An ink-flail slammed into the tree Henrietta had given her focus, and it almost effortlessly cleaved into the trunk, then continued pushing through its wood like it was particularly gummy taffy. A second and third flail gripped the tree and wrenched it to the side, felling it even as a half-dozen tendrils dug into the ground around it to wrench out the stump left behind. Her final three tendrils were dedicated to keeping her aloft and away from the carnage, and gave her an excellent view by which she easily stripped the tree of its branches and laid it at the side of the newly-forming dirt road.

With one dealt with, Henrietta turned her attention to the next tree in her way.

⟨Etch⟩

A tendril cut through the trunk, and the process began anew.

It hadn't been Henrietta's intention to get ⟨Etch⟩, and had been quite annoyed with herself when Oliver reported that she'd gotten the subskill while checking her [Status].

Name: Henrietta Inq Class: [Master Inkscribe] (Card, Rune, Shadow) Level: 8 Major Stats: Dexterity 10, Aura 4, Mind 5 Regular Stats: Recovery 1, Generation 0, Cohesion 2, Skill 4, Capacity 6 Minor Stats: Strength 0, Resistance 0, Power 0 Skills (3/4): [Refined Calligraphy] ⟨Epizeuxis⟩ ⟨Etch⟩ 12

She still wasn't entirely certain as to the how - ⟨Etch⟩ was a subskill that should have affected just her writing implement, rather than her ink - but clearly something about her efforts had been sufficient to grant her the new ability. That had forced her to devote another point to Skill, rather than to Capacity, to keep an opening for ⟨Amanuensis⟩ with her latest level-up.

Now, she didn't really need the Capacity that much, so she'd also diverted a point to Mind and Recovery each, the two places she'd noticed she was running up against her existing limits.

Regardless, even though she hadn't particularly been trying to get a skill which made writing surfaces more pliable - something that was usually only applicable when trying to carve writing into harder surfaces, and therefore usually only came about with the ⟨Universal Canvas⟩ subskill - considering what her inklings had been used for lately, it was incredibly useful. It was unclear how much it aided her diggers, but if it had even a minuscule passive benefit for them it would be enormous. And when she thought about it like that, perhaps it wasn't so unusual that she'd gotten it?

Another tree was tossed to the side, and another tree was felled. Without a day-night cycle to calibrate off of, it was almost impossible to estimate how long Henrietta had been at her task, but it was probably getting close to the end of her road-making day.

Over the past week or so, she'd managed to cut nearly a kilometer of roadway in, which was both a lot for a single person to do, and strongly underscored just how much they needed something that wasn't a human working on things.

At least the ballistae were doing a decent job of defending the Ironworks, but the turrets would inevitably run out of ammo after wasting most of it on false alarms, some of her diggers would die, and she'd need to replenish them. But the 'problem' was that there was more than a full load for her or Jacob to return with every time they went out, so the Universal Refinery was running at maximum pace, turning out two hundred kilos of iron per day regularly.

The reason that was a problem was because it was so, so much iron. More than they could personally use. Ingots of the stuff were piling up, each one roughly ten centimeters wide, five centimeters tall, twenty centimeters long, and just shy of eight kilos in weight. They had hundreds of them, and were getting twenty-five more every time Jacob took another trip out to check up on the Ironworks.

It almost felt ridiculous, bringing more ore back every day while knowing Oliver needed to process the iron dust into the actual ingots, and how that was taking up a substantial amount of his day. Incidentally, the time requirements were a non-trivial amount for why the ingots kept building up, but that was a separate thing that they needed to deal with.

Her team was fantastic, barely questioning the purpose of such an enormous resource backlog, but she didn't want to start feeling the weight of their judgement should she fail to actually use all of the materials they'd worked so hard to get. She'd reached for iron without having a clear goal in mind as to what it would be used for, and now they were paying the price.

Not that the price was high, but... she needed to be a better leader than this, than making her charges toil away at all-but-pointless work. There were worse things to be working on than a backlog for highly-important materials, but that didn't make it good either.

The place her mind kept traveling to was in utilizing it for the road. To immediately create railroad tracks, have them make rail carts, and directly skip the normal horse-drawn carriage in favor of some kind of self-propelled minecart.

The ballistae had proven that Oliver could make pieces of metal move past one another, after all. She wasn't aware of anything really stopping the same tech being applied to rail lines, to make an agonizingly slow sled slide along a pair of railroad tracks. So long as they ignored the ludicrous amount of metal that would require, anyway.

Operating under the assumption that they could reliably turn one ingot into a length of rail the same length, five hundred ingots - more than they had, but the result of twenty full-production days - would stretch all of a hundred meters.

Out of ten kilometers.

It practically didn't matter how conservative her estimate was, whether a single rail was the same length as an ingot, or twice as long, or even four times as long. Even if they devised a system that only used one rail rather than two, twenty meters a day just wasn't enough.

They were simultaneously making far more iron than they could ever use as individuals, and nowhere near enough iron as they would need for a civilization, and Henrietta didn't know how to fix it.

She took her frustration out on another tree, tearing it to shreds between her ink-flails.

