Chapter 83: "As you command, Hana."
The heavy titanium door remained slightly ajar, sealing the tiny room away from the mechanical chaos echoing further down the bunker’s halls.
Inside, the air was warm, smelling of fresh sweat, and the faint musky scent of a thoroughly satisfied fox.
Hana sat up, smoothing down her dress and adjusting the straps of her tactical harness. Her movements were entirely businesslike, showing none of the lingering breathlessness that Raiden was currently displaying.
She checked her balance on her system window.
> [CURRENT BALANCE: -902,880]
A tiny, satisfied twitch touched the corner of her lips. Step by step, that ridiculous debt was shrinking.
Beside her on the mattress, Raiden lay flat on his back, his bare chest glistening under the dim yellow light. His nine bright pink tails were loosely splayed across the sheets, twitching lazily at the tips like a cluster of satisfied flowers.
The vulnerable, heavy look from earlier was completely gone, replaced by a smug, self-satisfied grin that practically radiated from his face.
"Hana," he purred, his voice dropping into that arrogant, rhythmic lilt she was used to. He reached up, casually running a hand through his slightly disheveled hair. "Your ancestors really knew how to build a base. If we’re making houses at the Peak, I demand a room exactly like this. With a lock. To keep the loud lizard out, of course."
As if.
"Get up," Hana said, giving his bare shoulder a light shove as she stood up from the bed. "The Boars aren’t going to direct themselves. And we’ve already spent some time here. Caspian will be back soon."
Raiden chuckled, swinging his long legs over the side of the metal frame. The fierce, fanatic heat was still dancing in his green eyes, but the heavy shadow of his tribe’s past had been effectively wiped clean.
He adjusted his jogger pants, his pink tails swishing behind him with their usual prideful bounce. "As you command, Hana."
They walked out of the living quarters and emerged into the main storage bay. From there, the sheer scale of the operation hit them.
The area was a hive of activity. Dozens of scruffy Boar beastmen were grunting under the weight of silver crates, their tusks gleaming under the bright fluorescent lights.
Kulu had just landed near the loading dock, his massive red wings folding back with a heavy whoosh of air that sent dust scattering across the composite floor.
"Hana," Kulu called out, his voice steady as he wiped something that seemed to be dirt from his forearm. "The secondary landing is full. The dragon has already taken two hauls of the advanced medical units back to the main den. I am here for my second, and the Boars are asking where to stack the larger gray ones."
The modules, huh?
Hana tapped the screen of her tablet, pulling up the blueprints for the industrial construction robots she had found in the manifest.
"Tell them to leave the gray modules right here," Hana commanded, her eyes cold and precise. "Those aren’t supplies. Those are the automated builders. Once the path is clear, I’ll activate them."
She didn’t explain to them what the automated builders are or how robots function, but she would get to that later.
Hana walked toward the mouth of the bunker, the cool mist of the Great Divide splashing against her face as she looked out over the ravine.
The Fox Tribe sentries were still watching from the bone-white trees, but their posture had changed. They weren’t looking down at them like ’interlopers’ anymore. They were looking at the smoke still rising from the perimeter Caspian had scorched, and then at the massive crates of unknown tools being pulled from the cursed cave.
The Chief was still there, standing near the edge of the rushing water, looking entirely defeated. He looked at Hana, then at Raiden, who stepped up right beside her, deliberately pulling out his hand-mirror to admire his own jawline in front of his father.
Hana didn’t say a word to the old man. She didn’t need to. The terms had been laid out on the table, and the clock was ticking. Whether he dragged his pride into the dirt or let his tribe rot in the shadows was entirely his problem now.
They can rot with their backward mindset.
"Raiden," Hana called. "Come with me. We need to unbox a few things from the secondary armory section before we head out."
Raiden pocketed his mirror, his pink tails swishing with immediate curiosity as he fell into step beside her. "Oh? More toys from your ancestors, sweet-eyes? What exactly are we looking for?"
Hana stopped for a second, goosebumps rising in her neck. Sweet-eyes? He was just coming up with more and more pet names.
"Drones," Hana replied, trying not to sound affected by the nickname, her fingers tapping a command into the tablet to unlock the reinforced security locker near the threshold.
Raiden tilted his head, his ears twitching in genuine confusion. "Drones? What is that? Is it a type of bird? A metallic insect?"
"Think of them as artificial eyes," Hana explained, resuming her stride. "They fly, they scan, and they show us a live visual of what’s going on in front of them directly on this screen."
"Wow!" his eyes twinkled.
"I’m going to set up a surveillance network here at the sub-station and another one back at the den. If any of these local foxes—or anyone else—tries to sneak inside while Caspian and Kulu are busy going to and fro with the cargo, I’ll see it instantly. No one steals from me."
Raiden’s emerald eyes regained that familiar, wicked appreciation for her cold paranoia. "Ah, invisible sentries that never sleep. Truly devious, Hana. I like it."
As they walked back toward the loading zone with the compact, matte-black drone cases, Hana paused, her gaze shifting toward the mouth of the waterfall.
Outside, a small group of scruffy Boars were grunting as they helped Kulu fasten a particularly massive haul of heavy-capacity batteries to his specialized harness.
The Red Falcon stood steady under the weight, his massive wings slightly flared to balance the load. Catching her eye through the mist, Kulu looked over at her and offered a rare, small smile of quiet reassurance.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of Hana’s lips in return.
She wasn’t smiling out of affection, of course. She was smiling at his sheer resourcefulness. To her, Kulu was turning out to be the ultimate carrier pigeon of high-grade goods—reliable, incredibly strong, and entirely unbothered by the heavy lifting.
With a soft snort, she snapped her gaze back to the tablet screen, her fingers flying across the holographic interface as she initiated the automated calibration sequence for the quadcopters.
The wilderness of the Emerald forest was vast, and its inhabitants were full of unpredictable variables like illusion arts, but she finally had the surveillance tech to keep them entirely under her thumb.
It was time to secure her perimeter.
