The red flare of pine torches flickered through the darkening orchard trees forty minutes after twilight.
Heavy iron boots trampled through Barnaby’s wild onion patch. Low, guttural curses drifted on the damp evening wind, accompanied by the metallic rattle of heavy chain links and drawn steel.
Inside the garden gate, Sera Thorne gripped the ash shaft of Storm-Pike. Her knuckles whitened against the grain as her gray eyes tracked the shadows moving between the pines.
“Nine men,” Sera said, her voice dropping to a tense whisper as she glanced back at the hammock. “All armored in wolf-hide, led by a Rank 6 machete fighter. Young Master, wake up—you need to slip through the back hedge now.”
Barnaby Holt charged out of the drying room, clutching his iron shovel in his right hand and a heavy cooper’s mallet tucked into his belt. His singed eyebrow twitched with fury.
“Those aren’t estate guards,” Barnaby spat, his single eye bulging. “Those are Briggs’s quarry hounds. Get out of that hammock and take the girl through the hedge, boy!”
From behind the screen door, Mina ran onto the porch in her cloth slippers. She held a pair of dry boots in one hand and Kaelen’s patched wool cloak in the other. Her small face was pale as chalk, her fingers trembling as she tugged at the edge of Kaelen’s gray tunic.
“Brother, get up!” Mina begged, her voice shaking with fear. “Put on your boots! They have torches and iron cleavers. We can squeeze through the back blackberry hedge into the ravine. Please, Brother!”
In the hammock, Kaelen did not even take the straw hat off his face.
He lay perfectly flat, his arms crossed behind his head. Beneath his ribs, the dark stone tablet pulsed with steady, rhythmic ticks.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 118 Hours, 30 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 119x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)] [Next Milestone: 119 Hours (120x Ready)]
One hundred and eighteen hours and thirty minutes.
Ninety minutes remained until the legendary one-hundred-and-twenty-hour mark.
Running through a thorn hedge after a bowl of rice, Kaelen thought, feeling the comfortable sway of the hemp ropes. Thorns ruin silk hems, and running after dinner causes meridian indigestion. More importantly, ninety minutes of compound interest is worth five hundred hours of baseline labor.
Abandoning a one-hundred-and-nineteen-hour streak ninety minutes before the threshold was financial madness.
Kaelen turned a page of Book 2 of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride. In the story, the bandit king had just set fire to a wine barrel to escape a tax collector.
“No running,” Kaelen murmured through the straw brim. “The night air is damp. Running through damp woods gives me a cough.”
“A cough?” Barnaby’s voice rose in furious disbelief. “Boy, they’ve come to break your knees and put your sister in a wagon. Vorn was a pit brawler in the northern iron quarries. He cracks skulls for breakfast. This isn’t the time for your delicate chest!”
“Old Barnaby, your blood pressure is spiking again,” Kaelen said lazily. “High blood pressure rots the liver meridian. Take a deep breath and count to ten.”
“I don’t need ten breaths,” Barnaby hissed, brandishing his shovel. “I need an axe!”
Kaelen shifted his head slightly toward Sera.
“Sera,” Kaelen said.
“Yes, Young Master?” Sera stepped to the side of the hammock, her posture coiled like a hunting leopard.
“Look under the second drying rack,” Kaelen instructed, never looking up from his paper booklet. “There is a wooden tub covered with oilcloth. Inside are three clay jars sealed with red beeswax. Bring them here.”
Sera moved with silent, feline grace. Within three breaths, she returned holding the three heavy clay jars. Each was fitted with a thick tallow fuse coated in ground sulfur.
“What are these?” Sera asked, sniffing the seam.
“Home improvement,” Kaelen said. “A blend of dried mountain ghost-pepper, sulfur, and aged pine pitch. Take the jars down to the narrow stone alley between the turnip patch and the woodshed.”
“And then?” Sera asked, her eyes narrowing with tactical understanding.
“Light the fuses and drop them into the ditch,” Kaelen replied. “The wind blows south tonight. Anyone trying to walk down that path will breathe three seasons of regret in thirty seconds.”
“Understood,” Sera said.
