The mush in the pot bubbled and steamed as the Minutemen and residents gathered around the rekindled campfire, clutching old chipped porcelain bowls and slurping it down.
The sound mixed with the crackle of firewood, carrying a rare sense of solid comfort.
Josh shoveled in a big mouthful, grimacing as it burned his tongue, but he forced it down anyway.
“Slow down,” Emma said softly beside him.
“No one’s going to steal it from you.”
Josh did not even look up.
He dug in for another hard bite, far too busy eating to answer.
Anthony leaned against the wall, holding his bowl and eating slowly, but he never stopped.
The others ate and chatted, the mood easy and relaxed.
Preston sat down beside Jace, his bowl already half empty.
The tension that had been locked on his face for days had eased a little, and even the exhaustion in his eyes had faded.
Sturges crouched by the campfire, though his gaze kept drifting toward the power armor not far away, his eyes giving away the restless thoughts he was trying to hold back.
After the battle last night, the camp’s atmosphere had finally loosened.
Even the wind seemed gentler.
Before long, Sturges stood with his bowl and quickly walked over to Preston, lowering his voice.
“There’s something.”
“Those two sets of power armor, the T-51 and T-60, can both be fully repaired and restored to usable condition.”
Preston immediately set down his bowl, a trace of delight appearing on his face.
“That’s good news.”
“It is.” Sturges nodded, but his brows drew together and his voice sank.
“But there’s bad news too.”
“The T-51’s hydraulic lines are all old and brittle.
They have to be replaced.
The T-60’s core mounting bracket has hidden cracks, and it needs specialized parts to patch it up.
We don’t have any of those right now.”
Jace looked up at him and asked plainly, “Where can we get them?”
Sturges was just about to answer when Preston suddenly raised a hand slightly, signaling for him to stop.
The two followed his gaze.
Anthony, Josh, Emma, and the rest of the militia were all gathered by the pot, eating, laughing, and talking.
None of them were paying attention over here.
Sturges immediately understood.
He leaned a little closer to Jace and lowered his voice even further, until only the two of them could hear.
“Diamond City should have them.
They’ve got plenty of shops, a full spread of parts, and most importantly, they have ties to Atom Cats.”
Jace looked at him and kept his own voice low.
“Is it far?”
“Not too far, but we’ll have to make a special trip.
And we need to bring enough caps, or we won’t be able to trade for anything.”
The campfire crackled again, spitting out a few sparks.
By the pot, Anthony shouted some joke, and Josh burst out laughing along with him.
The atmosphere remained as lively as ever.
Jace looked down at the little mush left in his bowl, then lifted his eyes again, his tone calm.
“Once we finish eating, we’ll go.”
Preston gave a solemn nod and asked nothing more.
After the meal.
Jace checked the T-45 Power Armor again.
He had already put the partition back in place himself.
There was still some residual radiation, but at least it would not harm anyone else anymore.
He climbed inside.
With several clicks, the armor plates closed and locked into place.
The minigun was strapped to his back, the sniper hunting rifle was in his hand, and a heavy cloth sack hung from his shoulder, packed with supplies to take to Diamond City and trade for caps.
Codsworth slowly floated over to his side.
Sturges came out of the house as well, a tool bag on his back and a rough map clutched in his hand.
Preston stayed behind at Sanctuary Hills with the others to look after the wounded and the mountain of equipment.
Before they left, he repeatedly reminded the three of them to be careful and make it back safely.
Past the wooden fence of Sanctuary Hills was the Red Rocket truck stop.
Its faded red-and-white sign hung crookedly from the roof.
A few Bloatflies buzzed around a scrapped truck, and the air carried the mixed smell of gasoline and rust.
The three of them deliberately skirted the weed-choked hollows and avoided patches of grass where Mole Rats might be hiding, heading straight south along the road.
They followed the abandoned country road and soon entered Concord.
The houses on the edge of town had long since fallen into ruin, their plaster peeling and beams tilted.
In the distance, the outline of the Museum of Freedom looked bleak in the morning fog.
There was no sign of life among the broken walls and rubble.
The silence along the way felt unnatural, but it spared them plenty of trouble.
After crossing the outskirts of Concord and continuing south, they soon reached the edge of the Lexington ruins.
Broken high-rise walls crowded together in dense clusters, and every window had become a pitch-black opening.
Cold wind poured through the buildings with a low, sobbing whistle.
The entire area was frighteningly dead.
Sturges lightened his steps and occasionally raised a hand to signal Jace to slow down.
