man caught wind of Calvin’s trip to Juntai and sold promisary notes worth huge quantities of raw lumber a month before Calvin even arrived.

When Calvin arrived, the price of lumber plummeted, and Murak made a profit equal to the difference as he bought several cars worth to fulfill his obligations.

Sneaky fucker.

The train became a wonder of the world, and hundreds of merchant approached Calvin, clamoring for a way to rent a car and set up a shop on the train itself. After thinking about it for some time, Calvin agreed. Rather than handle the loading, unloading sale and trade of goods between the five nations, it would be far easier for him to lease individual cars to travelling merchants.

While it wouldn’t net him quite as much profit, it also meant he wouldn’t have to oversee everything himself. He could route the profit from the train back to his city in the form of raw materials

He assigned Grant and his mercs to making sure people paid their rent on time and preventing robberies. The sheer quantity of wealth on the train at any given time was a juicy lure for the occasional bandit crew.

Grant was very efficient, capturing the attackers and selling them back to their country of origin for a little bit more profit.

These events led the train to shift from primarily a bulk goods carrier to a travelling bazaar the likes of which the world had never seen. Every car housed a trader with specialty goods from all over the continent, each of them jealously hoarding their own contacts and suppliers.

It was something to see when the train first rolled to a halt in the nearest Bolesian city-state, sliding the car doors to reveal the smiling faces of a hundred Uleisan merchants and their wares.

The bazaar had come to town.

As the train made its rounds, Calvin’s five reserved cars began to slowly but surely fill up with his cut of each merchant’s earnings, taken in the form of raw silks, glass, gold, drugs, rare monster parts – Calvin was particularly interested in those – silver, copper and iron.

Once Boles, Iletha and Uleis had all been visited, The train made its way back to Calvin’s March, laden with treasure from every corner of the continent.

The final stop was Gadvera. Learning from Murak’s example, Calvin tipped off the duchess whose land he was building tracks through, along with Kala’s father, allowing those two to capitalize on the sudden abundance of trade.

Was it unethical? Calvin had no idea, but it sure made those two happy, and that was what mattered.

When the train arrived outside of Mujenan, there was a throng of people crowded around the tracks. For a few hours it seemed as if the entire population of Gadvera had assembled to gawk at the behemoth of steel that silently pulled up parallel with the city.

The doors slid open, and the wealth of nations began to slowly but surely spill out into the capital of Calvin’s country, in exchange for small bits of Gadvera’s national specialty: Mnemetite.

Watchign Dust and Stones, and even the rare Glimmer exchange hands by the thousands, Calvin took satisfaction in knowing that one in ten would find their way into his cars, filling his city’s coffers.

Calvin’s march was starting to reach the limit of what they could do by themselves, and they would need to ship food and raw materials to the march for a while, until they could create enough farmland to sustain the city.

The profit would have been even better if Malkenrovia wasn’t a horrifying nightmare country filled with people with worms in their brain, then Gadvera could stand to make even more shipping this haul across the ocean in exchange for pelts and exotic monster parts.

Alas, the shipments from Malkenrovia had consistently diminished over the last eighteen years, and now everyone knew why.

The city of Mujenan had changed drastically from a couple years ago. The invasion of the combined forced of Malkenrovia and Iletha had been a wake-up call. The walls had been reinforced and studded with iron. The towers designed to fight off an invasion by sea were now duplicated several times over, with a dozen trebuchets capable of shredding any approaching fleet.

The ocean of young men wearing glimmering steel and marching around the edge of the city was telling as well. The Hash’Maje had significantly increased Mujenan’s military might in the time Calvin had been gone.

Calvin had to wonder about the logistics of it. Armies took a lot of money and food to keep going. Every man marching under the hot sun in sweaty armor was one less man laboring under the hot sun in a sweaty tunic to make food.

Bigger army = less food production as well as a higher demand.

When Calvin asked the Hash’Maje about it, the response stunned him.

“I want you to bottle them,” The man had requested under a veil of secrecy. “I saw what you did for Kala. And I was hoping you would do the same for me.”

That solved the food problem, that was for sure. As far as Calvin was aware, time ceased to pass for people who’d been reduced to undifferentiated mass and a blueprint.

“As long as you’re not pointing them at me, I’m happy to oblige,” Calvin told his father-in-law.

The man chuckled and waved him off.

“No, no, there are other people much higher on my list,” He’d said.

“I’m still on the list though?” Calvin asked, but didn’t get an answer other than a smile from the ruler of Gadvera.

***

Later that month, the Gadveran army marched East, aiming to take the land route through Uleis up into Iletha.

A few days out from the city, Calvin Isolated and primed his blade Body mutation and had the soldiers mix their own blood with it, delineating them by squad before binding their blueprints to bottles created by the perfectionist Knick-knacks.

With a simple twist on the bottom of the bottles, each squad was rendered into undifferentiated matter and sucked into the bottles.

Calvin did all of them at the same time because he didn’t want anyone to panic when they saw their buddies getting turned into slime. That was generally panic-inducing, Calvin had learned from his first prototypes.

Once that was done, Calvin was left with a pallet of enchanted glass bottles, compressing an army of fifteen thousand into an area of about a hundred and twenty-five cubic feet.

He delivered the bottles to the Hash’Maje that very night, and where they went next, Calvin got no word, but he had a few ideas.

There were only two countries with tensions high enough to elicit an armed response.

Iletha and Malkenrovia.

Malkenrovia couldn’t really be considered a ‘country’ by normal standards, but it was true the threat there was real, and had to be dealt with. The Hash’Maje had the responsibility of reducing the number of threats against himself, either by destroying them or allying himself with them.

