Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - The Sense of the Mine

Sense of the

Drip.Water fell from forty feet above, smacking against the brim of

Kae’s hood before splashing onto the fogged lenses of her glasses.

She wiped them with a damp cuff, only to leave a dark smudge of red clay right across her left field of vision.The air in

Ravine was ten degrees hotter than the upper forest floor, thick with the stench of rotting vegetation and wet iron ore.

Basalt walls rose like sheer black teeth on either side of them, choking out what little green light managed to filter down through the canopy.”Nothing,” Cassia growled, swinging her right saber in a low arc that cleaved a thumb-thick jungle vine clean in two.

The blade didn’t even make a sound; it just glided through the pulp like warm butter. “No radio pings, no orange smoke, no parachute silk hung up in the branches.

Two hours in, and we haven’t found a single

Institute crate.”Kae trudged three paces behind her, her boots making a wet shloop with every step.

Her oversized fleece sweater had snagged on a thorn-bush twenty minutes ago, leaving a jagged tear along the hem, but she hadn’t bothered to mend it.”The

Academy drops crates along the high ridges where the drop-shuttles have clear sensor sightlines,” Kae said, her voice quiet, almost swallowed by the roaring rushing water at the bottom of the gorge. “They wouldn’t drop a supply box down here.

The basalt canyon walls act as a

Faraday cage.

The tracking beacons can’t punch through.”Cassia stopped dead, her boots sliding an inch in the mud as she turned around. “Then why the hell did we walk down into a dead-end trench, short stack?” Kae didn’t answer right away.

She stepped past

Cassia, her eyes fixed on a dark, mossy seam running diagonally across the basalt cliff face.She dropped her heavy gear bag onto a dry rock, unclipped her right glove, and pressed her bare palm against the wet stone.”What are you doing?” Cassia asked, her brow furrowing as she watched

Kae. “Checking for skitterer tracks?” “No,” Kae mumbled. “Too cold for skitterers.

They like the thermal vents near the ridge.” She closed her eyes.Deep inside her chest, that familiar, quiet knot of psionic energy uncoiled.

She didn’t let it burst outward.

Instead, she pushed a thin, needle-fine pulse straight through her fingers into the rock—a technique her father,

Lind, had beaten into her head during six grueling summers at the

Garrison.Command

Mapping 101, her father used to call it.

A high-tier tactical method designed for officers to sweep underground bunkers, detect hidden enemy troop emplacements, and map subterranean tunnels through solid concrete.

It required insane psionic resonance and a brutal amount of spatial visualization.Her father had wanted her to use it to spot concealed artillery units.

Kae had realized within three weeks that the exact same pulse bounced back differently depending on the density of the metal trapped inside the rock.To

Kae, the dark basalt didn’t feel like stone.

It felt like an acoustic map.A sharp, hollow echo meant quartz.

A dull, soft thud meant limestone.

But six inches past the mossy crust, she felt a sudden, thrumming vibration—a dense, heavy hum that resonated right up her arm and vibrated in her teeth.S-grade

Magnetite-Iron.

A massive vein of it, pinched between two layers of slate.

And right above it, nourished by the high mineral runoff, a patch of thick, silver-leafed flora thrumming with low-level bio-psionic energy.Kae opened her eyes. “There’s no crate down here.

But there’s better stuff.”She pulled a small, folding entrenching tool from her belt, snapped the spade head into a ninety-degree pick axe, and hammered it right into the crack in the wall.CRACK.A chunk of black shale flaked away, revealing a glittering seam of dark, blue-violet ore beneath.

It caught the dim light like shattered glass.Cassia stepped closer, her eyes widening slightly as she looked from the glittering rock face to

Kae’s muddy face. “Is that… iron?””S-grade

Magnetite,” Kae corrected, already pulling out a small pair of brass shears.

She didn’t just dig the metal; she reached into the muddy crevice beside the vein and carefully snipped four pale, luminescent roots growing out of the dark soil. “And these are

Frost-Lily tubers.

They only grow near raw iron seams.””What do we want flower roots for?” Cassia asked, sounding entirely bewildered. “We’re in a survival exam,

We need rations and armor plates, not a bouquet.””Three roots of refined

Frost-Lily extract go for eight hundred credits on the campus apothecary exchange,” Kae said bluntly, carefully wrapping the glowing tubers in a piece of damp oil-cloth before stuffing them into her sweater pocket. “And the iron… if

I melt this down with a fluorspar catalyst, it’s seventy percent denser than the standard scrap metal in the

Institute supply crates.” Cassia stared at her for five full seconds, her mouth opening slightly before she snapped it shut.”You can… you can just feel metal through a cliff?” Cassia whispered, her tone dropping its usual aggressive edge into something dangerously close to awe. “Without a ground-penetrating radar array?””My dad made me practice on granite hills,” Kae muttered, digging her spade into the wall to pry out another six-pound chunk of violet iron. “He wanted me to find hidden tanks.

But tanks move around, and rocks stay put.

Rocks are much easier.” Cassia leaned against the basalt wall, watching in absolute silence as the quiet girl in the baggy sweater efficiently stripped three thousand credits worth of rare military-grade ore out of a bare cliff face in less than ten minutes.”You’re weird,

Lind,” Cassia finally said, a slow, wild grin creeping back across her face as she unsheathed her curved saber to help scrape the loose shale away. “You’re genuinely, completely weird.

But if you can forge swords out of a rock wall…

I’m going to like being in this squad.”