Sakura flitted across the secret road of Puppet Town, Darting from one rooftop to the next so effortlessly it felt like she was floating.

  She wasn’t the only hunter who traversed this hidden highway, but she was wearing a mask and using several skills to protect her anonymity, so she didn’t mind the company. She waved as one of the deputies sailed over the rooftop in front of her, then continued on her way.

  Although Sakura had only been living here for a few months, the settlement already felt like home. Which was a good thing, since it was the only option on the table after the anomaly had teleported the Ivory Plains to the far side of Ord.

  The people she loved were here, and her ally Edge Vasher—the man she hoped had the power to change the world—had arrived only a few days before the disaster carried them away. If that wasn’t reason enough to put down roots, the town’s leaders had been willing to shelter Sakura and her friends.

  Although only Edge knew her deepest secret, Dialla and Earl were aware that she was a jailbird and had decided to trust her despite the prisoners’ tattoos inked across her forearms—a rare act of compassion that had convinced Sakura to protect the settlement while riding out the chaos engulfing the planet.

  At the moment, the three pillars of Puppet Town were doing everything in their power to survive their war with the Crimson Claws. But that was only the beginning.

  Over the course of the next few months, the magicytes flowing across the Ivory Plains would continue to thicken until they were just as concentrated as the high-threat biomes ringing the region. Before long, powerful stage-two beasts and even some early stage-threes would migrate into the center of the plains—once the magic was dense enough to sustain their high-rank skills.

  To weather both storms, Puppet Town had to grow stronger at an unprecedented rate—start producing enough weapons, armor, and gear to arm the populace while raising the fighting prowess of their elite members and the average person walking down the street.

  As Sakura crossed the districts, her thoughts turned to the only five people on Ord she trusted, including two friends from her homeworld who had been banished at the same time as herself.

  Dialla was the beating heart of the settlement—a woman capable of tackling a mountain of tasks that would normally have required multiple people serving in specialized roles. Now that Puppet Town’s mayor had a core of her own, Dialla had more energy than ever, along with the strength to defend herself in a pinch and skills that made her even more effective at her job than she’d already been.

  Earl the Earthhammer was the face of the law as well as its fist. The leader of the peacekeepers—who most people called the sheriff—was a late stage-two warrior and quite possibly the most powerful person in the settlement. Earl had a kindly disposition to everyone but his enemies and had walked away from more life-and-death battles than anyone she knew.

  After earning the trust of the mayor and sheriff, Sakura had become Puppet Town’s third pillar and had her own role to play in keeping the settlement safe. While Earl and Dialla handled the day-to-day operations, Sakura operated from within the shadows. She gathered intelligence, kept an eye on new arrivals, and tracked the activities of a colorful collection of hunters who were prone to getting into trouble.

  Although it wasn’t her specialty, she was also the closest thing the town had to an expert on various magical phenomena. Well, except for the alchemists, though they tended to focus on magic related to biology, medicine, and chemistry to the exclusion of all else.

  That brought Sakura to the newest member of her inner circle—the only person who knew about her Unique core Lore-Weaver, the spinner of truth and lies. Edge Vasher had undergone a dramatic transformation in the short time she had known him. Part of it was due to Skill-Eater—the only other Unique core she knew of, though there were bound to be more. But that wasn’t the whole story.

  When she first met Edge, he had been trapped on Ord for less than a week. She didn’t know the details, but he had seemed like a man newly reborn—who had broken free from the chains of his old life to stand at the precipice of something new. In the weeks that followed, he had come into his own. His personality had blossomed like a flower in the sun, filling Edge with a lust for life and thirst for adventure that made him seem like a completely different person.

  In some ways they were kindred spirits. Sakura was intimately familiar with having one chapter of her life irrevocably closed, then starting over from scratch in a strange land far from the planet of her birth.

  She came to a stop when she felt a spider skittering across her consciousness, as her core’s attention was drawn by her train of thought.

  “Do you think the scion of Skill-Eater will survive? Without him, all our carefully laid plans will come to naught.”

  “If he was able to run the gauntlet of the Savage Garden solo, there’s a good chance he’s the one we’ve been waiting for after all. We will know more after we learn whether he is able to save the other members of the expedition from the jailbirds who are besieging them.”

