Chương 28: G rank

The first plan was Liam's, and it was the obvious one.

"We can't go in," he said, drawing in the dirt with a finger.

"Walls, gates, twenty-five of them, and the second we're inside we're surrounded and Mia's useless because she can't shoot through timber. So we don't go in. We make them come out. We stand at range and we make it so annoying to sit behind that wall that they'd rather charge us than take one more arrow."

"They'll come out angry and they'll come out fast," Jeremy said.

"That's what the sand is for." Jeremy shook his head, and he did it hard.

"No. Something's wrong with this." Everyone looked at him.

"They didn't attack anyone else on the way here." Jeremy's jaw was tight.

"They hit that outpost, they hauled fifty bodies home, and now they're standing in a circle walking laps around a platform for days. They're not hunting. They're not expanding. They're busy. Whatever they're doing in there matters more to them than we do, and I don't like plans that depend on an enemy caring about me." The silence stretched.

"He's right," Ace said slowly.

"And it means something else, too." She sat forward, and her voice took on the flat, careful cadence Alex recognized from every time she'd ever explained a diagnosis to a frightened family.

"Think about what they've done. They brought the bodies here. They built a platform. They arranged them, they haven't eaten them, and they've been standing around them for days. That's not a monster hoarding food. That's a procedure. And it's a procedure with a cost, because whatever they're getting out of it, they're paying for it in time, and things that talk don't pay for something with time unless they need it."

"So?" Liam said.

"So they might not be able to come out." Ace looked around the group.

"Not without ruining it. Whatever it is." That landed on Alex like a stone in a well.

"Then we go in," he said.

"While they're stuck standing still."

"Sneaking five people into a fortified outpost," Mia said, "past twenty-five things that can smell us."

"... Yeah."

"Alex, they're dogs."

"I said yeah." They sat with it. The problem chewed itself in circles for a while, sneak in and get pinned in a killing box, or draw them out and hope Ace was wrong, and every road ended in a wall. Alex felt the pressure of it building behind his teeth, the platform sitting there in his mind with its rows.

"We do Liam's plan," he said finally.

"You just heard me argue we can't rely on them coming out," Jeremy said.

"I did. And if Ace is right and they won't come, then we've lost nothing except arrows and time, and we'll know something nobody in this tutorial knows, which is that these things can be pinned in place by their own ritual." Alex stood.

"But if they do come out, they come out through a gate. One gate. Onto ground we picked, into sand Liam laid down, in front of an archer who can see where their organs are." Mia's mouth twitched, very slightly.

"So we don't guess," Alex said.

"We ask them." They set up two hundred meters out, exactly where Mia had been perched, and Alex arranged them the way they'd drilled in his tent. Mia and Liam at the back. Ace behind Alex and left, close enough to reach him, far enough to run. Jeremy at Alex's shoulder with his cheap wooden shield. Alex out front, alone, where he belonged. Two Canifolk stood the wall.

"Take them," Alex said. Mia's first arrow crossed two hundred meters and went through the left one's skull with a crack Alex heard from where he stood. It dropped like a bag of rocks. Her second arrow was already gone before the body fell. The second Canifolk didn't die. It saw the shaft coming, twisted, and took it through the arm instead, and its howl of pain and rage came out of it with enough force to peel the air.

It staggered, clutching the wound, and toppled backward off the wall into the outpost, still screaming.

"That'll do it," Liam said. The howling from inside the walls went up like a fire catching. Voices, dozens of them, snarling and barking over each other, and Alex heard boards slam and things get knocked over and someone bellowing what sounded very much like an order. And then nothing. The gate stayed shut.

"... Huh," Liam said. Alex stood in the open grass with his glaive across his shoulders and watched a fortress full of furious things refuse to come out and kill him, and felt Ace's theory settle over the field like weather.

"Keep shooting," he said. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Mia shot for thirty minutes. She did it without skills, mostly, saving her mana, using nothing but Eagle Eye and a draw arm that had gotten frightening. Whenever a Canifolk showed itself over the wall to howl at them, she put an arrow into it. She hit shoulders and faces and hands. She hit a spear-arm so cleanly that the spear fell outside the wall.

Ace kept a slow trickle of stamina regeneration flowing into her to keep her draw from failing, and Mia burned through arrow after arrow, methodical as a metronome, and gradually the howling took on a new note. Not rage. Frustration. The specific, hot, humiliated frustration of a creature that wants very badly to charge and cannot. She killed three of them in that half hour.

"They're pinned," Ace said, very quietly.

"They're actually pinned."

"For how long, though," Jeremy said. Alex was about to answer when a new growl came out of the outpost. It came from deep inside, past the walls, from somewhere near the center where the platform stood, and it was not like the others. It was lower. It went on longer. And every furious voice on the wall shut up the instant it started. The gate opened. They came out in a torrent, and every one of them was glowing. Cloaks of mana rippled off their shoulders.

Their fur stood on end with it, red light crawling over muscle, that same physical strengthening skill from the wall fight but layered and stacked, and Alex realized with a cold jolt that Mia had been right about the missing level sevens. There were none. Every single thing pouring out of that gate was a level eight or nine, and they were the ones that had stayed home while the weak ones were sent to hunt. Twenty-five of them, running full tilt at five.

