Chapter 91: The place with lots of tubers
The morning air was quickly ripped apart by the heavy, mechanical grind of the automated builders.
The gray modules had unfolded into low-slung, multi-limbed industrial units, their diamond-tipped saws and plasma cutters whirring to life with a high-pitched scream that sent flocks of native birds exploding out of the canopy of trees below.
Hana stood on a high granite boulder, her boots planted firmly as her fingers flew across the tablet. The display was a chaotic grid of red and green lines, mapping out the true geographical nightmare of the Peak’s lower boundary.
"Listen up," Hana called out, her voice cutting through the mechanical din as the three beastmen and a massive line of Boars gathered at the edge of the rocky slope.
She pointed down toward the dense, tangled abyss beneath the cliffside.
"The bedrock up here is solid, but past this ridge, everything drops into a crater of overgrown vines, hardwoods, and thick brambles. We aren’t just clearing it for space. That wood is high-density, weathered material. I want every single log stripped, and stacked at the primary construction spot. It’s our raw material for the housing sector."
Caspian’s golden eyes flared with sudden excitement. He didn’t understand most of the words she used but the message was clear. They had to clear a path. "Leave it to me, Hana. J will burn the useless brush! Leave the thick trunks to the Boars!"
"Controlled bursts only, Caspian," Hana snapped without looking up from her screen. "If you scorch the construction timber, you’re hauling the next batch from the valley by hand."
The Fire King instantly checked his internal heat, nodding with a fiercely serious expression before leaping down into the ravine, letting out his obsidian wings.
From there, things got chaotic and bustling.
But the chaos, however, wasn’t just coming from her machines, the boars or her mates alone.
As the first giant hardwood crashed down under the robotic saws, Hana’s tablet pinged with a series of proximity alerts from the surveillance drones she had deployed the previous night.
She zoomed in on the live thermal feeds, her lips curling into a familiar, cold scowl.
The perimeter was crawling with her new labor forces.
Past the safety perimeter, hidden behind the jagged rock formations and peering through the heavy vines, dozens of faces were watching.
The Fox Tribe had arrived, looking exhausted and carrying hastily packed bundles, their nine-tailed and four-tailed sentries whispering nervously as they watched the giant gray metal ’demons’ slice through trees like butter.
But they weren’t alone. Hana’s drone feed picked up groups of foreign beastmen—scruffy leopard-kin, heavy-set bear-kin, and sharp-eyed avian scouts from the lower valleys.
They didn’t look like they were here to help.
They were lurking in the blind spots, their expressions a mix of raw greed and predatory anticipation. They were waiting to see the small, hairless human female fail.
In a world governed by muscle, strength and magic, a structured settlement built by a weak-looking outsider was a massive target.
They wanted to see her break so they could swoop in, instill fear in the labor force, and claim her high-grade relics for themselves.
It would’ve seemed dangerous if she wasn’t well prepared for this kind of attention. There is no such thing as just progress. Where there is progress, there are worms twisting and turning, looking for a way to steal that progress.
But she wouldn’t act on them now.
"Let them watch," Hana muttered to herself, her eyes cold as she adjusted the drone’s orbital path to keep a permanent lock on the dissenters. Idiots. They think this is a territory grab. They don’t realize it’s a closed-loop system.
In the first place, do they even know what they were up against? Likely not. They were all so stupid, using their pea sized brain to think that the one who grabs the remote grabs it all.
"Raiden!" Hana called out.
Raiden, who had been lazily strapping a woven foraging sack over his shoulder, instantly perked his long ears up.
His nine pink tails swished with a sudden, sharp focus. "Yes, mine? Are you ready to send me on my grand culinary quest?"
"The valley directly below the southern ridge has the highest concentration of wild tubers and root spices," Hana instructed, pointing toward a narrow path that bypassed the lurking onlookers.
She used her drones to pass the area and used her medical knowledge sight to scout for what was medicine and what was good. Luckily, there was no poison in the area and there seemed to be a lot of crops too.
She checked around to make sure she wasn’t stealing someone else’s hard down crops but there were no settlements nearby and the place was swarming with tubers and roots.
"That sounds wonderful, Hana," he said, his tails swishing as this would save him the trouble of looking around places he suspects but isn’t too sure. "I’ll go now."
"Wait." She stopped him. "You’ve got an audience out there. Some of your old tribe mates are looking disgruntled on their journey here, and there are outsiders waiting to spot a weakness."
Raiden’s lazy smirk returned tenfold, his green eyes glinting with a vicious, mocking light as he looked toward the hidden onlookers in the brush. He pulled out his hand-mirror, ran a hand through his pink hair, and let out a sharp, arrogant chuckle.
"Oh, let the street rats watch, love," Raiden purred, his tails fanning out in a majestic, blinding display of pink radiance that deliberately taunted the hidden fox-kin. "They spent their whole lives hiding from the ’Ancient Sin,’ and now they get to watch you properly handle it like a casual chore. I’ll make sure to point them in the right direction and bring back the finest potatoes in the valley—and if any of those lower-tier scavengers try to block my path, I’ll give them an illusion that’ll make them jump off the ridge themselves."
"Just don’t lose the foraging sack," Hana said flatly, but he’d like to believe she was worried he’d get hurt. "You can go now."
