The night before the battle, Yuki didn't sleep.
Not because of nerves — he wasn't worried about the horde. He was worried about Lira.
She'd told him at dinner, matter-of-fact, like it wasn't a big deal: "I'll be on the east wall with the other archers and the two mages the guild scraped together."
He'd almost said no. Almost said stay inside, stay safe, let me handle it. But he knew how that would land. She'd grown up on trade roads surrounded by monsters. She could shoot. She wasn't going to hide in a cellar while her town got attacked.
So instead of arguing, he went back to his room and started building something.
He'd been thinking about enchantment since he'd arrived in Millhaven. This world had enchanted items — he'd seen them in the market. Trinkets, mostly. A warming stone. A lantern that never went out. Minor stuff, powered by tiny amounts of stored mana.
But if mana could be woven into cloth and condensed into blades, it could be stored in stone. And if it could be stored, it could be programmed. A spell, locked into a physical object, running continuously on its own power supply.
He pulled a mana stone from dimensional storage — a smooth, dense piece of the blue mana-conductive metal he'd refined with his mana months ago at the homestead. About the size of a large marble. It hummed faintly when he pushed mana into it, the same way it always did. Perfect conductor. Perfect battery.
Now the hard part: layering spells into it.
He started with physical enhancement. He visualised the mana reinforcement he used on his own body — the flow pattern, the way energy threaded through muscle and bone and nerve — and compressed that pattern into a tight, self-sustaining loop. Then he pushed the loop into the stone.
The stone resisted. Not like rock resists a chisel — more like a jar resists a lid that's slightly too big. The spell pattern didn't want to fit into such a small container. He had to compress it further, tighten the loops, make the pattern more efficient.
It took an hour. But the reinforcement spell locked into the stone and held. He could feel it humming — a steady, low pulse of enhancement magic, waiting to be activated by contact with a living body.
Layer two: enhanced vision. He modelled it on his own mana-enhanced sight — sharpened focus, expanded peripheral awareness, improved low-light perception. Compressed. Stored. Locked.
Layer three: agility. Not just raw speed — reaction time. The spell pattern that made his nervous system fire faster, his reflexes sharpen, his body respond quicker to his brain's commands. Compressed. Stored. Locked.
Layer four: mana replenishment. This one was tricky. Most people in this world had tiny mana reserves — barely enough to light a candle, Lira had said. But the stone could act as a secondary reservoir, feeding ambient mana into the wearer's system at a steady rate. Like hooking up a second fuel tank. It wouldn't give her his reserves — nothing could — but it would keep her topped up and recover whatever she spent faster than her body could naturally.
Four spell layers. One stone. Each one running on the blue metal's stored mana, which passively recharged from the atmosphere.
He held the finished stone up and examined it. It glowed faintly — a soft blue-white pulse, barely visible, rhythmic as a heartbeat. The mana density packed into it was absurd. He'd crammed more magic into this marble-sized piece of metal than most enchanted items in Millhaven's market contained in total.
He threaded it onto a thin chain of woven mana — the same technique he used for clothing, but finer. Dark, nearly invisible, strong enough to stop a blade. The stone hung from it like a pendant.
He held the necklace in his palm and wondered if he was overdoing it.
Definitely overdoing it. Don't care.
Morning. The town was tense.
People moved through the streets with purpose — barricading doors, moving supplies, herding children toward the interior buildings. The guild had set up a command post in the market square. Adventurers checked weapons and armour. The Greymarch Company was already in formation near the west wall.
Yuki found Lira at the east wall staging area. She was stringing her bow, quiver full, leather armour fitted tight. Her hair was braided back for combat. She looked up when he approached.
"Hey."
"Hey." He reached into his jacket. "I made something for you."
He held out the necklace. The blue stone caught the morning light and pulsed once.
Lira looked at it. Looked at him. "You made this for me?"
"Yes, I couldn't sleep."
She took it carefully. "What is it?"
"An enchanted stone. I tried to layer in a few things — physical enhancement, sharper reflexes, better eyesight, and a mana replenishment loop. I don't know how well it'll work on someone else. I've never made one before."
She stared at the stone. Then at him. Then back at the stone.
"You've never made one before and you just casually layered four enchantments into a single item overnight."
"I had time."
She put it on. The chain settled against her collarbone, the stone resting just below the hollow of her throat.
The effect was immediate. Her eyes widened. She looked at her hands — flexing her fingers, rolling her wrists. Shifted her weight from foot to foot. Looked at the far end of the wall, then at Yuki, then at the wall again.
"I can see the grain in the wood on that watchtower," she said. "That's two hundred metres away."
"The vision enhancement is working then."
"Everything is working. I feel—" She bounced on her toes. Light. Fast. "I feel like I could outrun a horse. How much mana did you put in this thing?"
"As much as it could fit."
"Yuki." Her voice dropped. Serious. "This isn't a trinket. I've heard stories about artifacts like this. Royal treasuries. Vault collections. National treasures guarded by armies. You just made one in a night and handed it to me like it's a good luck charm."
"It is a good luck charm. I want you to come back safe."
Something shifted in her expression. The awe softened into something warmer. Deeper.
She stepped forward. Rose onto her tiptoes. And kissed him on the cheek.
Her lips were warm. The contact lasted maybe two seconds. She lingered close afterward, cheeks flushed — close enough that he could feel her breath on his jaw.
"Be careful," she whispered. "And don't hold back."
She stepped away.
Yuki's face was on fire. Not mana-heat. Not combat adrenaline. Just pure, catastrophic, seventeen-year-old embarrassment. His ears were red. His brain had stalled. Three of his five parallel thought threads had crashed simultaneously and the other two were producing nothing useful.
A girl had kissed him. That had never happened before. He had killed a dragon and split his consciousness into five parallel streams and torn holes in the fabric of space and none of that had prepared him for a cute girl's lips on his cheek.
Lira looked at his face and giggled. Actually giggled — bright and genuine and completely at odds with the armour and the bow and the battle they were about to fight.
"Well," she said. "At least I've found your one weakness."
She turned and jogged toward her position on the east wall, the blue stone pulsing at her throat, a big smile plastered on her face.
Yuki stood there for several seconds. Then he closed his eyes, forcefully rebooted his crashed thought threads, and walked to the north wall.
Focus. Horde. Hundreds of monsters. Stop thinking about her soft lips and how nice she smelled.
He couldn't stop thinking about her lips.