The lack of direct sensory feedback from the tendrils made it much less viscerally satisfying than she'd hoped. But it still did something, and Henrietta sighed with disappointment. Maybe that was why she was out here, trying to stay away from her team as they worked, just so that they wouldn't see her sitting around doing nothing and not being able to think of how to bridge the gap from personal to industrial levels of production.

Her other Expedition simply had never encountered this issue in the slightest. After they'd killed the vampire lord threatening to take over the world, supply lines had largely gone back to normal, and if she'd ever needed something like ten tons of iron, they could have just bought it. Would it have been expensive? Yes, but they got less expensive as they disseminated advanced knowledge that other people could take and run with, uplifting the entire world at once.

What would Mark do is the real question, she thought with no small degree of frustration. Because whatever it would have been would be better than this.

Henrietta turned back, setting herself down on the ground to free up more of her tendrils to pick up wood. Thanks to iron saws, they were actually able to process the wood into lumber, and even though it was wet... well, it had to be harvested before it could be dried. A wood-drying kiln was on the list, but at least some things could be made with wet wood without it being too much of a problem.

The bridge was one of those things, incidentally. The first one they'd made out of reeds was starting to get unstable thanks to the ebb and flow of the river eroding its foundations. Now, whether they actually replaced it with wood remained to be seen, but it was possible. Tables, benches, and stool-seats were more likely, their reed recreations just never felt quite right. Also boats. And...

Henrietta held back a grimace and resisted the urge to rub her temples. That wasn't the image she wanted to project as a leader, so she'd lost the opportunity to express her uncertainty when she'd crossed the Tower Stream and entered First Tower.

The half-dozen logs she'd brought back, selected for being fairly straight and large, were dropped off by Jacob, who was slick with sweat as he worked to single-handedly turn trees into boards.

She needed food, and stopped by the kitchen, built right next to their drinking water pool. Clark had been quite cheerfully upgrading everything mostly by himself, which was impressive, and it currently was two brick walls and a sloped roof made out of reeds and layered leaves, with a counter holding not only a stovetop, but a basic oven. There was food of some kind cooking in the latter, but Clark wasn't paying much attention to it, and was instead interacting with their local petalfur, carefully petting its head to his obvious delight.

But of course, simple cooking wasn't all, there was even an icebox dug into the ground, kept chilled by a 'battery' of Ice mana at the bottom. Jacob could only spare a small amount of mana each day to keep the imperfect storage-device fully charged, but considering its leakage allowed her to fill a ceramic canteen with ice cubes, it might well be the best thing Jacob did on an average day.

Alyssa was out of camp and Oliver was on the top of the Spire, likely forging iron sand into ingots. Everyone was being productive and doing their jobs so well... except for her.

And it was infuriating. She couldn't even say that oh, she was clearly unfit for the role, someone else needed to take over. She was, objectively, the best leader they had available.

Jacob was experienced, but was very uncomfortable being the one giving orders. He loved teaching, as was to be expected, but if Henrietta was worried about being a poor leader, Jacob was confident he was a bad leader. Perhaps he had been a squad leader at some point on a mission that had gone poorly, or something akin to that, and now refused to take the lead. There wasn't anything like that in his dossier, but his dossier had also left out the fact that he'd been present during The Cerulean One's last stand, so it clearly couldn't be trusted.

Clark was theoretically trained as a noble, but as much as she absolutely loved his heart and attitude, he simply could not lead. The things he thought about were important in their own way, but they weren't the things a leader needed to think about. From what she'd gleaned, it sounded like Director Haleford had encouraged his nephew to join the Forerunner Program in an attempt to 'toughen him up,' get him thinking about more conventionally important things.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

In the abstract, it wasn't a bad idea - you couldn't undergo Allosmos unless there was something about you that hadn't fully actualized, if your Fate still had room to be reshaped into being a solution to some other world's problem - but considering the other oddities around their Expedition, Henrietta almost suspected it was intended to be a form of permanent exile.

She had thoughts about that particular perversion of purpose, but unfortunately it didn't make Clark any more qualified to be a leader here and now.

Alyssa was far too flighty and petty to be a good leader. She could be self-sufficient, but usually saw people around her as competition and didn't like being overshadowed. That wasn't a good foundation for a leader, and she was better utilized in the wilderness regardless, so she couldn't even be present most of the time.

And Oliver... Oliver just couldn't think about the big picture. He was the one who needed leading most, the one she needed to ensure had the most capability for doing his own thing. Yes, she could fill in for him if needed, technically, but he'd already developed their technology further than Henrietta felt she could have in the same conditions. Hells, there was not ambiguity about it - he'd made a damned refrigerator within three months of being dropped on an alien planet with stone age level technology.

So no, she was stuck as the Commander, and as such she needed to figure out how to get out of her team's way and let them do their thing. She had the utmost faith that all of them could get them home, she simply needed to not be the weak link.

Unfortunately, no great insights came to her even as she chewed on cold meat or fresh fruits. Oliver joined her, but was mainly poking at his System, and Jacob had just sat down when a sudden screech grabbed all of their attentions.

