Colin Gael Foster drew a deep breath from his pipe. The aromatic smoke curled around his mouth, tickling his palate, and flooded into his lungs. He felt his Animus stir in his core, flooding into his Anima and seeping into his physical body.

The smoke he blew out formed into fractals briefly before the breeze distorted and dispersed the light orange smoke. Smoking aged kaf leaves had a similar effect to drinking the beverage but Colin found that his Animus was stimulated better when he used his pipe. He wasn’t at the state of Sollus yet despite being a Knight for more than a decade.

He needed to be at Sollus to be able to advance to Knight-Captain but no amount of wealth could buy the resources he needed to get that far. Well, no amount of reasonable wealth. Besides, the Foster Emporium wasn’t about to bankrupt itself just for a chance to propel one of the family members to Knight-Captain.

Smoking kaf stimulated his Animus and perhaps it could eventually bring him to Sollus. A long shot, he knew, so long that it was far more likely for him to earn the jade crown it would cost to buy enough zoi elixirs to bring his Animus capacity to fullness.

He drew another breath, taking in more of the smoke. Aside from the movement of his Animus, smoking also brought wakefulness. A necessity from the hours he kept at night. A minute later, he was done with the pinch of dried kaf leaves in his pipe. He tapped the dottle out onto the cobblestones, stepping on it firmly to put out any embers, and walked back into the Homestead Inn.

The Wave had devastated the Foreign Quarter in Faron’s Crossing. Hardly any structures were left undamaged when the swarmlings stormed into town. The town had concentrated its defences in the Central District and left the outlying areas to its own devices. Reasonable, Colin thought, but ultimately cold-hearted. The butcher’s bill wasn’t too bad, all things considering.

The Inn’s facade had been damaged when a group of swarmlings and a lone Wanderer had sniffed out the guests hiding within. Colin hadn’t been here when it happened, of course. He was sensibly at the Central District, which he had been drafted to help protect. He was a Knight and a citizen of the Empire, after all.

He waved at the innkeeper, a portly man with his brown hair cropped in the legionnaire’s style, gave him a solemn nod. Arturus and Colin had shared a tankard of ale the night before and their conversation had been…interesting.

Up in his room, he picked up his side-blade, a Plasma Lancet, and a heavy pouch weighing at least a couple of Jin. He had been discharged of his emergency muster after the Legion Vagaris had arrived in town but that didn’t mean he couldn’t materially help in clearing the Wave’s remnants. Besides, if he dealt his cards right, he could bag several HiJin of Chaos shards with no one the wiser.

His nephews were still sequestered in the Temple infirmary. Braden was lucky that he had received attention as soon as he was wounded otherwise, Colin would have had to return to Cierra Village with one less nephew. Who knew what his brother and sister-in-law would have done to him if that happened.

He suppressed a shudder while he thought of that and directed his annoyance at the administrators of the training camp. He would leave a sternly worded complaint letter later or perhaps tomorrow. At least Braden and Orrin got what they needed from there anyway.

“See you later, Art,” Colin said when he came back into the common room.

“There’s Kadrac Beef stew tonight!” the jovial man shouted.

“Well, Ancestors!” Colin yelled. “I won’t miss that. How could you even afford to serve that?”

“Legion’s largesse.”

“Huh,” Colin nodded thoughtfully as he left the building.

He walked towards the watchpost located a couple of blocks away from the inn. The Circuit Tram service had been held off in light of the siege and the landcraft transports were repurposed to move citizen volunteers. The watchpost was already crowded with a dozen men and women, each one bearing assorted arms.

“Mr. Foster!” One of the men, a middle-aged farmer holding an old collapsible spear, greeted him. Brisken Westley frequented the Homestead Inn nearly every night, mostly for the ale and mead. “Heading out to hunt?”

“For a little while,” Colin said easily. “Need to stretch my legs.”

“Oh, join our team?”

Colin eyed the small group consisting mostly of farmers and vagrants. Most, if not all of them were barely out of the Apprentice level. Strong enough to take on swarmlings and Wanderers but not in great numbers. Most of them were wielding melee weapons, too, with nary a Plasma Lancet between any of them.

“Hmm, no, another time, perhaps.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Colin nodded. “We’ll talk over dinner.”

