After about half an hour of driving, a makeshift settlement finally came into view.
The old truck rolled over a set of planks laid across the edge of a ditch and eased its way into the camp.
The camp’s outer wall was cobbled together from scrap alloy plating and mutated thorn vines, studded with sharp metal spikes, and ringed by a shallow trench bristling with sharpened wooden stakes.
Dozens of tents were scattered throughout the camp, thin trails of smoke rising from makeshift chimneys, the air thick with the strange mix of roasting meat and fuel oil.
This was the most common kind of drifter settlement in Star Abyss.
The people who lived here were mostly criminals cast out of the major cities, wanderers who refused to live under any city’s rule, or refugees who’d lost everything in the war.
They’d banded together for warmth and safety, scraping out a living in the wilderness.
Garron parked at the edge of the market square and hopped out first.
Keran pulled his hood down low and climbed out after him.
The people around the camp eyed him, the outsider, with wary, indifferent looks.
No one spoke to him, but every pair of eyes seemed to drift, almost casually, toward the pack on his back.
Out here, any stranger could be an enemy.
Or a mark ripe for the picking.
A hulking figure came striding up and planted himself directly in Garron’s path.
The man had a thick, tangled beard and a sharpened knife tucked at his hip.
His eyes swept over Keran warily, and his voice came out hostile.
“Garron. Why the hell are you bringing an outsider in here?”
This was Brasko, one of the traders who ran the settlement’s market.
His grudge against Garron went back a long way.
He resented how Garron’s hunting skills kept him at the top of the pecking order in the market, making Brasko look small by comparison, but Garron’s standing in the camp had always kept him from finding an excuse to push back.
Now that he’d finally found one, he wasn’t about to let it go.
A few nearby drifters stopped what they were doing and glanced over, feigning disinterest.
“Brasko! Get out of the way.” Garron frowned.
“Who I bring in here is my own business.”
“Your own business?” Brasko sneered, his voice suddenly rising, pitched as if he were performing for the crowd.
“Since when do you get to make the camp’s rules all by yourself? Outsiders don’t get to walk in without a supply check.” His eyes landed on Keran’s pack, and something lit up in them.
“That’s the rule. Unless you’re saying it doesn’t apply now?”
The tension snapped taut in an instant.
Keran’s left hand, hidden beneath his coat, had already found the grip of his pistol.
If these people actually wanted to start something, he wouldn’t mind taking the bearded man out first and blasting a way out with a grenade if it came to it.
Blowing his cover would cost him, but he wasn’t about to let anyone push him around.
Finn, standing by the truck, watched Brasko’s posturing with a scowl building on his face.
He opened his mouth to say something, but Garron raised a hand and cut him off before he could.
Smack!
Garron slapped his palm down on the truck’s hood, hard enough to make the sheet metal rattle, his voice suddenly booming.
“He’s my friend! Anyone touches so much as one thing on him, they can deal with me! Now get lost!”
Keran blinked, his grip on the pistol slowly loosening, and looked at Garron with something close to surprise.
In a world where interest came before everything and a human life was worth about as much as a weed, he’d assumed that even after saving a man’s life, once real supplies and turf got involved, most people wouldn’t risk making an enemy of the entire market over a stranger they’d only just met.
But Garron hadn’t hesitated for a second before taking his side.
Brasko’s face went rigid.
He tried to force out some comeback, his lips moving, but in the end nothing came out.
Garron didn’t bother even glancing his way again.
He turned and headed off deeper into the camp, tossing back one last line over his shoulder.
“Quit whining. I’ll split my kill with you tomorrow, enough to feed you for three days!”
Brasko’s face went livid with anger, but in the end he didn’t dare make a scene.
Garron was the settlement’s top hunter, and close to half the camp’s food came from what he brought back.
He finally stepped aside and let them pass, though the resentment in his eyes never fully faded.
The drifters who’d gathered to watch the show, seeing there’d be no more of it, drifted off one by one.
Garron turned back to look at Keran, gaunt and covered in dried blood, and there was a warmth in his eyes rare to find in this wasteland.
“Sorry about that. People out here don’t have much in the way of manners, don’t take it to heart. Brasko’s always been like that, grubby little hands reaching for whatever he can get.”
He reached out and clapped Keran on the shoulder, his tone softening.
