The swap dropped me into gray dust and the smell of scorched limestone, my knees buckling against a rock ledge that hadn’t been there a half-second earlier.
I caught myself on a support post before I went down face-first, which was probably the only dignified thing that happened to me in the next twenty minutes.
Kharvoss.
The quarry.
I knew it from the terrain briefings even before my HUD caught up and painted the sector marker into the corner of my vision.
Sheer walls of cut stone rose on three sides, terraced down into a bowl someone had once used to pull granite out of the mountain, and now used to try to kill a dragon in.
Rope bridges spanned gaps between platforms.
Ballista frames sat bolted into the rock at odd, deliberate angles, as if someone had calculated every angle before drilling.
Somebody had done their homework here.
Whoever built this ambush had taken every scrap of reconnaissance from earlier passes and turned it into a killbox, three tiers of harpoon nests ringing a central platform baited with what looked like half a butchered elk carcass, chains bolted through the rock to keep it from being dragged off before the shot landed.
A woman in scorched leather waved me over before I’d finished getting my bearings, which I appreciated, because standing around gawking at architecture gets people killed here.
“You’re the resupply,” she said.
Not a question.
She had a checklist board strapped to her forearm, the kind with a grease pencil tied to a string, and she was already flipping to a new page.
“Roster says Vorsk cleared out to Odrance ten minutes back. You’re his replacement on the third tier.”
“Copy that.” I didn’t know Vorsk, would probably never know Vorsk, but that was how this whole competition worked.
Somewhere in Odrance right now a man I’d never met was reading a handover note in my handwriting, trying to figure out which gears not to touch.
“What am I resupplying, exactly?”
She pointed with the grease pencil toward a squat stone emplacement bolted to the ledge above us, a harpoon nest with a crew of four crouched around a ballista the size of a small cart.
“Heavy bolts, mostly. Cordage. We burned through half our reserve on the last dry run and nobody wants to be standing here empty-handed when the real thing shows up.”
“When, not if.”
“It’s circling the ridgeline right now.” She said it the way you’d mention traffic.
“Twenty minutes, maybe less.”
I climbed the ledge with a crate of bolts that felt like it weighed as much as I did, my shoulder reminding me with every step that it hadn’t forgiven me for whatever I’d done to it in a city I couldn’t fully remember anymore.
The crew up top didn’t waste time on introductions.
A stocky man with a burn scar across one cheek grabbed the crate out of my hands before I’d even set it down and started sorting bolts by weight like he was cataloging silverware.
“Two bunkers,” he said, without looking up.
“That one.” He jerked his chin toward a reinforced stone structure on the far tier, squat and ugly and clearly built to take a hit.
“And the one behind us, smaller, half the capacity. Command post is in the first. If things go bad, that’s the fallback.”
“Define bad.”
“Worse than usual.” He finally looked at me. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“You new to this hunt?”
“New to this exact flavor of dying, yeah.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
Then a horn sounded from somewhere below, three short blasts, and every hair on my arms stood up at once because I recognized that particular flavor of dread.
Something was coming, and everyone around me had decided the correct response was to go very quiet and very still.
The dragon came in low over the ridge, wings dragging shadows across half the quarry floor, and even from this distance I could see the wounds along its flank, dark furrows where something sharp had bitten deep and never quite closed.
It banked once, lazily, almost bored, and I remember thinking that a bored dragon was somehow worse than an angry one.
It ignored the bait entirely.
The elk carcass sat there, chained and stinking and utterly beneath its notice, while the dragon dropped altitude and came straight for the first-tier harpoon nest.
It knew exactly where the crews were and it went for them directly, and I watched three people I’d exchanged maybe two sentences with get swept off a platform in a spray of stone chips and blood before anyone even got a shot off.
“It’s not going for the lure,” I said, mostly to myself, but the scarred man heard me.
“It never does anymore.” He was already hauling on the ballista’s crank, jaw tight.
“First hunt, it went for the meat every time. Somebody figured that out fast, baited every trap the same way. Worked twice. Third time it just started ignoring the bait and hunting the crews instead.”
I stared at the wreckage of the first tier, the way the dragon had banked hard right after the strike, circling back toward the second nest with the same economical, unhurried menace, and something ugly settled into my stomach.
This wasn’t an animal running on instinct and hunger.
It remembered what had worked against us faster than we could adjust ourselves.
“It’s learning,” I said, louder this time.
“It’s not attacking the food. It’s attacking the pattern. Every time we set the same kind of trap, it gets better at recognizing it before the trap even springs.”
The scarred man didn’t argue.
He didn’t have time to, because the dragon was already coming around for the second nest, and the second nest was us.
