The knock came at first light.
For half a second — just half — my whole body went cold, because the last time someone knocked on this door at an ungodly hour, it had been me, a thousand years older than I had any right to be. But this was Junha's morning to be up first, and I heard him cross to the door and open it, and then I heard a voice that wasn't human.
I was downstairs before I'd decided to be.
She stood on the step — a lizardwoman, one of the clan we'd allied with two days back, though I didn't know her face. She was breathing hard. She'd run a long way.
The words came broken and fast, half her tongue and half ours, but the shape of it was unmistakable, because it's the oldest shape there is. Taken. Her people, some of them — attacked in the night, dragged off. Bandits. And with nowhere else to turn, the law of two worlds lying dead under the same flat sky, she'd come to the one group that had ever shown her clan a kindness.
She'd come to us.
Junha had already called the house awake. By the time I came in they were all there, listening — and I watched the decision happen without anyone needing to vote on it.
Because that's a thing the first cycle never let me learn: what my family actually was, when it counted. Mom's jaw setting. Dad going quiet and dangerous. My sisters not hesitating for a second.
"We help," Jiyeon said. Flat. Final. Already reaching for her boots.
"We help," Dad agreed — and then, before I could speak, "and I'm staying. Someone keeps this house and your mother safe while the rest of you are gone, and that's me. No argument."
So it was five of us. Me. Junha. Jiyeon. Seojin. And—
"Me too," Miyoung said.
I opened my mouth to say no. I genuinely did. The thought of taking my baby sister — the one cooing at caterpillars yesterday — anywhere near a bandit camp put a cold hand around my heart, because I knew exactly how the first cycle handled little sisters in dangerous places.
But she lifted her chin at me. "You need someone to carry what we take, and to carry anyone who gets hurt. That's me. My subspace holds more than all your packs put together." A beat. "I'm not staying home to fold laundry while the rest of you go save people, oppa."
She was right. That was the worst part. She was useful, and she was right, and I'd spent two days being grateful that this time I didn't have to do everything alone — I didn't get to throw that away the moment it got frightening.
"You stay behind me," I told her. "The entire time. You touch nothing. You fight no one. First sign of trouble, you run. Swear it."
"I swear."
"Then get your boots."
We took the plasma weapons — the good ones, the interdimensional kit — and followed the lizardwoman out into the gold-dead morning, the five of us and her, moving fast and quiet toward whatever was holding her people.
The camp was an hour out, dug into a ravine: tents, a few cookfires, a pen of captives at the center, and maybe thirty bandits lazing around the edges of it like they'd already won. Bigger than the road-gangs we'd handled. Organized. They'd taken slaves and they meant to keep them.
Junha and I went flat on the ridge and read it together — and this is the part I'll never get tired of. My little brother has a mind for this. Always did, somewhere under the medicine and the bad sleep. We laid the whole thing out between us in five low minutes: where the watch was thin, which fire to take first, how to get ourselves between the bandits and the pen before any of them thought to put a blade to a captive's throat.
A thousand years had made me a weapon. But it turns out a weapon works a lot better with someone smart standing beside it.
Then we hit them.
I won't pretend it was a fair fight. I didn't want it to be. We came down off that ridge fast and from two sides, plasma fire splitting the dark before they understood the dark had teeth. I went through the watch the way the first cycle taught me — economically, no flourish, no mercy I couldn't afford. Junha was a battering ram on the far flank, that impossible strength of his folding men and tents alike. Jiyeon held the line at our backs, hands already glowing, ready the instant one of us needed her — and twice, one of us did. Seojin, to his enormous credit, planted himself at the mouth of the pen with a plasma rifle and simply did not let anything past him, screaming the entire time, exactly as promised.
And Miyoung stayed behind me. The whole time. Just like she swore.
The boss came last, the way they always do.
He was big — system-fed big, swollen with whatever ability he'd dumped his points into, a head taller than any man in the ravine and grinning like the slaughter was a fine way to start a morning. He went straight for the loudest threat, which meant he went straight for Junha.
I started toward them. I'll be honest — I started, because a thousand years screams at you not to let your little brother fight the biggest thing in the room.
Junha caught my eye across the camp. And he shook his head. Once.
I've got this.
So I let him have it. God help me, I stood there and let my baby brother fight a monster.
I needn't have worried. I should have known I needn't have worried. Whatever that woman handed Junha in the dream he can't remember was made for exactly this. The boss came in like a landslide and Junha didn't give an inch. Took it. Smiled. Then he hit back, and the grin came off the boss's face in a hurry, and what followed was short and brutal and entirely one-sided. Junha put him down in the dirt of his own camp and stood over him, breathing hard, untouched.
My brother. Twenty-one years old. Terrifying.
I have never been prouder of anyone in my life.
We opened the pen.
Lizardfolk poured out — the woman's people, battered but alive, falling on her with relief. And there were others in there we hadn't expected: beastmen. A handful of them, fur and fang, a people none of us had met yet, taken by the same bandits and caged with the same cruelty. They stepped out blinking into the new sun, looked at the five strangers who'd torn the camp apart for them, and understood.
Both peoples thanked us — the lizardfolk in the words we were starting to learn, the beastmen in a low rumbling chorus that needed no translating. Allies. More of them. People who would remember, the next time the sky did something terrible, exactly who came down off that ridge for them.
The first time, I had no one. This time, I was building something I didn't even have a name for yet.
"Miyoung." I nodded at the camp around us — the tents, the stores, everything the bandits had stolen and stacked. "All of it. Take everything that isn't nailed down. Then take the nails."
Her eyes lit up. This part, she was built for.
She walked the ravine with her hand out and the world folded things away — weapons, food, coin, supplies, crate after crate vanishing into that pocket of hers like the camp was a store and everything in it was free. By the time she finished, there was nothing left of the bandits' little kingdom but bare dirt and the boss face-down in the middle of it.
Then the five of us walked home in the full light of morning — lighter than when we'd left, and somehow heavier too, the way you always are after a thing like that.
We told the rest of them everything. The camp, the captives, the beastmen, the boss Junha put down with his bare hands. Mom took Junha's face in both her hands and made him swear he wasn't hurt. Dad listened to the tactical parts with the still attention of a man quietly revising every assumption he'd ever made about his children.
We'd gone out five and come home five. We'd freed two peoples. We'd made allies of strangers and poured an entire enemy into my little sister's pocket.
The first time, I learned that the strong survive alone.
I was starting to think, this time, that I'd had it exactly backwards.
— To be continued.