The new posts went in before the sun cleared the treeline.
The timber was cold, wet, and heavy, its pale bark charred black at the base where Kara had passed a low, controlled flame across the grain. It was an old farmer's trick to keep damp clay from rotting the pine from the inside out. Her palms were smudged with soot, but her grip didn't slip as she held the third post vertical in the ditch.
"Half an inch left," Xander said, sighting down a length of taut hemp twine stretched between two iron stakes.
Drake didn't argue. He sat low in his hips, his boots buried past the ankle in red mud, and nudged the heavy base with the side of his knee until the timber aligned with the string.
Above them, James brought the wooden mallet down.
Thud.
The sound was dull, heavy, and swallowed immediately by the wet morning air.
Thud.
The timber bit two inches deeper into the gravel substrate.
James lowered the mallet, resting its block head on the mud, and wiped a streak of gray sweat from his eyebrow with his forearm. His shoulder ached with a dull, familiar heat—not the sharp flare of an overextended mana circuit, but the simple, honest fatigue of driving timber into stone.
"Straight," Xander said, pulling his string taut once more. "It'll hold."
"It'll hold until spring," Drake corrected softly, standing up and wiping his mud-caked palms on the thighs of his trousers. "If the rain stays light."
"Spring is four months away," Kara said, stepping back to admire the line. "By spring, we'll either be back in the upper campus or we'll have built a house out here."
"A house requires permits," Xander noted automatically.
Kara looked at him, one eyebrow raised. "Whose permits? Yours?"
Xander opened his mouth, caught the corner of Drake's mouth twitching, and closed it again. He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses with a clean knuckle.
"The structural integrity of this line is mathematically superior to the section that fell," Xander muttered, turning back toward the ditch. "That is all I am contributing."
"Better," Kara murmured.
On the porch, Master Chawng sat on his low three-legged stool. A light dusting of pine shavings covered his sandals, looking like pale flower petals against the dark, weathered wood. The small whittling knife moved across the stick in his lap with a soft, rhythmic shuck, shuck, shuck.
He hadn't offered a suggestion all morning. He hadn't checked their plumb lines. He simply sat in the cold morning light, carving.
"James," Luna said softly.
She wasn't looking at the fence. She was looking past the open gate, up the gravel service path that led toward the main campus.
James turned, his hand remaining rested on the head of the mallet.
A woman was walking down the slope.
She wore a dark, double-breasted administrative coat buttoned tightly against the chill, a narrow leather folder tucked neatly under her left arm. Her leather boots clicked against the gravel—a sharp, measured rhythm that sounded completely foreign against the damp quiet of the Annex yard.
She didn't have an escort. She didn't carry a weapon.
She stopped ten paces outside the gate.
Her eyes moved over the scene with practiced efficiency: the raw ditch, the five muddy students, the stack of unused pine timber, and the charred posts already standing straight against the treeline.
She didn't pull the gate bell. She didn't announce herself.
She looked past the squad, straight toward the porch.
"Master Chawng," the woman said. Her voice was clear, dry, and entirely devoid of inflection. "I require clarification on yesterday's incident report."
She reached into her folder, pulling out a white parchment document bound with a red lead seal.
"A logistics runner reported an unclassified entity crossing the property perimeter at 09:18," she continued, looking directly at the old man on the stool. "The ledger requires a signed statement regarding disposal or capture."
Chawng's knife didn't stop. A paper-thin curl of pale wood peeled away from the stick and drifted down onto his knee.
He didn't look up.
"They built it," Chawng said, his voice barely louder than the rustle of the pine needles above. "Ask them."
The woman's hand paused on the edge of the parchment.
For a fraction of a second, her composure wavered—a microscopic hitch in her posture as her mental ledger hit an unexpected blank space. The Academy functioned on hierarchy; administrators spoke to instructors, instructors spoke to department heads, and students existed as data points in between.
Chawng didn't offer her a bridge. He just cut another thin strip of wood.
The woman turned slowly back toward the gate.
Her eyes locked onto James.
"Squad Seven-Gamma?" she asked.
