They came up the path in silence, the three of them strung out in a ragged line with the scrubnd dimming to grey on either side.

  Marsh walked point, his gait stiff from the bruised shoulder but his stride long enough that Leo and Sera had to work to keep pace. Sera moved between them, one hand pressed ft against her ribs where the bandage sat beneath her leather armor. She hadn't compined once since they'd left the dungeon mouth.

  Leo's pack dug into his shoulders. The carapaces shifted with every step, clicking together like ceramic ptes, and the weight dragged at muscles that had already given everything they had.

  He saw the figures before he could make out their faces.

  Three of them, clustered at the weathered gate that marked the edge of Ashwick. A wooden bench sat against one post, worn to a pale shine by decades of use.

  Dar was pacing, her boots wearing a groove in the dirt path beside the posts. At twenty-eight, her pregnancy had softened the angles of her face, giving her full cheeks and rounding her features into something more cherubic than her natural beauty had been before. Her hair, a shade lighter than wheat in the fading daylight, was coming loose from its braided bun at the nape of her neck, sweat-darkened strands clinging to her temples and forehead.

  Her sharp brown eyes kept flicking toward the path leading toward the Pit. One hand cradled under the swell of her belly, supporting its weight through the simple linen dress that strained across her midsection. The other hand was clenched at her side, her knuckles turned white, stark against her freckled skin.

  Maren stood beside the bench with her arms crossed, while Ronan leaned against the far post, arms folded, his broad frame dark against the fading sky.

  All three of them, or at least Dar, had known where Leo, Sera, and Marsh were going that morning. The dungeon wasn't a secret anymore. But the pn had been midday return, or early afternoon at the test.

  Leo could fill in the rest. After hours of waiting, Dar arrived at Maren and Ronan's door, belly-first, asking if they'd heard anything, trying to keep the shake out of her voice.

  Dar spotted them first. She stopped mid-stride, her weight rocking forward onto her toes, and Leo watched something move behind her expression. Her worried melted, and relief washed over her features, then her jaw set and her spine went rigid.

  "Marsh," she said, her voice tight.

  Marsh faltered, his usual easy stride broken, and for a step he looked like a man walking into a headwind.

  "We ran into some trouble. It took longer than..."

  "You're hours te," her hands moved to her hips, but one never strayed far from the swell of her belly. "We've been standing here since the sun touched the hills."

  "I know, Dar," Marsh said, attempting a half-smile as he approached. "Better te than never, right? And look, we brought souvenirs."

  Dar's arm shot out, a sharp sp against his shoulder that made him wince. The half-smile vanished.

  "This isn't funny, Marsh," she said. Then her expression softened just enough to let the worry show through again. "Does that hurt?"

  "I'm fine. These will go away in a few days."

  Dar's eyes dropped to the dark stains on Marsh's shirt, tracked up to the bruises mottling his forearms, and her mouth thinned to a hard line. She didn't say anything else. She took his arm, possessively, her fingers sinking into the crook of his elbow, and pulled him forward.

  Maren was already moving.

  Her eyes found Sera first, then the bloodstain on Sera's armor - the dark, rust-edged smear that had dried in a wide streak across the left side of her chest piece - and the color left her face.

  "What happened?" Maren's voice came out steady, but her hands didn't. They hovered over Sera's armor without touching.

  "I'm alright," Sera straightened, pulling her hand away from her ribs with a deliberateness that Leo recognized as performance. "It looks worse than it is."

  Maren's gaze snapped to Leo. He didn't know what she read on his face, but whatever it was made her mouth tighten into the same hard line Dar had worn. She wrapped her arm around Sera's waist, careful, avoiding the wounded side, and steered her forward without another word.

  Ronan pushed off the fence post and walked to Leo with the same steady, ground-covering stride he used going to the fields each morning.

  "Are you hurt?" he asked.

  "Not as much as them."

