Chương 17

A small hand shook Alex awake before the sun had properly cleared the wall. He came up out of sleep slow and heavy, and found John crouched at the tent flap, nine years old and trying very hard to look like a messenger instead of a kid. It wasn't working. The skin around his eyes was puffy and raw, and there were clean tracks through the dirt on his cheeks where he'd wiped at them and given up.

"Grandpa says everyone has to come to the meeting." The word went through Alex like a splinter before his brain caught up and did the arithmetic. Grandpa meant Chris now. To John it always had. Alex reached out and settled a hand on the boy's head anyway, and John leaned into it for half a second, just long enough to stop being a messenger, then pulled away and ran off toward the fire. Alex got up.

He hadn't finished being done with yesterday, and yesterday clearly wasn't done with him either, but the family was gathering, so he went. Most of them were already assembled when he arrived, and he stood at the back and listened the way a man listens to rain, aware of it without taking any of it in. The shape of the plan came through anyway. Constant rotation through the dungeon, starting today. Four teams, four leaders.

Mia would take one group, Ace another, Liam a third, Jeremy the last, each of them shepherding a handful of the untested through kills until the whole settlement stopped being level one. After yesterday, nobody argued that they had time to take it slow. Nobody said Grandpa's name either, and everybody heard it anyway. What snagged Alex's attention, finally, was his own name and the absence attached to it. No team.

"You go alone," his dad said, and then corrected himself before Alex's chest could finish deciding how to feel about that.

"Almost alone. You take one healer. Everyone leading a group gets slowed down to the pace of the slowest person in it. You don't. Your job is to get as strong as possible, as fast as possible. When the next boss comes through that portal, we need somebody standing in front of it who can actually kill it." The champion strategy. Alex turned it over and found he couldn't argue with the logic, which annoyed him almost as much as being handed it would have. Then the rest of it landed.

"Katelin volunteered," Ace said. Alex looked across the circle and found her, fifteen years old, hands folded tight in front of her, meeting his eyes and then not quite managing to keep meeting them. The girl who had lectured him about dying after the first wave. Yesterday had rearranged something in a lot of people, and apparently in her it had rearranged itself into this.

"No," Alex said.

"I go alone. If something happens to me, that's one person. I'm not adding her to the bill."

"Then you take a full team of level ones instead." Jeremy's voice came out flat and hard, and nobody in the circle mistook it for anything but what it was. He had stood on the flank that buckled. He would be carrying that for the rest of his life, and he was not going to watch anyone else stand somewhere thin.

"One healer, or six greenhorns. Pick." Alex hated being boxed in. He hated it with a specific, familiar heat that usually ended with him doing the thing he'd been told not to do. But he looked around the circle at the faces doing the telling, his dad, Ace, Jeremy still gray around the eyes, and the heat didn't have anywhere honest to go. They weren't wrong. That was the worst part.

"Fine. One healer." The rest of the meeting washed past him. The family voted to let him keep his own points instead of pooling them, gear the champion, sharpen the spear. He wanted to object to that too, wanted to pull his weight like everyone else, but the math had changed since the wave.

Level four monsters and up paid out enough tutorial points that food had stopped being a question, and the wall had already been upgraded through the store, thicker timber with a faint thread of mana running through the grain, the kind of purchase that would have been a fantasy a week ago. The settlement could afford a champion now. So it was buying one. Back at his tent, Alex geared up.

The armor had taken a beating in the wave, dents hammered across the chest and both arms, two of the worst spots smoothed back out through the store's repair function for a handful of points. He ran his thumb along one of the shallower dents and let himself feel, briefly, exactly how much worse yesterday would have gone for him without it. Then he pulled up his status.

Name: Alex Morningstar Age: 21 Level: 4 Race: Human (H) Class: Warrior Strength: 24 Dexterity: 15 Constitution: 19 Perception: 10 Intelligence: 13 Wisdom: 11 Skills: Identify (Common), Cleaving Strike (Uncommon), Reinforce Body (Common), Taunt (Common), Polearm Mastery (Novice), Mana Manipulation (Novice) Body Cultivation: None Mana Cultivation: None Bloodline: None Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Another point of Constitution and another of Intelligence, arrived from nowhere, unattached to any level. He noted it the way he'd learned to note it, filed it with the rest of the numbers that refused to add up, and moved on to the line that actually stopped him. Cleaving Strike. Uncommon. Where Power Strike used to be. The memory came whether he wanted it or not.

The boss under his blade, his arm tearing itself apart, the skill shifting somewhere deep in his muscles at the exact moment he'd stopped caring what it cost him. So that was real. Skills could grow through use, could climb right out of their rarity if a person poured enough of himself into them. Liam would lose his mind over this. There was a version of today where Alex walked across camp and told him, and they pulled the mechanic apart together for an hour, and it felt like discovery.

