Chương 26: iron fist

Alex woke up groggy, stretched, and found abs he did not remember owning. He stood there in the half-dark of his tent, prodding his own stomach as if it belonged to somebody else. He'd never bothered chasing lean. Powerlifting rewarded mass, and mass came with a comfortable layer over the top, and he'd made his peace with that years ago. But his waist had come in.

The fat had quietly gone somewhere, and what was left underneath was more cut than anything he'd ever managed on purpose, without a single day of dieting, without giving up one of the over four thousand calories he ate daily. Not a dramatic change. Just a body being slowly rewritten by numbers on a screen, one point at a time. He got dressed and went out into the morning. The camp had grown into something that startled him a little every time he actually looked at it.

A hundred people now, give or take, and even at this hour the paths between the tents had traffic on them. Children ran everywhere. Cassandra's people and his family's people had stopped occupying separate halves of the camp somewhere in the last few days, and nobody had announced it, it had simply happened. Liam was already up and geared, cinching his robe, looking like a boy who'd been awake for an hour and had opinions about it. Seventeen years old, running mage drills for adults three times his age.

Alex watched him for a second and wondered how that was actually going for him, whether any of those adults gave a teenager grief for being their teacher, and decided it wasn't his business unless Liam made it his business. The kids spotted him before he got twenty paces. Jake and John waved from a tangle of children that included several faces Alex didn't know, refugee kids, mixed right in with his cousins as though a wall had never separated them. He waved back.

One of the new ones stared at him with open, unabashed awe and said something to the girl next to her, and the phrase the big man carried across the grass with perfect clarity, and Alex's mouth twitched. There was a version of this morning where he walked over there, picked two of them up, and spun them until somebody screamed. He wanted to. His hands wanted to.

But the thought led straight into the low, gray place he'd been living in since the burial, and he wasn't sure he'd come out of it with a smile on his face, and children deserved better than a man performing joy at them. Strength first. He'd earn his way back to the other thing. Katelin was still asleep, which almost never happened. Alex found her tent flap closed and sat down outside it rather than wake her. She was usually up before him.

Yesterday had clearly cost her more than she'd let on, standing thirty feet from a burning bull boss pouring green light into a man who kept insisting on getting hit. He waited half an hour, decided he'd give her half an hour more, and had gotten about ten minutes into the second when the flap opened and she came out apologizing.

"Don't," he said.

"I'm never late."

"You're not late. I just got here early." She snorted, which he counted as a win, and they went to the dungeon. Today's rule was simple. Bosses only. Ordinary bulls barely moved his essence needle anymore, but bosses paid out like nothing else in the dungeon, and Alex had started to notice something strange about them.

They were level nine, same as the highest ordinary bull he could find, and yet they hit like something else entirely and rewarded like something else entirely, with no title, no description, nothing on the Identify tag to distinguish them. Just the same flat text. He turned it over between fights and got nowhere. Maybe his Identify was too low to see what he was fighting. Maybe the system simply didn't bother. He filed it and kept hunting. The day was long, and it hurt.

Prioritizing bosses meant fighting the hardest thing in the room every hour on the hour, and the bosses came with escorts, and the escorts came with horns. Katelin healed him more times that day than in any two days before it. His armor held up better than his body did, which he supposed said something about where his points had gone. The last one nearly ended him. He mistimed a charge, the way he still did about one in four, and the boss's shoulder caught his leg square instead of grazing it.

Something ground in his knee. He went down hard, and lying there in the grass with his leg screaming and the boss wheeling for another pass, Alex did the only thing his hands could still do and built a Blazing Core one-handed. The explosion took the boss's head off from the inside. [You have killed Tainted Bull - Level 9.] [Level up. Level 9.] [Skill selection available.] He lay there in the grass, sweating, while Katelin sprinted the distance and got both hands on his knee, and read his options through the pain. Most of them were the same tired list. Then one wasn't. [Quick Dash (Common). Burst movement in any direction your body can naturally move. Distance and control scale with the body's own capabilities.] Alex almost laughed.

He'd spent two weeks throwing his own bodyweight sideways out of the path of charging bulls, over and over, badly at first and then less badly, and the system had apparently been watching. He took it, and the second Katelin cleared his knee he tested it, and vanished six meters to his left with a snap of displaced air that surprised even him. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. The one thing that stuck under his ribs, though, was the tag. Common.

And Quick Dash grew through mana manipulation, the manipulation he was worse at, not thermal, which had come to him like it had been waiting for him his whole life. Life, he decided, was not obligated to build him a matched set. He'd take the dash. He left the dungeon early for once, well before exhaustion, because tomorrow he walked into an enemy outpost and he intended to walk in whole. On the way out he found a runner and sent word around the camp: Mia, Ace, Jeremy, Liam, his tent, tonight.

He practiced polearm forms alone until they came, and could feel it in his hands, the difference between the man who'd picked up a spear three weeks ago and whatever he was becoming now. The skill still said Novice. The skill was lying, or the skill was measuring something he couldn't see. Liam arrived first, obviously.

"Why tonight?" he said, dropping onto Alex's spare crate.

"We could do this tomorrow while we walk."

"Because tomorrow while we walk, I want us walking, not talking." Alex nodded at him.

"Also because I want to know what you can all actually do before I find out in a fight."

"Fair." Liam brightened, which was his default response to almost everything, and then, without being asked, produced a fistful of sand from a pouch and made it stand up in the air in a spiral column, then flatten into a disc, then split into six perfect spheres that orbited his wrist like a solar system.