  His father nodded. A single dip of his chin, and with it, some tension left Ronan's shoulders. His gaze moved to the heavy packs strapped with bundles and sagging under their own weight.

  "Dar, Marsh, wait. Let me take some of that," Ronan said.

  He reached for the carapace bundle on Marsh's pack and hefted it. Leo caught the subtle lift of his father's eyebrows. The weight registered, then the quality. Ronan shifted the bundle to his shoulder, ran his thumb across the mineral crust of the topmost shell, and reached for a second load from Leo's pack without being asked.

  They moved together toward Maren and Ronan's cottage. Leo watched the procession from the rear - Maren and Sera ahead, Dar steering Marsh by the arm, Ronan walking beside him with the dungeon loot banced like hay bales.

  The vilge was dark around them. Dim yellow hearth-glow leaked through shuttered windows, and somewhere down the ne a dog barked once at their passing and went quiet.

  When they stepped inside the cottage, a familiar warmth washed over Leo's body. The iron pot still swung from its hook above the embers. The scent of herb and dried meat curled through the air.

  "You'll be wanting stew after such a day," Maren said, her gaze moving between them as she crossed the room to stir the pot.

  Sera shifted against Leo's side, her hand still pressed to the bandaged ribs beneath her armor.

  "Nothing for me, thank you," she murmured, her voice fatigued. "I'd rather see Hanna first."

  But both men answered together. Marsh's voice emerged before the words fully formed, a groan of anticipation. Leo's came an instant ter, quieter but no less earnest.

  "One for me, Ma."

  Sera was deposited into the chair nearest the fire before she could protest. Leo set his bowl aside and helped ease the leather armor off - the buckles had stiffened with dried blood, and removing the chest piece pulled at the bandage underneath, drawing a sharp hiss through Sera's clenched teeth. The cloth was spotted red in pces but not soaked through.

  Marsh dropped into a chair at the table and groaned, long and theatrical. Dar took the seat beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. She hadn't released his arm since the vilge gate. Her other hand rested on her belly, and every few seconds her thumb moved in a slow, absent circle across the fabric of her dress.

  "I'll get Hanna," Ronan set the loot packs against the wall by the door before walking out again. He pulled his coat back on and stepped into the dark, the door clicking shut behind him.

  While they waited, Maren took over. Clean cloth, warm water from the kettle she'd swung back over the fire. She knelt beside Sera and wiped the worst of the grime and dried sweat from her face and hands.

  Leo sat at the table. His legs throbbed. His forearms burned from hours of cranking the crossbow's lever.

  He lifted the spoon, his hands stiff but steady as they approached his mouth. The stew was thin, but heat radiated through the wooden bowl into his palms. He swallowed, and the warmth spread down his throat, chasing away the memory of cold tunnel air.

  I should buy some salt for Ma and Da the next time I go to Rockhaven, Leo thought as he took one more spoonful.

  Still, it filled the hollow space in his stomach, and eventually, feeling returned to his exhausted limbs.

  "So... not bad for a second run," Marsh broke the silence.

  Dar's elbow caught him square in the ribs. He shut up.

  The door opened and Ronan stepped back in, followed by Hanna. She'd thrown a wool shawl over her nightclothes - a linen shift that hung to her shins, wrinkled from sleep. Her hair was down, loose and slightly tangled where it fell past her shoulders, and the spectacles were fogged from the walk through the cold air. She pushed them up with one finger and scanned the room, her eyes sharp despite having been dragged from bed.

  "Which one?" She asked.

  "Sera," Ronan said.

  Hanna crossed the room, set her satchel on the floor beside Sera, and knelt. She studied the bandage, then looked up at Sera's face.

  "I need to see it properly. Shirt needs to come up."

  Sera gnced around the room. At Ronan, then Marsh.

  "Out," Maren said, the non-negotiable tone of a woman who had decided something about her household and was not entertaining discussion. "All of you. Outside."