She sprinted down the porch steps, agile as a deer.
Down by the perimeter fence, the iron gate rattled violently under a heavy kick.
“Open up, little bird!” Lieutenant Vorn’s gravelly roar echoed across the yard. “Garrick Young Master wants his fifty Spirit Stones. Come out quietly, and we might leave your arms attached to your shoulders!”
The eight thugs behind him laughed, crude and mocking.
“Drag the girl out!” one thug shouted, rattling an iron crowbar. “Garrick said we could share the extra silver in her pouch!”
“Burn the shack down!” another yelled. “Smoke the invalid out like a badger!”
Sera did not waste a single breath answering their taunts. She knelt behind the low stone wall of the turnip patch, struck a flint against her iron dagger, and sparked all three tallow cords at once.
The fuses hissed with bright red sparks. With three smooth throws, she hurled the clay jars straight into the mouth of the narrow alley.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
The jars shattered against the stone cobbles.
A thick, roiling cloud of dense orange-yellow smoke erupted from the broken shards, expanding with terrifying speed. The wind caught the medicinal vapor, funneling it directly into the narrow path where the eight thugs were jostling to enter.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific.
“What is—COUGH! MY EYES!”
“Gah! It burns! It burns like boiling oil!”
“I can’t breathe! Get back! GET BACK!”
The front three thugs dropped their cleavers and fell to their knees, clawing at their throats in sheer agony. Ghost-pepper resin mixed with burning pine pitch entered their nostrils, blinding their eyes with instant tears and blistering their lips.
Lieutenant Vorn leaped backward, his wolf-hide cloak pulled over his nose, his eyes watering furiously.
“A smoke trap?” Vorn bellowed, coughing violently into his sleeve. “You cowardly rats! Circle around the turnip patch! Smash through the picket fence!”
In the hammock, Kaelen turned another page of his romance pamphlet.
Thirty minutes burned, Kaelen noted silently.
The chime rang in his skull.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 119 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 120x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)]
One hour left.
“Sera,” Kaelen called out mildly from the porch.
Sera vaulted back onto the porch flagstones, her chest rising and falling with controlled breaths. “Young Master?”
“Behind the rain barrel,” Kaelen said, pointing with his toe. “There is an iron bucket filled with four-pointed caltrops. Dump them along the vegetable beds.”
Barnaby let out a loud, vindictive cackle. Without waiting for Sera, the old herbalist ran to the rain barrel, seized the iron bucket, and scattered fifty jagged iron caltrops across the damp soil of the turnip patch.
“Step on that, you dog-faced thieves!” Barnaby roared.
Seconds later, four thugs who tried to skirt the choking smoke leaped over the low timber fence.
CRUNCH.
“AAAAAGH!”
Two men landed with their full weight directly onto the iron spikes. The four-pointed iron barbs drove clean through their thin leather boot soles, piercing deep into their heel bones.
One thug collapsed sideways, howling as two more spikes impaled his palm.
“My foot! He spiked the dirt!”
“Form up, you idiots!” Lieutenant Vorn barked from behind the hedge, his face dark with murderous rage. “She’s only one woman with a broken stick! Kill her!”
The three uninjured thugs charged forward, raising their notched iron machetes.
Sera Thorne did not give an inch.
Her Mortal Pulse Rank 5 Qi surged into the ash shaft of Storm-Pike. Even without a steel head, the ancient northern ironwood hummed like a taut bowstring.
She stepped into a low lunge. The blunt, splintered tip of the ash pole shot forward like a lightning bolt, catching the first thug directly beneath his breastbone.
The sound of shattering ribs cracked through the yard.
The man flew backward five yards, crashing into the cabbage crates with his eyes rolled back in his head.
Before the second thug could swing his cleaver, Sera spun on her heel. The heavy butt of the spear whipped in a horizontal arc, slamming square against the side of his iron helmet with an ear-splitting chime.
The iron helmet caved inward, and the man dropped like an empty flour sack.
The third thug hesitated, his boots skidding in the bloody mud.
Sera glared at him through the drifting pepper smoke, her gray eyes burning with lethal calm.
