Chương 37: Prep

Alex woke with the wave sitting on the day like a due date, geared up, and went to find his father first. Chris was where Chris always was on a wave morning, near the wall with the whole settlement's readiness passing through him in pieces, a runner arriving, a question answered, a nod sending someone somewhere. Alex waited for a gap and then took it, and laid the whole account out the way he had for the team the night before. The class and its tier. The affinity by name. The body. The gravity. The profession.

His father listened the way he listened to everything, completely, arms folded, letting the entire report finish before spending a single word on it.

"Rare," Chris said finally.

"Rare." His father looked at him for a long moment, and Alex watched about four different reactions get considered and filed, pride and worry and questions and the leader's cold arithmetic of what this meant for the next six hours, and what came out was the one underneath all of them.

"The body skill. It'll keep you alive?"

"Better than anything I've had."

"Then I'm glad of it." A pause, and something dry entered his father's voice.

"Since you've made keeping you alive a community project."

"That's fair."

"It was your sister's phrasing." Chris almost smiled, and then the leader came back.

"The wave's this afternoon. Whatever you're about to ask me, ask it fast." Because of course he'd seen the ask coming. Alex laid it out.

"I want to test the skill before the wave, properly, and I want to test it against our own mages. Have them hit me. Ramp it up until we find where the damage starts. If I'm going to build our whole formation around what I can absorb, I want the number measured, not guessed." His father's expression did not change, which was itself information.

"You want twenty mages to attack my son on the morning of a wave."

"I want to know exactly what I'm worth as a wall before I ask people to stand behind me. And their mana refills by noon. It costs us nothing but the look of the thing." Chris held the silence for a moment, then exhaled through his nose, the closest he came to conceding a point out loud.

"The look of the thing," he repeated.

"Fine. But you stop the moment Ace says stop, and Alex." He waited until he had his son's eyes.

"Measured is the word you used. Stay inside it." The mages assembled in the open ground inside the wall, and the crowd assembled right behind them, because there was no version of this staying private.

Twenty-something casters in a loose arc, Liam bouncing on his heels at the end of it, Ace positioned to one side with her arms crossed and her healer's kit very pointedly open, and behind all of it a growing audience of family, neighbors, and new folk who had heard, with the speed rumor moved in a camp this size, that the big one was about to get shot on purpose. The mood surprised him.

A week ago this crowd had carried its fear everywhere, and this morning, hours from a wave, they'd shown up with the loose, chattering energy of people at an event. The camp had changed under everyone's feet in more ways than tents.

"Ground rules," Alex called.

"One caster to start. Mana bolt, center mass. Then we scale up on my word, and nobody aims below the belt, I've seen your accuracy." That got a laugh down the line, and the first mage, one of Cassandra's people, put a bolt into his chest. His armor took it with a flat clank. Alex looked down at the fresh scuff on a breastplate already crosshatched with a week of abuse, and felt, from the impact itself, almost nothing. A tap. Someone knocking on a door two rooms away.

"Again." Clank. Another scuff. The armor was registering more damage than he was, and standing there being knocked on. The plate was days from falling apart, he couldn't afford its replacement, and somewhere in the last two days the equation had flipped, the armor was no longer protecting his body, his body was chauffeuring the armor. It was slower, it pinched, and it was now the single most damageable thing on his person. So he started unbuckling it. The arc of mages exchanged looks.

The crowd's chatter changed pitch. Ace's voice carried over both, flat as a table.

"What are we doing."

"Science," Alex said, and pulled the breastplate over his head. He stripped to the waist, down to store-bought pants and nothing else, and stood in the morning light feeling exactly as ridiculous as he looked. He'd never been a show-off, that was the honest truth, an entire life spent being stared at for his size had cured him of wanting more eyes, and he could feel the whole camp's attention on his bare torso like sunburn. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Stomach," he told the first mage.

"Full strength." The bolt crossed the gap and broke against his abs, and what reached him was a graze. A firm poke. The sensation of a friend flicking him to get his attention, and the mana bursting bright and useless off his skin, and Alex stood there, shirtless in front of a hundred people, feeling the impact spread and die somewhere above the muscle and below his notice, and grinned before he could stop himself. Fine. It was a little invigorating. Nobody needed to know.

"Two casters." Two bolts. A double poke.

"Four." A shove, spread across his chest, his heels not moving.

"Eight." Now it arrived as a hit, a real one, the combined force landing like a hard body shot from a lightweight boxer, and Alex rode it, rocked half a step, and settled. No pain that lingered. Nothing bleeding. His skin didn't even mark.

"Everyone," he said.