“Fire on it,” someone shouted from below, one of the ground crew, and half the harpoon teams started cranking their winches at an angle that was never going to connect, wasting torque and bolts chasing a target that had already broken line of sight behind an outcrop.
“Don’t.” I grabbed the scarred man’s arm before he committed a bolt he couldn’t get back.
“Look at the angle. It’s coming in from the blind side of the ridge—we can’t get a clean shot from here without exposing the whole crew to the strike first.”
“So we just stand here?”
“We fall back to the secondary bunker. Now, while it’s still committed to the first tier.” The scarred man didn’t debate it; he slammed the safety pin into the winch and shoved the loader toward the access ladder with a boot to the hip.
Everyone abandoned the frame in an instant.
We were halfway down the connecting ladder when Sivrel’s voice cracked out over the quarry, sharp and strained, and I turned in time to see him planted on an exposed ledge below, both arms raised, his whole body twisted at an angle that made my own neck ache just looking at it.
The dragon had turned, mid-strike, its neck whipping around in a violent lash meant to catch a fleeing harpoon crew off balance.
His head snapped sideways with the same brutal torque, his whole spine following in one convulsive jerk that dropped him to his knees on the stone, and even from thirty feet away I heard something in his neck pop loudly enough to carry over the wind.
It bought the crew two seconds.
Two seconds where the dragon’s attention hung on the impossible sight of a man thrashing in perfect, painful sync with its own killing motion, and in those two seconds four people made it off the exposed ledge and behind cover.
Sivrel didn’t move again after that.
He just knelt there, one hand clamped over the back of his own neck, blood leaking between his fingers from a nose that had cracked against stone on the way down.
Somewhere above the quarry, I knew without needing to check, a screen was probably lighting up with a fresh graphic.
Vassago never missed an opportunity like this one.
I could picture it easily enough, some tidy little chart plotting a rising curve labeled Dragon Adaptive Learning against a flatter, more stubborn line labeled Contestant Collective Intelligence, with a bright banner underneath thanking some educational sponsor for making the segment possible.
Nothing sold quite like watching people prove a beast was smarter than the room.
The primary bunker took the next hit directly.
The dragon came around low, wings folded tight, and slammed its full weight into the reinforced stone like it had decided the whole structure personally offended it.
Rock sheared away in slabs.
Half the harpoon frames on that tier went with it—twisted metal and snapped cordage tumbling onto the quarry floor along with two men who never made it clear of the collapse.
“Move, move, move,” the scarred man was screaming now, no more calm cataloging of bolt weights, just raw urgency as we half-carried, half-dragged the wounded toward the smaller fallback bunker.
My shoulder screamed with every load I took onto it, and I didn’t care, because the alternative to carrying weight was leaving someone behind on open stone with a dragon still hunting the ridge.
We got the last of the crew through the fallback door with maybe ten seconds to spare before the dragon swept past overhead again, apparently satisfied with the damage it had already done, peeling off toward the far ridge to nurse its own unhealed wounds in whatever den it kept up there.
Inside the fallback bunker, in the sudden quiet that always feels obscene after that much noise, I crouched beside the wreckage someone had dragged in with the wounded and found what I was looking for: a harpoon tip, snapped clean off its shaft, bent at an angle that told me it had struck something and failed to penetrate.
Dried blood, not ours, streaked along the barbed edge.
I turned it over in my hands, feeling the weight of it, thinking about the way that creature had ignored bait it had once fallen for twice, thinking about a rising curve on some sponsored chart that nobody in this bunker had asked to be judged against.
“It’s not going to fall for the same trap twice,” I said, to no one and everyone, holding the broken tip up where the scarred man could see it.
“But it remembers specific traps. Specific baits, specific angles. If we build something it hasn’t seen before, something that doesn’t look like a lure at all until it’s already committed, we might get one clean shot before it adapts to that too.”
The scarred man looked at the tip in my hand, then past me at the ruin of the first-tier nest, at Sivrel being propped against the bunker wall with his neck wrapped in a strip torn off someone’s shirt, at the two empty spaces on the crew roster that used to have names attached to them.
“That’s one bolt’s worth of proof,” he said, not unkindly, just tired.
“We lost an outpost and half our ordnance figuring it out.”
“Yeah.” I set the broken tip down carefully, like it mattered, because right now it was the only thing in the bunker that told us anything useful about the next attempt.
“But the fallback held. And that thing’s still bleeding out there somewhere on the ridge. It hasn’t healed a single wound we’ve dealt it yet.”
Nobody answered that.
Outside, the wind carried faint metallic pings as cooling metal contracted somewhere in the wreckage of the first tier, and somewhere far above us, invisible and untouchable, a broadcast kept running its numbers.