The two men and one robot kept to the railway outside the city and firmly avoided the dark corridors and piles of ruins, afraid of disturbing the Ghouls and Raiders entrenched inside.
Once they passed through Lexington without incident, the road gradually opened up.
Rows of steel-framed greenhouses came into view.
They had reached Graygarden.
The robots tending the crops in the fields slowly turned their optical sensors, scanned the three of them, confirmed they were not hostile, then went right back to work.
This was one of the few safe stops along the way, but they did not linger.
They continued south along the straight railroad tracks.
They deliberately avoided the city route around Cambridge Police Station.
The buildings there were packed too densely, and no one knew how many Ghouls were hiding inside.
In the story, even Danse and his Brotherhood of Steel squad had nearly died there.
More importantly, the bridge to the far bank of the Charles River had long since been occupied by Raiders, making it impossible to pass.
The railway line was far safer.
The farther south they went, the damper the air became.
The Charles River was close.
Fortunately, the railroad bridge across the river was still intact, with no collapse or breaks, so the three crossed smoothly without having to wade through the water and risk danger.
After the bridge, they walked along the tracks for a while until the watchtower of Oberland Station appeared in sight.
Beside the rails, several rows of sickly potatoes grew crookedly in a patch of open ground.
A settler staying at the station glanced at the three of them from a distance, then lowered their head and went back to work without asking anything.
Jace looked down at the map on his Pip-Boy, confirmed the direction, and the three continued along the tracks without delay.
After leaving the tracks at Oberland Station, they stepped onto the edge of the Boston urban area.
They turned past a collapsed red brick wall, and in the distance, a stretch of towering, unmistakable green wall suddenly came into view.
It was the pre-War Fenway Park.
Diamond City was finally here.
The Diamond City security guard on duty at the gate held his gun and let his gaze linger briefly on Jace’s T-45, then swept it over Codsworth and Sturges behind him.
“First time I’ve seen someone bring a Mr.
Handy into the city.” His tone was flat, nothing more than routine.
The guard pulled a clipboard from his waist and flipped through a couple of pages.
“Where from?”
“Sanctuary Hills, up north.”
The guard glanced up, asked nothing else, and lowered his head to make a few marks on the clipboard.
“Name?”
“Jace Tan.”
“And that one?”
“Sturges.”
After writing down the names, the guard looked at Codsworth.
“Robot has to be registered too.”
Codsworth’s eyes curved slightly.
“Codsworth, household robot, affiliated with Sanctuary Hills.”
The guard nodded, closed the clipboard, tucked it back at his waist, and stepped aside.
“Go on in.”
“First time here, Upper Stands’s to the right, Lower Fields’s to the left.
Don’t bring weapons into the market, don’t start fights in the ballpark, and don’t make trouble for security.”
Jace gave a slight nod and stepped inside.
Sturges and Codsworth followed close behind.
Only after passing through that towering green wall did they truly set foot inside Diamond City.
The sight before them was forcibly separated from the dead, barren Wasteland outside, as if it were another world entirely.
The entire city was fitted tightly inside Fenway Park.
The oval field had been used to the limit, its length and width matching the outline of the century-old ballpark perfectly, without a scrap of space wasted.
A straight main road stretched inward from the entrance.
The ground was uneven, but it had been carefully cleared.
Broken bricks, rusted scrap, and clutter were piled on both sides, leaving a path down the middle wide enough for three people to walk side by side as it ran lengthwise through the stadium.
Looking along the smaller paths beside the main road, one could see all the way to the lower level of the opposite stands.
Dense rows of homes pressed in on both sides of the road.
Some were low shacks built from scorched wooden boards, some were crude huts pieced together from bent sheet metal, and some people had simply fixed scrapped pre-War bus cars in place and turned them into shelters against wind and rain.
Laundry washed pale hung from the roofs.
Firewood, water barrels, and miscellaneous junk were piled by the doors.
A few skinny children crouched by the roadside, using pebbles to scribble aimlessly on the packed dirt.
These were the homes of the permanent residents, crowded but not chaotic.
Not far from the entrance, two unremarkable buildings stood on opposite sides of the road.
The one on the right had a faded wooden sign hanging by the door that read “All Faiths Chapel.” The door was half closed, and low prayers could be faintly heard from inside, occasionally mixed with a few lines of chanting too indistinct to understand.
Several people in worn-out clothes walked in with their heads lowered, while others came out wearing a hard-to-describe calm on their faces.
