Dusk thinned into full dark somewhere past the third milestone, and the road narrowed from a proper cart-track into little more than a packed dirt trail worn by generations of feet that had all, apparently, wanted to leave the Midlands as quickly as possible. The grass along the verge grew sparser with every mile, giving way to hard-packed clay and then to a scrub of low, wind-bent scrub trees that Remus didn't recognize from either of his two lives, their bark grey and papery, their few remaining leaves curled tight against a cold that hadn't fully arrived yet but was clearly already sending word ahead of itself. Somewhere off to the north, past a line of hills he couldn't make out anymore in the dark, lay the crossing into the Northlands proper, a border Remus had never once expected to walk toward on foot, carrying nothing more official than a job posting three companies had already refused and a stub of charcoal he was steadily wearing down to nothing.
Remus walked at the front of the line more out of habit than authority, the traveling box he'd crafted for himself thumping softly against his hip with every stride, and somewhere behind him Leo's breathing had gone loud and theatrical enough that it was clearly meant to be overheard.
"My legs are getting tired," Leo announced, to nobody in particular, the way a man announces something he's hoping will be argued with so he doesn't have to make the request outright. "We should have hired a horse-drawn carriage. A proper Lorekeeper doesn't march to his research."
"You're not a Lorekeeper yet," Gregory said, not unkindly, hefting his pack a little higher on his shoulder. "And we've barely covered any ground. You're just being lazy."
"I am not being lazy," Leo said, with the wounded dignity of a man who absolutely was, at least partly, being lazy, though something tighter than laziness sat underneath it that he wasn't saying out loud yet. He kept glancing east, toward a horizon he clearly recognized and Remus didn't, and every time he did it his mouth pulled a little flatter.
"We should stop here regardless," Andrea said, and there was nothing performative in the way she said it, no theater at all, just a flat, considered statement dropped into the conversation like a stone into a still pond. "Not to rest. To work."
"Work on what?" Gregory asked.
"On him." She tilted her chin toward Remus without breaking stride. "We're two days from the border of anything civilized, and I have watched him fight exactly once, in an alley, by standing behind me and handing over his coin purse. I'd like to know what he can actually do before something out here decides to test it for us."
Remus felt the observation land somewhere just short of an insult, mostly because it was true, and he found himself, oddly, grateful that at least one person in the party had said the quiet part out loud instead of leaving it to fester unspoken the way Yoshi's old coworkers used to do when they thought a design was doomed and didn't want to be the one who said so first.
"That's fair," he said. "Let's camp."
They found a shallow clearing off the trail where a fallen log made a natural windbreak, and while Gregory and Leo gathered kindling, Remus noticed, not for the first time, that Leo's eyes kept drifting the same direction, east and faintly south, toward wherever it was his own thoughts kept wanting to travel without him. Remus filed it away without asking. He'd learned, across two lives now, that some things came out on their own time and got worse for being pushed.
The fire caught slow, then all at once, throwing long orange light up the trunks of the trees around them and turning the dark beyond the clearing into something total and absolute in the way only true wilderness dark ever managed. Andrea crossed her arms and waited until the flames had settled into something steady before she spoke again.
"Equip your weapon," she said. "Like this."
She opened her status window with a small, practiced gesture, and a short black blade shimmered into her free hand, close and quiet, the same one Remus had watched her use in the alley outside Dinolfo's shop.
Item Equipped: Blade of Woe!
"Now you," she said.
Remus opened his own inventory, felt for the shape of the word the way he'd learned to feel for all of them by now, and thought, simply, equip.
Class Restriction: Unable to equip Item: Spear!
Class Restriction: Unable to equip Item: Two-Handed Sword!
Class Restriction: Unable to equip Item: One-Handed Sword!
Class Restriction: Unable to equip Item: Dagger!
Class Restriction: Unable to equip Item: Shield!
Class Restriction: Unable to equip Item: Bow and Arrow!
