Chương 22: intelligent monsters

The idea arrived with breakfast, and Alex knew it was reckless before he finished having it. Cassandra had marked her old outpost on the crude map the night she arrived, a day's walk southwest, walls already built, dungeon already carved, currently held by whatever had overrun it. Which made it, by the tutorial's own rules, a conquest target. Claim an outpost, hold it an hour, collect whatever reward the system paid for expansion.

The rules had dangled that carrot since day one and nobody had been strong enough to reach for it. Alex chewed his way through a plate of rations and wondered if that was still true. He ran it past Liam first, which had become a habit somewhere in the last week without either of them naming it. Liam's eyes went wide at the idea, then narrowed, which was roughly the correct order of reactions.

"Take it to your dad," Liam said.

"Out loud. In words. Before you do anything."

"That was the plan."

"I'm just saying it out loud. In words. Because of your history." Fair. Alex took it to his father that morning, laid the whole thing out, the known location, the intel from Cassandra's people, the reward the system promised for conquest, and Chris heard him all the way through before shaking his head.

"No. Not yet." He held up a hand before Alex's jaw could set.

"Hear the reason. Every outpost we take raises the wave difficulty, that's written into the rules, and nobody, including the system, has told us by how much. Bartholomew asked days ago whether thirty new people already scaled our waves and we still don't have an answer. I'm not stacking a second unknown on top of the first. When we can handle a wave without a single injury, when it's boring, then we talk about making our lives harder on purpose."

Alex turned it over looking for the flaw and couldn't find one, which was almost more annoying than being dismissed would have been. His enthusiasm died the quiet death of a good idea meeting a better argument. He nodded, and meant it, and noticed on the walk back to his tent that going to his father first and accepting the answer had cost him almost nothing. Two weeks ago it would have cost him the whole morning and probably a wall.

The knowledge orbs he'd bought with his wave points were waiting for him, so he spent the rest of the morning learning what level ten actually meant. The rank-up from H to G was, by every account the condensed knowledge offered, drastic. Two things unlocked at the threshold, and the first was called an affinity.

Every individual received one, and what they received depended on how they had lived their H-rank, their choices, their inclinations, something the knowledge gestured at with words like personality and soul without ever landing on a definition. The list of known affinities ran from the obvious to the absurd. Fire. Water. Stone. Metal, and separately, steel.

And past those, rarer things the knowledge treated half as rumor, barrier affinity, and at the far edge of speculation, something called reality affinity, less a documented fact than an idea of what might be possible. An affinity did nothing on its own. It marked what a person was aligned toward, made related skills come easier, made the matching branch of power feel like a language they'd grown up half speaking. Alex sat with that one a while. His, if the logic held, would be heat.

He'd built an entire manipulation skill out of it on purpose, hours of deliberate compression, which the knowledge suggested counted for far more than an accident like Cleaving Strike's heat-of-the-moment evolution. Fire, he supposed. The word sat almost right, and he couldn't have said why the almost was there, so he filed it and moved on. The second unlock was professions. Blacksmith, alchemist, potter, glassmaker. Trapper, beekeeper, lumberjack.

And stranger entries the knowledge listed with visible respect, crystal carver, formation creator. Almost none of them fought, and all of them mattered, because a blacksmith never swung his hammer at a monster and still armed everyone who did. The knowledge closed with its only piece of direct advice, and it read like it had been underlined by someone who meant it. Fight, yes.

But above all, develop manipulation skills, because most people touched their first manipulation only afterG-rank handed it to them, and anyone who grew one early was working with a head start most of the multiverse never got. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Alex had two. Liam had two. He spread everything he'd learned through the camp by lunch and watched the word affinity start doing laps around the fire pits within the hour.

Then it was dungeon time, because it was always dungeon time. The rhythm of days twelve and thirteen barely varied. The newcomers had been folded into the rotation groups, Cassandra's people leveling fast now that food and walls weren't the whole job, and Alex remained the exception, him and Katelin and an accelerated pace nobody else was allowed to match.