“Next,” Sera said coldly.
The thug dropped his blade, turned tail, and ran back into the pepper smoke, screaming in terror.
From the porch, Mina cheered quietly, clapping her small hands together. “She got them! Brother, she got them!”
Kaelen adjusted his straw hat against the torch glare.
Rank 5 spear technique, Kaelen observed, admiring the clean economy of her footwork. Zero wasted motion. Every strike lands on a joint or a nerve cluster. Hiring her for twelve silver and a mud-ball was the best investment I made all month.
Down by the turnip wall, Barnaby kept guard with his shovel, whacking any groaning thug who tried to crawl out of the mud.
“Stay down, dog!” Barnaby bellowed, thumping an iron caltrop into the dirt next to a thug’s ear. “One more twitch and I’ll use your skull for a mortar!”
The minutes dragged on in the cool mountain dark.
Kaelen listened to the distant hoot of an owl and the soft rustle of pine needles overhead. He watched the stars creep slowly past the roof edge.
Hour one hundred and nineteen, forty-five minutes, Kaelen calculated. Fifteen minutes left. The tea in my cup is cold, but the slate is hot.
Outside the broken gate, Lieutenant Vorn was shaking with uncontrollable fury.
Four of his men were incapacitated by spikes, three were unconscious from spear strikes, and the remaining two were still vomiting in the bushes from the ghost-pepper smoke. His entire raiding party had been dismantled by an old cripple, a girl with a broken pole, and a garden full of kitchen traps.
“Useless dogs!” Vorn roared, drawing his massive curved machete from his back scabbard.
The blade gleamed with a greasy black sheen—a Tier 1 blood-steel weapon, notched and wicked.
Vorn stepped forward, his heavy boots crushing an iron caltrop flat into the mud. A dense, muddy yellow aura erupted from his broad chest, swirling around his shoulders like heavy armor.
Mortal Pulse Rank 6. Iron-skin resonance.
“You think a broken stick and kitchen spices can stop an Iron-Hound lieutenant?” Vorn sneered, his heavy voice vibrating through the valley. “Little girl, I broke your father’s ribs two years ago. Tonight, I will take your head back to Garrick in a basket!”
Vorn lunged forward. His heavy machete swept in a ferocious downward chop, carrying the crushing weight of a falling boulder.
Sera raised the ash shaft with both hands to block.
CLANG.
Sparks showered into the darkness. The sheer physical weight of the Rank 6 blow forced Sera down to one knee. The timber porch boards beneath her boots splintered from the transferred impact.
Blood seeped from the corner of Sera’s mouth as the concussive force rattled her chest.
“Die!” Vorn bellowed, twisting his heavy blade to shear through the wood.
Sera gritted her teeth, channeled her wind Qi into the shaft, and rolled backward across the porch floor, dodging the second cleaving strike by a fraction of an inch.
Vorn’s machete struck the porch edge, shearing off an eight-foot section of railing with explosive violence.
The remaining two conscious thugs rallied behind their leader, battering down the remaining fence posts with iron crowbars and flooding onto the porch with cruel grins.
Barnaby swung his shovel, but Vorn kicked him hard in the ribs, sending the old man tumbling into the herb bins with a painful thud.
“Barnaby!” Mina screamed, rushing forward to shield the old herbalist.
Vorn ignored the old man and the girl. His bloodshot eyes locked onto the hemp hammock slung between the cedar posts.
Inside the hammock, Kaelen still lay on his back, calmly turning the final page of Book 2 of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride.
“Still sleeping, invalid?” Vorn barked, stepping toward the hammock with heavy, earth-shaking strides. “Let’s see if you can sleep with your throat slit!”
Vorn raised his heavy, blood-stained machete above his head, aiming directly for the hemp suspension rope to drop Kaelen onto the floor.
The iron blade whistled downward through the cool night air.
At that exact second, a magnificent, golden chime rang out inside Kaelen’s skull, echoing through every bone in his body.
[The Fallow Slate] [120 Hours Abstained -> Multiplier: 121x READY!] [Current State: True Fallow State (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)]