I Have a Military Shop Tab in Fantasy World

He did not return on a black ring like a proclamation. He folded into the seam he had kept for himself under the valley and let the earth close over him the way a book shuts to keep its place. The descent was quiet—good stone, old heat, the slow breath of tunnels that had never needed names.

His hall greeted him with the small truths he liked: a basalt table polished by gauntlet and time, sconces that were not fire but remembered being fire, the dull, patient hum of runes that meant pressure, vent, focus. He sat carefully. That was new.

Pain announced itself like a ledger read aloud. Hip: pitted by small storms and their stubborn cadence. Visor: starred, with one impolite tunnel drilled where honest iron had insisted. Left ribs: opened by guided fury, closed by will and heat, now annoyed. Palm runes: one finger guttered, stable again because anger had bullied it. Cloak-skin: sloughed twice, regrown in a hurry, sulking.

He liked it. Pain spoke plainly. He had missed plain speech.

"Unbound Soul," he said into the basalt, trying the human's title again as if it were a tool in a hand. The stone did not echo. Perfect.

He replayed the fight with a craftsman's pettiness. Smoke, thrown past him, not at him, to backlight and make the world tell thermal truth. Claymores set at shin height in a pair because one teaches and two insist. A hose of tiny bullets stitched so tight it looked like thread. Old Soviet steel that refused to lie. A Carl Gustaf jet kissing a wound another tool had opened. The rude cannon—Black Dragon—first a blunt sermon, then a fracture that chose malice over elegance and became six arguments at once.

And the archer.

He did not soften. He gave her what mattered: attention. A leaf that stings, yes—but one that listens. She hunted seams, not spectacle. She let the cook's storms make openings and then spent her hurt wisely. She kept the angle of her shot while falling. The arrow that pinned his gauntlet for a heartbeat had disobeyed gravity with admirable manners. When he clipped her—helm and shoulder together, a cruel bell—he had aimed for removal, not kill. He had expected the man to fold with her.

The man did not fold. The man got honest.

The Shop. The word felt like shape more than sound, a void that delivered teeth when asked with numbers. He could not see the gears, only the outcomes: artillery groaning into being, missiles that curved like hawks with good teachers, a truck that wrote a sky of smoke and then learned to group its notes. "Infinite retaliation," the human had said with a mouth that half-believed. Not infinite. Enough. Enough to make guessing expensive. Enough to make the day fun.

Fun. He made the small ugly sound that lives between snort and laugh. He had not meant to think it. He allowed it.

He stood and walked the length of the hall, testing gait and pride. The limp was surface, not core. He tapped a wall. A slab slid. The slate behind it drank his heat and brightened to map.

He drew arteries under Elandra with a finger: the vaulted aquifer kings had forgotten; the crypt lattice that had been a prison when the world still sang in vowels; the old ward-anchors that had stirred when he walked nearby, not awake—restless. He marked a spiral in the poorer quarter where brick wanted to be stone. He circled the river gate. He drew a thin line through the guild stables—horses panicking at the right minute could do more work than ten clever men. He pressed a small point where the market smelled of oil and onions and pepper. He did not write their names. He remembered hands and aim without poetry.

He turned from the map and faced arithmetic: he could have died. Not drama—accounting. If the Dragon had carried a second fracture before he learned to curve the wall; if the archer's shaft had stuck at his elbow instead of snapping; if one heavy burst had stolen his balance a breath earlier—he might have become instruction rather than instructor.

He was not afraid of death. He was afraid of boredom. Today had not been boring. He owed thanks to a cook with a temper and a leaf with good taste in seams.

"Thank you," he said, quiet enough to keep the compliment useful.

Now: counter-grammar.

Pressure walls, neat and proud—those cracked under fracture darts. Present curves, not planes. Teach force to slide. Cloak-skin—too honest; seed failure lines so fragments lodge and die. The visor—its star told a truth; add inner baffles to catch what future honesty shoves through. Palm runes—too legible; bury the lines under plate, let the gesture live in the shoulder so men watch the wrong hand.