"Together. Empty half your pools into me." Ace made a sound. The mages, who had progressed from hesitant to invested somewhere around volley four, lit the morning up. Twenty-plus bolts converged on one shirtless target, a bright rippling barrage that cracked against him all at once, and the world shoved him, hard, a giant's punch across his whole front, and when the light cleared Alex had slid back two full boot lengths, was still standing, and was laughing. It had hurt.

Genuinely, this time, a deep body-wide thud he'd be aware of for an hour. And half a settlement's mage corps unloading half their mana had produced, in total, one very hard punch. No blood. Not even a red mark for Ace to point at.

"Head," he called.

"Same test."

"Absolutely not," Ace said.

"The sheep won't sign your rules, Ace. I need to know if a hit to the head blinds me. Better to learn it here than out there." She stared at him, doing the math between the promise he'd made last night and the request in front of her, and evidently this one qualified as told-you-first, because she raised one finger at the mages, one caster, and posted herself directly beside him. The bolt cracked against his temple. His vision didn't so much as flicker.

Eyes open the whole way, no daze, no ring, the same distant knock as everywhere else, and he saw the moment Ace's clinical annoyance turned into clinical fascination despite herself. Then Liam stepped up, vibrating.

"My turn. New thing. Been saving it." He planted his feet, and the mana that gathered off his hands was not a bolt, it condensed, stretching into a spike, a spear-length lance of pure pale force, and Alex's attention sharpened, because he could read density now the way he read heat, and the thing Liam was holding carried as much mana as a Blazing Core. Pure force instead of fire. The kid had built himself a sibling to Alex's sun, and told no one, saving it like a birthday present.

"Stomach," Liam said, delighted.

"Full strength?"

"Full strength." The spike crossed the distance too fast to track and hit him like a car. Alex left the ground. Not far, not high, but truly, his whole frame thrown backward off his feet to skid a body length through the grass, and the impact reached all the way in, deep into the metal-adjacent flesh, a flat heavy blow he felt in his organs. He sat up, took inventory. Nothing broken. Nothing bleeding.

A profound new respect for Liam, and the certain knowledge that five or six of those in a row would put even his new body into real trouble.

"That," Alex said, getting up, "is a good spell." Liam took a bow to scattered applause. But the knockback was the finding, and Alex chewed on it while the archers took their turn. His body could refuse damage now, but it still weighed what it weighed, and mass didn't care how tough you were, enough force would move him whether or not it hurt him, and a wall that slides isn't a wall. The answer arrived almost before the problem finished stating itself. Gravity.

Anchor himself, weight on demand, rooted like something ten times his size. His control was nowhere near it yet. He filed it at the top of the list, the next thing worth bleeding for. The archers confirmed the pattern, arrows tapping off him like thrown pencils, and then Mia stepped up, drew, and put one into his chest that genuinely rocked him, similar to Liam's spell, and he caught something in her draw, a flicker of light down the arrow that no Common skill produced. He looked the question at her.

She looked back, shy and fierce at once, saying nothing, and Alex smiled and let her keep it. Everyone deserved a birthday present. The plan meeting was short, because the test had done the arguing.

"I'm the anchor," Alex told the assembled leads, his father, Ace, Liam, Mia, Jeremy, Cassandra with her archers.

"I go out front. Taunt, as loud and wide as I can push it, and I hold as many of them on me as the skill will grab. Liam bleeds the charge with sand and keeps anything I miss slowed. And then the mages kill everything attacking me, at their own pace, in perfect safety, because the thing the monsters are hitting doesn't break." He looked around the circle.

"The mages are the priority this wave. Every level they gain is defense the whole camp keeps forever. I'm not out there to rack a count. I'm out there to be a target that levels our casters." Nobody loved it. He watched his father not love it, watched Ace not love it, watched even Jeremy weigh it with his arms crossed. But the morning's evidence stood in the middle of the circle, shirtless and unbruised, and there was very little to argue with a man half the mage corps had just failed to injure.

"Don't overdo it" his Father said"Measured," Alex agreed. The mages ate, rested, and refilled through the middle of the day, and by afternoon the whole settlement was in position, wall lined, kids pulled deep into the camp's center, the familiar pre-wave quiet settling over everything like weather. Alex stood out front of the gate, glaive in hand, bare to the waist by choice now, and watched the dungeon. Something was wrong with it.

He'd stood watch on this thing for days and knew its moods, and the mana rising off the entrance today wasn't a mood, it was a change of nature. The flow came thicker than he'd ever seen it, and dark, genuinely dark, a stain spreading up into the air with an oily, clinging wrongness that his senses recoiled from the way skin recoils from rot. He'd conquered an outpost since the last wave.

The difficulty had a reason to climb, he'd known that, signed for it, and the knowing did nothing at all for the animal part of him watching that blackness pour out of the earth. The dungeon exhaled once more, darker. And the first thing came out.