“Build without testing? Optimist.Test without documenting? Gambler.Do neither? Cautionary tale.We’ve all been the third one at least once.”— Tinkerer DB, #beginners FAQFour minutes became three, then two, and then the nearest group crested a low ridge of dark stone and drifted into the open ground below my depression.Five of them.Four followers and the leader, exactly as I’d mapped from above, the pack moving in that loose formation where the smaller creatures orbited the bigger one like planets around a particularly ugly sun.The leader’s sensory pits burned brighter than the others, casting faint halos against the stone with each step, and it moved slowly as if it were checking the terrain for anything that didn’t belong.Anything like me.My plan was simple, which was both its greatest strength and, given my track record, probably a warning sign.Kill the smaller ones first, at range, while I had the advantage of distance and surprise. Isolate the leader. Deal with it last, alone, without four sets of digit-claws flanking me while I tried to fight the biggest thing in the room.Textbook predator management: reduce the numbers, then handle the alpha.Well… textbook.The trailing creature separated from the group by a few meters, pausing beside a boulder to investigate something on the ground, its sensory pits dimming as it focused downward.I settled the coilgun’s stock against my shoulder, found the creature’s center of mass through the simple iron sights, and let my breath out in a slow, controlled stream the way my old Kallum instructors had taught me.Squeezed.At MAX power, the coilgun didn’t push.Oh no, it shoved.The full electromagnetic acceleration cycle dumped 7.2 kilojoules of energy into a single ferromagnetic round, and Newton’s third law collected the debt (...)