He looked at the tag a moment longer and felt nothing move in him at all. It was the first gain he'd ever gotten that brought no joy with it. Then he picked up the glaive and went to find something to kill. Katelin was waiting near the gate, and she crossed the last stretch to him at a nervous half-jog.

"Sorry. Sorry, I had to help pack the kits, I didn't mean to make you wait."

"You didn't." He looked at her once, properly.

"You're sure about this."

"Yes." Her chin came up when she said it, and stayed up.

"Then here's how it works. When I engage, you stay far enough back that nothing in the fight can see a reason to look at you. If anything comes your way anyway, you yell. If I don't react, you yell louder until I do. That's your whole job. Healing comes second." She nodded fast, both hands white around the strap of her kit, and followed him in. The dungeon had changed with the wave.

Same endless green, but the ground had reshaped itself in places, low rises where it used to run flat, and the air carried a different smell now, musk and wet fur instead of the dry nothing of snakes. Bootprints fanned out from the entrance in three directions where the other teams had already gone ahead. The space had swallowed whole groups before without them ever crossing paths. It would swallow two more. The first pack found them inside of five minutes. Four dogs, rust-colored, red-eyed, no boss among them.

[Tainted Dog - Level 3] [Tainted Dog - Level 4]"Wait here," Alex said, and went to meet them. The first one died before it finished committing to its lunge, the glaive taking its head in a single arc. The second and third split to flank him, and he let them, turning into the gap between their angles and triggering Cleaving Strike as the blade came around.

The new skill answered differently than Power Strike ever had, wider, hungrier, mana sheeting along the whole edge instead of pooling at the point of impact, and the arc caught both dogs across the body and opened them to the spine. The fourth got its teeth into his forearm. He felt the plate flex, felt the pressure grind down toward bone, and something in him that had been sitting very still since yesterday finally stood up. He didn't reach for the glaive.

He reached with his free hand instead, closed his fingers around the back of the dog's skull, and squeezed. The animal thrashed. He squeezed harder, arm burning where the fangs were still buried, and kept squeezing past the point where the thrashing turned frantic, past the whine, until something under his palm gave with a wet crack and the jaws went slack on his arm. He stood there breathing over it for a moment. Then he shook the body off his arm and walked back. Katelin's face had gone the color of paper.

She looked at the blood running off his gauntlet, looked at what was left in the grass behind him, and he watched her decide, visibly, muscle by muscle, not to be fifteen about it. She swallowed, stepped forward, and put her glowing hands on his arm.

"Hold still," she said. Her voice only shook a little. She didn't say anything about being careful. He noticed the absence like a missing tooth. The hours after that blurred into work. Packs of three and five and eight, dying faster as his read on the new skill sharpened, Cleaving Strike carving through groups that Power Strike would have taken one at a time. He lost count of the dogs somewhere past thirty.

Three bosses crossed their path across the afternoon, big level sevens with that same skin of hardened light the wave boss had worn, and each one cost him something, a gash along his thigh, a dent driven deep enough to bruise ribs, but the pattern held every time. Soften the shimmer with hits until it flickered. Crack it open with Cleaving Strike. Finish it before it recovered. Katelin patched him between fights, and the essence of all that healing did its quiet work on her too.

By late afternoon she had leveled again, sitting at three and visibly closing on four, and she'd stopped flinching when he came back bloody. The last boss of the day died with the glaive standing out of its skull, and the notification arrived while Alex was still pulling the blade free. [Level up. Level 5.] Warmth rolled through him, deeper than the last one, settling into muscle and bone. He'd wanted this number before the second wave came. Getting it the day after cost the wanting most of its taste.

He checked the screen, set it aside, and looked at the light instead. It was going amber toward evening, and Katelin was sitting on a rise with her kit across her knees, scraped hollow of mana, done in a way that had nothing to do with complaint. They walked out mostly in silence, passing the sounds of Liam's group somewhere off to the left also making for the exit. At the gate she stopped, gathered herself around whatever she'd been building up to say the whole walk, and produced: "I'll be ready earlier tomorrow."

"You did fine," Alex said, and meant it, and watched it land on her like a medal. Alone by his tent with the sky going dark, he pulled up his total. Seven hundred and forty tutorial points. The number would have felt like wealth a week ago. Now it just felt like ammunition, and he already knew where he was spending it.

He opened the Skills tab, found the entry he'd been circling since the white room, since the moment he'd stood in front of a class list and mourned never getting to throw one, and paid the five hundred without letting himself hesitate. [Fireball (Common) acquired.] Two hundred and forty points left. A ranged option he'd been missing since the first wave, and better than that, a skill that forced mana out of his body instead of through it, exactly the motion his manipulation training kept failing at.

Two problems, one purchase.