Chương 25: Groove

The dungeon had stopped being frightening somewhere around the tenth trip, which Alex understood was its own kind of danger. He and Katelin walked in with the ease of people going to work. The bulls weren't much of a problem anymore unless they came in numbers, and even then the arithmetic mostly held. What Alex actually came for now wasn't the kills. It was the search, hours of it, cycling through every tool he owned and looking for the shape they made together.

He'd been calling it a groove in his own head, for lack of a better word. Every skill worked. None of them worked together yet, not the way he wanted, and there had to be a version of him where Reinforce Body and Boost and Taunt and the two manipulations and Polearm Mastery all pointed the same direction instead of six. So he experimented, pack by pack, and slowly the pieces started to fit. The first honest discovery was a limit. Two skills at once he could carry.

A third turned his head into a room with too many people talking, focus fraying at the edges until he nearly ate a horn learning it. Two, then. Two forever, until something changed. Reinforce Body and Boost became his default pairing, the enhancement stack, one making him harder to break and the other making him briefly ridiculous. Boost cost him, the exhaustion arriving after rather than during, but its mana price was almost polite, and mana was the resource he actually had to ration.

The second discovery was that he'd become something the old world didn't have a word for. It hit him mid-fight, dodging a charging bull, that he had covered eight meters sideways in the time the animal needed to notice he'd moved. He was faster than anything he'd been on Earth. Not faster than his best. Faster than his best had been possible, faster than the fastest man he'd ever seen move in person, and carrying strength that would have made him a medical curiosity and a world record in the same afternoon.

He'd known the numbers. He had somehow never sat down and looked at the man they described. Alex killed the bull and stood there a second with a faint smile on his face, and then went back to work, because a man could only stare at himself for so long. Taunt earned its place next. Opening a fight with it pulled every red eye in the room onto him, which meant nothing looked at Katelin, which meant she never had to be anywhere except behind him. The cost was straightforward.

Taunting a mass of bulls meant a mass of bulls hitting him, and by midday he'd taken more damage than he would ever have volunteered for if he'd been alone. But he wasn't alone. Katelin's healing had turned his own body into a resource he could spend, and she spent it right alongside him without a word of complaint. The charges were the real problem. Without Liam's sand there was nothing to strip the bulls' momentum, so Alex had to become the answer himself, and what he built was ugly and worked.

Enhancement stack up. Wait, wait, let the thing commit, and then step out of the lane at the last possible fraction while the glaive came around, so the bull's own thousand pounds of speed dragged its flank across an edge already in motion. Half the time it opened them from shoulder to hip. The other half he mistimed it and got hit by a charging bull, which was every bit as educational as it sounded, sent skidding through the grass with something cracked and Katelin's light chasing him down. He kept doing it.

That was the point. On a group of four or five he could take those failures now and stay standing, and by afternoon the failures were getting rarer. Then he decided to hunt a boss. Alone. He knew exactly how that sentence sounded, and he did it anyway, because there was no faster way to find the ceiling than to walk up to it. He found the level nine grazing with five ordinary bulls around it, and told Katelin to stay well back before starting the slow work of positioning.

It took him several minutes to get the shape he wanted, the boss and its escort clustered close, everything in one bloom radius. He built the Blazing Core carefully, pouring in nearly everything he could afford while still keeping enough to run both enhancement skills afterward, and the sphere shrank as it grew hotter, compressed down and down the way he'd learned to do it, until the thing hovering over his palm was a marble that made the air above it swim. The boss wasn't waiting to be surprised.

Stone was already crawling up its flanks, the earth armor going on, and Alex realized it had seen him a while ago and simply hadn't cared. Fine. He threw. Boom. The core landed in the middle of the herd and the herd stopped existing in any organized sense. Two of the ordinary bulls simply came apart.

The others reeled, scorched and screaming, and the boss came out of the fireball with a third of its stone armor blown off and one whole side of its head cooked down to exposed muscle and bone, hide gone, an eye boiled out of its socket, patches of it still actively burning. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. It felt none of it. It just lowered what was left of its head and charged.

Alex met the survivors first, enhancement stack up, moving through the wounded escort like he was clearing brush, glaive taking legs and throats in two swift passes. And then, because he had never once in his life left a thought unpulled, he reached for the fire still burning on the boss's flank with his thermal manipulation, wondering if he could feed it, make it bloom, turn the thing's own burning body into a second weapon. He could. Barely.

