Chương 38: wave

The thing that stepped out of the dungeon had been a sheep the way a burned house had been a home. Every wave before this one had sent out animals, wrong-sized and red-eyed but recognizable, creatures a person could name. What walked into the afternoon light now stood upright on two thick legs, taller than a man, its body a fusion of wool and human musculature that the eye kept trying to separate and couldn't.

The flesh looked rotten without being rotten, intact but wrong, discolored in patches like fruit gone bad from the inside. And it moved. Not just the creature, its surface, because everywhere across the body, from shoulders and ribs and the corners of its face, thin tentacles the length of a finger wriggled and reached, dozens of them, tasting the air. Its eyes were the brightest red Alex had ever seen on a living thing. [Tainted Sheepfolk, Level 9] Behind it, the dungeon kept exhaling, and the field filled.

Alex counted as they came, and the count kept getting worse. Level nines, wall to wall, with a scattering of eights and not one single seven, the weak stock simply gone from the roster. They spread out from the entrance in a loose, jostling mass that didn't stop growing until it had passed anything a previous wave had sent, a hundred of them, give or take, milling and steaming that oily dark mana into the air. Then the last two came out, and the whole mass went quiet around them.

[Tainted Sheepfolk, Level 12] [Tainted Sheepfolk, Level 12] Two of them. Two G ranks, head and shoulders above the herd, built like the others had been built and then built again, slabs of wrong muscle stacked onto frames that made the nines look like drafts, and Alex stood in front of the gate doing math he didn't like. Liam's sand had a limit. The wall had a limit.

One of those things had nearly been the end of him a few days ago with an army at his back, and today there were two, and the plan he'd sold this morning had been priced for one. The plan was still the plan. He climbed down inside himself, found the promise he'd made last night, and kept it.

"I'm going down." Alex said, his determination showing His father's voice came back level, and then, quieter, just for him.

"Be safe."

"Same plan as this morning," Alex said, which was not a promise, and both of them let it stand. He dropped off the wall and walked out to meet the wave alone. Up close they were worse. The smell arrived first, sweet and spoiled, and then the detail, the way the little tentacles all leaned toward him as he approached like grass leaning into wind, hungry, coordinated, and Alex put the disgust in a box and put the box away. Feelings after. Work now.

The front rank broke toward him, and he answered before thinking, glaive already swinging, and something new happened. He'd been running mana and thermal through the blade out of habit, the two manipulations layered along the edge the way he'd practiced for weeks, he activated cleaving strike, and as the swing came around, the layered power didn't stay on the steel. It left.

A crescent of force peeled off the arc of the cut and traveled, one meter, two, shearing through the first three sheepfolk before it frayed apart, and Alex finished the follow-through staring at six bodies he hadn't touched. He hadn't known he could do that. Nobody had taught him that. The wave hadn't gone far and hadn't gone deep, but his glaive had just spoken at range for the first time, and some corner of his mind grabbed the discovery and sprinted off to study it while the rest of him got on with the war.

Because it was time to be loud. Alex planted his feet in the churned grass, opened the Taunt skill wider than he'd ever pushed it, and poured. Mana flooded the skill until he felt it strain, and he shaped all of it around a single intention, the two big ones and as much of the others, look at me, and then he threw his head back and roared.

It came out of him like something structural failing, a sound he had never produced and could not have rehearsed, guttural and enormous, rolling across the field and up the wall and out over a hundred wrong red eyes. The wave turned. All of it.

He watched the mass of them rotate toward him like iron filings finding a magnet, watched the two giants at the back lock onto him over the herd, and had one clear thought, that this was far more than he had believed the skill could hold, before the world closed over him and became muscle. They hit him from every direction at once.

Fists, hooves, teeth, weight, a hundred levels of enhanced bodies breaking against his like surf, and the little tentacles came with all of it, wrapping his arms, his neck, crawling at his face with a strength that turned out to be nothing, thread and spite, and he tore through them without slowing. The blows themselves were a stranger experience.

He felt them the way you feel rain through a roof, arrivals without consequences, the Star Forged Body drinking impact after impact and handing him back dull notices where wounds should have been. What the hits did steal was momentum, each one shoving his frame, checking his swings, and whenever the crowd's rhythm stacked enough to stagger him, he spent a Cleaving Strike and bought the space back, mana and thermal roaring down the glaive, bodies opening in an arc.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Between those purchases, he simply fought, and the fighting was almost pure. He didn't need skills for the nines. That was the drunk, giddy discovery of the first minutes, that the strength his new class had poured into him outclassed anything at this level, and so he let loose in a way he had never once been able to, no rationing, no math, just the glaive and the body and years of training with nothing held back.

He split one open collar to hip and shouldered the corpse into two more. Drove the butt-spike back without looking and felt it crunch home. Took a skull off. Put his fist through a chest when the glaive was busy.

