Chương 15: second wave

The moon hung low over the settlement, and Alex sat alone in the grass beyond the training yard, mana coiling sluggishly through his channels like water through a bent pipe. Tomorrow the wave would come. He intended to be ready for it. He pushed the mana again, guiding it down his arm and into his palm the way he'd practiced in the dungeon. It resisted him. It always resisted him.

Where Liam could spin his mana into shapes with a thought, Alex had to wrestle every thread of it into place, and even then it slipped loose the moment his focus wavered. Mana Manipulation, the system called it. Novice rank. The word felt generous. Still, there was progress. A week ago he couldn't have held the flow steady for more than a breath. Now he could cycle it through his skills, feeding Power Strike and Reinforce Body with a smoothness that made them cost less and hit harder. Not elegant. Not efficient.

But his. He was so deep in the exercise that he didn't notice Grandpa until the old man's shadow fell across the grass.

"Still at it," Grandpa Bill said. Not a question. Alex glanced up. Even in the moonlight he could see the exhaustion carved into his grandfather's face, the way his shoulders sat lower than they used to. The old man had been training for hours every day since the first wave. Sword drills until his arms shook, then the healers would patch the torn muscle, and he'd start again. It was how most of the family leveled now, Grandpa's own method: push the body past breaking, heal, push again.

The healers couldn't restore stamina, but they could keep the flesh willing long after it should have quit. Alex had been surprised, at first, that a man his age would grind that hard. Then he remembered the first wave, and Grandpa standing at the front line with a sword in hand while men half his age held the wall behind him.

Grandpa Bill was old, but he had the strongest physique in the family, and he was not the kind of man who would let his children and grandchildren stand in danger without planting himself in front of them.

"Wave's tomorrow," Alex said, because he didn't know what else to say. He never did, with Grandpa. The words were always there, somewhere, but they came out smaller than he meant them.

"It is." Grandpa lowered himself onto the grass beside him with a grunt. He didn't offer advice. He didn't ask how the training was going. He just sat there a while, watching Alex cycle his mana, and when he finally spoke it was only four words.

"Fight on, boy. Whatever comes."

"I will." Grandpa nodded once, like a contract had been signed, and pushed himself back up. Alex watched him walk toward the houses, sword hanging from his hip, and then turned back to his mana and forgot about everything else. That was the thing about focus. It ate the world. Later, he would hate himself for that. He trained until his channels ached, and when he finally lay down he could admit he was still nowhere close to Liam. But the gap had narrowed from a canyon to a river. Decent progress. He slept.

Alex woke with the sun and knew before he opened his eyes that the settlement was already moving. He could hear it: boots on packed dirt, orders called across the yard, the rhythmic thud of the last barricade stakes being driven home. Five days since the world changed, and already the place had the sound of a village bracing for a siege. The plan was simple, laid out at the morning meeting. Close combatants outside the walls. Ranged fighters on top of them, where a narrow wooden platform ran along the inner face.

The wall itself wasn't much, but it was theirs, and it turned fifty feet of open ground into a killing field. Alex took his place outside, glaive in hand. He'd left the shield behind. Something in his gut told him today wasn't a day for holding ground behind a slab of wood. Today was a day for reach and edge. He found the others with his eyes. Grandpa, sword drawn, positioned down the line with the other frontline warriors.

Liam and Mia up on the wall, Liam's hands already wreathed in a faint shimmer, Mia with an arrow loose on the string. Ace and Grandma he couldn't see at all, which meant they were inside the walls where the family had insisted they stay. Good. He pulled up his status one last time. Name: Alex Morningstar Age: 21 Level: 4 Race: Human (H) Class: Warrior Stolen novel; please report.

Strength: 24 Dexterity: 15 Constitution: 18 Perception: 10 Intelligence: 12 Wisdom: 11 Skills: Identify (Common), Power Strike (Common), Reinforce Body (Common), Taunt (Common) Mastery/Manipulation: Polearm Mastery (Novice), Mana Manipulation (Novice) Body Cultivation: None Mana Cultivation: None Bloodline: None Nearly double what he'd arrived in this world with. Every number on that screen had been paid for in blood and repetition, and looking at them steadied him. He felt prepared.