One of the turrets, it seemed, had noticed something. The ballista mounted near the wall was tracking something they couldn't see, dragging metal against metal to ear-splitting results.

"I wonder how often that might chase away creatures on its own," Henrietta remarked.

"It certainly can chase away some of them," Clark remarked, presumably looking at where the petalfur had dashed off to.

"I want to see what it's seeing!" Oliver said with glee, jumping up from the table and dashing up the side of the cliff onto a ledge. Henrietta hesitated, but as Jacob followed their Artificer, Henrietta shrugged and followed as well.

She arrived at about the same time as the other two, getting a good look at three wolf-sized feathered critters stalking forward on two feet, their pseudo-wings coiled into what looked almost like a martial arts pose to support some rather surprising claws at the end of them.

"That's... that's a velociraptor," Oliver spoke what Henrietta was thinking, then froze.

To her left, Jacob shook his head, but kept his eyes fixed on the feathered creature, "No, velociraptors are smaller, merely knee-high. It could, however, be a deinonychus. They are the creature which most popular media incorrectly call velociraptors."

Henrietta had a bit of a double-take, splitting her focus between the small flock of dinosaurs and her Warrior.

"You fought real dinosaurs in the War?" She asked, incredulously, "I thought that was an invention for the movies."

It was an absolutely spectacular movie series at least, but she'd thought that the closest that dinosaurs had come to participating in The Binding Wars was during a fight against a Demi of The Chained One, when a T-rex skeleton had been animated during a battle taking place in a natural history museum.

"Hm?" he asked, then realized what she was asking. "Ah, no. I do not know of dinosaurs on account of my time fighting. They simply are most fascinating creatures."

"Ah, alright," Henrietta released a bit of tension. Actually, she probably should apologize for assuming that Jacob didn't know about anything other than his time fighting-

"Though I have been far closer to the teeth of a dinosaur than I would have preferred," Jacob continued. "If we consider an animated skeleton as a dinosaur, that is."

Henrietta's attention was firmly wrenched from the living fossil currently investigating their camp. "You were at the Battle of Anthropocene? Your record said you were a normal soldier," she hissed.

A smile passed across Jacob's lips. "Officially, I was."

"Uh, guys?" There was a note of worry in Oliver's voice, "They're getting closer!"

"Then shoot them," Jacob shrugged. "Just one or two shots should suffice."

"But they're dinosaurs," Oliver protested, "How will that work?"

"This isn't the movies, Smith." Henrietta pointed out. "Guns work fine against nonmagical creatures."

"All creatures are magical," Oliver halfheartedly muttered. "But... alright."

He flicked his hand, a quick whiff of motor oil and musty paper filled the air, and the turret fired with a clunk. The loaded claynade flew a bit short, but it still managed to strike the ground hard enough that it exploded with a bang.

The trio of deinos scattered at the sound, instantly fleeing back into the woods.

"Now, that was most enjoyable!" Jacob laughed as most of the tension instantly evaporated. "True dinosaurs!"

"Probably."

"What is most likely true dinosaurs! I suppose we underestimated truly how untouched this world was! What a jewel in the Empire's crown this place shall be in due time!"

"I hope they don't try turning it into a theme park," Oliver laughed a bit nervously. "I don't think that would go well."

"Does this mean we might be in for an asteroid?" Clark asked. "If this is a dinosaur world? Have we returned to the past?"

"That shouldn't be the case," Henrietta frowned. "There's no allowance for time travel within the Jump, and while there certainly are... echoes of places up the stream of Fate in the worlds we land in, there shouldn't be anything that extreme."

"Is it safe to assume that?" Clark asked.

"I'm not keen on assuming anything at this point," Henrietta replied. "We can investigate whether we've got a dinosaur-killing asteroid headed our way eventually though, but I don't think we've got anything close to what might be needed to detect it. Plus... no sun. There's no way the cosmology is anything close to what it is back home."

"But there could be analogues?" Jacob asked.

"There could be," she conceded, then tapped her knee. "Well, it doesn't change anything for us in the short-term. Smith, can you do some divination to determine if a rock from the sky is liable to kill us in the next year?"

He nodded.

"Appreciated."

"But if it's not that," Oliver asked, "Is it likely that the calamity might be a dinosaur apocalypse?"

"We don't know how many of the creatures we've seen are dinosaurs," Henrietta pointed out.

"But so many of the creatures here are hexapedal," Oliver countered. "Dinosaurs were - are - were - quadrupedal."

"Griffins and pegasi are hexapedal," she pointed out, "That didn't prevent their existence back home. True dragons are also hexapedal, and are speculated to be saurian in biology."

"I... well, I was going to say griffins and pegasi aren't the products of natural evolution and so can't count, but dragons are a good point," Oliver contemplated.

"There certainly are creatures which are not saurian," Jacob provided. "Our own petalfur is very clearly mammalian, which was a type of creature which barely existed while dinosaurs existed on our planet."

"And yet," Clark cut in, and Henrietta allowed a bit of tension to drain away. She could worry about their civilization tomorrow, she decided. Worry about her competence, making the jump to industry, all of that could be tomorrow.

Right now, she just wanted to have some fun talking about dinosaurs.

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