One Inch Tall, One Power a Day - Ball Bearings on Crushed Loam

Her right big toe burned inside her boot with a dull, rhythmic ache.

She looked back over her shoulder. The thistle thicket where she’d faced down the rat was barely ten feet behind her. Ten feet. It felt like she’d hiked half a mile through an overgrown drainage ditch off Route 52.

“Three miles an hour back in the warehouse,” she muttered, her voice thin inside the mask. “Down here, I’m taking twenty minutes to clear a yard.”

Twenty feet ahead, half-submerged under a drift of spruce needles and quartz gravel, sat a smooth, gray-black object.

Not a standard iron crate. The surface was rounded, molded from matte-black polymer rubber with structural ribs running along the sides. To her frame, it came up to the middle of her thigh.

On the top center panel, two bronze stars were stamped into the casing.

Wren stopped three paces back. She circled the rubberized crate slowly, checking the dirt for burrows or silk lines before bracing her heels against a boulder and hooking the sharp bevel of her needle under the front latch plate.

Snap-click.

The pressurized seal broke with a pneumatic hiss. The heavy rubber lid swung back on internal hinges, falling against the gravel with a thud.

Wren stood rigid, needle leveled. Nothing lunged.

She stepped closer to the lip and looked inside.

Two-Wheeled Precision Kick-Scooter x1

Crude Steel Cleaver x1

Wren’s jaw went loose inside her hood.

She reached in with both gloves and hauled the kick-scooter out.

To her fifty-millimeter frame, the scooter was roughly three feet long from its rear foot brake to the crossbar of its rubber-gripped handlebars. Lightweight aluminum frame painted olive drab, fitted with two solid four-inch polyurethane wheels containing sealed ball-bearing hubs. On the front steering column, a small wire basket was welded directly to the crossbar, complete with an adjustable kickstand at the base of the deck.

Two-Wheeled Precision Kick-Scooter: Mobility Asset. Multiplies baseline movement speed by 30.0x across level or semi-compacted soil. Deck capacity: 5.0 kg.

“Thirty times,” Wren breathed, running her gloved thumb over the smooth polyurethane tread of the front wheel.

She set the scooter onto a flat strip of packed red clay, kicked the stand down into the loam, and picked up the steel cleaver.

Crude Steel Cleaver: Base Attack: +1.0. Weight: 0.8 kg. Front-heavy balance. Forged from scrap iron with a ground bevel.

The cleaver was nearly six inches long overall—to her frame, a heavy executioner’s falchion with a thick spine and a broad chopping face. The ash wood handle was wrapped in friction tape, giving her gloves a solid grip.

Wren took a step back, held the cleaver in her right hand, and gave the air a short test-chop.

WHOOSH.

The heavy steel blade cut through the air with a deep shriek, stopping dead without pulling her wrist off balance. Front-heavy and crude, smelling of machine grease, but holding six inches of sharpened sheet iron made her shoulders feel twice as broad.

She unclipped the sewing needle, strapped it horizontally across her lower back harness, and slotted the new cleaver into the heavy canvas loop on her left hip.

She stored the empty Two-Star container into slot four of her haversack, walked over to the scooter, and grabbed the rubber grips.

“Let’s see if this aluminum frame holds up on crushed loam,” she muttered.

She planted her left boot flat on the deck, set her right boot on the clay, and shoved off.

WHIRRRRR-RATTLE.

The polyurethane wheels caught traction instantly. The precision ball bearings inside the hubs engaged with a high-pitched whine.

The world transformed into a green blur.

The towering crabgrass stalks zipped past her elbows like telephone poles along a highway. She carved a smooth arc around a massive quartz boulder, ducking her head beneath a drooping clover leaf heavy with a globe of stagnant dew. The surface tension of the water drop wobbled as her shoulder brushed the stem, but the droplet held, splashing a few cold beads across her visor.

Her movement speed on the status screen jumped from 0.1 straight to 3.0. Covering thirty yards of ground took less than fifteen seconds.

“Now this,” Wren grinned behind her visor, leaning into a left-hand turn, “is more the sort of ride you’d expect from a Chevrolet.”

The red clay path wasn’t a paved interstate, though. Twenty yards out, the soil gave way to a rough course of exposed root knees, half-buried beetle shells, and fissures in the dirt where the ground had baked and split under the sun.

She had to keep her eyes pinned to the clay three inches ahead of her front tire.

The wind whipped through the neck seal of her hood, carrying the scent of crushed pine needles and warm soil.

Three minutes into the ride, the clay path ended at the base of a steep incline—a towering hill of loose red dirt and quartz gravel that rose four feet above the grass floor.

Wren squeezed the rear fender brake, bringing the scooter to a halt.

She stepped off, checked the time on her HUD (1:15 PM), and unclipped her steel cleaver. Her Brimming Fortune trait had four hours remaining. Satiety was down to four; a dull tremor was starting in her calf muscles from the continuous push-and-glide.She decided to scout the ridge line on foot before hauling the scooter up the slope.

Moving with quiet caution, she picked her way up the crumbling incline, keeping low behind a clump of dried chickweed.

When her head cleared the upper crest, she froze.

Ten feet away, perched on top of a flat granite stone, sat a vertebrate predator.

A field mouse—eight inches long from pink snout to scaly tail. To Wren’s frame, a brown-furred monster broader than a beer keg, towering six feet over her head if it stood on its hind legs. Its coarse fur reeked of stale grain and raw animal fat. Two yellow, curved incisors jutted from its upper jaw.

The mouse was crouched over a shriveled dandelion root, its dark eyes darting toward the sky as its front paws worked the taproot.

Wren didn’t move. The scooter stayed cradled against her side, and no blade left its sheath. Her heart hammered against the inside of her suit, her breath catching in her throat.

The grace protocol was still active in her HUD— Natural predators will not initiate aggression unless provoked or cornered.She stood dead still on the slope, her thumb locked around the cleaver handle, staring into the monster’s unblinking eyes while the sun beat down on her hood.

The field mouse finished the dandelion root, wiped its whiskers twice with its pink paws, and let out a short chittering sound. It sniffed the air, catching the faint smell of synthetic rubber and motor oil rolling off Wren’s suit, but it didn’t lunge. It gave her small gray figure an indifferent glance, turned its heavy body around, and bounded off down the far side of the ridge into the brush.

Wren gave a long breath through her nose, her visor fogging slightly.

“Two inches,” she whispered, her hands shaking as she reset the cleaver back into her hip loop.

“Just a field mouse. Just big.”

She took three deep breaths, wiped her gloves on her thighs, and turned back to haul her scooter up the ridge before the afternoon light began to fade.