He also felt, in the pit of his stomach, that anything could go wrong. Around him the team checked their gear. Jeremy hefted a spear that hadn't been there last week, some dungeon drop with a wicked barbed head. Liam's staff pulsed with stored mana. Mia's new bow creaked as she tested the draw. Everyone had upgraded. Everyone was ready. Alex was still nervous. The portal stood where it always stood, a wound of light in the middle of the field, and above it the system's countdown burned in the air.

Alex took a half step ahead of the line, glaive angled low, planting himself to take the brunt of whatever came through. His mana sense — clumsy as it was — picked up the change first. The density around the portal thickened, pressure building like the air before a storm. Behind him, on the wall, Liam's mana flared bright in his awareness, brighter than anyone else's. The dungeon's mana was stranger. Older. Alex couldn't read it the way Liam probably could, but he could feel it, and it felt wrong.

The countdown hit zero. The dogs came out running. They poured from the portal in ranks, flesh the color of rust, eyes glowing a wet red, moving at a speed that made the first wave's snakes look like they'd been standing still. Two abreast, then four, then a flood — Alex counted as fast as he could and gave up somewhere past forty. Fifty, maybe more. And at the back, emerging last, a dog half again the size of the others, walking while its pack sprinted, in no hurry at all. The boss. There was always a boss.

Alex flicked Identify across the charge. [Tainted Dog — Level 4] [Tainted Dog — Level 5] [Tainted Dog — Level 3] And at the rear, unhurried, patient: [Tainted Dog — Level 7] Level seven. His stomach dropped. The strongest snake in the first wave had been level Five, and it had nearly killed two people. These things were faster, higher-leveled, and there were fifty of them. For one cold heartbeat, Alex looked at that wall of rushing bodies and thought, clearly and simply: we can't handle this.

Then the arrows started falling and there was no more time to think. The first volley thinned the charge less than he'd hoped. The dogs were fast and low and they wove as they ran; half the shafts buried themselves in dirt. But some hit. He saw one arrow punch clean through a dog's skull and drop it mid-stride — Mia, it had to be Mia, nobody else on that wall shot like that. Liam's magic followed a breath later, bolts of two different elements hammering down into the pack, and dogs died screaming in fire and force.

Ten down. Maybe fifteen. Not enough. Nowhere near enough. The remainder came on without slowing, and Alex felt the moment the melee line's nerve started to bend under the sight of it. Thirty-plus monsters at full sprint did something to a man's legs. So he did the only thing he could do for his family. He used Taunt. He'd drilled the skill in the dungeon until he could split it across multiple targets, and now he cast it wide, again and again, dragging every red-eyed gaze he could reach onto himself. Ten dogs.

Fifteen. Twenty. Their charge warped, the flood bending toward him like iron filings to a magnet, and Alex had exactly enough time to trigger Reinforce Body before the wave hit. The first dogs leapt with their jaws wide and slammed into him like thrown stones. His armor shrieked. He kept his feet — barely — and brought the glaive down in a full-strength arc, Polearm Mastery guiding the blade through one spine and into the shoulder of the next.

A dog got its teeth into his arm; he felt the pressure even through the plate, felt the metal begin to give, and simply kept swinging, because stopping meant dying. Power Strike. Another skull split. Power Strike again, mana flooding down the haft the way he'd practiced all last night, and the blade went through two bodies at once. They came for his legs. His arms. Anywhere the armor was thin. Red eyes everywhere, snapping and tearing, and dents blooming across his armor like bruises.

Something in his forearm ground against itself in a way that promised a fracture. He didn't care. Reinforce Body held his frame together and he paid for every wound with two of theirs, punching with his gauntlet when the glaive was too close, cutting when he had room, standing in a widening circle of rust-colored bodies and black blood. Slowly — impossibly — the pressure around him eased. He risked a glance and saw the field littered with dead dogs, the survivors scattered and hounded by the other warriors.

They'd held. His whole body was bleeding under the armor and his arm was a bar of fire, but they'd held. Then he saw the mana. Liam's power and Mia's arrows and every ranged attack on the wall was pouring toward one spot, off to the right, where the warrior formation had buckled. Screams came from there. Jeremy's voice was one of them, raw with something worse than pain. The boss had never charged with the pack. It had circled.

Alex turned, and through the chaos he saw it: the level seven dog, huge and scarred with a dozen arrow wounds, blood sheeting from cuts along its flanks. Its muzzle was red to the eyes. And hanging from its jaws was something that Alex's mind refused, for one merciful second, to recognize.