Chương 33: Wall duty

The snoring reached him before the tent did. Alex slowed his walk and listened to it with something like professional respect. It was a serious snore, a committed snore, the kind that came from a body that had given everything it had and was now collecting payment with interest. Katelin had pulled night watch, he remembered hearing that somewhere, and the sound coming through the canvas suggested the night had won. He knocked on the tent pole anyway, because the dungeon didn't care how anyone slept.

"Katelin. Time to get up. We should head out soon if we want some good hunting in." The snoring stopped mid-note. There was a rustle, a pause long enough to be a decision, and then the flap pulled back on the groggiest face he had ever seen on a living person. Her hair had fought a war in the night and lost, and her eyes focused on him the way eyes focus on a math problem.

"We're on watch duty today," she said.

"We're what?"

"Watch duty." She said it slower the second time, with the particular patience of a fifteen-year-old explaining something to an adult.

"Both of us. It's on the rotation. It's been on the rotation since the meeting." Alex opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, because the meeting surfaced in his memory right on schedule and it agreed with her completely. The family had hashed out the rotation days ago.

Everyone pulled watch, no exceptions, and he hadn't stood a single shift since they'd gotten back from the fortress, which meant Mia and Liam and half the camp had already paid their turns while he was off leveling and nearly dying and having conversations in fields. He and Katelin came as a set now, everyone treated them that way, so of course the schedule had them down together.

"You're right." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Sorry. Go back to sleep for a bit, I'll come get you when the shift actually starts." She gave him a long look, the kind that filed this incident away for future use, and let the flap drop. The snoring resumed inside of a minute. Alex stood there a second longer, honestly a little impressed, and then turned back into the camp with a free morning he hadn't planned on. Jeremy's voice found him the moment his feet had nowhere to be. Not the words, exactly.

The shape of them, the weight of that conversation in the field, the sound a man's disappointment made when it was earned. Alex breathed in slow, put the whole thing in the same box he'd been putting it in all week, and pressed the lid down. He was working on it. He'd apologized, or started to. It would keep until tonight. He gave himself the walk instead. The camp had changed under everyone's feet without asking permission, and taking it in all at once, it was hard to believe nine days had done this.

The sad sagging canvas of the first week was gone, replaced tent by tent with taller, tighter, better, the store's higher grades spreading through the rows as points came in. The upgrades had visibly plateaued too, and Alex could guess why. There were no buildings on offer, nothing past a certain quality of tent, as if the tutorial had drawn a line and said this far, no further, you're not settlers yet.

Everyone had simply hit the ceiling and then, like sensible people, taken their remaining points to the dungeon instead. The sound of the place had changed most of all. Kids were everywhere now. Not just the family's kids, whose voices he could have picked out of a stadium, but new ones, children from Cassandra's group and from the trickle of survivors the camp kept absorbing, all of them mixed into one loud, self-governing swarm that went streaming past the tents in pursuit of a ball someone had bought or made.

Alex stopped and watched them longer than he meant to. Nine days ago some of those kids had walked in with the specific silence he was still learning to recognize. Now they were shrieking about the rules of a game that clearly had none. Whatever he was paying out there in blood and mana, this was the exchange rate, and it was worth it. It was worth everything. Which was when he spotted the litterer. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

A skinny kid, one of the new ones, maybe nine, was sitting on a crate finishing some kind of ration bar, and as Alex watched, the wrapper went over his shoulder into the grass with the easy confidence of long practice. The kid was also wearing a helmet. Not a kid's helmet, because no such thing existed in the store, but a full-sized metal one, dented in at least three separate places, sitting so low on his head that eating had to be done by feel.

It was entirely possible the helmet was why the wrapper missed the kid's own notice. It was also, Alex noted, a helmet too big for Alex himself to wear, which raised questions about where it had come from that he decided not to pursue. He walked over and crouched down, and put on the gentlest voice he owned, the one he used on the twins.