"Liam," Alex said.

"Now."

"On it-"" Fifty meters. Let them commit." Liam had been feeding Mana Storage all morning, banking every drop he could spare, and Alex watched him wait, and wait, teeth gritted, while twenty-five glowing monsters ate the distance. A hundred and fifty meters. A hundred. Seventy.

"NOW." The ground went liquid. Liam dumped his entire storage into it and thirty meters of hard-packed earth turned to churning sand under the charge, and the front rank of the Canifolk simply vanished into it up to their chests. The ones behind them piled in at full speed. The whole beautiful lethal wedge of them collapsed into a floundering, howling knot in the space of two heartbeats. And Alex, who had spent the entire wait building the largest Blazing Core of his life, threw it.

He'd learned something about the skill since the last time. This wasn't the tight, cruel marble he used to punch through armor. He fed it heat and let it stay wide, spread it, thinned the density and grew the radius, because he didn't want to kill one of them. He wanted to hurt all of them. The core came down in the middle of the sand pit and the world went white. BOOM.

The blast rolled outward in a flat sheet of fire that Alex felt on his own face at eighty meters, and the sand pit became a bowl of flame and screaming. Fur went up like dry grass. The mana cloaks flared and shredded. He saw Canifolk stagger out of the fire with their hides burned off in sheets, meat exposed and blistering, one of them with the bone of its own forearm showing white through the char. None of them died. That was the point. Almost none of them could fight properly either.

"Hands!" Liam shouted, and thrust both arms forward. The sand reached. It came up out of the pit in thick ropes and grabbed, wrapping legs, closing around ankles and knees and dragging downward, sand hands built out of the same skill he'd been practicing on a handful of grit in Alex's tent for a week. The burned, howling mass of Canifolk hauled against them and got nowhere. Mia was already firing.

She'd dropped the discipline entirely, both hands moving in a blur, Duplicate Arrow splitting every shaft into two, and she wasn't aiming for kills anymore, she was aiming for damage, saturating the pit, putting shafts into anything that was still standing.

"Jeremy," Alex said, and started running. Alex hit the edge of the pit with his enhancement stack burning and his glaive glowing dull orange along the edge, heat running down the haft, and he used Taunt before his feet even stopped. Every red eye in that pit turned to him. That was the whole plan. Because Jeremy vanished in a crack of white-blue lightning at the exact same moment and reappeared behind the pack, and none of them saw it happen, because all of them were looking at Alex.

The first Canifolk lunged out of the sand at him with a blade in its burned hand, and Alex took its arm off at the elbow on the backswing and its head off on the follow-through, one motion, the heated edge cooking the wound shut as it went. The second came at his flank and he pivoted the glaive around his body and opened it from hip to sternum, and its insides came out in a rush of heat and steam. The sand held them. That was the thing.

The sand held them and they could not close and they could not run, and Alex walked the edge of that pit like a man mowing a lawn. He cut legs. He cut throats. He cut a Canifolk in half at the waist and the top half kept crawling at him and he stepped on it.

Blood sheeted up his arms and across the chest of his iron armor and into his face until his whole field of view had gone red at the edges, and behind the noise he could hear Jeremy's lightning cracking through the back rank, could hear the wet impacts of Mia's arrows arriving in twos, could hear Liam screaming with the effort of holding the sand. They hit him. Of course they hit him.

Blades scored his arms and a spear went into the meat of his thigh and something's teeth found his forearm and ground down until the armor buckled. One of them came out of the sand directly at his face, jaws wide, going for his eyes, and Alex saw the whole cavern of its mouth fill his vision and drove his glaive up through its stomach with Cleaving Strike and split it from groin to skull. He didn't feel most of it. He noted the damage the way a man notes weather.

The armor was doing its job, his Constitution was doing its job, Ace's green light kept arriving from behind him in pulses, and none of it mattered as much as the next swing. Children in a row. He kept cutting. And somewhere in the middle of it, moving through a pit of burning, screaming, half-buried monsters with his glaive tracing arcs that flowed one into the next without a single wasted motion, Alex realized that he wasn't thinking about the forms anymore. His body simply knew where the blade went.

Polearm Mastery, still tagged Novice, still lying to him, had turned him into something that could kill twenty-five intelligent beings and barely need to concentrate. The last one fell to Jeremy's spear through the back of the neck. Alex stood in the smoking pit surrounded by them, breathing hard, steam curling off his blade, blood running off his fingertips. Twenty-five. Fifty bodies avenged, a little. Ace was already crossing the ground toward him at a jog, hands lit green, mouth open to say something.

The growl stopped her. It came from the open gate, deeper than anything they'd heard yet, and it carried something no Canifolk voice had carried before. Not rage. Contempt.

"Guard up!" Alex shouted, wrenching himself around, and Ace skidded to a stop behind him.

"There's another one!" And out of the gate, walking, unhurried, came something with a staff in its hand and a cloud of glowing spheres drifting around it like a swarm of luminous fruit, hundreds of them, and its eyes found Alex across the field with the flat, personal hatred of a man who has come home to find his house on fire. Alex ran Identify. [Tainted Canifolk - Level 13] Every other thing he had killed in three weeks had been H rank. This one wasn't.