Chương 13

Reminded of his conversation with Liam, Alex sat down in the grass outside his tent and tried to make mana come out of his hands the way Liam did. He focused on the feeling of it, that warm reservoir sitting somewhere behind his ribs, and pushed. A wisp curled out of his palm, thin and pale and shapeless, gone almost as soon as it appeared. That counted as progress, sort of. He tried again and got another wisp, sloppier than the first if that was even possible.

Forming it into anything concrete, a ball, a line, anything with edges, turned out to be a different problem entirely. It reminded him of his first weeks of Chinese calligraphy, back when he understood exactly what the stroke was supposed to look like and his hand simply refused to produce it. The knowledge was there, but the control wasn't. Every wisp came out the way his early brushwork had, recognizable as an attempt and nothing more, and each failure cost him mana he could feel draining away.

Liam had made this look like breathing. Liam had also spent every waking hour since the first wave doing nothing else, so maybe the comparison wasn't fair. Alex kept going anyway, and somewhere around the fifteenth malformed wisp he had to admit that manipulating raw mana was a lot harder than Liam made it sound. He sat back, rolled his shoulders, and thought about it differently. There were already two working examples sitting inside his own body.

Power Strike and Reinforce Body both moved mana through him along routes that worked, routes the system itself had carved. He didn't need to invent the stroke from nothing. He could trace over one that already existed, the same way he'd once practiced letters over faint gray guidelines until his hand learned the shape on its own.

So instead of forcing mana out of his hands, he tried extending it through his body the way Reinforce Body did, slow and deliberate, feeling for the path the skill normally took without him. It was clumsy. The mana moved like it resented being asked, coating his forearms in something that was almost the skill but leaked constantly, burning through his reserves for a fraction of what the real thing gave him. Wasteful in a way that would have made Liam wince. But it was moving. He was moving it.

Alex kept at it for hours, draining himself dry, lying back in the grass to watch the stars while his mana crawled back, then sitting up and starting over. Easily the least glamorous training montage in history, one enormous man sitting cross-legged in a dark field, sweating over something completely invisible. Somewhere deep into the night, on an attempt that felt no different from the forty before it, he checked his status out of habit. [Mana Manipulation (Novice)] Alex stared at it.

Then he grinned wide enough that his face hurt, pumping a fist at absolutely no one, the exhaustion swallowed whole by pure jubilation. A few minutes later he was flat on his back in his tent, out cold and snoring loud enough to scare off anything the wall didn't. Alex woke to the sound of children screaming. The good kind, his brain supplied, a half-second after his hand had already found the glaive. Laughing and shrieking, feet pounding past his tent, one of the younger cousins yelling something about cheating.

He let go of the weapon and lay there listening for a moment longer than he needed to. If somebody cut the monster waves out of the deal, this was honestly a decent vacation. Food showed up every day, nobody had work, and the kids ran wild from sunrise until somebody's mom caught them. Ten out of ten, since the food still had wonderful seasoning from the store. He dragged himself out into the morning, still groggy, and found Ace and Jeremy already geared up and walking toward him.

Ace reached him first, hands glowing before she'd said a word, green light sweeping over him while she studied his face.

"You slept badly." If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"I slept fine."

"You slept badly, and you're late." The light winked out.

"We said sunrise."

"There are no clocks here. Sunrise is a suggestion."

"It's a suggestion you're late for." She patted his cheek twice, the way she used to when he was eight and she wanted him to know she'd won, then went back to Jeremy's side and took his hand like it was the most natural motion in the world. Jeremy, quiet as usual this early, just nodded at Alex over her head. Mia came up while they were talking, bow already strung, and hovered at the edge of the group the way she always did, like she hadn't fully decided whether she was invited.

"Are we hunting the big ones again today?" Her voice was quiet. The question wasn't.

"That's the plan," Alex said, and something in her shoulders settled. Liam was the last problem. They found him face down in his tent, one hand still half-curled like he'd fallen asleep mid-cast, and getting a response out of him took an embarrassing amount of teamwork. Jeremy shook him, Ace threatened him, and Mia poked him once with the end of her bow and then looked apologetic about it.

What finally worked was Alex saying the word dungeon, at which point Liam sat up with his hair flattened against one side of his head and said, "Why didn't you open with that," like they were the ones wasting his morning. The second run went smoother than the first, and the first hadn't been rough. Somewhere around the third group of snakes, it stopped feeling like fighting. Mia's arrows kept arriving exactly where Alex was about to swing, so he learned to swing somewhere else.

Liam's bolts staggered anything big before it built momentum, each one tighter and meaner than the day before, and he narrated his own improvements to anyone in earshot whether they asked or not. Jeremy had stopped waiting behind his shield entirely, slipping in with fast, needling thrusts and back out before anything could turn on him, and when Ace spotted the shield lying abandoned in the grass, she said nothing to him in a way that said a great deal.

They hunted the level 5s on purpose this time, tracking the bigger red-eyed shapes through the endless green and pulling them one at a time. Alex split the fourth one open along the same line Mia's arrow had drawn for him, and the notification arrived while the body was still falling. [Level up. Level 4.] Warmth rolled through his limbs. He checked it, set it aside, and stepped over the corpse to cover Jeremy's flank.

The glaive kept getting better in his hands, or he kept getting better behind it, and he honestly couldn't tell which. Polearm Mastery still sat at Novice on his status, unmoved, so the skill probably ranked on thresholds he hadn't reached yet, which was a guess, but the kind that felt right. Between fights he kept running mana under his skin without touching Reinforce Body, and the coating came thinner and cleaner each time, the strokes steadier, less of it bleeding away into nothing.

By the time they walked out, the sun sat low and everyone's mana sat lower, and two small shapes were waiting by the portal. Jake and John, bouncing on their heels like they'd been standing there for hours and would deny it under oath. Jeremy scooped both boys up at once, one under each arm like groceries, and they delivered their message upside down and giggling: there was a meeting about tomorrow's wave, and everyone was supposed to come.

"Did you fight anything cool?" John asked Alex from under his father's arm.

"Seven cool things."

"Whoa." Four days, Alex thought, walking behind them toward the fire. Four days gone already, and the portal would open again tomorrow whether they were ready or not. The meeting settled things faster than he expected. Ace would run the healers, which surprised nobody. Mia would lead the archers, which surprised Mia, who went red to her ears and stared at her boots but didn't say no, and Alex caught the small, fierce look underneath the embarrassment before she buried it.

Liam got the mages and reacted like he'd been handed a birthday present. Alex and Jeremy took the melee line together. Being handed responsibility sat fine with Alex, always had. It was being handed orders that made his skin itch, and tonight, mercifully, nobody was giving him any. Afterward, he pulled up the shop with tomorrow sitting heavy in the back of his skull.

He'd been quietly sore about the missing metal armor since the white room, back when the racks held nothing but leather and he'd assumed the system simply didn't want people surviving that badly. The shop had no such rule. He found a Common rank set with full coverage, added a durability enhancement, and watched most of what two days of dungeon runs had earned him disappear in one purchase. Getting into it was its own battle.

The armor fought him like the twins fought bath time, and after several minutes of losing, he had to wave Liam over to deal with the back straps.

"You look like a very well-funded trash can," Liam said, cinching him in.

"Thank you."

"A really premium one though." Fully sealed in from head to toe, Alex ran through a few steps, then a few more, waiting for the stiffness that never came. His stats carried the weight like it wasn't there, and the joints moved cleaner than they had any right to. He reached for the glaive last, let his hands settle into their places on the haft, and felt the quiet click of everything sitting where it belonged. Whatever came out of that portal tomorrow, he was ready to meet it.