James didn't step out of the ditch. He didn't drop the mallet or stand at attention. He stayed right where he was, his boots set deep in the red clay, beside Drake and Kara.
"Yes," James said.
She opened the folder wider. "I am Registrar Vance. Yesterday at 09:14, a logistics wagon experienced an axle failure near this boundary. According to the runner's initial statement, a timber-hound was trapped beneath a fallen retaining log."
She looked up from the page, her pale eyes assessing them with cold neutrality.
"The animal is not listed in the yard ledger. Was it destroyed?"
"No," Luna said.
Vance shifted her gaze to Luna. "Reclaimed by the Academy?"
"It was stuck," Luna said quietly. Her voice had no edge, but her stance remained rooted beside the newly set post. "We lifted the timber. It walked back into the woods."
Vance's pen hovered over the parchment.
"Unassigned biological assets cannot simply 'walk back,'" Vance said softly. "If an entity enters property maintained by the institution, it must be categorized. An unclassified survival becomes a discrepancy."
Xander went entirely still.
"A discrepancy," Xander repeated, his voice dropping an octave.
Vance glanced at him. "You are familiar with the term?"
"In administrative accounting," Xander said, his voice flat, "a discrepancy is an item that costs more to categorize than to erase."
A heavy silence settled over the gate.
Kara's fingers tightened slightly against the cold wood of the post she was holding. A faint, invisible shimmer of dry heat rippled through the air around her wrist, turning a drop of morning dew on the bark to steam.
Vance noticed. Her eyes lingered on Kara's smudged cuff, then moved down to Drake's low, locked stance, and finally back to James.
She didn't see five castoffs rotting in punishment.
She saw five people holding up a two-hundred-pound timber frame without a word spoken between them, working in complete synchronization while an administrator stood in their driveway.
"The Board is monitoring logs around the North Annex," Vance said slowly, closing the leather folder with a soft snap. "Unusual events in decommissioned zones tend to draw interest."
"We're setting posts," Drake said. It was the first time he had spoken. His voice was low, deep, and utterly unbothered. "The fence fell."
Vance looked at the charred base of the pine post buried in the gravel.
"You charred the timber," she observed.
"Keeps the rot out," Kara said flatly.
Vance stared at the dark wood for three long seconds. The institutional machinery behind her eyes was visibly recalculating—trying to fit five muddy first-years doing peasant carpentry into a file marked Failed Candidates.
"I will record the entity as displaced," Vance said, tucking the folder back under her arm. "The formal audit for the North Annex sector is scheduled for the end of the month."
She turned toward the gravel path, then paused, looking back over her shoulder at James.
"You should know," she added, her voice dropping into something almost human, "the runner didn't report a monster. He reported five students who didn't ask who was in charge before they moved the wood."
She didn't wait for an answer. She turned and walked back up the service road, her dark coat disappearing around the bend toward the upper campus.
The gate stayed open behind her.
For a long moment, no one moved. The morning wind rustled the high canopy of the pines, dropping a light shower of cold water onto the gravel.
Xander adjusted his glasses. "An audit."
"We knew they'd come eventually," Kara said, wiping her dark forehead with her back-hand. "They can't leave a blank spot on their map forever."
"Let them come," Drake said, picking up the heavy wooden wedge from the grass. "The ground's still soft. We have five more posts to set before noon."
James looked down at his hands. They were caked in gray dirt and dried pine sap, his knuckles raw from the cold handle of the mallet.
He looked at Chawng.
The old man hadn't moved from his stool. He held a smooth, perfectly rounded wooden peg between his thumb and forefinger, inspecting it against the morning light.
He didn't offer a word of praise. He didn't tell them they had handled Vance correctly.
He simply placed the peg into a leather pouch at his belt, picked up another raw pine branch, and set his knife against the wood.
James looked back at the fence line.
The new wood stood dark against the cold sky—rough, hand-cut, and charred at the base. It wasn't pretty. It didn't match the grand stone walls of the upper campus.
But it was theirs.
"Drake," James said, stepping back into the ditch and gripping the mallet handle. "Raise the next one."