Pain woke Seiko.
It wasn't sharp—it was a dull, nauseating throb at the back of his skull, a sick reminder of being hurled against the cave wall. He opened his eyes to a world of gray blur. For a heartbeat, the panic of the fight flooded him again, his pulse hammering against his ribs.
"Pawn…" A low metallic growl came from the entrance.
Seiko focused. Acies was there—a dark silhouette framed by the pale light of dawn. The Pawniard stood motionless, but Seiko could see fresh dents in the Pokémon's steel armor and the way it favored its left leg. They had both paid a price.
"I'm fine," Seiko lied, forcing himself upright. The world spun violently. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and willed the dizziness to fade. 'Concussion. Probably mild. But I can't afford to be down.'
He crawled to the cave entrance. Morning air hit him—cold, laced with ash. The pit forge was wrecked, reduced to a heap of shattered clay and scattered coal. The Ursaring had unleashed its fury on it.
And worst of all—the knife, his first creation, was gone. Lodged deep in the skull of an enraged Alpha beast.
"Damn it," Seiko muttered. They were alive, yes—but unarmed. Their only piece of advanced technology lay in ruins.
Acies clicked softly, scanning the plains. The Ursaring was nowhere in sight, but Seiko knew it was still out there. Wounded—yes. Which only made it infinitely more dangerous. A wounded predator wasn't tactical; it was vengeful. It would come back.
"We're not waiting for it to," Seiko said, his voice hardening. He forced himself to stand. His head protested, but adrenaline and fear were powerful painkillers.
"New plan," he said, his engineer's mind already rebuilding. "Yesterday was about tools. Today is about defense. First, we seal this entrance. Second, we rebuild the forge. Third, I make a new weapon—a better one."
He pointed toward the mouth of the cave. "A wall. But a fixed wall is a trap. If they besiege us, we're stuck. We need a gate—one they can't open."
He scanned the area. Wood. The ruins of the old outpost still held dozens of charred but solid beams.
'A chevaux de frise,' Seiko thought immediately. 'A stake defense. Modular. We can build it inside the cave and push it forward to block the entrance at night. And if we need to escape, we can pull it back from within.'
It was an elegant design—several X-shaped beams joined by a long spine, each bristling with sharpened stakes.
"Acies," Seiko ordered, pointing toward the thickest beams among the ruins. "I need wood. Lots of it. And stakes—half a meter (about 1.6 feet) long, sharpened."
Over the next few hours, their synergy became a production line. Seiko selected the beams; Acies, despite its dents, cut them to size with terrifying precision. Its Fury Cutters were faster than any saw. Seiko, using a sharp granite rock as a primitive knife, stripped off branches and began shaping the pointed tips of the stakes Acies cut.
They worked feverishly, every sense attuned to the faintest sound from the plains.
While they worked, Seiko noticed something. Acies's cuts, though fast, were rough. They splintered the wood.
"Wait," Seiko said, taking one of the freshly cut stakes. "Your cuts are brute force. A spear tip needs a clean edge."
He sat down and began scraping the stake's tip with the granite stone—not cutting, but shaping, creating a smooth, sharp plane. He showed Acies the difference between a jagged and a refined point.
Acies tilted its head, red eyes analyzing. Then it picked up another stake. This time, instead of a quick Fury Cutter, it used a single metallic claw—a slow, deliberate Metal Claw. SKREEE… The sound was like a file on wood. Acies shaved away the fibers, mimicking Seiko's motion with mechanical precision.
The result was a near-perfect point in seconds.
Seiko smiled. "Yes. Exactly like that. We're learning."
He used raw Patrat hide strips to lash the X-shaped beams together. It was frustrating, slow work without a proper knife, but he managed—using a shed claw of Acies he'd found to punch holes through the leather.
By midday, they had a formidable barricade—a wall of sharpened stakes about one and a half meters (roughly 5 feet) tall, heavy enough to stop a charge but light enough for the two of them to move.
"Good," Seiko said, panting. "Priority one—complete."
