Chương 23: Easier

The gate swung open and thirty exhausted strangers poured through it, sobbing their thanks at anyone in reach, and Alex kept his eyes on the treeline the whole time. He wasn't angry at them. He kept telling himself that, and it was mostly true. Nobody ran a day and a night ahead of things like those and deserved a closed gate at the end of it, and feeding people to dog-faced monsters was never going to be a thing his morality survived. But a colder part of him did the other math anyway.

These people had been tracked here. Whatever hunted them now stood looking at his family's wall, at his family's children, because thirty strangers had led it to the door. Both things were true at once, so he let them both sit and readied his glaive. The camp moved like it had drilled for this, because it had. Liam arrived at a sprint with Mia half a step behind.

Chris peeled off to wring information out of the newcomers while Ace waded into the worst of their injuries, and the wall filled with armed family faster than Alex could count them. The wall itself was the same wall as last week. The next upgrade had been priced out of reach, the store's numbers climbing every time they bought anything at all, and Alex spared the timber one flat look and hoped it wouldn't matter today. Beside him, Mia's eyes changed.

Something behind them sharpened, one of her skills pulling the distance close, and she read the treeline like a page.

"Twenty of them. Four at level nine, five at eight, the rest sevens." Her voice stayed level and her knuckles didn't.

"Blades and spears, almost all of them. One bow." The Canifolk came out of the trees in a loose line and made no attempt to hide, and the sounds they traded between themselves rolled across the field as growls right up until the distance closed enough for the system to do whatever the system did, and then the growls resolved into words inside every head on the wall at once.

"... three days to track ten soft ones. Three days." The biggest of them, level nine by the tag floating over it, cuffed the lone bow-carrier across the back of the skull hard enough to stagger it.

"My grandmother hunted faster with her eyes rotted out." The wall went very quiet. The big one surveyed the timber, the archers, the packed camp behind them, and smiled with a mouth that had far too much architecture in it. Its gaze crawled the defenders and stopped on Alex, and held there, unhurried, the way a butcher's eyes hold a carcass while his hands are busy with something else.

"Look how many," one of the others said, rolling its shoulders.

"Fat ones in the back. The soft ones first, the fat ones after. I want the small ones saved." Alex's grip cracked the leather of his own glove. Down the wall, a woman made a sound like she'd been struck, because every parent up there had understood every word, and Chris's voice arrived low and fast from behind them with what the refugees had managed to tell him. Their outpost, hit at midnight. The ones who stayed behind, killed. Some of them eaten. There would be no talking. There had never been any talking.

Then the Canifolk stopped talking too, and charged. The tall one ran fourth in the pack, where a leader runs, and it was already sorting the meal in its head. The wall was tall, but walls were a puzzle with teeth as the answer. The prey had numbers, but prey always had numbers, and numbers had never once mattered. It could smell the fear coming off the timber in sheets, smell the smoke of their fires, smell the fat and the young behind the The sky went bright.

Mia had loosed before the charge covered its first fifty meters, a full-drawn shot that split into two identical shafts mid-flight, and the Canifolk archer at the rear of the pack died with both of them through its skull before it ever nocked. The only ranged threat on the field, deleted first. Alex marked it, filed a private thought about how far she'd come from paper targets, and poured everything he had into the sphere growing over his palm. The ground answered before he did.

Liam had thrown every drop of mana he owned into the earth, and thirty meters of the charge lane turned to churning liquid in a breath. Liam felt the pack hit his sand the way a man feels someone stand on his chest. Twenty bodies, every one of them carrying stats no level seven had any right to, all of them wrenching against a hold he was feeding directly out of his own reserves. The drain wasn't a stream, it was a cut hose.

The edges of his vision were going white and the sand kept wanting to be dirt again and he held it anyway, one more second, one more, because every second was another arrow in the air. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Red light crawled across the bogged pack as the Canifolk snarled some skill into their own bodies, muscle visibly swelling under fur, and they began tearing free of the sand far too fast. It didn't matter. The volley was already up.

