The Extra's Rise

Low gravity makes everything look slow even when your heart isn't. The rim ridge beyond Tycho was a line of broken glass under a black sky, and we moved along it like chalk marks—quiet, exact, nobody trying to be the loudest thing on the Moon.

"We set here," Reika said, planting a boot on a flat slab. Cursed Script ghosted across the back of her hand in dull violet, not for power—yet—but to stamp the site into her memory. "Inner ring at thirty paces. Outer at eighty. No one crosses the inner but Arthur, Luna, Erebus. If I say 'out,' you sprint."

Luna nodded once, her eyes calm and bright. "Harmony on my call."

Erebus lifted a palm. Bone from thin air, clean and pale, rose without a clink: four low pylons, each the height of my knee. They did not hum. They did not leak. They simply were, and the ground around them agreed to become less messy.

Seraphina paced off twelve points and set down what looked like silver chips in the dust. "Timing-stars," she said. "You can't see them work, but you'll feel when the counts drift." Her breath misted—an ice trick, not temperature—and a faint pattern of plum blossoms traced under her feet as she moved.

Cecilia unrolled three hair-fine filaments from a bone spindle. Witchcraft—her Gift—curled through them like mischief. "Chaos goes where I tell it," she said, affixing each filament to rock with a click. "Anything Deepdark tries to stitch, I'll tangle its first thought."

Rose breathed in, then out, and the ridge went one step uncertain. Paradox. Angles near her skewed as if shy. "If something arrives aiming for here," she said, pointing at the exact middle, "it will think it is one palm to the left. It will keep thinking that."

Rachel, already reading us and the ground in one pass, pressed a clip to my wrist and another at my neck. "Two sips before we start," she said. The music in her voice smoothed my ribs without asking. "If I say stop, you stop."

"I will," I said. It wasn't a promise; it was an agreement with something older than pride.

Reika touched her in-ear. "Tycho, check." Reika's voice went out over a courtesy line to five continents and the Seven as simple words: "Interception net forming one ridge west, listen-only." No speeches. No drama. Just civilized warning.

Valeria lay across my back, a simple sword for now, quiet as a wrapped thought.

We waited.

I felt it first as a thinning in the dark, like a page about to turn on its own. Luna's hand brushed mine. "Now," she said softly, and let Lucent Harmony breathe. The Moon's small noises—dust settling, our heartbeats, the whisper of suit seals—fell into a gentle rhythm. Not silence. Agreement.

The courier came without wind or sound: a knot of script, all angles, moving like a spider that had learned to be liquid. It wasn't a demon in a person's shape. It was function given teeth—here to put down a triangle for someone much worse.

"Three pins," Seraphina said. "Counting… one."

The first pin lanced for the ground like a nail of night. Rose's Paradox slid the angle half a hand. The nail struck wrong, skittered, and tried again.

"Two," Seraphina said.

Cecilia flicked a finger. Her filament snagged the nail's leading edge and filled it with the smallest chaos—just enough to make "straight" forget itself. The nail's line trembled.

"Three," Seraphina finished.

The courier flexed. All three pins lunged at once.

"Reef-light," Luna said.

Harmony washed over the ridge. Not a dome. Not a wall. A request the ground liked: movement finishes, then rests. Erebus's bone pylons drank what spilled. Rachel's Purelight thinned the Deepdark's bite without trying to burn it—she is a surgeon, not a hammer.

"Edge low," Valeria murmured in my head, the first sound from her all morning.

I moved. Low gravity stretches timing, but it doesn't change truth. I stepped in under the courier's first pin, let my small law from training hold—first touch bites, no chatter—and shaved the nail's tip off without marking the stone. The second pin snapped toward my hip. Cecilia tugged her filament; it twanged like a wicked guitar string and the pin missed by a finger.

"Now," Valeria said, cold and pleased.

I slid the flat of the blade along the courier's core—the tightest knot inside the script—and set Harmony against it the way you lay a palm on a frightened animal. Not force. Refusal to rush. The knot stuttered, trying to call home.

Erebus stepped in, robe barely moving, and sleeved the knot with a bone sheath that did not crack or glow. "Contained," he said. "Not severed."

For a heartbeat the world looked at us.

It was not the Demon Overlord. It was not a god. It was a bigger mind on a farther shore, surprised to find its hand slapped.

I wrote one Grey line—small enough to live between breaths—and laid it across the captured link: no trespass. I did not add my name. The Grey carries signatures even when you don't sign them.

The look withdrew.

The three nails loosened all at once as if embarrassed. Seraphina exhaled. Rachel lowered her hands. Rose let the angles relax. Cecilia reeled in her filaments with a satisfied shimmy. Erebus's pylons kept drinking like polite wells.

Reika spoke in our ears. "Outer ring clear. Tycho stable. Courtesy brief going global in sixty seconds."

We didn't cheer. Low gravity doesn't need applause. We logged. We bagged the sheath. We looked at the ground like we were checking on a sleeping friend.

Then Seraphina lifted her head, eyes narrowing. "Feel that?"

I felt it too, far out beyond the rim: three faint flickers in a line, nothing like the courier we just pinned. Scouts, not hands. Tests, not nails. A path through the dark basins, mapping us.

"Tomorrow," Reika said. "Wider answer. For today, we do not take the bait."

We walked back to the ridge in a slow line. Luna's Harmony stayed with the stones a little longer and then let go. Tycho's lights looked small and good in the distance.

Valeria cooled along my back. "Clean," she whispered, pleased.

"Clean," I agreed.

We had captured a core, said no once, and not broken the yard. Some days, that is the win.