The Grey Slopes earned their name the honest way.

  Not with fog or poetry—just rock. Loose shale that shifted under every step, jagged limestone that chewed at boot soles, and a wind that carried the sour stink of musk and old rot up from somewhere below. Even in daylight, the foothills felt like a place that wanted you tired before it bothered to kill you.

  Captain Hargin halted the column at a narrow pass where the path pinched between two slanted walls of stone. He raised a fist. Twenty militia soldiers stopped as one, shields angling forward like a single creature drawing breath.

  His eyes swept the Drifters—then narrowed.

  “Form up,” he barked. “Shield wall in the center. Drifters, you don’t float behind us like baggage. You integrate. Stay in the gaps, protect the flanks, and wait for my signal.”

  Null stepped into the slot behind two stout Dwarven guards without hesitation. He checked his bowstring by feel, eyes flicking to the ridgeline, the scree, the places where stone looked too clean—as if something had been climbing over it recently.

  Blitz crouched a step to his left, daggers held in reverse grip, shoulders loose. His breathing was steady, quiet enough to disappear under the rhythmic clink of militia armor.

  Hargin’s voice cut again, low and hard.

  “Remember why you’re here.”

  The attack announced itself with a whistle.

  A sharp, thin sound—human-made. Not wind. Not birds.

  Null’s gaze snapped up.

  Sunstone Kobolds tumbled from the rocks above, a dozen of them at least, chittering and yelping as they slid down the shale like it was a playground. Rusty spears. Crude axes. Black-feathered arrows already being nocked by the ones that stayed higher.

  Hargin lifted a hand.

  “Wait for it…”

  Jax didn’t.

  Seeing only mobs and numbers, he roared a skill name, as if volume made it real.

  “[Valorous Charge]!”

  He exploded from the formation.

  For a heartbeat, it was impressive—system-assisted speed, shield leading, sword raised.

  Then his boots hit loose shale.

  He didn’t fall, but he drifted, just enough. He slammed into the first Kobold anyway, but the charge pulled him three meters forward and tore open a gap in the defense wide enough to drive a wagon through.

  The Kobolds didn’t swarm Jax.

  They poured through the opening he had created.

  Hargin’s face twisted with pure disgust.

  “Fool.”

  His head snapped toward Null and Blitz.

  “Cover the gap!”

  Null moved before his mind finished registering the order.

  Arrow. Nock. Draw. Loose.

  The shaft took a leaping Kobold in the throat mid-air. It dropped like a cut puppet, sliding down the shale.

  Blitz was already in motion, cutting across the gap with a low, fast sprint that ignored the terrain’s treachery. He caught the next Kobold at the knee, then the throat, then stepped away before the corpse even hit the ground.

  Behind them, Sora and Mina tried to turn chaos into a spell rotation.

  Sora flung a firebolt that splashed too wide, scorching stone and making three Kobolds duck—useful, but sloppy. Mina’s healing light flashed the instant Jax’s health bar dipped, wasting mana like fear was her primary stat.

  Null didn’t chase kills. He used his bow like a lever.

  A shot to force a head turn. A shot to pin a spear arm. A shot to interrupt a draw. Control, not glory—because glory didn’t keep a line intact.

  Blitz flowed through those openings like he’d been built for them, finishing what Null disrupted. Not flashy. Not loud. Just clean.

  The militia held. Shields stayed locked. Spears stabbed in measured rhythm. When Kobolds tried to break away and hit the flanks, they found steel and arrows waiting.

  Within a minute, it was over.

  The last Kobold twitched in the shale, then went still.

  Silence returned—thicker than before. The kind that comes after something tries to kill you and fails.

  Hargin marched straight to Jax.

  Jax was already wiping blood off his shield with a smug grin, like the entire maneuver had been a stage built for him.

  Hargin got close enough that his beard nearly brushed Jax’s visor.

  “You broke the wall,” he growled. “You put my men and your own Drifters at risk for a glory-kill.”

  Jax bristled. “I hit their front—”

  “You created an opening,” Hargin snapped. “And if it weren’t for them—”

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  He jerked his chin toward Null and Blitz.