Thankfully, the Circuit Tram arrived before the awkward silence could stretch. Colin took a seat behind the driver and the makeshift team occupied the rest of the seats. The Tram headed straight to the town’s western outskirts, a journey that took half an hour. Colin would have smoked another pinch of dried kaf leaves but not everyone appreciated the scent.

Once they were let off, he trotted towards the north, activating a Boost technique that increased his stamina and running speed. It consumed a lumen of Animus a minute but allowed him to cross a league in the same amount of time. Colin could gauge his Animus consumption to within a couple of lumens, a product of years of scraping by with his limited reserve. His nephews left the Atavism Ritual with nearly a third more reserve than he did decades ago and he still felt stings of jealousy whenever he thought about it.

The golden fields of nearly ripe wheat had been turned into trampled, muddy fields. Though the swarmlings didn’t destroy the crop intentionally, their sheer numbers had mowed down the grain.

There were patches and mounds of ash in some fields, a product of a misaimed plasma bolts from the militia or the legionnaires. Even now, Colin could see flying shuttles in the distance, spitting out bolts of different coloured plasma at an unseen foe.

“This was ill-advised,” he muttered to himself while he ran over a hill and found a small group of swarmlings huddled in a nest of upturned earth and stalks. A quick pulse of his Facet and the critters were pressed flat on the ground and a clean stab to the back of each head ended their little lives.

He pulled out a little vial, channelling some of his Animus to attract the Chaos dust that started rising from their bodies. Half a minute later and he was twelve GiJin of dust richer, though he would have to turn the produce in at the end of the day. There wasn’t much he could do about it since he was still in full view of the legionnaires on the shuttles. Besides, Chaos dust wasn’t the ingredient he needed.

He moved on from his kill, finding more pockets of swarmlings. Sometimes he ran into groups of farmers stabbing their spears into resistant carapace. The glow of their Animus on their weapons was a testament to the Empire’s success. Still, they could go no further than that.

Continuing north, it was already mid-afternoon when Colin happened upon a copse of trees in between a couple of small hills. He had been planning to return to Faron’s Crossing already, giving up the hunt as a failure. However, the moment he came close to the trees, he froze.

With a small grin, he reached into his belt pouch and drew out a handful of iron spheres half an inch across, each sphere weighing about ten HiJin. His Animus coated the spheres, sparks of miniature lightning dancing between them, and the iron floated above his palm. The Wanderer, a variant called a Lurker, spat out a corrosive burst of acid when it sensed Colin.

He waved a hand and the liquid splashed back as if it had encountered strong winds. Little droplets burned the grass and tree bark. The creature started to spit out more acid but with another gesture, three iron balls flew from above his palm in a line. The first one bounced away from the Lurker’s Protective Field. The second one created cracks while the third one punched into the creature’s forehead.

Another volley of iron balls flew from his hand and pierced through its head and torso, exiting the creature slick with blue blood. Colin gestured casually and the six balls rose from where they lay on the ground as the Wyldling collapsed. With a shake, the bloodstains on the iron were shed and they returned to his hand like well-trained hounds.

Colin sauntered up to the corpse and pulled out his side-blade. He stabbed into the Lurker’s torso and pried the carapace off. He made a careless incision and eventually fished out the Chaos shard. The black octahedron had a glimmer of green inside it.

“Hmm, three HiJin. About average,” Colin muttered. He was within the shelter of the trees and, as he was in a small valley, it was unlikely that his quick battle had been observed. Still, he needed to get rid of the evidence.

Looking around quickly, he chose a spot between two large trees. He focused on his Facet and coated his Animus around a small boulder and the dirt under it. Beetles and worms crawled out of the moist earth when the boulder floated as if it weighed nothing. More earth floated up until he had a hole three paces deep. He pulled the corpse with his Facet and dumped it into the hole, piling the dirt and stones back on top of the body.

Wiping the sweat off his forehead, Colin walked out on the other side of the copse and slowly made his way back to Faron’s Crossing. The Chaos shard was at the bottom of his pocket, wrapped in his linen handkerchief.

That little stunt cost his nearly a hundred lumens out of his available hundred and sixty. The fight itself cost him less than ten. Conventional wisdom was to leave at least a fifth of Animus as a reserve but Colin had already dipped below that. The opportunity was well worth the risk though.