Given the number of soldiers he’d just packaged up for transport, Calvin wagered the Hash’maje had chosen the former option.

The Hash’Maje didn’t request any further assistance from Calvin, telling him that what happened next required him to keep secrets. Calvin didn’t particularly mind, as long as they weren’t being used against him, of course.

Someone somewhere was about to get a faceful of soldiers.

***

‘Hurry up,’ Ameuah signed to his companion following behind him. The Genosian hunter had the unenviable task of scouting the forest ahead of the women and children.

Over the last few months, people had begun to disappear from the frozen mountains of their home. Slowly at first, then with alarming regularity. Even when the Maje declared and emergency and used his Chained Spirit to watch over them while they slept, people still went missing, just from a moment’s inattention, even mothers clutching their children would vanish without a trace.

It quickly became clear that something was hunting them, and if things stayed as they were, there would be no tribe members remaining in a matter of weeks.

So they decided to leave.

Taking women and children through the Kugeya-infested forest was dangerous. It was always dangerous, but the slow and the weak were especially in danger.

The Maje had devoted all of his Bent to creating a sturdy circle of protection of their ancestors around the children, while the hunters took on the task of navigating the tribe through the jungle.

They didn’t know where they would go at first, but after some deliberation, they realized they only had one choice: Northeast.

West meant Gadvera, and the relations between their people was particularly strained. The same applied to the Juntai to the east. South was the Deep Jungle, home to thick Warp and an overabundance of Warped creatures. An Eohea like their Maje’s Chained spirit might be able to survive, but the strange creatures that dwelt there would easily pick off their weaker members, so the Deep forest was out of the question.

Ameuah glanced to the south, his yellow eyes unable to pierce the darkness. A sense of foreboding washed over him as he gazed that directions, a subtle raising of the hairs on the back of his neck, a coldness in the pit of his stomach.

Ameuah had no proof, but he suspected that whatever preyed on them had come from the Deep.

He glanced away from the south and to the north. North was the great desert. A land where the only thing to eat were the occasional insect and Grik foraging on scrub.

East of Uleis and north of Juntai was a plainsland, where large animals roamed, each one big enough to feed an entire tribe for a week. If they could make it to the forests abutting those plains, they might have a chance to survive.

Ameuah froze as he noticed the oppressive silence. The insects of the night were silent. The movements of small burrowing animals had gone still.

His companion behind him wasn’t making a sound.

Dreading what he would see, Ameuah glanced behind himself and spotted…nothing.

His companion was nowhere to be seen.

Had he been taken in the few seconds Ameuah been distracted by his thoughts?

There wasn’t any sound! He thought, spinning around and scanning the treeline, his vision unable to pierce the deepest darkness.

He didn’t dare call out to his companion and risk discovery by whatever had taken his companion.

Likely it already knew where he was, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

I have to warn the others. Tell them this way isn’t safe, He thought, heading back toward the camp.

A few minutes later, He saw the light of the camp piercing through the darkness ahead. Eager to reach the perceived safety, Ameuah picked up the pace, but never failed to keep his senses heightened, looking an listening as hard as he could in every direction, including up. More hunters died from carelessness on the path home.

Thankfully he reached the camp without incident, but what he saw there froze him to the core.

No one was at the camp.

The fire burned merrily, there was a half-finished hide shirt sitting beside Ameala’s tent. She’d been working on it when he left. A lump rose up in Ameuah’s throat and he finally spoke.

“Hello?” he asked, glancing around the abandoned camp. “Is anyone left?”

The brilliant orange fire seemed to lose some of it’s luster, greying as his heart sank. Everyone’s been taken except for me? What is there to live for at this rate?

“Ameuah?” A voice called out of the darkness, causing his heart to leap with joy. Someone else is alive!

Out of the trees, Melanua stepped into the light of the fire, and his heart fell into the pit of his stomach.

“Melanua,” He said, taking a shaking step toward his wife. “You’re here. But..you were taken.”

Melanua glanced at the fire, and her eyes widened, then she held a hand over her mouth, and used hunter-sign. ‘do not speak.’

Ameuah clenched his jaw shut despite desperately wanting answers. Melanua had been missing for weeks, taken by whatever was stalking them. Or at least he’d thought she’d been. Where was she? What had possessed her to sneak of on her own? Did she see some advantage to being on her own.

Why hadn’t she included him? Ameuah would have left the tribe with her.

The fire beside Ameuah flickered, turning from orange to grey, attracting his attention. The light that was cast outward bathed the entire world in shades of grey in a display that bathed his body with a cold sweat as something moved through the clearing, draining the color out of the area. He felt as though a great and deadly beast was passing by, within arm’s reach of him.

He couldn’t feel it, but some primal part of his brain knew it was there, filling in details with no rational reason.

The creature he couldn’t see, hear, or smell, stopped. It’s massive head turned toward him and he knew it was inhaling, smelling him. Tasting him.

Ameuah fought through the panic with the experience borne of years of hunting, keeping his body still and mind as calm as possible in the face of certain death.

As suddenly as it approached, the…thing hovering just out of sight moved on, leaving him be.

The fire turned from grey to orange, once again bathing the clearing in bright orange light, revealing his wife’s purple skin.

The creature didn’t just take entire tribes all at once. it had never done so before.

It only took people one at a time.

It had taken Melanua. He was with her now. A horrifying realization began to gnaw away at the back of his mind.

Ameuah glanced around the abandoned camp and noticed the shirt had gained a few more stitches since the last time he’d looked.

He glanced up at Melanua and spoke to her with hunter-sign.

‘are we dead?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ she signed.