Item Equipped: Steel Armor!
He stood there a moment, reading it a second time in case the first reading had simply been wrong, the way he'd once double-checked a load calculation he was sure had to be a rounding error before finally accepting the number was the number. There was something close to bitter comedy in it, if he let himself sit with it long enough to notice: Yoshi Yoshimura had spent an entire career designing the things other people carried into battle, had died, in the end, over blueprints for exactly that kind of hardware, and had woken up in a new body with a new name only to be told, flatly and without appeal, that whatever this world's version of a weapon was, his own two hands would never once be allowed to hold it. He almost laughed. He didn't, because laughing at it in front of the other three felt like it would cost him something he wasn't ready to spend yet.
"My class won't let me equip a weapon," he said, out loud, mostly to hear how it sounded once it left his mouth instead of just sitting there in his own head. "Any weapon. It just refuses."
"None of them?" Gregory said, straightening from the woodpile so fast a stick clattered out of his arms. "That's not a small thing to leave out of a class description. What kind of adventurer can't hold a sword?"
"Apparently the kind sitting in front of you," Remus said, and made himself say it lightly, though something colder moved underneath the lightness: the narrow, personal fear of a man discovering a hard limit on the one thing he'd assumed would always be his to decide.
"What kind of weapons can an Artificer equip, then?" Andrea asked, watching him with the same unhurried attention she gave everything, patient and a little clinical, like a woman conducting an experiment she already suspected the outcome of.
"I've only ever made tools," Remus admitted. "Pencils. Boxes. Fertilizer. A tractor. Nothing that was ever meant to hit anything back."
"Too bad tools can't fight," Andrea said, and there was no cruelty in it, just the same flat honesty she'd given him in that alley about hiding fear behind cleverness.
Leo, for his part, had pulled a slim, battered book from his satchel and was flipping through it with the quick, anxious energy of a man looking for reassurance he half-expected not to find. "The Archive's records on Artificers run to exactly four lines," he offered, "and none of them mention weapons at all, restricted or otherwise. For what little that's worth. I don't think anyone's ever actually watched one fight before. You might be the first data point anybody's had in a hundred years."
"That's comforting," Remus said, dry.
"I didn't say it would comfort you," Leo said. "I said it was true."
He sat with it a moment longer, turning the restriction over the way he turned over any problem, looking for the shape of the thing underneath the surface of it rather than the surface itself. He'd spent an entire life, the first one, believing that competence meant knowing how to hold the tool yourself. Every promotion, every contract, every late night at the drafting table had been built on that assumption without him ever once examining it. Now the System had reached in and removed the assumption entirely, cleanly, without apology, the same way it had refused him a bigger bed frame back in his own room for want of material. There was a rule here. He just hadn't found its actual shape yet.
"What if they could?" he said finally.
"What?"
"Fight back. Tools." He was already reaching for the charcoal stub at his collar without fully deciding to, the motion as automatic now as breathing. "I have iron. I have coal enough to make steel out of it. I just need something to give the steel a reason to move on its own."
"If we find a magic beast," Andrea said, watching him with new interest now, "I can bring you its core. That's usually the part that makes constructed things move."
"Perfect." He flexed the thought toward the second of his five skills, feeling for it the way you'd feel for a switch in the dark. "Search."
Skill Activated: Search!
Magic Beasts Detected: Elemental Wyverns!
"There are wyverns about a hundred meters east," he said, already unfolding a scrap of paper across his knee, charcoal finding the surface without him needing to look down at it, muscle memory doing the work his conscious mind had already moved past. "A rock type and a wind type, by the read on them. Gregory, go with Andrea and bring me one core of each."
Gregory was already on his feet, sword half-drawn before Remus had finished the sentence, the particular hunger of a man who'd spent weeks apprenticing at a bladesmith's bench wishing he were doing anything but standing still. "Finally," he said, and it came out lighter than anything he'd said since Remus arrived in Oldtown.
