Chương 3: First wave

Alex appeared with many others, suddenly, the white nothing of the void replaced by open grass and a sky that looked almost right. Loud voices and the sharp edge of panic rang out around him as everyone scrambled to find familiar faces in the crowd. The clang of armor and the dull knock of medieval weapons being shifted into ready grips came from people he'd known his entire life, people who, until ten minutes ago, had never held anything sharper than a kitchen knife.

Most were dressed in leather, similar to his own, and a few carried bows slung across their backs like they'd stepped out of some hunting reenactment. Alex paid the gear little mind. What mattered was finding his parents and sibling. He pushed through the press of bodies of people he was familiar with, scanning faces, he caught sight of his cousins clustered together, then his uncles and aunts a little further off. Aunt Becky stood beside her husband, head turning side to side, searching.

Uncle Josh was doing the same a few feet away, calling a name Alex couldn't quite make out over the noise. Everyone looked like they'd been dropped into the deep end without warning, which, Alex supposed, was exactly what had happened. A voice cut through the chaos, deep and steady in a way that made people's heads turn toward it. Dad, with Uncle Sam and Uncle Bartholomew flanking him, already pulling people in.

The crowd began to bend toward them, the scattered clatter of armor and weapons consolidating into something like order as everyone formed a loose, ragged circle. Alex's eyes found Ace across the gathering crowd, standing close to her husband, their parents' hands locked together beside her. Judging by how full the circle already looked, Alex was one of the later ones to arrive.

He spotted the kids next, clustered low to the ground, sitting without armor of any kind while their parents told them, again and again, to stay put. They seemed to understand, on some level, that this wasn't the time for games. They sat with wide, unblinking eyes, curiosity outweighing fear for now, the way it tended to with kids who hadn't yet learned what to be afraid of.

"John." Dad's voice carried real weight when he called the name, the kind of seriousness Alex had only heard him use a handful of times before.

"Take the kids and get them somewhere safe. Make sure none of them wander off, you hear me?"

"Yes sir." John, nine years old, normally elbow-deep in some sword fight with his twin brother, straightened up like the words had physically settled onto his shoulders. Something in his face shifted, the easy mischief replaced for a moment by something older. He looked, for just a second, like he understood exactly how much weight had just been handed to him, and he took it without complaint. Dad had always been the one who stepped into that kind of role without being asked.

Being the oldest of Grandpa's ten kids meant he'd had decades of practice keeping a room full of people from falling apart, and old habits, apparently, traveled well even into whatever this was.

"Everyone, gather in. Count off, tell me who's missing and who's here." They counted. Everyone from the family was accounted for, along with fifteen neighbors who'd either come by for the holiday or simply happened to be close enough to the house when the world changed underneath them. A notification bloomed into the air in front of every set of eyes at once, the kind of shared, simultaneous flicker that made it clear nobody was hallucinating this alone. [Welcome to the tutorial.] [Your tutorial is a survival and conquest challenge. Your primary mission is to survive while conquering as many outposts as you can. There are monster outposts and human outposts. To claim an outpost, you must remain within its area for one hour without leaving. Each outpost has a dungeon nearby where monsters will spawn every 5 days for the next 60 days, until the tutorial ends. These dungeons will be updated with new monsters every 5 days. Each outpost conquered will increase the difficulty of future monster waves. Other mechanics should be explored and discovered by tutorial participants.] [A system shop will be available to each individual. The currency used is tutorial points, earned through killing monsters or completing other accomplishments.] [Please select a faction and choose a faction leader.] [First wave in 4m 58s.] Alex looked around.

In any family emergency, real or otherwise, his dad was the one who ended up leading, so the decision came together fast and without much debate. Chris Morningstar, leader.

"Everyone in agreement, Chris leads?" Uncle Sam asked, his tone carrying the particular respect of a second-oldest brother who'd spent his whole life deferring to the first. A murmur of agreement rippled through the circle, and a notification confirmed it a moment later, flashing in front of Alex's eyes. [You have selected Chris Morningstar as the leader of the outpost.]"Everyone, listen." Dad's voice rang out across the field, steady even though his eyes carried none of that same calm.