On the left was a sheet-metal shack with a hand-painted sign nailed to the outer wall.
“Publick Occurrences.” Through the first-floor glass window, stacks of paper and typewriters could be seen inside, and a young woman was bent over, typing rapidly.
Another dozen steps forward, a mixed wave of smells struck them.
The charred aroma of grilled meat, the sharp bite of machine oil, the faint raw smell of mutated fruits and vegetables, and the slight bitterness of fermented liquor tangled together, forming the unique, lived-in scent of this Wasteland city.
On the right was an open-air market that took up most of the ballpark’s infield.
Stalls were packed one after another, tightly arranged along the oval field.
Some had faded ragged cloth awnings, while others were nothing more than old wooden planks set across two crates.
Wilted, yellowing Tatos and potatoes, rusty repair tools, bundles of bullets wrapped in old newspapers, a few worn pieces of old clothing.
There was a little of everything.
Most of the stall owners were traveling merchants who did not stay overnight.
Their calls and the sounds of haggling rose and fell in waves.
They gathered here during the day, then left or found nearby lodging once night fell.
Beside them was a row of fixed shops.
Their signs hung crookedly beneath the eaves, the lettering faded by wind and rain.
These belonged to the city’s resident merchants.
One shop had a clean display window, with several polished guns inside gleaming with cold metallic light.
That was Arturo’s weapon shop.
Beside it was the clinic, its sign reading “Mega Surgery Center,” where Dr.
Sun and Doc Crocker practiced.
A few steps farther on, a purified water stand was especially eye-catching.
A child who looked barely over ten sat on a wooden crate, watching over several bags of clear purified water.
That was Sheng’s stall.
Not far away, all sorts of baseball bats hung outside the door of Moe’s shop.
Diamond City Surplus was run by Myrna and her Mr.
Handy robot, Percy.
There was also Solomon’s drugstore, John and his mother Cathy’s barbershop, and Becky Fallon’s underground clothing shop.
At the center of the market was the noodle stand run by the robot Takahashi.
Above the stand, a nuclear fusion reactor had been mounted, supplying power to the entire Diamond City.
At the end of the main road, the view suddenly opened up.
A wooden podium, about half a person tall, stood there.
Its surface was split with weathered cracks, and a few pieces of patching metal had been nailed along the edges.
To the right of the podium stood a medium-sized water tower.
Rust climbed from the base all the way to halfway up, but the storage tank at the top still looked sturdy enough and was venting a fine mist of water vapor.
A pipe ran from the base of the tower, buried itself into the ground toward the vegetable plot, and branched off again toward a nearby row of houses.
Several children crouched beside the pipe, holding out their hands to catch leaking droplets and wipe them across their faces.
Near the podium and water tower stood a lone sheet-metal room, much sturdier than the surrounding shacks.
A handwritten sign hung by the door.
“Diamond City Radio.” The door was half open, and static hissed from within, occasionally mixed with a few blurred human voices.
A man wearing headphones sat by the window, a heap of unknown electronic devices placed in front of him as his fingers kept adjusting the knobs.
Farther to the right was a vegetable field.
It was not large, only a few dozen paces across.
Several rows of Tatos and Mutfruits were planted there, and beside it stood a livestock pen with a few Brahmin inside.
Looking up along the curve of the ballpark, the original giant stands of Fenway Park rose in dozens of tiers from bottom to top, and the whole structure had been converted into housing.
The upper levels were the rich district.
Some homes even had pre-War-style painted brick walls, with spacious rooms and their own seating areas.
The lower levels were much more cramped, with wooden boards and sheet metal thrown together and stacked densely on top of one another.
It looked disorderly, but it was firmly anchored into the stadium’s original structure.
People walked back and forth along the high walkways.
Bedsheets hung out to dry were lifted by the wind.
Occasional shouts and conversations drifted through the oval stadium space, only to be swallowed by the noise of the market.
Nearly five thousand people gathered here year-round.
Apart from the two thousand permanent residents inside the city, the rest were traveling merchants, mercenaries passing through, travelers making short stops to resupply, and runners from nearby towns coming in to trade.
By day, the place was packed with people, sustaining all this noise and life.
Sturges stood beside Jace, looking at the layered homes spreading along the curve of the ballpark, then at the vivid signs of life all around them.
The tension on his face finally relaxed completely.
He turned to Jace, a hint of relief in his voice.
“Welcome to the Jewel of the Commonwealth.
Diamond City.”