  Sakura chatted with Lore-Weaver until she drew near her destination, then returned her attention to the task at hand. Today, she was performing an independent evaluation of the settlement’s capabilities—in case the mayor or sheriff had missed something important.

  She was focusing her efforts on projects that were vital to winning the conflict with the Crimson Claws, which would blossom into an all-out war sometime over the next few weeks. These dwindling days of relative calm were Puppet Town’s last chance to adjust their strategy and finalize their preparations, and she asked Lore-Weaver to watch through her eyes and double-check her work.

  The first item on Sakura’s list was to evaluate the settlement’s efforts to increase their military might. On that note, she came to a stop on top of a two-story building overlooking the public green, where Earl was overseeing a joint-training exercise between the peacekeepers and the town militia.

  Right now, they were engaged in a mock battle, with Earl and a handful of other elites observing from the sidelines, calling out whenever a person was “killed” so they could remove themselves from the battlefield until the drill was over. She watched as the new recruits learned how to follow orders, fight in formation, and keep a cool head in the middle of a chaotic situation.

  This training would help both forces learn the basics and condition their attributes while simultaneously unlocking the prerequisites for some Basic skills that even the uncored could use and ranking up the powers they already had.

  For everyone except Edge, there were three ways to learn new skills. Dialla and Earl were using all of them to power up Puppet Town’s residents as quickly as they could. The first method was to complete a System quest. While situationally generated quests were few and far between, they invariably offered superior rewards.

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  There was also a set of lesser quests that anyone could complete, such as the starter implant quest people received after acquiring their first Mortium and finding the exchange. Those were the quests Puppet Town’s leaders were focusing on, and Dialla had asked Ann to run the Mortium exchange while Lilly was away.

  The second method to obtain a new power was to use a skill gem, which had the advantage of providing exactly what someone wanted without having to jump through extra hoops. There had been quite a few skill gems for sale before the anomaly, and Dialla had bought most of them over the last few weeks.

  More gems were available through the Mortium exchange, including a decent selection of Commons and Uncommons. However, those items were owned by the System, and they wouldn’t work if you didn’t pay.

  Earl had been going around town—asking the settlement’s cored residents if they had any Mortium they were willing to sell—then having them buy the gems he wanted in exchange for Credits or other goods. His efforts had let the town’s peacekeepers and hunting associations enhance their strongest members and given a few promising young talents a head start on their development.

  However, most of the Puppet Town’s residents were going to have to acquire additional skills the third and final way, clearing the requirements to receive them directly from the System. For Basic skills, the process was relatively painless, although it could still be rather time-consuming to complete.

  For example, there was a group on the green going through a drill now, slashing in time with their instructor’s command. If they executed 5,000 perfect slashes, they would gain the skill by that name.

  Similar methods were known for learning a range of Basic skills. None of them were particularly strong, but they were far better than nothing and would serve as a bridge to picking up rarer powers once these volunteers obtained cores of their own and could handle skills with a higher drain.

  The requirements for learning several Common and Uncommon skills had been made publicly available after the anomaly—now that people were trying to survive their new lives instead of racking up views on the feed. Rarer skills were considerably more difficult to obtain through this method. While some people were making the attempt, Sakura doubted that most of them would be ready before the war with the Claws entered a bloody new phase.

  She made a few notes on how the training could be conducted more efficiently, then moved on to the next task on her list. She Darted over toward the wall—the immense barricade encircling the town. She leapt lightly from the last building on the block and landed on the walkway skirting the wall’s perimeter—a feat only a few other hunters could match.

  The wall was a special defense unique to Puppet Town. It was considerably tougher than anything else located within the planet’s former starting regions—the places people could begin their adventures after purchasing a puppet and transmitting their consciousness to Ord.

  It had become a tradition for each generation of hunters to add a high-grade material to the wall’s construction, piling on layer after layer of resilient resources as the years rolled past—many of which were specialized toward repelling a specific type of attack.

  “Now that the town is producing cores, Earl needs more Perception specialists to cycle up and acquire sensory-enhancing powers. Our ability to detect distant threats is inadequate, as is our capacity to convey information in real time. Excluding my own abilities, of course.”