"I don't fully understand what's happening, but there is real danger here, and we're going to have to fight it together. If you've got a weapon and a shield, you're up front with me. Two-handed weapons, stand right behind the shield line. Anyone with a bow, get ready to fire over our heads." There weren't many of them, not in the grand scheme of whatever this tutorial expected. Around forty people total could actually fight.

Most of the men had managed to grab a shield, paired with a spear or a sword, the obvious choice for people with zero combat experience. A handful of teenagers, maybe fifteen years old, had picked up sword and shield too, and Alex eyed their thin arms with no small amount of doubt about how useful those weapons would actually be in their hands. He spotted Jeremy, Ace's husband, standing near the front.

The guy had never lifted a weight in his life as far as Alex knew, but he ran every morning without fail, rain or not, so there was at least a chance he'd hold his ground. Seven healers had assembled near the back, which Alex counted as a small mercy. The family had no shortage of medical workers, nurses and doctors both, with Ace and his mom leading that group without anyone needing to ask. None of them had bothered with the robes offered in the equipment selection.

Despite looking the part, the robes hadn't carried any actual magical effects, just cloth dressed up to look the way people expected a healer to look, so going with real armor underneath instead had been the obvious call. The rest of the healers were former nurses, plus one fifteen-year-old cousin who'd declared, with all the conviction of someone who hadn't yet seen what dying actually looked like, that she wanted to save lives. Alex shook his head at that. Bless her.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Off to one side, nine of the family had ended up with Mage as their class, robes and all, since theirs actually did something. They'd clustered together near the archers, murmuring through what little they understood about how their spells worked, none of them having cast so much as a spark before today.

At the one-minute mark, a dark, circular portal tore open in the air ahead of them, gray and depthless, like a window cut straight into the void itself. Looking at it did something to Alex's nerves that he hadn't expected, a tightness low in his gut that refused to settle. He gripped his hammer tighter, sweat already beading at his hairline as the sun bore down directly into his face. And in the middle of all of it, in possibly the worst moment to notice something like this, Alex realized the sun looked wrong.

He couldn't place exactly why. Just off, somehow, not the sun he'd spent hours of his childhood staring up at from the fields behind Grandpa's house, the one he'd mapped and remapped in his head a hundred times since. There wasn't time for that thought right now. The countdown hit ten seconds. He raised his shield and fell into line beside ten other men from his family, men he loved, men he could not afford to watch die today. He knew, without needing to think about it, that he was stronger than any of them.

That meant the responsibility for keeping them alive sat squarely on him whether he wanted it or not. He'd been in his share of fights before, plenty of them, mostly idiots at bars who'd decided his size was a challenge rather than a warning. But he'd never actually killed anything in his life, not so much as a fish on a hook, and there was a difference between cracking some guy's jaw in a parking lot and what was about to come pouring out of that portal.

Everyone around him was terrified in their own quiet way, and that was fine. Terrified people could still survive, as long as they did it together. The portal split open, and serpentine shapes began pouring out of it in steady, writhing waves, climbing toward something like fifty in total before they stopped coming. Even at a distance, their eyes caught the light wrong, a deep, glowing red with no visible pupil, the kind of detail that made it obvious these things hadn't crawled out of any nest on Earth.

Watching fifty snakes surge toward you at full speed, every single one of them staring back with eyes that looked lit from the inside, was the kind of thing that hollowed out a person's stomach even with combat experience, and most of the people standing in this field had none. Someone near the back shouted over the rising noise.

"Everyone, use Identify!" Alex had nearly forgotten he even had the skill. He focused on the nearest snake and let it run. [Tainted Python - Level 2] [Tainted Python - Level 2] [Tainted Python - Level 2] He scanned the writhing mass and found the pattern held, snake after snake tagged the same. Near the back of the pack, though, one stood out, bigger than the rest by a wide margin. [Tainted Python - Level 5] Alex felt the weight of his armor settle against his skin, felt his grip tighten around the hammer's haft.

This was going to be bad.

