Chương 24

The blood came off with water. The smell took longer, and some of it, Alex was learning, didn't come off at all, just moved into the back of the nose and set up residence. He scrubbed for a few minutes behind his tent, got himself to merely stained, and made it to the meeting Chris had called within hours of the last Canifolk falling. The newcomers went first. Their story came out in pieces, handed back and forth between a few of them when one voice or another gave out.

Fifty of them, originally, scooped up together on day one the same way everyone had been scooped up. They'd done decently for themselves, better than decently, five lost across their waves, which by the math of this tutorial was a record to be proud of. They had walls. They had two gates, inner and outer, a redundancy someone among them had insisted on early, and that redundancy was the only reason any of them were sitting in this tent. The Canifolk had come at midnight.

Over the walls, not through them, the guards dead before anyone heard anything, and then the killing had simply started inside the camp, in the dark, among the tents. Fifteen of their people had planted themselves at the inner gate to buy time. Nobody in the tent needed the ending of that sentence spoken, and the man telling it didn't manage to speak it anyway. Thirty had run. Twenty, all told, had not. Alex sat and watched the weight of it move through the room.

The newcomers wept openly, still, days of running having deferred the grief without discharging any of it, and the family absorbed it the way his family absorbed things, aunts closing in, food appearing, Grandma of all people sitting with an older woman from the fifty and holding her hand without a word. What settled in Alex wasn't sympathy, or wasn't only that. It was the picture of the thing. Guards dead first. Killing among the tents. Children in the center of camp, exactly where his family kept theirs.

The Canifolk had died fast against a ready wall in daylight, and it would be the worst kind of stupidity to let that be the lesson. The lesson was midnight. Chris moved the meeting to what the group had bought. The Tainted knowledge had cost more than any single purchase the settlement had ever made, pooled points from dozens of contributors, and Chris had spent it that morning and absorbed it on everyone's behalf.

What it bought, hedged and incomplete the way expensive knowledge apparently still managed to be, reorganized everything they thought they knew about the things they'd been fighting. The Tainted, as far as the knowledge could say, came in kinds. The first kind was the dungeon kind, and every wave the family had ever fought belonged to it. Tainted replications of ordinary creatures, snakes and dogs and bulls that existed in the real world, copied and stained.

And the defining trait of the dungeon kind was in its head, or rather wasn't. No dungeon-spawned Tainted had ever been recorded conversing, planning, or carrying a tool. Mindless, top to bottom, every time. The second kind chose it. Living, thinking beings who accepted the touch of something the knowledge would not name at this price, took power from it, and changed. Physical changes, always, and the red eyes, always.

The knowledge said little more about them except that they had been people, of whatever species, before they were Tainted. And then the part that Chris relayed slowly, because it deserved slow. Every living species had a Tainted replication. Not some. All. Tainted humans existed. Tainted lions, tainted tigers.

The knowledge listed onward with a straight face into tainted dragons and tainted phoenixes, and the tent had to sit with the casual confirmation that dragons and phoenixes were a thing the sentence could contain. Which left the Canifolk sitting in a category gap that Alex found himself turning over long after Chris moved on. Not dungeon-kind, obviously, they'd talked, planned, carried steel. But nothing about them had read like converts either, like people who had once been something else.

They'd seemed like exactly what they were, a species, hunting the way a species hunts. The knowledge went no further. Everything past that point cost more than the settlement had, and the store seemed to know precisely where the interesting part started. The doctrine changes came next, and they came fast, because the picture of midnight was sitting in everyone's head now. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

From tonight forward, the wall would never be without one of the four strongest on it. Alex, Liam, Mia, Jeremy, rotating, each shift backed by a squad of five to ten. It would slow their leveling and everyone said so out loud and everyone agreed to it anyway, because the alternative had just finished telling its story through tears at the front of the tent. Scouting parties would push wider, with two jobs, find the nearest outposts, and find out what held them.