  “You’re right, oh wisest of weavers. I’ll mention it in my report. Your insights are invaluable and appreciated, as always.”

  Her core was vain, and Sakura had learned long ago that stroking the spider’s ego was the best way to encourage its assistance. So, she laid the praise on thick as she began her inspection of the settlement’s defenses. It helped that she really meant it, since Lore-Weaver had an uncanny knack for uncovering secrets and identifying falsehoods.

  As she ran, she looked up, casting her energetic senses across the Dome—the magitech barrier that protected the settlement from magical attacks and unauthorized entry. It looked like a soap bubble with a faint orange tint to the naked eye. But to her magical senses, the Dome buzzed and thrummed with a layer of gold-class aether that was capable of blocking all but the most subtle of skills.

  The field is stable, but I should check the generators after I inspect the turrets. By now, she was approaching the south gate, where two of the town’s massive magitech turrets were located. After stopping to greet the deputy on duty and showing her a token from Earl authorizing the inspection, Sakura turned her gaze to the turrets themselves.

  Each of the sophisticated devices was taller than she was, with a diameter wider than her outstretched arms. They were able to rotate freely on a swivel mount and could tilt all the way down to point at the base of the wall and nearly straight up to repel enemy flyers.

  Sakura walked a few steps closer to test their targeting apparatuses as the deputy scrambled to get as far away as possible. The turrets’ barrels swung around to point straight at her, emanating a menacing hum. While the cannons could obliterate her in a single shot, they wouldn’t fire at anything friendly unless she drew considerably closer or manifested a skill within their warning zone.

  Everything seems to be in order. She shifted her focus to her energetic senses, making sure that the device’s power train was performing to specification. Each turret was actually two devices in one—both housed within a dense layer of top-grade titanium. One supplied power, allowing the weapon to turn and acquire targets automatically. It also generated a protective shield to prevent magical interference.

  The other device controlled the weapon’s firing mechanism, providing the correct amount of gold-class aether while determining the optimal form of attack. These turrets were multimodal. They could fire explosive balls like a cannon, unleash a devastating beam, or release a cluster of miniature ordnances to deal with swarms and aerial foes.

  After jotting down a few notes, Sakura went through the same routine with the turrets bookending the north gate, then jumped across the rooftops until she arrived in the industrial quarter.

  She made her way over to a facility that was guarded by several elite peacekeepers, which housed the town’s aether refinery and the generator powering the Dome. While a range of skills and devices could produce copper-grade aether, the distillery was the only facility that could manufacture silver and gold in the quantities the settlement needed to keep its magitech devices running.

  Sakura only understood how the refinery worked on a theoretical level. While she found the science of magic to be inherently interesting, all that mattered today was that the distillery and adjoining generators were secure from a variety of threats. She was most worried about people armed with high-rank infiltration skills—in case someone found a way to bypass the Dome or forced one of the residents to attack the machinery.

  She let out a sigh of relief after determining that the area was secure, then moved on to the adjoining bunker housing the generators. The concrete building was shielded by its own barrier device—just like the turrets on the walls. All the magitech looked good to her energetic senses, so after writing down a few suggestions for creating a rapid response team in case the Claws managed to infiltrate the settlement and attack this vital point, she continued on her way.

  That brought Sakura to her final stop of the day—the refugee camp where the tourists who had escaped from the Claws were being detained. They had been secured in a temporary ward Dialla had established in the residential district. A walled-off area with no other buildings nearby.

  Even though Lore-Weaver hadn’t found anything wrong with the refugees, the timing of their arrival was too suspicious to give them free rein of the town until the jailbird threat had passed.

  She was pleased to note that they were being treated well and happy to report they were under adequate supervision by the guardsmen stationed around the perimeter. There was even a pair of peacekeepers watching from rooftops in opposite corners of the camp—positioned where it would be easy to spot anyone who tried to slip away. “That’s it for today. Thanks for the help, Lore-Weaver.”

  Sakua had another set of inspections to run later in the week—most notably a visit to the core manufactory once the first core was ready to come off the line. But for the next few days, she could focus her efforts on gathering fresh information on the Claws’ activities.

  Today, Puppet Town was safe and secure, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that this moment of calm was only the eye of the hurricane, and the worst was yet to come.