Talia woke to quiet—not the brittle kind that meant danger, but a soft, lived-in quiet. Low voices. A laugh here and there. Pots clinking. The steady rush of the waterfall. No crying, no panic, no arguments about night watch. Just… morning. Cool air brushed her nose, edged with early-autumn bite. Smoke, damp wool, cooking oil, crushed grass. It felt like a village, not a camp on the verge of fleeing.
She rolled up, shoved on her boots, and stepped outside.
Grandma Elene waved her over and handed her a warm leaf wrap. "Before someone steals it." Inside: fried egg, peppery greens, nut paste.
Talia blinked. "Foraged?"
"Mm. Dav took Jace and Lira. Just the edge of the forest." The emphasis was deliberate.
Talia exhaled. "You're all trying to age me fifteen years."
"Children aren't glass," Grandma said. "They're supervised."
Talia bit in—flavour blooming rich and smoky—and made an involuntary noise.
"Good?" Lira asked shyly. Jace bounced beside her, clutching leaves triumphantly. Dav hovered behind them, bow over his shoulder.
"Very good," Talia said, pulling the kids into a quick hug. They poured out stories—bush-chickens, egg collecting, mist on spiderwebs—until a construction worker hovered at the clearing's edge, papers clutched like a hostage.
Duty called. Talia sighed and straightened. "Don't let Dav teach you bad habits."
"We're doomed," Grandma said under her breath.
The construction man practically trotted over as soon as Talia stepped away, words tumbling out—questions about ceiling supports, whether the system had limits on stair gradients, if there was any way to pre-map the mountain's internal structure. She answered what she could, promised to check the rest, and watched him sprint off toward the makeshift drafting area, shouting for the others that they'd have preliminary designs ready by lunch.
She headed for the Lord tent.
The big canvas structure crouched near the cliff, ropes taut, sides reinforced with stone weights. Inside, it was already warm from breath and bodies. Dav and Theo stood at the main table, heads bent over a map, while other department heads clustered in small groups, murmuring.
The map caught her eye immediately. Someone had improved it overnight. The valley lines were cleaner, the river more accurately placed, the tunnel entrance marked with neat, careful ink.
"Going to need paper soon," Talia muttered. "We're burning through it."
"Already on it," Theo said without looking up. He tapped a small stack of books sitting beside the map. "Also, I dug these out last night. From a Random item drop back on Earth."
Talia leaned in to squint at the titles.
"Practical Guide to Designing a Settlement 101," Theo read. "One hundred Must-Know Recipes for Early Settlers. And—my personal favourite—Know How, Know Why: Crafting on the Frontier."
"We got isekai starter packs," Dav observed dryly.
Theo's eyes flicked to Talia, catching the way she stiffened for a split second. "You look guilty," he said.
Talia sighed and, very reluctantly, pulled three slim volumes from her space earring. The covers proudly revealed: "Surviving the Apocalypse with my Superman Grandpa", "Me and my trusty Blue Heeler take on the End of Days", and "Last Light in the Last Days? Not me and my Lantern Fish companion!".
The tent erupted in laughter.
"Shut up," Talia said mildly. "They sound interesting."
She slipped them back into her ring before anyone could snatch them. She did want to read them, on some hypothetical future evening where nobody was bleeding or arguing about food stores.
"So," she said, folding her arms. "We apparently have a small library of practical guides. Have you read yours?"
Theo shrugged. "Skimmed them when we first dropped. Bored on watch duty. Mostly generalised fluff, some good frameworks, but nothing we couldn't reinvent. Still, they'll be useful for the construction crew. After that, school or library."
"Library," Grandma Elene said from near the entrance, where she was looking over a separate list. "We are not raising children without books. I refuse."
"Duly noted," Theo said.
Talia tapped the map with a finger. "Right. I came to talk about hunting. We can't do it like before."
Dav rolled his shoulders, gaze already shifting to a more tactical focus. "No. The tunnel's the bottleneck now. That entrance eats at least a third of our workable daylight for outside operations. We can't run out, hunt, and be back for dinner like a stroll."
He tapped a scribbled schedule pinned to the edge of the table.
"Hunting teams go on a two-day rotation," he said. "Day out, night out, day back. Same with patrol units—four teams, staggered. One on the wall, one outside finishing, one preparing to go, one resting. That way there's always eyes on the valley entrance and the tunnel both."
"Anything else I need?" she asked.
A few updates followed—water tests from the Professor's team, promising soil nutrient reports from Mum, initial beast catalogue additions. Nothing on fire, nothing wildly unexpected. A strange luxury.
"What about the Nomads?" Theo broached a subject everyone had forgotten.
Talia didn't pause,"Until the system objects, we're keeping everyone."
The group all exhaled in relief. "No objections?, alright Theo adjust our personnel lists to include all the nomad teams and notify their leaders about the Cores decision, make sure that they understand this all depends on the territory systems response." Talia said at last then she drew herself up a little.