“Stay with me for now, as long as you need. Come on back with me first, get those wounds sorted out, get something in your stomach. We’ll figure out the rest later.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” Keran said, his voice hoarse.
…
Garron led Keran through the sprawl of tents to a somewhat larger one tucked in a corner of the camp, its frame reinforced with scrap alloy.
He pulled back the flap.
Inside, the place was simple but kept spotless, the air carrying a faint, warm smell of wild vegetable soup.
“Elara, we’ve got company! Add another bowl for dinner!” Garron bellowed the moment he stepped inside.
“Got it, coming!”
A woman in a plain cloth dress turned away from a makeshift stone hearth.
Keran noticed immediately that her eyes were hollow, unfocused, clearly blind.
And yet her movements were sure and practiced, guided by nothing but sound and long memory as she felt her way to setting rough wooden bowls out on the stone table.
“This is my wife. Just call her Elara.” Rough as he looked, Garron moved carefully to steady her, tenderness in his eyes that you didn’t often see on a wasteland man.
“Hello.” Elara smiled gently in Keran’s direction.
As Garron helped her settle into her seat at the stone table, he couldn’t quite keep the leftover fear out of his voice.
“We owe this guy big time today. If not for him, that little troublemaker would’ve gotten me killed out in the woods!”
In a few short sentences, he laid out the whole story: running into the Thorn Beast in the woods, Finn stirring up trouble and provoking it, himself too badly hurt to keep fighting, and finally Keran finishing it off with grenades and gunfire.
He couldn’t resist shooting Finn another glare at the end of it.
The smile slowly drained from Elara’s face, her hand rising to cover her mouth, fingertips trembling slightly.
“What… your back…”
She reached out and felt her way along Garron’s back until her fingers found the freshly wrapped bandages, her breathing suddenly quickening.
“A Thorn Beast, that’s how dangerous, and you take Finn out there with you, you didn’t even try to stay clear of it…”
The fear caught up with her all at once, and she gripped the hem of Garron’s shirt, taking a long moment before she could steady herself.
She turned, rose to her feet facing Keran, and gave him a solemn bow.
“Thank you for saving them. If you hadn’t stepped in, I might have…” Her voice caught, and she didn’t finish the sentence, just took a deep breath and lifted her face again.
“We won’t forget what we owe you.”
In a world scattered with city states and choked with danger at every turn, a scene this warm left Keran momentarily adrift.
He murmured that it was nothing, pulled off his dirt-caked hood, and sat down on the ground.
Garron handed him a bowl of steaming wild vegetable and meat stew.
Seven straight days of nothing but raw rat meat and dew hadn’t left much room for manners, and Keran took the bowl and drank it down in big gulps.
The warm liquid hit his stomach, and his stamina began climbing back, slow but visible.
After some conversation, Keran was satisfied the man had no hidden agenda, and let his guard down a little.
“Mister Garron.” Keran set his bowl down and wiped his mouth, finally voicing the question that had been on his mind.
“On the way in, I noticed the people here have different accents, different looks, different habits. They’re clearly not all from the same place. You don’t strike me as someone who grew up here either. Why stay in this settlement?”
At the question, some of the easy humor faded from Garron’s expression, and something worn and weary flickered behind his eyes.
He gave a self-deprecating laugh and lit up a hand-rolled cigarette, the sharp, bitter smell of tobacco slowly filling the tent.
“Where you’re from? Your homeland?” He shook his head.
“On a piece of ground the gods themselves gave up on, none of that’s worth much anymore.”
“Back then, there were a hundred nations you could name off the top of your head, and not one of them would bow to another, not one could swallow the rest. They fought for who knows how many years.”
He paused.
“But keep fighting like that forever, and the resources would’ve run dry sooner or later. There’d be no chance left of ever leaving this world at all, and civilization would just get strangled to death right here. Better to stop bleeding each other and pool everything together for something bigger.”
“Except not every nation was willing to give up its flag and its sovereignty. Some backed unification, and naturally some fought it. Negotiations, mergers, wars, it dragged on for years before we finally got today’s Hundred Cities Federation.” This chapter was copied from novelping(.)com without permission.
Garron let out a slow breath of smoke, his voice dropping low.
