Jake Altoras knelt in the packed grass with a torn shirt and a shaking sword hand and looked at the men getting ready around him, and for the first time in two lives — in all the combined years of both of them, in every moment of comfort and laziness and easy pleasure and carefully avoided difficulty — he understood with his entire body what it meant to have absolutely nothing left to rely on except himself.

As he was lost in his world, the men had brought it out like it was something ordinary.

He looked at the men and the thing that they brought.

That was the part that lodged in Jake’s mind and wouldn’t move — the casualness of it.

Two men carried the thing between them with the practiced ease of people who had done this on many roads before this one, and they set it in the packed grass of the rest stop without ceremony, without drama, as though they were setting down luggage.

It was circular - Iron, dark and old, the surface of it pitted with age and traced across its face with patterns that sat somewhere between carvings and burns — lines that seemed to go into the metal rather than rest upon it, like something had written on it from the inside using heat as its language. The diameter of it was roughly two meters, wide enough that two people could have stood in its center with room between them. It sat low to the ground, shaped like a broad shallow bowl, and at its edges six protrusions rose and curved inward — claw-shaped, each one bending toward the center with a geometry that was too deliberate to be decorative. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

They were reaching. They were waiting.

Jake stared at it.

The leader raised one hand.

His men moved outward — not toward Jake, not toward the cauldron, but outward, fanning into a wide circle with the coordinated precision of something rehearsed many times until it required no thought.

They crossed the stone wall, spaced themselves along the perimeter, and began working with their hands in motions Jake couldn’t fully see from his angle on the ground.

The air at the rest stop’s edges began to thicken. Not visibly — not in any way that the eye could catch directly — but in the way that pressure thickened, the way a room felt different when all the windows were closed at once.

A barrier.

He didn’t know how he knew that. He knew it the way he knew things through the system — or the way he had known things through the system, before the system had gone somewhere it apparently couldn’t be reached and left him with nothing but his own two lives’ worth of increasingly inadequate judgment.

He shouted at it anyway.

Internally, urgently, throwing himself against the closed door of it the way you threw yourself against a door you needed to open and found locked from the other side.

Do something!

Tell me something!

Give me anything!

The ledger behind his thoughts sat dark and still, and then—

[ERROR]

Not a word. Not a notification in the dry, library-bell tone he’d grown accustomed to.

Something else — a blare, red-edged and wrong, the system’s equivalent of an alarm sounding in a language it didn’t normally use.

It arrived once and then went silent again, and the silence after it was worse than the silence before, because at least before the error he could tell himself the system was simply being difficult.

The error meant something was wrong.

Something that the system itself hadn’t expected.

The sweat came all at once.

Jake was aware of it the way he was aware of his shaking hands — distantly, observationally, with the fractured attention of a mind that was trying to track too many things at once and dropping most of them.

His shirt hung open at the back where the blade had parted it. His ribs reported in. The grass was cold under his knees. The iron thing sat before him in the late afternoon light and the patterns on it caught the gold of the sun and held it differently than iron should have held it, with a faint, deep luminosity that had no business being there.

He looked around.

The men at the perimeter were focused on the barrier. The figures who’d handled the earlier violence were repositioned and watching the surroundings.

The leader stood near the cauldron with his back to Jake, speaking quietly to one of his men, gesturing at the patterns on the iron surface with the focused attention of a man confirming technical details.

Nobody was looking at Jake.

Move, some part of him said.

Move where, the rest of him answered, and the rest of him was right, because the barrier was up and the circle was closed and the only direction available was into the center of a ring of trained blades, and Jake Altoras was Class V, injured, system-dark, and alone.

The leader turned.

He looked at Jake with the expression of a man arriving at the next item on a list.

"Bring him," he said.

-

They were not rough about it.

That was somehow worse.

Two men took his arms with the firm, impersonal grip of people performing a task and walked him the four steps to the cauldron’s edge with the businesslike efficiency of a thing that was simply happening, that had always been going to happen, that his presence or absence of resistance had no particular bearing on.

He pulled against them once — instinctively, the body’s refusal operating ahead of the mind’s calculation — and they absorbed it without effort, without reaction, the way water absorbs a stone.

The leader produced a blade. Short and narrow, the specific tool of a specific purpose.

He took Jake’s right hand.

The cut was quick.

A single draw across the palm, deep enough to matter, and the pain arrived bright and immediate and Jake hissed through his teeth and tried to pull back and the men holding his arms kept him in place.

The leader pressed Jake’s bleeding palm flat against the surface of the cauldron.

The iron was cold. Then it was not.