While they were gone, Remus sketched by firelight, working the proportions of a rough humanoid frame out across the page in quick, sure strokes, the way he'd have laid out a chassis back on Earth: broad shoulders for stability, a low center of mass, articulated joints he wasn't yet certain the material could support. He touched the finished sketch.
"Identify."
Design Acquired: Construct!
He frowned slightly at the word. It wasn't the one he'd expected.
Note: "Construct" is the general classification for any self-directed object an Artificer builds and animates. Two tiers exist beneath it. A Lesser Construct performs a single function reliably, at a fixed scale, from a design the caster already fully understands. A Greater Construct performs multiple functions and adapts its own behavior within limits, and requires a design of substantially greater complexity to acquire. What you have just drawn is a Lesser Construct.
Remus read it twice, the same careful, filing-away read he gave every rule the System handed him, and felt the same small, particular satisfaction he always felt when a system that could have simply been magic turned out instead to be legible. A tier existed above what he'd just designed. He hadn't earned it yet. That was fine. That was, if anything, better than fine, because it meant there was a ceiling worth climbing toward instead of an arbitrary wall with no shape to it at all.
"Something above this," he murmured to the empty clearing, tucking the charcoal back behind his ear, "for later."
Andrea and Gregory returned inside the hour, breathing hard, Gregory's sleeve torn at the shoulder and a fresh shallow cut along Andrea's forearm that she didn't so much as glance at.
"They ran, at first," Andrea reported, dropping into a crouch by the fire and holding out two small, glowing cores, one the dull grey of river stone, the other a pale, restless blue-white that seemed to shift color faintly even at rest. "I nicked the rock one before it could get away. Its skin turned to solid stone the instant the blade touched it and it stopped taking damage entirely, but it also froze in place doing it, like the shift itself locked something up. The wind one came back around and charged us the second it noticed we weren't chasing it anymore. Gregory handled that half."
"It was fast," Gregory said, still breathing hard, grinning anyway. "Faster than anything I sparred against in the city. Good. I needed that."
Remus took the two cores, feeling their weight settle differently in his palm, the stone one dense and cold, the wind one almost weightless, humming faintly against his skin like something that hadn't fully decided to stop moving.
"Craft," he said, laying both cores against his sketch.
Item Created: Stone Guardian (Lesser Construct)!
Item Equipped: Two-Handed Sword!
Item Equipped: Shield!
A shape rose up out of the firelight where nothing had stood a moment before, broad and grey and faceless, built along the exact proportions Remus had sketched, sword and shield already settled into hands that had no fingers to speak of, just a working approximation of a grip.
"Craft," he said again, working the second sketch.
Item Created: Wind Archer (Lesser Construct)!
Item Equipped: Bow and Arrow!
A leaner shape unfolded beside the first, lighter on its frame, a bow already strung and drawn taut across one shoulder.
Leo let out a low, delighted laugh, the anxious energy of earlier draining out of him for just a moment in the face of something that was, undeniably, wondrous. "You built soldiers," he said. "Out of a rock and a sketch."
"I built tools that can hit back," Remus corrected, though he was smiling too, unable to help it, the same private thrill he'd felt reproducing the pencil back in his own room. "That's all a Construct is. A tool with a reason to keep moving after I let go of it."
"They're stronger than I expected," Andrea admitted, circling the Stone Guardian once, testing the give of its shoulder with two fingers and finding none. "At least now you're not entirely defenseless out here."
They set the two Constructs to stand watch at the edge of the firelight, and the camp settled into the low, easy quiet of people who'd earned a real rest, Gregory dropping off first with his back against his own pack, Andrea sitting upright and awake long after everyone else had stopped pretending otherwise, and Remus lying on his back staring up through a gap in the branches at stars that belonged to a sky he still hadn't fully learned the shape of, his Search skill left running quietly in the back of his mind the way you'd leave a stove on low, not urgent, just present, just in case.
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