In the Empire, there was only one legal buyer for Chaos shards and dust and that was the Empire itself. The seller would only get three silver pennies for every GiJin of dust and three silver crowns for every HiJin of shard. A buyer would have to pay a silver mark for dust and a gold mark for shards but that was often already in a nearly inert form. Dust and shards were used for tonics that could recover Animus: the only way to do it quickly in the heat of battle. They were also one of the key ingredients for creating zoi elixirs.

Of course, the other ingredients were much harder to find, with the seeds of the Imperial Lotus only cultivated in the Imperial Capital of Realmheart. Stil, there was no denying that the cores of Wyldlings were of great import and Colin was sure the other ingredients could be replaced by something else.

Once he was back in the wheat fields, Colin pulled out his pipe and stuffed some dried kaf leaves in it. He lit it with a firestarter, clicking the mechanism several times before the spark caught. He puffed on the pipe for a while, tamping it down once the charring light went out and lit it up again. Then, he drew evenly and sighed in pleasure.

He was well within sight of the legion, the militia, and the volunteers by now. He waved at one of the flying shuttles and the pilot gave a languid wave while they continued on to the Watchtower. After half an hour of walking, a troop transporter trundled up next to Colin. The large landcraft was modelled much like a hauler with the driver’s cabin upfront, the Animatech engines forefront, and a flatbed with two rows of benches running along the side sheltered by a sturdy metal framework and solar panels on the top One of the legionnaires at the back, a man looking to be in his late twenties, yelled out, “Heading back to town?”

“You’re giving a ride?”

“Sure, hop on.”

Colin climbed up the back passenger area easily even though the landcraft didn’t even slow down.

“Good hunting?” The legionnaire asked.

Colin shrugged. “Just swarmlings. A waste of time, mostly. Well, at least I got to stretch my legs.”

“Well, it would have been a miracle if anything stronger had gotten past our net,” the other man boasted while Colin held in a smirk.

The rest of the trip passed while Colin went through several pinches of dried kaf. The other passengers didn’t seem to mind this time but it was probably because he had been blowing smoke outside the transport. Most of the people inside were farmers anyway and were glad enough to catch the ride home. The legionnaire kept nattering on as they travelled which Colin soon tuned out.

They were dropped off at the edge of town, at the square in the western district. A small administrative camp had been put up, using some bleached cloth to give shade for the clerks sitting on makeshift desks and chairs. A couple of militiamen armed with Plasma Casters stood at attention on either side.

The farmers gave Colin precedence and he pulled out the vial of Chaos dust, by now full with nearly a hundred GiJin. The clerk weighed the dust on a small device, noted the number and gave Colin a receipt he could use to claim the proceeds of his labour. He could claim the coins directly from the Town Hall or he could deposit the receipt at the Bank of Rumiga to be credited to his account.

Three hundred silver pennies were equivalent to three silver crowns or about three hundred Sovereigns. Not bad, really, for an afternoon’s work. A day labourer would barely earn a hundredth of that amount in a day.

Colin caught the Circuit Tram back to the Inn. Arturus greeted him warmly, ushering to a corner seat and placing a generous serving of aromatic stew, a goblet of mead, and several slices of white bread in front of him. Colin gulped the mead down, asked for more, then started partaking his meal.

The Kadrac Beef cuts in the stew were pretty scarce; he had some trouble finding the single cube of it behind the potatoes. It wasn’t so much about the price of the imported meat. There was no doubt in his mind that Arturus intended to stretch out the meagre supply and earn a pretty penny from every diner he could entice.

He had just finished his meal when a messenger crane flew in and landed in front of him. He touched the paper crane’s head and it unfolded itself into a sheet of paper.

“After Founding 2997

36th Day of Fire

Mr. Colin Gael Foster

Homestead Inn, Foreign Quarter

Faron’s Crossing

Dear Mr. Foster,

I’ve thought about your proposal and realized that I do have the items you are looking for. They were hidden at the very back of the shop and I’d had to check my inventory records, though those didn’t match too.

Nevertheless, I believe I can fulfil your request and look forward to finalizing an accord with you. If you are free tomorrow, the 37th Day of Fire, AF 2997, I’d like to discuss the details over a warm cup of kaf.

Long life to the Empress,

Shane Kilrain Morgan

Morgan General Goods Store”

Colin read through the short missive thrice before he folded it into a little square and tucked it into his pocket, right next to the Chaos shard. He couldn’t help chuckling to himself. Looks like something’s finally going right.