Vol 3: Chapter 3

Sela didn't waste time on ceremony. She laid out the terms across her desk, seed money up front, a cut of profits once the Zoids started selling, nothing locked in beyond that. Alex read through it twice, and she let him, tapping the edge of the ledger while she waited. By the time he signed, the sun had shifted enough to throw a new line of light across the floor between them.

Sela set the signed pages aside.

"So what's the plan now?"

"I've got the designs figured out in my head. What I don't have is the materials to actually build any of them."

Sela leaned back, considering him for a moment.

"I know someone who can help with that."

"Who?"

"Korn Stele. He runs supply out of a warehouse on the trading district's edge. Used to be a Warden himself, twenty years in the field before his body told him to quit." Sela tapped the desk once. "Now he's the one everyone comes to when they want materials that are actually what they're labeled as. He's blunt. Doesn't do small talk. But if he tells you something's solid, it's solid."

"Sounds like a real charmer."

Sela was already standing, gathering her coat off the back of her chair.

Stele's warehouse sat at the far edge of the trading district, where the road stopped being cobbled and started being packed dirt instead. The building itself gave nothing away, gray stone and a corrugated roof, no sign out front. Crates were stacked near the entrance in neat, labeled rows, each one marked with a batch number and a date instead of any advertising. Inside, shelving ran floor to ceiling in every direction, materials sorted with a precision that had nothing decorative about it.

Korn was crouched at a workbench near the back, sorting through a tray of pale materials with a grip that immediately looked wrong, only two fingers and a thumb on his left hand doing the work of five. He didn't stand right away when Sela called his name. He finished setting the piece he was holding into its slot first, unhurried, like the tray mattered more than whoever had just walked in.

"Korn. This is Alex."

He rose then, and Alex got his first real look at him, gray eyes, a face weathered enough that guessing his age within five years would've been a coin flip, hair cut short and going salt and pepper at the temples. Korn didn't offer a hand. He just looked Alex over, head to boots, the same way he'd been looking at the materials on his workbench a moment ago, like he was checking for flaws before deciding what something was worth.

"You're a builder."

Alex glanced down at his own hands before he caught himself doing it.

"That obvious?"

Korn turned back to the workbench and picked the tray back up, sorting while he talked.

"Calluses sit in the wrong spots for a Warden. Right spots for someone who actually makes things instead of just breaking them."

Sela crossed her arms, already settling into the kind of patience that said she'd watched this exact routine before.

"And here I thought I was being mysterious."

"You weren't." Korn set one piece down, picked up another, turned it over in the light. "Most people who walk in here haven't held a wrench in their life. They want to buy something that looks impressive and call it theirs. You're not one of those."

"So what am I, then?"

He glanced up at that, just for a second, before his eyes dropped back to the tray.

"Ask me again once you've bought something."

Korn set the tray down and nodded toward the back of the warehouse.

"So what are you building?"

"That's the problem. I don't know yet, not exactly." Alex glanced at the shelving stretching floor to ceiling around them. "I've got a few ideas in my head, but they all depend on what Titan materials are actually available. I build around what I can get, not the other way around."

Korn studied him for a moment, the answer clearly not what he expected.

"Most people walk in here with a blueprint already picked out and just want to know if I've got the parts for it."

"I'd rather see what you've got first. Figure out what's actually possible before I commit to anything."

"That's the right way to do it. Most people just don't." Korn wiped his hands on his apron and started walking, not waiting to see if they followed. "Storage is this way."

He led them past the shelving and through a doorway at the back, into a room that ran the length of the warehouse. Bones and shell fragments filled it in towering stacks, sorted by size and species into aisles wide enough to walk a cart through. Pale wolf-Titan ribs stood bundled upright like cordwood along one wall, while thick plates of caterpillar carapace lay stacked flat in crates nearby, each one tagged with a batch number burned into the surface. Overhead lanterns cast the whole room in a dull amber light, and the air carried the dry, mineral smell of old bone rather than anything rotten. Along the far wall, a smaller section held the rarer stock: allosaur claws bundled in cloth, a few ram-horn segments set apart on their own shelf, each marked with tags dense enough to read like a ledger.

Alex ran a hand along one of the wolf ribs, then picked up a caterpillar plate and turned it over, testing the weight.

System, scan these. Anything I can build?

[SCANNING MATERIALS...]

[BLUEPRINT MATCH FOUND: COMMAND WOLF][BLUEPRINT MATCH FOUND: MOLGA]

[SUFFICIENT MATERIAL STOCK CONFIRMED FOR BOTH BUILDS]

Alex kept his face still, but the plate in his hands suddenly felt like it weighed less than it had a second ago.

There it is.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.