"Show-off."

"I've been calling that one the little guys." Liam grinned.

"Also I think Quicksand's about to evolve. I can feel it. It's right there."

"Good." Alex meant it, and then his eyes caught something on Liam's forearm, a scrape, half-scabbed, that had no business being there on a man who fought from forty meters back.

"What's that?"

"Nothing." Liam pulled his sleeve down.

"Just being clumsy." Alex looked at him a second longer, and let it go. The others filed in after. And as they came, Alex noticed something that unsettled him more than the scrape had. Everyone was scuffed. Mia had a bandaged thumb. Jeremy's knuckles were raw. Even Ace, who spent every fight thirty feet behind the line, had a fresh bruise going purple along her forearm, and Alex opened his mouth to ask about it, then closed it.

His entire family was clearly beating itself half to death in private, and given that he was the man who'd nearly had his leg broken twice this week, he decided he was in no position to lecture anybody. They talked about the Canifolk first. Nobody had good feelings about it. Jeremy said, flatly, that things which announce the order they'll eat your children in are things you kill in their sleep if you get the chance, and nobody disagreed with that either.

Then Alex asked them to lay out their skills, all of them, no holding back. Mia went first, quiet and precise.

"Level eight. Power Shot and Duplicate Arrow, you've seen those. Tracking, which is why I'm coming. Eagle Eye." She paused.

"And Weak Point Analysis."

"Which does what?"

"It shows me where to put the arrow." She said it like she was describing the weather.

"On anything. It highlights it." Liam turned to stare at her.

"You've had that for how long?"

"Four days."

"That's horrifying."

"It's useful," Mia said, and went slightly pink, and that was the end of that. Liam went next and needed no encouragement whatsoever.

"Level eight. Mana Bolt, Mana Shield, Quicksand, Mana Hand, and Mana Storage." He counted them off on his fingers with visible relish.

"Mana Hand is exactly what it sounds like, it's a hand, made of mana, it does hand things. Mana Storage is the boring one and it's also the best one, it's a battery, I can bank mana ahead of a fight and dump it later, which means I can hold a quicksand a lot longer than I could when I passed out on the wall like an idiot."

"You didn't pass out," Ace said.

"I caught you."

"I passed out into you. That's still passing out." Jeremy was next.

"Level eight. Piercing Strike, Reinforce Body, Movement Boost, Lightning Step, Runner's Endurance." He shrugged one shoulder, faintly self-conscious.

"Runner's Endurance is why I can use Lightning Step more than twice a day now. It's not glamorous."

"You cross six meters in a flash of light," Alex said.

"It's a little glamorous."

"It's mostly cardio." And then Ace, who had been sitting perfectly still with her hands folded, and who said, "Heal. Cleanse. Regenerate. Invigorating Aura." A beat.

"And Iron Fist." The tent stopped. Alex looked at his sister. Mia's eyebrows had gone somewhere near her hairline. Liam made a small strangled noise.

"Say that last one again," Alex said.

"Iron Fist." Ace held his eyes without a flicker of embarrassment.

"You heard it correctly."

"Ace, you're a doctor."

"I'm a doctor who has spent weeks standing behind a line of people while things with teeth try to get past them, and every single day of it I have been the softest thing on the field." Her voice stayed level, which somehow made it worse.

"Do you understand what that's actually like? I keep everyone alive and I cannot do one single thing about the creature currently deciding whether to eat me. I've been mana-drained and helpless with a bull forty feet away and my only plan was someone else will handle it. I'm done with that." Alex looked at Jeremy, the only person in the tent who wasn't reacting, and understood.

"You knew."

"I've known for a week." Jeremy's mouth did something complicated.

"I've been sparring with her."

"That's where the bruise came from."

"That's where my bruises came from," Jeremy said, and rubbed his raw knuckles, and Ace's expression finally cracked into something almost smug.

"I asked Liam what the evolution paths look like," she went on.

"The healing tree's got branches nobody in this camp is walking. Something that heals and hits. A frontline healer. I want that."

"A battle nun," Liam said reverently.

"Do not call me that."

"I'm calling you that." And Alex, sitting there watching his older sister openly plan to punch a monster, found that the thing surfacing in him wasn't alarm. It was recognition. Because he was remembering high school, and the girl who had put a boy through a locker in the tenth grade for reasons she never fully explained, and who had chosen medicine and buried all of that so deep that most of the family had genuinely forgotten it was ever there. It had never left. It had just been waiting for the world to need it.

"Fine," Alex said.

"But you're the only healer coming. If you're on the ground trading punches while somebody's bleeding out, we lose everyone."

"I know." Ace nodded once, all the fight going out of her posture and none of it out of her eyes.

"Healer first. I'm not stupid, Alex. I just refuse to be helpless."

"Then we're agreed." They worked out the formation after that, and it built itself. Alex up front, tanking, holding aggro on everything with Taunt. Jeremy as the first strike, the one who crossed a gap in a heartbeat and put a spear through whatever mattered most. Liam on control, sand and shields, damage where it helped. Mia purely damage, from as far back as the terrain allowed, painting weak points with an eye nobody could hide from.

And Ace behind all of them, healing, with a right hand that was apparently now a contingency plan. Five people. Five, walking into an enemy outpost tomorrow. Alex looked around his tent at all of them arguing about whether Liam was allowed to name their formation, and felt something he hadn't felt since a level seven dog came out of a portal. He felt like they might actually be enough.