The blood came off them almost black and it painted him as he worked, shirtless and roaring in the middle of a herd that could not put him down, and distantly, between heartbeats, he registered the light falling on all of it, mage fire streaming down from the wall into the edges of his crowd, arrows dropping runners, Liam's sand churning away on the far flank exactly as designed. The plan was working. The plan was working better than the plan. Then the crowd detonated.

No warning his ears caught, just a pressure change behind him and then the punch, and the punch was a different category of event. It landed on his back like a vehicle, and Alex left the ground, left his own crowd entirely, thrown clean out of the press of bodies to hit the grass and slide, and he was rolling to his feet before the slide finished with the automatic checklist already running. Damage, none.

Nothing broken, a slight bruise, the Star Forged Body had eaten a G rank's full swing and handed him the usual dull notice. But he'd been moved like luggage, and the anchor problem he'd filed this morning stood over the moment shaking its head. The first boss came through the gap it had made in its own herd, and it had grown.

Red light crawled over its slab shoulders, the same enhancement skill the herd used but layered deeper, muscle swelling on muscle until the thing was a bodybuilder's fever dream in rotting wool, and it did not slow down. The second one hit him from the side. He caught the blur at the edge of his vision, instinct hauling the glaive across his body, and the impact of fist on haft drove him sideways through the grass, boots plowing furrows. Two of them, coordinated, and no herd left around him to soak their attention.

Alex triggered Boost, felt the burn light up his limbs, and gave himself to the worst fight of his life. They jumped him. There was no more dignified verb for it. Two G ranks working him over in the open field, and everything he had went into staying in it, glaive flashing between them, edges finding flesh and buying only shallow red lines, cuts that would have halved a level nine landing on these two like insults. He blocked a punch that made his arms sing.

Traded one of his own, bare fist against a descending forearm, and the collision cracked a small shockwave across the grass, and the honest ledger of it was that the thing was stronger than him. Slightly, probably due to its body enhancing skills that these monsters seem to specialize in..

Its partner landed a fist square in his back and he felt that one, actually felt it, a deep bell-note through the forged flesh, and somewhere in the exchange Mia's arrows began arriving out of the sky, buying him half seconds, and half seconds were what he was living on. He could not land anything real.

Every clean opening closed a fraction before his edge arrived, every committed swing bought him a hit from the other side, and his mana was sliding toward the floor, three Cleaving Strikes spent on the herd and no room to spend more, and the fight settled into a shape he recognized and hated, a fight he wasn't losing yet and could not win alone. Then the air went white at the boss's heels. Jeremy arrived as light.

That was the only honest description, a crack of brilliance and he was simply there, behind the first boss, spear already through its motion, and the blade opened the back of the thing's ankle to the bone. The boss dropped. Its own mass betrayed it, the severed line folding it down onto one knee mid-swing, and for exactly one heartbeat its neck was at the height of a man's swing. Alex was already swinging. The fourth Cleaving Strike took its head off clean.

No pause, no celebration, Jeremy was moving again, lightning-stepping to the second boss with the spear driving for its chest, and the blade bit, tore a long wound across the slab of its torso, and then the thing did something fast and horribly smart. Its hand closed around the spearhead, seized the weapon out of its own wound, and drove the butt end back into Jeremy's face. The crack carried over the whole field.

Jeremy went down and sideways, blood coming off his mouth, and the boss rose over him with the stolen spear reversing in its grip, and Alex crossed the distance with everything dash had left and did not aim for a limb. The fifth Cleaving Strike went in at the waist and came out the other side.

The boss's top half slid from its bottom half in one long diagonal, both pieces folding into the grass, and Alex stood over Jeremy in the sudden strange quiet with a glaive full of black blood and a mana pool scraping empty, five strikes spent, nothing much left in the tank but body. The quiet held. He looked up, ready for the herd, and found no herd.

The field belonged to the wall now, the last knots of sheepfolk collapsing under overlapping mage fire, arrows walking down the runners with a calm, practiced rhythm that hadn't existed a week ago, Liam's sand releasing its final prisoners into the barrage. The group had gotten stronger. All of them, visibly, the whole machine of them, and the machine was finishing his fight without him. Alex let the glaive drop and got his hands on Jeremy.

"Look at me. Eyes here." Blood sheeted from Jeremy's nose and a split along his cheekbone, his eyes swimming and then finding focus, and Alex held his brother-in-law's face steady and looked for the things Ace had drilled into all of them, pupils, tracking, sense.

"How many fingers."

"Enough of them." Jeremy's voice came out thick, and he spat red into the grass and sat up against Alex's arm, waving off the panic before it could form.

"I'm fine. It stole my spear."

"It's dead."

"Good." Jeremy probed his own cheekbone, winced, and looked out across the body-strewn field toward the wall, where a healer was already running their way with green light building in her hands.