  "I could stay and..." Leo started.

  "Out."

  "Ma, she's my wife...I've already seen..."

  Sera gred at him, faint red spots appeared on her pale cheeks, and Leo wisely shut up. He followed Marsh and Ronan through the door.

  The night air was sharp after the warmth of the cottage. Stars crowded a sky that had gone fully dark, thick and close in a way that hadn't been possible for Leo to see back on Earth - no streetmps, no neon signs bleeding orange across the horizon.

  Leo leaned against the cottage wall. The stone was cool through his shirt. Marsh sat on the bench by the door and stretched his legs out with a wince, rolling the bad shoulder in a slow circle. Ronan stood a few paces off, smoking from his old cy pipe.

  For a full minute, nobody spoke, until Ronan broke it.

  "How much is in those packs?"

  "A lot more than the first run," Leo said. "We haven't been keeping track. For some reason, we met a lot of monsters."

  "I could tell by the weight," Ronan's gaze was steady. "And the carapaces. Those aren't first-floor shells."

  "Stonecap Beetles," Marsh confirmed. "Tough bastards."

  "Twenty-odd carapaces, Stonecaps," Leo ran through the inventory in his head. "Shambler ptes. Veilcap Stalks. Stonemorels. And the ptes from the thing that hurt Sera."

  Ronan was quiet. Leo watched his father process the list, transting dungeon loot into currency, currency into months of food and tithe payments and seed grain.

  The breeze moved through the ne again. Somewhere across the vilge, a shutter creaked and tched.

  "That...thing," Ronan said. His eyes flickered toward the cottage door. "What is it?"

  "We don't know. Some kind of beetle," Leo shook his head. "Much bigger. Tougher. We'd never seen one before."

  "Imagine a beetle the size of a calf with a shell that cracks axe bdes and crystals growing out of its spine," Marsh, who had never once in his life left a silence unfilled when he had something worth saying, filled in. "It blocked the tunnel behind us, so we had to fight."

  Ronan nodded slowly.

  "Your mother worried, a lot."

  "I know, Da. We'll be more careful next time."

  Then, the cottage door opened. Maren's head appeared in the gap.

  "You can come back in."

  They filed inside. Sera was back in the chair, her shirt down, a fresh bandage visible at the edges where the fabric rode up. Her color was better. Hanna was busy with her satchel. The sleeves of her nightshift pushed up past her elbows.

  "Three stitches," Hanna reported, looking at Leo. "The wound is clean. No fragments, no sign of infection. She's going to be fine. Bandage changes morning and evening. No heavy lifting for a week. I'll come back tomorrow to check the stitches."

  Hanna stood up, then hesitated.

  "The injury," she said carefully. "You mentioned it was from a special beetle's thorn?"

  "A big one," Marsh offered from the table.

  "Was the creature unusual? Different from standard Thorn Beetles? Other than its size, I mean."

  Leo and Sera exchanged a gnce. Sera gave a small nod.

  "Yes," Leo said. "It has crystalline growths along its spine that we've never seen before."

  The shift in Hanna's expression was immediate. She opened her mouth, caught herself, and adjusted her spectacles instead.

  "I'd like to hear more about that. Not tonight, you all need rest. But sometime."

  "Sometime," Leo agreed.

  Hanna's gaze slid from the fresh stitches to where Marsh sat prodding a dark bruise spreading across his forearm, his usual swagger reduced to a grimace.

  "Let me see that," she said.

  "This? It's nothing, really. A love tap from our beetle friend," Marsh looked up, surprised.

  "Your definition of 'love tap' appears to include ruptured blood vessels. Hand over."

  While they were arguing, Leo crossed the room and crouched beside Sera.

  "Ready to go home?" he asked.

  "More than ready," she said.

  Leo helped her to her feet, careful with the wounded side, and after saying goodbye to the other people inside the room, they stepped out together into the cool night air.