She was closing on level seven, riding the shared essence from his kills plus everything her healing earned, and at her current rate she was going to pass Ace, whose own climb had slowed to the speed of the twelve people she was shepherding.

Katelin had also picked up a new skill somewhere in the grind, something that raised the body's passive recovery, and the first time she cast it on him between fights, the ache of the day drained out at half speed and Alex decided the skill had been invented specifically for people who lived the way he did. He was trying to talk more. Ace's advice, applied sideways.

Somewhere in the second day he asked Katelin, between packs, how she was actually finding all this, and got an honest answer delivered to the middle distance. Comfortable, mostly. More than she'd expected. The dungeon didn't scare her the way it should, which she'd decided was his fault.

What made things strange wasn't the monsters, she admitted, it was him, six years and a foot of height between them, and the fact that watching him crush a skull with one hand made it hard to remember he was the same cousin who used to fall asleep at family parties. Alex accepted that as fair. Opening up, it turned out, mostly meant holding still while someone told you accurate things. Evenings went to practice. His newest experiment was the glaive, and it worked better than it had any right to.

He'd already learned to run mana along the blade. Running heat along it instead took a fraction of the effort, warmth flowing out of his palm and down the haft like the weapon had been waiting for exactly this, the edge going hot enough to sear before his reserves had even noticed the cost. Thermal came easier than mana. It kept coming easier, every time, and he added the observation to the small pile of things about himself that added up to something he couldn't read yet.

Liam joined him both nights, and watching him work had become its own entertainment. There were no grand gestures in what Liam did with sand anymore. He sat cross-legged and made a handful of it flow like water, pulled it into a thin ribbon, curled the ribbon into a sphere, split the sphere into a dozen smaller ones that orbited his wrist in formation, every motion precise to the grain.

Delicate work, size control most mages apparently never bothered learning, and Alex could see the shape of what it would become once Liam layered power under the precision. Between sand exercises he drilled Mana Bolt, over and over, the plain core skill he'd decided his whole progression hung on, and narrated his findings to Alex whether Alex asked or not. Alex mostly didn't ask. It never mattered. Day fourteen arrived with Alex still at level seven.

Close to eight, close enough to taste, but close counted for nothing and the wave was tomorrow. He'd promised himself the level before the portal opened, and the morning of the third day he geared up intending to go take it from the dungeon by force. The runner reached him before he reached the gate. Family summons, the wall, now. He arrived to find a knot of strangers outside the gate, ten or so, and one look told the whole first act of their story.

Road dust, no packs worth the name, the ragged breathing of people who had been running longer than bodies were built to run. Chris stood on the wall talking down to them, and the answers coming back up were barely answers, the same fragments over and over, tripping on each other. Red eyes. A group of them. Smart, they kept saying, it was smart, they hunted us like dogs, they herded us, and Alex stood beside Liam trying to assemble a picture from the pieces and failing, because monsters didn't herd anything.

Then the grass moved at the treeline, and the picture assembled itself. They came out of the cover upright. That was the first wrongness, before any other detail landed, shapes walking on two legs with the easy balance of things that had always walked on two legs. Canine ears. Muzzled faces, less bestial than a wolf's, more deliberate.

Two arms each, and the second wrongness was what the arms held, because every one of them carried a weapon, spears and long knives and one crude axe, held properly, held the way people hold things. The third wrongness arrived on the wind as a low exchange of sounds between them, back and forth, rhythmic, structured. They were talking to each other. Every eye in the group burned the same red as every monster Alex had killed in two weeks, and nothing about them moved like a monster at all.

His hand found the glaive before his thoughts found anything, and he ran Identify across the treeline because it was the only tool he had that might make this make sense. [Tainted Canifolk - Level 8] [Tainted Canifolk - Level 9] [Tainted Canifolk - Level 7] Levels like wave bosses. Weapons in their hands and language in their mouths.

Alex counted eight of them before he stopped wanting to count, and the line of them stood at the treeline, unhurried, looking at the wall the way people look at a problem they intend to solve.