This was the thing the field had never seen before today, the simple addition of Cassandra's thirty added to the family's line, and when the order came down, the sky filled. Arrows in overlapping sheets. Mana bolts stitched between them. And out in front of all of it came Alex's Blazing Core, dense and white-gold and heavier with mana than he'd ever fed it, half his whole pool gone into one sphere, streaking down at the knot of level nines dragging themselves clear of the sand.

Two of them met it head on, one hauling a shield around, one crossing a pair of long daggers into a guard, both flaring the red light of their skill brighter. The third did neither. The third grabbed the shield-bearer and the dagger-wielder by their harnesses and hauled them into the sphere's path, and then the world went white. Boom. Heat rolled back across the field and slapped the wall like an opened furnace.

Where the core had landed there was only a boiling column of smoke and dust, and into it, without pause, the volleys kept falling. Reload, loose. Reload, loose. Chris watched the smoke swallow the arrows and did not order a halt. Some of them were eaten, the refugees had said, a shaking man describing what he'd watched from the second gate, and Chris had led enough of his life to know which orders a man regrets. Mercy was for things that hadn't announced the eating order of his grandchildren.

"Keep firing," he said, and the wall obeyed, and behind him he heard Ace catch Liam as the boy's legs finally quit. The volleys stopped when nothing left moving could justify them. The dust took a long minute to clear, and what it uncovered belonged in no version of the world from three weeks ago. The sand held bodies like flies in amber, feathered so thick with shafts they'd lost their silhouettes.

The core's landing point held two shapes fused half into each other, fur and armor burned away entire, ribs standing pale and exposed out of blackened meat, and the smell that came off the field was char and copper and burnt hair. Off to one side, a level eight dragged itself in a slow circle with everything below its waist crushed flat, its own insides pulled out behind it in a rope, still growling. A few of them were still alive. That was the problem with things this strong.

Alex went over the wall with Jeremy beside him, and the field's heat washed up through his boots. The third level nine, the one that had fed its packmates to the core, came up out of a drift of bodies with its face burned to ash and bone down one whole side, one eye cooked white. Its remaining eye found Alex, and even now, it dropped into a fighting crouch. Lightning answered before it finished.

Jeremy crossed the distance in a white-blue flicker and put his spear through its shoulder from the flank, staking it half around, and Alex was already inside its reach with the glaive coming up. The blade glowed. He'd been feeding heat down the haft since he cleared the wall, thermal manipulation running the edge the way he'd drilled it every evening for days, and the metal shimmered with haze, a line of dull orange light along the cutting edge.

The Canifolk swiped at him with a long knife, and Alex's counter wasn't the parry-then-answer of two weeks ago. Polearm Mastery had been growing in the dark the whole time he'd been grieving, and what came out of him now was one continuous motion, deflection flowing into rotation flowing into a full-hipped horizontal cut that went through the level nine's ribs and out the far side. The heated edge didn't so much cut the wound as cook it open. Blood hit the blade and hissed into steam.

The thing folded around its own cauterized halves, and the notifications arrived while it was still falling. [You have killed Tainted Canifolk - Level 9.] [81 TP earned.] [Level up. Level 8.] Warmth flooded his limbs, deep and settling. He checked it, set it aside, and turned to the rest of the field. The cleanup was work, not war. Jeremy's lightning had a cost he couldn't pay twice in a row, so he settled into his calm, needling spearwork, and Alex simply walked the field and ended things.

A level eight with one arm burned down to bone raised a blade at him anyway, and he split it collarbone to hip in a single hissing stroke. Another, sand-mired and pincushioned, snapped at his ankle with half a face, and the glaive came down through its skull with less effort than the thought behind it. The survivors fought to the last, every one of them, missing limbs, dragging ruptured bodies, dead already and refusing the paperwork. It didn't take long.

Some part of him noted that it didn't feel like it should have taken this little. When it was over, Alex stood among twenty corpses with steam curling off his blade and looked back at the wall, at archers reloading out of habit, at Mia already counting the field the way she counted everything, at the smoke still climbing off the crater. They had walked up to a fortified wall with forty bows behind it and announced what they planned to eat. In daylight.

That was the thought that wouldn't sit down, the one he carried back toward the gate. Because the outpost these things had actually broken hadn't gotten daylight, or warning, or a wall full of ready archers. It had gotten midnight, and one gate too few.