  “—I’d be sending your remains back to Ironpeak in a sack.”

  Jax’s grin collapsed into a hard, red-faced glare.

  “I took down the leader!”

  “You were being a liability.”

  Hargin turned away from him like Jax wasn’t worth the air.

  He looked at Null and Blitz instead. His tone didn’t soften—Hargin didn’t do soft—but something like approval settled into it.

  “Good work. You kept your heads. You followed the rhythm. That’s how real soldiers fight.”

  Null gave a single nod.

  Blitz didn’t smile, but his eyes sharpened in a way that said the praise landed.

  The column moved again.

  And the atmosphere behind the militia turned sour.

  Jax fell back into step with Sora and Mina, muttering loud enough for the “rear” to hear.

  “Cheaters. That archer doesn’t even call skills and he hits every time. Must be some hidden buff. Some exploit.”

  Sora snorted. “Whale behavior.”

  Mina didn’t look up from her interface. “Maybe he’s got a rare passive. People get those.”

  Blitz’s hands tightened on his daggers until the leather creaked. He slid close to Null, voice low and vibrating with contained anger.

  “You’re just going to let him talk like that?”

  Null didn’t turn his head. His eyes stayed on the ridgeline, on the way the wind bent around the stone like it was carrying scent.

  “He’s a clown,” Null said. “Background noise.”

  “That’s not noise.” Blitz’s jaw flexed once. “That’s him poisoning the group.”

  Null finally glanced at him—quick, flat, and done.

  “My dignity isn’t tied to his perception.”

  Blitz held the gaze a second longer, then looked away, breathing through his nose.

  It didn’t mean he agreed.

  It meant he understood Null wasn’t going to give Jax what he wanted.

  The patrol pressed deeper, the pass widening into broken limestone terraces and sparse pine. The footing stayed bad. Every few minutes, shale slid under boots, as if the slope were trying to buck them off.

  Null noticed the militia’s micro-adjustments.

  How they shifted weight before turning. How shields angled to avoid glare. How the rear ranks watched the ridge instead of the road.

  It wasn’t “NPC programming.”

  It was lived habit.

  A second skirmish came without whistle.

  Just the soft clatter of stone above, then arrows—crude, black-fletched—hissing down from a shelf of rock. Two militia shields took the first volley with dull thuds.

  Hargin didn’t shout a skill. He shouted a shape.

  “Down. Left. Lock.”

  The militia obeyed like a hinge.

  Null’s bow came up on instinct. His eyes tracked the shelf, the movement of small shapes crouched behind rock.

  He loosed two arrows in quick succession—not to kill, but to force them back from the edge. One Kobold jerked away with a yelp, dropping its bow. The second arrow hit stone, sparked, and still did its job: heads disappeared.

  Blitz vanished toward the left flank without a word, using the militia’s shields as cover. Ten seconds later, there was a brief, muffled squeal from the shelf.

  Then silence.

  The militia advanced. The Drifters scrambled behind them, not quite understanding why that had worked, only grateful it had.

  Afterwards, Null caught a glimpse of a militia guard, his shield arm shaking, teeth clenched. A black-feathered arrow had wedged between two metal bands, bending one of the rivets.

  Not dangerous now.

  Dangerous later.

  Null filed it away without thinking. The way he filed everything away.

  By the time the sun began to lower, the wind sharpened. The air cooled fast, like the mountain was sucking warmth out of the stone.

  Hargin ordered a halt in a shallow bowl of terrain sheltered by stone on three sides. The militia moved with practiced speed—sentries posted, perimeter set, fire started low and tight so it wouldn’t broadcast their location.

  The Drifters milled, unsure what to do when the system wasn’t telling them to tap a corpse.

  Null watched Jax hover near Sora and Mina, whispering with that tight, conspiratorial energy of someone who needed to believe the world was unfair to him specifically.

  He also watched Blitz—who didn’t hover.

  Blitz moved.

  He checked sightlines. He counted exits. He circled the perimeter once, fast, then returned like a dog that didn’t trust the yard.