The heat answered him with a fraction of the obedience mana gave him, sluggish and blurred at that distance, and it took his focus with it. That was when the boss hit him. The world went sideways. A stone-plated shoulder caught him across the ribs and threw him off his feet, and the horn dragged a line up his side as he went, armor screaming, and he landed badly in the grass with the sky spinning. Green light found him almost immediately, Katelin already casting, and the pain went from blinding to survivable.

He didn't have time to be grateful. Taunt was still on him from the opening, the boss was already wheeling around, and his mana had gone thin from an experiment he should have run on a day nobody was charging him. Idiot, he thought, getting up. Play with the fire when you're not on fire. He set his feet, and let the enhancement stack fill him, and dropped the manipulation entirely. No experiments. One thing, done right.

The boss came in for its second pass, burning, half-blind, dragging its ruined head low, and Alex fed everything he had left into the glaive as Cleaving Strike lit the edge. He didn't dodge this time. He stepped inside the charge lane at the last instant, pivoted his whole body into the cut, and took both of the boss's front legs off above the knee. It went down like a building. It kept trying.

It hauled itself forward on two legs and a chin, snorting, and Alex walked around behind what was left of its skull and put everything he had left into one downward stroke. The head came off. [You have killed Tainted Bull - Level 9.] [81 TP earned.] He stood there breathing for a moment. Not level nine. Close now, close enough that he could feel it pressing against the inside of his skin, but not today. Katelin was already jogging over, light gathering in her hands.

She started on his ribs, made the face she made when the damage was worse than he'd let on, and told him he was an idiot with the same words Ace used but a different tone, tired and matter-of-fact instead of furious. The nagging had gotten shorter over the past week. She knew why he did it now. That was somehow worse. He rested until his mana came back, killed one more boss with far more care and far fewer injuries, and walked out of the dungeon in the late afternoon with his mind already somewhere else entirely.

The Canifolk had come to their wall. That was the fact that wouldn't leave him alone. Sitting behind timber and waiting for the next thing to walk out of the treeline was how the fifty had lost twenty, and Alex had already run out of patience for waiting. He found the meeting already assembled when he got back, and everyone in it had clearly been sitting there a while. Chris. Bartholomew. His mother. Ace. Jeremy.

All of them stopped talking when he ducked in, and Chris said they'd been waiting for him, which landed on Alex strangely and took him a second to place. They'd waited. For him. The proposal was the one he'd been building in his own head all day, which saved him the trouble of arguing for it. Find the Canifolk outpost. Destroy it before it destroyed them.

The scouts had already mapped the nearer ground and found nothing organized, which meant the answer lay further out, and the obvious thread to pull was the refugees' fallen outpost, a day's walk southwest, where the Canifolk had come from and might be traced back. Nobody disagreed. Chris only added the condition, and he added it looking at Alex the entire time. Go, look, trace them back if it can be done. Destroy the outpost only if destroying it is actually possible. No unnecessary risks.

If it isn't worth it, come home. Mia said she was going, and produced her reason before anyone could raise the rotation problem. She'd bought a skill for exactly this, Tracking, spent nearly everything she had on it the day after the Canifolk attack, and she said it flatly and without drama, which somehow made it land harder. Alex volunteered. Jeremy volunteered before Alex had finished.

Liam nearly came out of his seat, and Chris waved him down and told him he was going too, because a group walking into a fortified enemy outpost without someone who could turn thirty meters of ground to soup was a group that deserved what happened to it. Which left the wall with none of the four names it had spent a week learning to trust, and left the question of who could actually hold a camp of a hundred people if something came out of the trees while they were gone. Alex answered it before anyone else could.

"Katelin runs the defense." Every head in the tent turned toward him. He kept going.

"She's higher level than half of you think she is. She's been in that dungeon with me every day for two weeks and she's held me together through things that should have killed me. She knows exactly how bad an injury has to get before it's fatal, which is more than most of you do, and she doesn't panic. If something comes at this camp while we're gone, she can carry the whole line, and everyone who's ever been carried out of that dungeon on her mana already knows it."

Chris looked at him for a long moment, and something moved behind his face that Alex chose not to examine.

"Agreed," he said. That left the healer for the expedition itself, and Alex opened his mouth to raise it and found the question already answered, because Ace had stood up.

"I'm going," Ace said.

"Don't argue." Jeremy's jaw worked. He didn't argue. They set the departure for the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow was for leveling, for buying, for standing in the dungeon and getting every scrap of strength the clock would still give them, and for stockpiling healing potions in case somebody came back in pieces. The wave came in three days. They intended to be home before it.

The meeting broke, and everyone dragged themselves toward their tents, and Alex went to his and sat cross-legged in the dark playing with heat until his hands shook and exhaustion finally knocked him over sideways.