“People who lost their homeland, who didn’t want to join the Federation and sure as hell didn’t want to throw in with a bunch of lunatics like Undercurrent, ended up with nowhere else to go but drifting, banding together for warmth out in the wild. I was on the run with Elara back then, she was sick, and we happened to fall in with this bunch of drifters. Everyone here comes from somewhere different, different languages, different habits. But at the end of the day, we’re all just people who can’t let go of the past, leftovers from an old world. No point drawing lines between us. We’re all in the same boat.”
Keran said nothing.
Back in Azure City, he’d seen the broad strokes of this world’s history.
Star Abyss was living through the violent labor pains of a world dragging itself from an old era into a new one.
To pool an entire planet’s resources and reach for the stars, to escape being trapped and left to die on their homeworld, the process of unification had come soaked in endless blood and tears.
All the civilizations and all the people who’d been absorbed or wiped out in the process, their grief, their struggle, in the end it all boiled down to a few lines in a history book about “the inevitable tide of the times.”
Against a tide of civilizational change that vast, any single person was just sediment caught in the current of a river, carried wherever the water went.
“So yeah…” Garron looked over at his gentle wife beside him and let out a sigh to no one in particular.
“Sometimes I wonder if those bigwigs in the Hundred Cities Federation were even right about all that theory on how the infighting was costing us. Life before was backward, sure, but at least it was peaceful, stable. Now, all in the name of some grand civilizational leap forward, the wars they’ve started have killed ten times, a hundred times more people than the old infighting ever did. However good the future sounds, that’s something for people living a few hundred years down the line. What’s it got to do with the rest of us, the ones who already lost everything?”
The tent went quiet for a moment, nothing but the occasional crackle and pop of the fire.
Keran let out a breath.
“Who knows,” he said quietly.
“Maybe to the people standing at the top, the sacrifice of ten million lives is just the necessary cost of buying a future.”
The final war of unification from the old era had buried countless civilizations in ash, and left behind the scattered remnants now spread across the wasteland.
Keran’s eyes fell on Garron’s calloused hands.
Rough, strong, the knuckles worn and reshaped from years of hard use, unmistakably the hands of a man who’d spent a lifetime gripping a gun.
“You used to be a soldier?”
“Yeah.” Garron rubbed his palm, something complicated flickering behind his eyes.
“Served over ten years.”
“I figured every veteran who wouldn’t accept getting folded into the Federation ended up joining Undercurrent,” Keran said.
Garron shook his head.
“The country I was born in ended up part of the Federation too, eventually. I don’t like the Federation much, but the peace we’ve got now, we paid hard for it.”
He sighed.
“Just when the fighting was finally winding down, Undercurrent shows up, shouting about tearing down the Federation, dragging in soldiers from every fallen nation, wanting to start it all over again.” He shook his head.
“I don’t understand the big picture stuff. I just don’t want to get pulled back into it.”
“Yeah, war’s too cruel.” Elara stirred the pot of stew, speaking softly.
“I lost my sight on the very last day of the fighting, a stray piece of shrapnel. Explosions everywhere, people screaming, I thought we were both going to die right there. Garron carried me on his back and crawled us both out of a pile of bodies.”
She turned her head and smiled in Keran’s direction.
“Don’t underestimate me, though. I can’t see, but my ears and my nose are a lot sharper than most people’s. How long the meat’s been stewing, whether there’s enough salt, one sniff and I know. If a rat runs by outside the tent, I hear every bit of it. I’m not some helpless burden that needs looking after.”
“Sure, sure, you’re the most capable one here.” Garron looked at his wife, a rare tenderness spreading across his face.
“Just stubborn as hell. Has to do everything herself.”
Elara let out a small huff, not bothering to argue, though the corner of her mouth curled up slightly.
Garron seemed a little embarrassed to be showing that much affection for his wife in front of a stranger, and quickly changed the subject.
“Oh, right, let me show you something good.”
He opened up a crate beside him, revealing a heavy mechanical arm lying inside.
The metal surface was covered in scratches, the joints rusted black, exposed wiring tangled across the housing like dead vines.
Look closely, and you could still make out a few bullet holes.
“Picked it up off a battlefield, back in the day.” Garron smiled.
“Word is it’s Federation power armor. Damn shame it’s this busted, but I never could bring myself to throw it out.”
The moment Keran’s fingers touched the metal surface.
[Power Armor Component Detected]
[Technical Grade: Lv1]
[Analyze? Y/N]