Chương 21

The wave hadn't moved him. Alex sat on a crate inside the gate with his armor half off, watching the number while Ace's healing light worked across the gouge a bull horn had left along his ribs. Level 7, same as yesterday morning, same as before fifty bulls and a level nine boss. Days eight and nine in the dungeon had carried him from five to seven, and then the climb had simply steepened under his feet, the way it kept doing. Each level cost more than the last.

He filed the thought next to all the others about how the system priced things and let the warmth of the healing pull him back into his body.

"Hold still," Ace said.

"You flex when it itches and it makes the itching worse."

"It doesn't itch."

"Your ribs are knitting. It itches." She pressed her palm flatter against his side, and the green light deepened, and for a while neither of them said anything over the sound of the camp celebrating behind them. Then she said, "You haven't talked about him." Alex went still in a different way than holding still.

"Everyone else has," Ace went on, eyes on her work, voice level.

"Mom cried on me twice. Liam talks about him in past tense now, which took him a while. Even the twins asked me questions I didn't have answers for. You trained." She finally looked up at him.

"Its been days, Alex. You trained."

"Training keeps people alive."

"So does the person doing the training." Her hand didn't leave his side.

"I'm not telling you to fall apart. I'm telling you it doesn't go away because you outwork it. It just waits. I've watched it wait in patients for years and it always collects." The light faded out and she sat back, and the teasing that lived in her face on any other day surfaced for just a moment, gentler than usual.

"You're the biggest thing in this camp and you're carrying it like you're the only one who can. Put some of it down. And when you can manage it, talk to Dad. Not for his sake. For yours." Alex didn't answer. She didn't push. She packed her kit, kissed the top of his head like he was six, and left him sitting there with his ribs whole and everything else exactly as cracked as before. He tried to train that night anyway.

The mana came when he called it, wisps and threads gathering over his palm, and then his focus slid sideways to a sentence Ace had said and the whole working fell apart in his hands. He rebuilt it. It fell apart again. On the fourth collapse he sat there in the dark looking at his own empty palm and admitted the thing had already been decided somewhere below the arguing, probably hours ago. He found his father's tent with the lamp still burning inside.

Chris looked up when he came in and, for a second, looked older than Alex had ever seen him, and then the second passed and he was just Dad, tired, setting down whatever ledger of the camp's points he'd been working through.

"I keep going over it." Chris said it before Alex had figured out how to start, which was its own small mercy.

"The dungeon. The days we spent playing it safe. You told me we weren't strong enough and I heard you and I still chose slow, because slow felt like the version where nobody got hurt." His jaw worked once.

"I wasn't trying to be right, Alex. I was trying to not bury anyone. I'm sorry it cost what it cost." The anger was right there. Alex felt it stand up in his chest, the raging thing that had been pacing behind his ribs for six days with a sentence in its teeth, if you had listened, if you had just listened, and for one long breath he let himself want to say it, wanted to watch it land. Ace's voice arrived instead. It just waits. It always collects. He breathed out.

"I know you weren't." A pause he had to force himself through.

"I'm fine." They both heard the lie. Neither of them called it. His father nodded slowly, accepting the two true words and letting the third go, and it wasn't repair, not really, the distance between them was still there and both of them could measure it. But a door that had been shut since the burial now stood open a crack, and apparently that was what tonight had in it.

"There's a fire going," Chris said.

"Becky's cooking. Come sit with your family instead of punching the dark all night." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Alex had fully intended to make up the lost training hours. He'd promised himself, walking over, that this would take twenty minutes. It took the whole night, and he let it.

It started small, him and Liam and Mia around one fire, Uncle Bartholomew wandering over with the particular walk of a man following a smell, and then the aunties arrived carrying more food than the fire's audience justified, which summoned more audience, which justified more food, and within an hour the whole center of camp had reorganized itself around eating and noise. Aunt Becky's chicken came off the flames tasting like the old world.

Jake and John dueled with sticks between the tents, and ten days of apocalypse had done horrifying things to their footwork, both of them moving like small fencers now, and every adult watching pretended not to find it unsettling. Uncles argued about nothing. Somebody's laugh set off somebody else's. Alex sat in the middle of it with a plate he kept refilling and felt the shape of the thing settle over him slowly. This was Thanksgiving.