"In that case, the Shadow Lord will be taking over leadership for a while."
A couple of the older squad leaders snorted. "When has he not been?" one muttered.
Talia chose not to hear it. "I," she continued, "will be very busy crafting us a kingdom of stone. Those who displease me will have the best view from the mountain."
"Top floor?" Cael called. "Or is this a hanging-outside-the-wall situation?"
"Still deciding," Talia said. "Motivate me with good behaviour."
Laughter rippled again, warm and easy. They were starting to learn how to joke around the fear.
She didn't stay. Her time was better spent on the cliff.
The construction team had colonised a flattish piece of meadow and as Talia approached, she felt the prickle of too many tired eyes on her—overbright, wired, papers clutched in white-knuckled fingers.
Theo, trailing at her shoulder, took one look at the stack of designs and muttered, "We're moving paper-making up the list. We'll need tree samples for pulp."
Talia stopped at the edge of the mess and clapped her hands once. "All right. Let's see what you've got."
The nearest architect handed her a sheet. Floor plans, cross-sections, notes. She touched the corner and flicked her awareness to the system, a translucent interface flickered, asking if she wanted to 'upload'.
"Sure," Talia said, and confirmed.
There was a sense of something filing itself away. A soft ding in the back of her skull. She checked the result: approved. F-Rank. Adaptable.
Interesting.
She picked up another sheet. Same process. Approved.
Third, held, but flagged for alterations.
On a whim, Talia gathered the whole stack, set it on the invisible surface only she could see, and tried to upload them all at once. Nothing.
"All right, fine," she muttered. Then she set her jaw and began a ten-minute speed run of shuffling through paper, tapping, uploading, mentally tagging.
When the last sheet vanished into the invisible archive, Talia exhaled and looked at the results.
It was, as she suspected, a mixed bag.
"The good news," she said, "is that all your building designs are approved. A few are too high Rank for now, but the system downgraded them for temporary use. They can scale up as our territory does."
Murmurs. A few triumphant fist-pumps.
"The production stations," she went on, "are also approved. Somehow. Even the… floating solar-powered log-handling platform."
The inventor of that monstrosity coughed delicately.
"That one's tagged B-Rank," Talia added. "We'd need something called runes to power it long-term. Which we don't have, or even know of, yet. So it's on the 'future madness' shelf."
"The bad news," Talia said, "is that your town planning made the system either confused or offended, which, frankly, is impressive. Half of it needs adjustments. The other half it was chucked out as 'non-viable fantasy.'"
A collective groan.
She shot a look at Theo. He was already scrolling through the same results on his own panel, expression intent.
"I'm designating future submissions to Theo," Talia announced. "He'll pre-filter before we bother the nice aloof system spirit."
Theo's head came up, eyes narrowing. "Paper is a limited resource," he said crisply. "If you burn through it on ten variations of the same staircase, you will find yourselves carving plans into the dirt. Your choice."
That gave them pause. The enthusiasm cooled into something more practical.
Talia hid a smile. 'Love having him work for me.'
She sat down on an overturned crate, pulled the "needs adjustment" designs into a neat pile, and began to work through them with the team. She pointed out issues the system had flagged—stairs too steep, corridors too narrow for evacuation, load-bearing walls compromised by over-ambitious windows. They argued, amended, sketched new options. Theo occasionally leaned over her shoulder to offer a more efficient layout.
An hour later, Talia pushed back from the crate, stretching her cramped fingers. "All right. Uploading these again."
This time, every plan came back with a clean approval tag.
They spread the chosen designs out across the grass.
"It's not… pretty," one of the younger drafters said slowly. "Not like some of the fantasy sketches."
Talia studied the chosen composite. "It's more than 'not pretty,'" she said. "It's ours. And it's good."
Six levels, stacked into the mountain.
Basement: water storage tanks, an emergency bunker, and bulk storage chambers nestled closest to the bedrock, easiest to insulate, hardest to reach from outside.
First floor: industrial area, military training hall, indoor greenhouses running along the cliff where sunlight could be funnelled in, animal pens for the pet beetle, the bush-chickens, and the three baby Stone Rabbits that had somehow become everyone's shared responsibility.
Second floor: The governing centre along with Education and Medical centres.
Third floor: Housing. Multiple clusters, each with shared kitchens and wash spaces. Enough flexibility to shift families as they grew or changed. With a small central street blocked out for future trade—stalls, a canteen, the inevitable gossip knots
Fourth floor: Research, labs and higher education classrooms and a great deal of empty space for whatever the future threw at them.
Fifth floor: The Culture and History collection with a library and museum.
Sixth floor: Ceremony and Entertainment. A hall large enough for the entire settlement to gather. A smaller side space marked for mourning rites. Corners noted as "stage maybe?" with uncertain arrows.
Each area was designed in a way that they could be expanded into districts once the territory expanded further.
It was perfect, more than needed for a winter overstay, but who said it only had to be used for winter?