The Shop—he could not stop purchase, perhaps nudge when. Teach battlefield air to file deliveries slightly wrong: two paces left, one heartbeat late. Not theft. Grit in a gear.

Kinetic darts—answer with song through stone: harmonic cancels tuned to the Dragon's barrel so force trips over its own echo. He would need to stand nearer ground. Good. He liked ground.

Old guns that traverse by hand—tip the world under them, a patient undulation that steals center. He had done it at a pass once and watched a column miss everything by a handspan while insisting they were accurate. Missiles—respect first (move), then grids of false heat at improper depths. Pride makes guidance crash. Fog that eats jacket energy—hungry air cone where microguns hose loudest. Mortars and grenades and the seven petty violences that turn alleys into teeth—walk. Accept stings. Save answers for questions worth the price.

He dismissed plate a finger's width from skin and let seam-light dim. He examined the visor hole from the inside, ran two fingers along its burnt lip, spoke patience into it so it would mend without smoothing. Scars do more work than polish. He bled heat into the wall and pulled it back so stone would remember his appetite and offer itself tomorrow.

He visited a corridor whose walls kept trivia: gouges from bad teaching days, a child's careful straight line, a footprint of someone he had loved badly. He did not put his foot in it. He never did.

At the open-roof room the sky looked down through a fault. He lay on his back and let heat rise like admission. He counted breaths until control returned with its usual arrogance. Plans arranged themselves without haste.

Not Elandra, not yet. He was not a wall-knocker. He was a pressure artist. A city with a cook like that deserved a week to sharpen or snap. If he struck at dawn, he would earn spectacle and then waste. If he waited, he might get a chorus.

Five small towns west believed they were too small to matter. He would teach one of them modesty and let the others decide. He would undulate roads, not break them, so wagons learned dances and time went missing. He would sing to ward-anchors until they moved a finger. He would open a seam in a guild cellar and leave it there—not to enter, to remove sleep. He would not touch the stall of pepper and oil. He would ask the river to remember an old name and walk sideways for an hour, then pretend it hadn't. Confusion saves more lives than courage spends.

Work, then rest.

He returned to the basalt, took out tools small enough to insult his scale, and engraved. He wrote the new curve-grammar along the palm and buried it under plate. He tuned the helm so the star became a funnel for future insults. He set three little catch-pockets inside his chest for shrapnel's pride. He tightened the guttered finger rune and left it a little ugly so he would not forget to respect it.

When he flexed, the changes complained the way good fits do before they concede. He allowed himself the indulgence of a breath that bordered on satisfaction.

He went to the water room with no water—only steam that had changed its mind. He breathed until his bones stopped narrating. He said the archer's name once, to file it correctly. He did not say the cook's. Names should not be spent where they do no useful harm.

He returned to the map and drew a road east. Midway he wrote a small circle that meant lesson.

He tasted Elandra through stone—towers trembling, not from fear but from indecision; bells learning a single note and holding it like stubborn farmers. He granted neither bravery nor cleverness. He granted hunger.

"Keep your iron singing," he said, and surprised himself by not knowing whether it was a threat or a wish.

Before he left, he opened a chest and lifted a ring of glass caught from a lightning strike he had persuaded the sky to make in a particular sand. It remembered a different world. It asked if this one still had rain. He told it yes. It glowed with a promise older than any of his runes and went to sleep again. He smiled—a hairline crack in composure—and put it away.

He stepped to the seam and smoothed the air where it would open when asked. Not yet. Let the field he wanted taste its quiet and learn the edges of its shadow.

He allowed one indulgence: he admitted the sentence that had tried to form all day.

He had been bested—forced to adjust first. He would repay that with interest and care.

He thought of the human's casual talk. Gather your seven. Let them. Seven knives could make a better shape to push against. He would bring answers and questions and leave room for surprise. Surprise had fed him more honestly today than ruin had.

He palmed the seam open.

He paused, facing west—through stone, through memory—toward a small room that smelled of onion broth and leather and a woman's boots, where a man practiced stillness with a rifle cleaned past reason.

"Stay loud," he murmured, and stepped through. The seam closed with the busy indifference of a wound choosing to scar.