If intelligent Tainted groups were seeded across this map, the settlement needed to know where before midnight found out for them. The teams got rebuilt too. The big shepherding groups had done their work, most of the camp leveled past the point of needing hand-holding, and the essence had started punishing size, every kill split too many ways.

Smaller squads now, faster progression, and a handful of new squad leads promoted, two of them from Cassandra's thirty, which said something about how fast the walls between the groups were coming down. The last piece of business was the strangest, and it was good news. The Canifolk had paid out. Essence had flooded off those twenty kills at a rate no wave had come close to, intelligent Tainted apparently worth multiples of any mindless monster at the same level, and the results were sitting in the tent.

Jeremy up a level. Liam up a level, mana exhaustion and all. And Alex, already at eight from the fight itself, could feel the pressure of nine building under his skin days ahead of any schedule he'd imagined. He'd killed a great many of those things personally. He decided, on reflection, that the surprise was misplaced. After the meeting broke, Alex dealt with his gear, and his gear was in worse shape than he'd wanted to admit mid-crisis.

The glaive's edge had taken damage no amount of care would polish out, heat-stressed and notched from a day of cutting through beings with stats, and the armor underneath him had folded in three places it was never going to unfold from. He pulled up the store, found the listings, and got his second education of the day. The same Common glaive that had cost a hundred points once now listed at prices that made him double-check the tag. Armor, the same story.

The store, it turned out, scaled with you, every purchase the group made nudging the next one higher, the system quietly taxing success, and the family had been buying things for two weeks straight. Replacing the glaive and the armor together ran him five hundred tutorial points, five times what the originals had cost, for gear that was functionally identical. Out of curiosity that he immediately regretted, he checked the next tier. An Uncommon glaive, the genuine step up, sat at twenty-five thousand points.

He looked at the number for a while, the way a man looks at a mountain from the bottom, closed the tab, and paid his five hundred. The replacement glaive materialized in his hands, black-shafted, long, the same make as the one it replaced, and settled into his grip like it had always been there. He'd looked at other polearms on the list for exactly four seconds. There had never been a real decision in it.

This was his weapon, his mastery had grown around its exact length and weight, and he wasn't changing his mind for anything short of that twenty-five-thousand-point mountain. Then, alone in his tent, he pulled up the sheet.

Name: Alex Morningstar Age: 21 Level: 8 Race: Human (H) Class: Warrior Strength: 35 Dexterity: 22 Constitution: 26 Perception: 15 Intelligence: 19 Wisdom: 15 Skills: Identify (Common), Cleaving Strike (Uncommon), Reinforce Body (Common), Taunt (Common), Boost (Common) Blazing core (uncommon), Polearm Mastery (Novice), Mana Manipulation (Novice), Thermal Manipulation (Novice) Body Cultivation: None Mana Cultivation: None Bloodline: None The levels explained maybe half of it.

The rest was work, and he could read his own last two weeks in the numbers like a diary. Intelligence and Wisdom had spiked far past anything his free points accounted for, and he knew exactly which nights of thermal experimentation had bought that. Constitution had climbed off the sheer volume of damage taken and healed.

And Strength had simply run away from everything else, thirty-five, a number that would have been a world record and a medical curiosity in the old world, while Dexterity trailed it badly and Perception trailed everything, the runt of the sheet. A lopsided build. He studied the lopsidedness, thought about the Canifolk leader's eye finding him across a battlefield before he'd sensed a thing, and filed Perception under debts to pay. But not today. Today the imbalance was survivable, and survivable was the whole game.

He rested until a little past noon, which for him was practically decadence, and was still lying there doing productive nothing when a shadow crossed the tent flap. Katelin stood in the opening with her kit already on her shoulder, and she was smiling, actually smiling, the first one he'd seen from her that arrived before the healing instead of after it.

"Dungeon?" she said.

"Dungeon," Alex agreed. He pulled his new armor on, took up the glaive, and followed her out into the afternoon. Level nine was already leaning on the door, and whatever this tutorial had scheduled next, the intelligent things in the trees, the outposts nobody had scouted, the wave after the wave after this one, every version of it ended the same way in his head. He was going to need the levels