  Null’s eyes landed on a veteran soldier sitting off to the side after the second skirmish, staring at a bent spearhead with a look that was half annoyance, half resignation. He tested the edge with a thumb and hissed.

  Null walked over.

  “I can fix that,” he said.

  The Dwarf blinked up at him. “You? You’re one of the Drifters. Thought you lot only knew how to scream skill names and drink potions.”

  “I’m a smith,” Null replied. Simple. No defense. No pride.

  He knelt, set the spear across his knee, and opened his pack.

  Not mana. Not glamour.

  Tools.

  A small hammer with a worn handle. Specialized pliers. A wedge punch. A strip of treated leather. A lump of resin that smelled faintly of pine and smoke.

  Null corrected the bend with controlled taps, coaxing the angle back into line. Reset the edge line. Then stabilized a loose binding where the socket met the shaft with resin and a leather wrap pulled tight.

  The veteran watched, silent.

  When Null finished, he handed it back.

  The spear looked… right. Not pretty. Not new. But functional. Honest.

  The Dwarf tested it with two quick thrusts into the shale, then grunted.

  “Huh.”

  It wasn’t praise.

  But in a militia, a “huh” meant you didn’t waste my time.

  Word spread anyway.

  Quietly at first. Then less quietly.

  A second soldier approached with a buckler showing a hairline fracture at the rim. A third with a shield strap half-torn. Then another spear. Then a short sword whose edge had rolled.

  Null didn’t advertise himself. He didn’t posture.

  He just worked.

  Fast. Efficient. Hands moving with that unsettling certainty—like the motions had been carved into him long before he understood why.

  Captain Hargin watched from a distance, arms crossed. His eyes didn’t leave Null’s hands.

  When four soldiers had been sent back into the line with repaired gear, Hargin finally walked over.

  He looked down at Null, then at the tools.

  “A Drifter who understands steel,” he said. Not a question.

  Null didn’t look up. “Steel doesn’t care what you call me.”

  For a moment, Hargin’s mouth twitched—almost a smile, but not quite.

  “Good answer.”

  He turned his head slightly, gaze cutting past Null toward the Drifters.

  “If you lot learned half that discipline,” he said loudly, “you’d stop dying in ditches and blaming the sun for it.”

  Sora bristled. Mina pretended not to hear. Jax’s face tightened like he’d swallowed something sour.

  Behind Null, Blitz stood with his arms folded, trying very hard to look indifferent and failing just enough to be obvious. When Null rose, Blitz leaned in slightly, voice low.

  “That’s… actually useful,” he said, like he’d just discovered fire wasn’t a rumor.

  Null glanced at him. “You sound surprised.”

  Blitz huffed once—half laugh, half disbelief. “I’m not surprised you can do it. I’m surprised you can do it without making it a thing.”

  Then, after a beat—awkward, restrained, but real—he added, “Good work.”

  It wasn’t a cheer. It wasn’t a speech.

  It was the rough shape of pride from someone who wasn’t used to offering it.

  Null didn’t answer with warmth.

  But he didn’t brush it off either.

  He gave Blitz a single nod and went back to the line.

  As the camp settled, a militia cook shoved a rough tin cup of hot broth into Null’s hand without ceremony. It tasted like salt and herbs and something smoked too long.

  Null drank anyway.

  Across the fire, Jax stared at him like Null had stolen something that was supposed to belong to him.

  Attention. Respect. Reality.

  To Jax, those militia men were supposed to be background. Flavor text. Quest props.

  But they were looking at Null like he mattered.

  Like he was real.

  And Jax couldn’t stand that.

  A distant howl rolled down the slopes—low and hungry. Not close. Not yet. But enough to make Sora stop talking mid-sentence.

  Hargin didn’t flinch. He simply pointed to two soldiers and snapped a quiet order.

  The sentries shifted. The perimeter tightened.

  Null felt the bow in his hands again. Light. Cheap. Practical.

  And, tonight, necessary.

  He sat where he was told, eyes on the darkening ridgeline, tools in his pack, and the quiet understanding settling deeper into him with every breath.

  Steel didn’t care what you were.

  But men did.

  And friction—between ego and discipline, between greed and craft—could cut just as deep as any blade.

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