"Hey, bud. You dropped something. We keep the camp clean, yeah? Everybody picks up after themselves." The helmet rotated toward him. Somewhere in its shadow, two eyes performed a slow, unimpressed audit of the largest human being in the settlement, blood-scarred armor and all, crouching in the grass and saying bud. The kid held the stare a moment longer than any nine-year-old should have been able to.

Then he slid off the crate, picked up the wrapper, and walked off without a single word, the helmet wobbling with each step like a pot on a fence post. Alex stayed crouched there for a second, oddly defeated. He'd expected a flinch, honestly. Most of the new kids still flinched. Getting absolutely nothing, being assessed and dismissed by a child in headwear he couldn't have gotten past his own ears, sat somewhere between funny and humbling, and there was no move available to him. You couldn't fight a kid.

There was no counterplay. He stood up, elected to never mention this to Liam as long as he lived, and headed for the wall. Uncle Bartholomew was already up at the gate, and the sight of him stopped Alex short in the best way. Metal armor, the same Common grade set Alex had worn for weeks, sat on his uncle's frame like it had found the right owner. A spear stood in one hand with a broad shield slung at his other arm, both plainly store-bought, both plainly used.

Bartholomew was well into his forties, an age the old world had been slowly collecting from him, and the system had apparently torn up that ledger, because the man looked healthier than Alex could remember him looking in years. Solid through the chest. Color in his face. A bruise going yellow along one forearm that said the health was being paid for honestly.

"There he is." Bartholomew clapped him on the shoulder, and there was real force in it now.

"How's the body? Everybody heard. About the fortress thing."

"Recovered. Constitution does most of the work."

"Good. Good." His uncle nodded like the answer had been examined and passed.

"Scared some people, you know."

"I know."

"Your dad especially. He won't say it."

"I know that too." Bartholomew nodded again, and that was the whole conversation, and both of them were fine with it. They had never been talkers, the two of them, their entire relationship built across two decades of holiday dinners and comfortable silence. What Alex mostly registered, watching his uncle settle the shield strap, was the level floating in his own assessment of the man. Seven.

His forty-something uncle, who nine days ago had a desk job and a bad knee, was level seven and standing a wall with a spear. The system was rebuilding everyone, not just the young ones, and something about that steadied him more than any notification had. Alex climbed up onto the wall and found his spot, and the day arranged itself around him. The watch was seven or eight people all told, spread along the walkway. A few he knew.

Several he didn't, new faces from the absorbed groups, nodding at him with the careful respect that had followed him around since the fortress, the respect he still hadn't figured out where to put. Katelin arrived a couple of hours in, hair defeated into a ponytail, took one look at him, said, "You're lucky you're related," and posted up further down the wall with her kit, and that was that handled. Cassandra came up not long after.

He knew her the way you knew someone from three group fights and zero conversations, the leader of the thirty who'd joined before the second wave, the mages whose volleys had helped bury the Canifolk. She walked the wall with an easy economy that said the staff across her back wasn't decoration, and when she reached him she stopped and offered a nod.

"Alex."

"Cassandra. You're on today too?"

"Rotation." A beat.

"Same as you, I'd guess."

"Same as me." After an awkward couple of minutes"Good wall," she said, in the tone of someone auditioning small talk and hearing it fail in real time.

"It's a solid wall," Alex agreed, matching her effort exactly. They stood in it together for a moment, the full awkward weight of two people who had bled beside each other and knew absolutely nothing else about one another. She had the look of someone with more to say and no bridge to say it across, and he had nothing to offer but the same. She settled a few posts down with her staff, and the silence between them relaxed into the ordinary kind.

The field beyond the wall stretched out green and empty, the dungeon sitting quiet in the distance, and Alex leaned on the parapet and felt the day open in front of him, long and flat and unscheduled. Which was dangerous, because his head immediately went back to the field two nights ago. The risk. The bill. The conversation. His hands wanted something to do that wasn't thinking about it. So he gave them something. He turned his palm up, pulled a thread of mana into it, and started to work.