Chapter 884: Overeager Doggy
Alice appointed herself director of illumination.
As the afternoon shadows stretched across the site, golden light bloomed above every work station, steady, warm, and carefully angled, courtesy of a dark halo hovering above Kaiden’s head that had clearly decided lighting management was a critical tactical operation.
<The workers on station seven are operating in suboptimal conditions,> Alice reported to Kaiden with the gravity of a field assessment. <I’m adjusting.>
"Good job, Alice."
<I know. They’d be lost without me.>
The station seven workers had not requested better lighting.
They also did not object, because the girl providing it had been directing golden beams at them with the focus of a military searchlight operator who took her assignment very seriously.
Pebble tried to help.
The Guardian had watched the humans and awakened bustle around him with growing agitation, because everyone was carrying things, building things, contributing, while he was lying next to the supply depot doing nothing. This was unacceptable.
He rose, padded over to a stack of structural steel, clamped his jaws around a girder, and began dragging it toward the nearest group of workers with all six eyes bright and his tail wagging in enthusiastic arcs.
The drag path carved a trench straight through the section Bastet had flattened minutes ago.
"THE FOUNDATION!" The grading lead’s clipboard hit the dirt.
Pebble’s tail swung at the shout, and the concussive gust knocked over a stack of rebar three workers had just spent twenty minutes sorting.
"Pebble." Kaiden’s voice cut across the site. "Sit."
Pebble sat. The impact tremor knocked a surveyor’s tripod off its mounting forty meters away.
The whine that followed was low and warbling, six burning eyes locked on Kaiden, wide with the dawning horror that he was in trouble.
Pebble looked at the trench he’d carved through Bastet’s freshly leveled ground, and the whine got worse.
He lowered his massive head and pressed his face beneath both forepaws, peeking out at Kaiden from between them with the energy of a puppy who’d eaten the couch and was hoping the cuteness would offset the damage.
It would not.
"This is foundation work," Kaiden said, looking up. Even in this position, his dog was much taller. "Everything gets built on top of it. That’s why we need utmost precision. Understood?"
Pebble’s ears flattened against his skull.
Seeing it, Kaiden’s voice softened. "I know you want to help, but this isn’t for you."
Before extreme whimpering could follow, he added, "That’s why you should go to the outer perimeter where the heavy transport crews are. Ask for work there."
All six eyes went wide. The paws came off his face.
"WOOF!"
The bark sent a concussive ripple across the site that ruffled every tarp and loose sheet of paper within fifty meters, and Pebble was already rising, tail swinging into full celebratory mode-
"And keep the tail under control."
The tail froze mid-swing.
Pebble turned and began walking toward the outer perimeter with the most exaggerated care any creature his size had ever attempted.
Each paw placed with surgical deliberation, his body threading between equipment stacks and work crews with the slow, focused intensity of someone crossing a room full of mousetraps.
The tail was held straight out behind him, rigid, vibrating with the effort of not wagging.
It wagged once. He caught it and clenched it still.
...
At the outer perimeter, a heavy-set operator with a beer gut testing the limits of his high-vis vest sat in the cab of his excavator, sipping from a thermos, waiting for the next load to stage.
He turned his head to check the supply lane.
A dog the size of his housing unit stared back at him through the cab window. Six burning eyes, tongue out, tail vibrating.
"WOOF!"
The thermos hit the floor.
Coffee sprayed across the console. The operator’s hand slammed the horn on reflex and the excavator blared across the perimeter while the man flattened himself against the far side of his cab.
"FRANK!" His partner came jogging over, barely upright from laughing. "Frank, relax! That’s the guild’s guardian dog! Or something like that."
"I KNOW WHAT IT IS!" Frank’s voice had not descended from the register it had reached. "WHY IS IT IN MY WINDOW?!"
Pebble’s tongue lolled further. His tail vibrated with barely contained excitement.
Frank’s partner looked at the Guardian, then at the flatbed loaded with twenty tons of raw stone that needed to reach the eastern staging area, then back at the Guardian.
"...Hey boy. Wanna move some rocks?"
"WOOF!"
The bark nearly took Frank’s door off its hinges.
What followed was the most efficient transport operation the outer perimeter had ever seen.
Pebble clamped his jaws around twenty-ton stone slabs and trotted them to staging areas like a retriever with a tennis ball, nudged flatbed trucks into position with bumps of his snout, and freed an excavator stuck in soft ground by grabbing the back end and pulling until the treads spun uselessly in the air before setting the machine down on firm earth.
Frank, who had recovered enough to stand on his running board and direct traffic, pointed at a rubble pile blocking the next access lane.
Pebble cleared it in one scoop of his paw and sat down, tail thumping the ground in careful, measured beats that only produced minor tremors.
"...Good boy," Frank said, and the Guardian’s entire body vibrated with joy.
The professional operators adapted, because that was what they did for a living, and once Eclipse’s fighters - who were not conducting guard or other duties - settled into the construction labor alongside them, the site found a rhythm no project manager could have anticipated.
The crane operator who’d been in the business for twenty years saw a pink-haired woman place his next load with her fingertips and decided his break could start early.
The fabrication lead watched moonlight crescents cut steel cleaner than his best saw and quietly asked an Eclipse veteran if the silver-haired girl accepted freelance contracts.
The grading team whose full afternoon of bulldozer work had been completed in four minutes by a barefoot felinid sat on their idle machines and discussed whether early retirement was an option.
Eclipse’s own members filtered in without prompting.
Soren moved crates with the same silent efficiency he brought to everything.
Renoa set up a hydration station and immediately began lecturing anyone who looked dehydrated.
Mabel opened a first-aid post, and the first thing she treated was a construction worker’s pride after Calypso carried the load he’d been struggling with using one arm and a roasted monster thigh in the other.
The sun dropped toward the horizon, and where open wilderness had greeted them that morning, the skeleton of Eclipse’s future rose against the orange sky.
Steel frames stood in rows.
Footing walls hummed with Kaiden’s glyphs beneath their surfaces.
Ward stakes circled the perimeter in a chain of soft light.
Runewoven inscriptions pulsed in the structural supports, settling into the building like a heartbeat finding its rhythm.
Kaiden stood at the center of it with his hands in his pockets, concrete dust on his jacket, sweat cooling on his skin, and his girls scattered across the site in various states of grime and laughter, doing work none of them had ever trained for.
They’d fought a Kaiju that morning.
Negotiated with a government that afternoon.
And now they were building their future.
’From a listless boy watching tons of porn and being depressed in economics classes to this...’
He shook his head.
’Thank you, Demonic Pornstar System.’
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