"Archers, mages, fire!" Dad's voice cut across the field before the snakes had closed even half the distance. A ragged volley of arrows arced out from behind the shield line, more enthusiasm than aim behind most of them, but enough found their mark to send three of the smaller pythons tumbling. A heartbeat later, the mages let loose whatever they'd managed to scrape together, bolts of raw, uncontrolled energy in shades of blue and white streaking across the grass.

Most of it missed wide, scorching the dirt instead of scales, but one stray bolt caught a python broadside and sent it flying in a smoking arc through the air. It wasn't much. Forty people who'd never held a weapon outside of a video game weren't going to win this with ranged fire alone, but every snake that went down before reaching the line was one less thing trying to put its teeth into someone Alex loved. The snakes closed the distance fast despite the losses.

None of them stretched more than two meters, slightly thinner than Alex's own arm, but speed made up for what they lacked in size. The first one lunged at him, and Alex caught it on his shield, deflecting the strike sideways before driving the spiked end of his hammer down through its skull in one clean motion. The body kept twitching even after the killing blow landed, and Alex flung it off his weapon, only to feel a second pair of fangs catch the meat of his calf, barely breaking skin.

He swung again, catching that one across the head with the flat of the hammer and sending it sprawling. The formation had already started to fray by then, the neat shield line dissolving into a dozen smaller fights, and Alex found himself swinging at whatever came closest. More fangs found him over the next several seconds, one sinking into his forearm with enough force to send a hot bolt of pain up to his shoulder, but he kept moving, kept swinging, dropping snake after snake until his eyes landed on the level 5.

It was easily five meters long, its scales patterned in alternating brown and black like something carved rather than born, its eyes the same unnatural red as every other snake in the wave, just larger now, close enough that Alex could see they didn't reflect light so much as generate their own. Uncle Sam was already moving toward him, spear leveled, shield raised, ready to help. The big snake coiled back on itself and struck with a speed that didn't match its size at all.

Alex felt the impact rattle straight through his shield and down into his bones, and he activated Reinforce Body on instinct, the skill barely holding the line against the force still slamming through his arm. Feeling that kind of power humming under his own skill use, Alex didn't hesitate to reach for the only offensive skill he had. Power Strike.

Blue mana surged into the hammer's head, and he brought the flat side down across the python's skull, rocking it backward with a wound that started bleeding immediately, dark and heavy. Something in Alex's chest swelled at that, a kind of strength he hadn't known he had access to until just now. He also knew, somewhere underneath the adrenaline, that he couldn't keep throwing that skill around. His mana wasn't bottomless, not even close.

Uncle Sam and Dad both started moving to back him up, and Alex called out before they could close the distance.

"I got this. Go help someone else!" He knew, even as the words left his mouth, that he was probably overestimating himself. But Uncle Sam and Dad wading into this particular fight meant pulling their attention away from people who needed it more, and Alex would rather take the hit himself than watch that math play out wrong. The python slithered low across the grass, tongue flicking at the air, tasting him before it moved. Alex could feel it coming, that same tightening low in his gut from before, sharper now.

He chose to charge rather than wait, shield raised to block whatever came first, eyes locked on the snake the entire time. He triggered Reinforce Body again, felt the warmth settle into his muscles, and watched the python's scales ripple as its own mana surged. The strike, when it came, was faster than anything before it. A mouth far too large for the snake's actual head opened in front of Alex's shield and clamped down, fangs the length of kitchen knives filling his entire field of vision in a wash of pale pink.

Three arrows thudded into the snake's flank from somewhere behind him, doing what little damage they could while those fangs stayed locked around the edge of his shield. The snake's mistake became obvious almost immediately: its fangs had caught on the metal rim and dragged across his chest armor as it bit down, slicing through leather and into the skin beneath without finding bone or anything that mattered, but the damage was done either way. It couldn't pull free. Alex didn't waste the opening.

He poured every scrap of mana he had left into one final Power Strike, driving the spiked end of the hammer straight down through the top of the snake's skull and into the dirt beneath it. The body convulsed, twitching hard enough to shake the ground under his boots, but the strike had already done what it needed to do. It was over.