They sat inside their now-fortified cave, eating cold Patrat meat. The relief was overwhelming.
But priorities two and three remained.
"The forge." Seiko eyed the wreckage. The clay structure was broken, but the concept worked. "We can rebuild it—bigger."
He spent the next hour hauling more clay from the stream. Acies followed like a shadow, guarding him and scanning the horizon.
As Seiko scooped clay from the riverbed, he noticed something—some of the rocks weren't gray. They were a deep, earthy red, heavy as lead.
He dropped the clay. 'No way…'
He picked up one of the red stones. Dense. When he scraped it against granite, it left a blood-red streak.
Hematite. Iron ore.
His heart skipped a beat.
'I've been using scrap—iron ruined by Heinar's oxidation. This… this is raw material.'
He forgot the clay entirely. For the next hour, he gathered every red rock he could find, piling them inside the cave. Acies seemed to understand his excitement, dragging larger stones with its claws.
By the time Seiko repaired the forge—this time reinforcing the clay walls with river reeds, forming a crude adobe—he had a respectable pile of iron ore.
This changed everything. He wasn't repairing anymore. He was creating.
"I'll need more heat," he muttered. "A lot more."
He rebuilt the coal mound, bigger this time, and lit it. The familiar roar of flame filled the air.
But smelting ore was different from forging metal.
'I need a crucible,' he realized. He couldn't just toss the ore into the fire—it would mix with ash and impurities.
He shaped the last of his clay into a thick bowl about the size of his head and dried it as quickly as possible by the fire, praying it wouldn't crack.
While it dried, Acies returned with a third Patrat. The little war machine was turning into an incredibly efficient hunter.
The process took the rest of the day. Seiko crushed the hematite ore, pounding it with a stone hammer. He mixed the iron powder with powdered charcoal—a carbon-reducing agent—and packed it into the crude clay crucible.
He placed the crucible into the white-hot heart of the forge.
Then came the real work—bellows by breath.
He blew for hours.
His head throbbed. His lungs burned. The concussion made the world tilt. But he refused to stop. Acies sat beside him, silent and watchful, a steel sentinel lending him strength.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in orange and violet, Seiko saw the crucible's contents glow with liquid brilliance.
With two thick sticks, he pulled it from the forge, staggering from the heat. The crucible cracked as it hit the ground.
Inside, nestled in glassy slag, was a lump of metal the size of his fist—glowing red-hot. Not refined steel, but raw, spongy iron. A bloom.
Seiko laughed, hoarse from smoke. "We did it, Acies. Iron. Real iron."
Before it cooled, he placed it on his stone anvil and began to hammer.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
This time, he wasn't forging a knife. He was forging a spearhead.
His movements were surer now. He hammered the bloom, driving out slag, folding it over itself. He shaped a long, willow-leaf blade—thick at the center for strength, edges narrowing to sharp symmetry. He left a hollow socket at the base.
When it was done, the metal gleamed dark gray and solid. He quenched it in the stream, listening to the hiss.
He took one of the longest, straightest stakes Acies had cut—the same one he'd used for sharpening practice. He carved the end to fit snugly into the socket of the spearhead, binding it tight with rawhide strips.
When he finished, the last rays of sunlight were gone.
Seiko stood, holding a spear nearly two meters (about 6.5 feet) long. It was heavy, balanced—and deadly.
He walked to the mouth of the cave. Acies stood beside him.
Together, they pushed their chevaux de frise barricade into place, the sharpened stakes pointing into the darkness. It locked in with a deep, satisfying thud.
Seiko leaned on his spear shaft. Behind the barricade, in a cave warmed by a high-temperature forge, with a true iron weapon in hand and a steel soldier at his side, he looked out toward the plains.
For the first time since arriving in this world, he didn't feel like a victim. He didn't feel like an exile.
He felt like a founder.
"Let it come," Seiko whispered to the darkness, to the wounded Ursaring, to the wild world beyond. "This time, we'll be ready."