Not like Thanksgiving, it was the same gathering wearing different clothes, the same faces and the same volume and the same woman cooking the same chicken because one enormous nephew would eat most of it. He scanned the firelight the way he'd scanned the wall before the wave, face by face, and the count came up one short, and it always would now. He let the ache sit where it was without feeding it or fighting it. Ace had said to put some of it down. This seemed like the place a person would put it.

For one night, nobody trained. He decided that was allowed. The gate guard came for Chris the next morning. Word moved through camp faster than the guard did, and by the time Alex reached the wall with Liam beside him, most of the family's core had assembled. Beyond the gate, standing well back in the open grass with their hands conspicuously empty and visible, waited a crowd of strangers. Alex counted automatically and got a little over thirty. Packs on their backs. Road dust to their knees.

The particular stillness of people trying very hard to look harmless to a fortress. He ran Identify down the line. [Human - Level 4] [Human - Level 4] [Human - Level 3] Level four, most of them, with a thin scattering of fives, and every number told the same story. Eleven days into the tutorial, these people were where his family had been on day four. Whatever their road here had looked like, it had not been kind.

At the front stood a thin woman with mana coiled visibly around her, a mage, one of the level fives, and when Chris stepped up onto the wall she raised one hand slowly and called out a greeting that cracked in the middle from a dry throat.

What followed was ten confused minutes of shouted half-conversation, who are you, where did you come from, why are there thirty of you, before Chris ordered the questions moved inside to something resembling a real meeting, the strangers kept outside the wall under watch while the family talked. Alex listened to the shape of the argument form around the circle. They were unknowns. They were mouths. They were thirty-two more bodies inside a wall built for one family.

Then Alex heard himself talking, and kept talking, and realized somewhere in the middle of it that he had never once said this many words in a family meeting in his life. Faces around the circle registered it too, his mother's eyebrows climbing, Ace openly staring.

"They're not a burden," he said.

"Look at their levels. They kept thirty people alive for eleven days out there, which means they can work, and they'll level fast in our dungeon once they're fed. But that's not actually my reason." He made himself hold his father's eyes.

"My reason is that they'll die out there. Maybe not this week. But the zones are climbing, I've watched the wildlife tick up levels every time we scout, the whole map is getting stronger while we sit here, and thirty people at level four don't survive that. We could help them. Turning away people we could save, to protect margins we don't even need, isn't who this family has ever been." He sat back. Silence held for a moment. Then Uncle Bartholomew, practical as a hammer, raised the question that deserved raising.

"Does the wave scale with us? If the system counts heads, thirty more people might mean thirty percent more monsters. Does anyone know?" Nobody knew. The silence that answered him was its own kind of answer about how much of this tutorial they were all still guessing at. Chris let it sit, then spoke.

"We take the risk. Alex is right, it's who we are, and he's also right that we need hands. The zones aren't waiting for us." He looked around the circle once, collecting nods.

"They work. Everyone works. But they come in." The gate opened an hour later, and thirty-two exhausted strangers walked through it into the middle of a family, and Alex watched the thin mage woman at their front hold herself together right up until Chris formally said the word stay, at which point something in her shoulders came down an inch that looked like it had been up for days. Her name was Cassandra, and once she started talking, she barely stopped.

She was their leader, though she said the word like it was a debt rather than a rank, and she laid out everything with the compulsive thoroughness of someone who had clearly been keeping the whole account in her head. Their outpost to the southwest. A first wave of red-eyed rabbits, which drew disbelieving looks until she described the speed of them. A second wave that killed seven, including the man who'd led them.

The math she'd run on a third wave they couldn't survive, the decision to walk, the notification on the road telling her the system had taken her title back because monsters had overrun everything they'd abandoned. Different dungeons, different monsters, outposts that could fall. Alex filed every piece of it while Chris and the uncles asked questions, and underneath the filing, one quieter thought kept turning over.

The camp had just grown by thirty-two people, thirty-two lives that were now inside the circle of things he had promised to keep alive. The next wave was five days out. He was going to need to be a lot stronger than level seven.