The town woke slow and suspicious. News moved like damp through wool: not gossip exactly, but the careful exchange of people who'd learned to measure every rumor before letting it bloom. Ethan left the diner with a wrapped forearm and a coffee to-go, the wolf-stone warm in his pocket. The Primer's aftertaste still thrummed faintly in his muscles — not a power, but a memory of speed and a reminder that miracles cost things.
He checked the Panel the way a man checks a private ledger. The numbers flashed only for him: 870 PP. Quiet arithmetic. He'd spent 200 on the Primer and had been deliberate with everything else. Manual Mode still held; the system would not yank him away. That decision felt like a tether he'd chosen instead of one imposed.
Isla had a list of small businesses that had close-calls last night. Old Miller's was not the only pane that had glowed. A seam of disappearances threaded half the town: a fisherman's boy gone from an empty bunk, a teenager who'd not come home after working the diner, a dog too frightened to be soothed. People exchanged facts in low voices, and the air tasted of guilt and thin fear.
Ethan moved like he owned nothing but his curiosity, but under his sleeve the Terrain Module hummed a map of places likely to harbor secrets: the mill, the old boathouse, an abandoned train platform beyond the west road. He could have spent another dramatic extraction — mind-scan, full-shift emulation — but each spectacle here made watchers hungry. He needed tools that read as competence. He needed scripts and scents.
He pressed the Panel, quietly.
PANEL (HOST ONLY): Pack Bond Template — 60 PP. Enhanced Scent (Tier I) — 80 PP. Confirmation?
He did not hesitate. The Pack Bond Template would give him phrases and ritual beats he could use to pull disparate people into a single temporary cohesion — not magic, but a choreography that read as empathy and competence. Enhanced Scent would let him track the faint human/inhuman residue the creatures left behind; it was blunt and practical.
Two clicks later the Panel confirmed the purchases and the subtraction: -140 PP → Balance: 730 PP.
He folded the buys into his head the way a carpenter folds tools into a belt. When he spoke to Bella and Edward that afternoon, he did not say, I bought a ritual. He said, We need a plan everyone can trust. He offered a simple script: shared names, a marker ritual at the oak, a set of mutual rules for tonight's watches. The words came from him, but the Pack Bond Template had given them cadence and timing so they sounded like common sense instead of contrivance.
Jacob listened with the slow, assessing silence of someone who weighs bone and intent. He was not quick to trust outsiders, but he was quick to accept competence. When Ethan suggested a joint sweep—Cullens to shadow the rim, Quileute to cut the high ground, and humans to monitor exits—Jacob's jaw tightened and then eased. "No one crosses the marked line," he said. "We move at my signal."
Bella stayed close to Ethan as if proximity could answer questions he'd gone to town to ask. Edward watched from the edges, eyes fjords of silence. Ethan felt the private map in his head: where sound would carry, where the river cut an echo path, which dark hedges would swallow footsteps. He'd spent PP on a way to read the world more closely; now he would use that reading to make other people's skills snap together.
They set out at dusk. Isla helped stitch together a casual story to justify unusual movement in town; the Cullens left their house as if for a long drive; the Quileute slipped from their beach as shadows. The plan was modest: follow the scent trail from Miller's to the edge of town, track movement to the boathouse, and hold a perimeter until morning. Ethan kept the Hunter Awareness Beacon in his pack as an insurance, but tonight the Enhanced Scent hummed through him like a tuned string.
The scent made the world a new channel. It was not mystical; it was layered: the iron of blood, the oily animal-sour of someone who'd fed recently, the indistinct undernote of smoke and laundry detergent. He padded along the alley and felt the trail like a faint tug. It bent toward the boathouse.
They moved without shouting. The Cullens flanked the distant shadows where moonlight would betray any unnatural gleam; Jacob's pack folded the high brush. Ethan walked in the middle and whispered the lines the Template had given him when a local fisherman's wife began to tremble at the sight of armed faces.
"Name," he said softly, the ritual's first beat. "We are here. We come with hands, not with hunger. Tell us one thing you need, and we will hold that need while we look."
It was astonishing how often people answered that instead of bolting. Names came, a short confession here and there; fear turned to a brittle kind of cooperation. The Template didn't lie. It provided a human way to exchange assurances that felt like honesty rather than manipulation.
At the boathouse a wedge of shadow pulled at the edge of Griffith's light; wet footprints vanished under the planks. Jacob signaled, and the group split silent as a breathing organism. Ethan crouched at the edge and let his enhanced scent pull at the air. He smelled three things clearly now: recent blood, a human perfume that smelled of laundry and lemons, and an undercurrent — a warmth that belonged to the Cullens when they'd fed, odd and spare.
The trail veered toward the old ferry dock, a stretch of rotten planking and cold salt wind. They moved as one; the Cullens took a watching line, Jacob's wolves folded into the dunes, and the humans kept the road. Ethan's role was quiet orchestration: he counted footfalls, guided where people put their flashlights to avoid washing out night-vision, whispered the Template lines to keep tempers tethered.
Then movement: three pale shapes slipping along the dock, careful like predators that had practiced patience. The Quileute hit the high ground and surged in a way that made the world's muscles tighten; the Cullens melted into motion like light folding. Ethan stayed at the hinge point: a small, ordinary human who could call a maneuver and have it executed. That was—he realized with a small, private thrill—exactly the leverage he wanted, invisible and decisive.
They didn't fight a war. They contained a raid. The Cullens blinded two figures with a sweep of motion and a rustle that broke the night. Jacob's pack boxed the nearest exit. Ethan had the Enhanced Scent to see the faintest micro-trail and pointed it like a compass: here. The pale raiders faltered and then fled into the reeds, hissing and disappointed. One human—shaken, hands bound, pale with cold—cowered under a crate and then looked up with the small betrayal of gratitude.
The sweep turned into a quiet arrest of circumstance: no dramatic bloodletting, no banner of victory. The raiders escaped beyond the marsh, but the rescue held. The town's people who had watched from hidden corners came out to find someone they'd known returned—staggered, alive.
Later, around a low, managed fire on the dock, Ethan let the Template do its slow work. He prompted folks to exchange names, to place a smooth stone at the oak as a promise of future courtesy, to agree on a joint watch rotation. Bella thanked him with that soft, earnest look. Jacob gave him a small nod that felt like acceptance. Edward's gaze lingered long enough to be a question and then moved on.
When the Panel ticked its private approval, Ethan checked the balance: +500 PP mission reward (base 50 ×10) — the system's arithmetic slid into his view. New Balance: 1,230 PP.
He felt the numbers the way a farmer feels rain: useful, enabling, not reason enough in themselves. Manual Mode still held. The Pack Bond Template lay in his memory like a taught string he could pluck again later. Enhanced Scent had given him more than a trail; it had given him confidence that a small man without spectacle could make the right call.
They left the dock with no badges and fewer scars than expected. The town would stitch this night into its story and not know his ledger; that secrecy was precisely what kept their world quieter, safer. Ethan walked back through mist toward the diner with a private tally updated and a feeling like responsibility pressing steady into his shoulders.
He had more PP than before. He had more trust than he'd had two nights earlier. The multiplication under his sleeve was invisible to everyone but him — a secret advantage he chose to spend in ways that smoothed lines rather than burned them. He slept that night with his hand on the wolf-stone and the knowledge that the ledger was a tool, not an answer; that the toughest choices would be the ones where he spent numbers to preserve ordinary lives, not to paint himself into legend.