Chương 39: Bond

Ace arrived at a dead run and went straight past her brother. Alex would have been offended if it hadn't been so completely correct. He was sitting in the grass with a hundred dead sheepfolk around him and not a single injury worth naming, and Jeremy was beside him bleeding freely from the nose with a split opening along one cheekbone, so his sister's priorities sorted themselves without any input from him.

She dropped to her knees in the churned dirt, got both hands on her husband's jaw, and turned his face toward the light with the grip of a woman who had done this in an emergency room and was doing it now in a field.

"Look at me. Follow my finger. Don't help me, just follow it."

"I'm fine."

"You are not the one who gets to decide that." Green light spilled out of her palms and over his face, and Alex watched the split along the cheekbone knit itself shut under it, watched the swelling drop, watched his brother-in-law submit to the whole process with the resigned expression of a large dog being toweled off. When she finished she didn't let go.

She held Jeremy's face a moment longer than the medicine required, and neither of them said anything at all, and Alex looked at the grass instead because some things weren't his to watch. Then she made a face and wiped her hand on her pants.

"You have blood in your mustache."

"I have blood everywhere."

"Yes, but the mustache is the part I have to look at." She kissed the unbloodied side of his face anyway, quick and unbothered, and Jeremy's ears went faintly red the way they had at every family gathering for the last decade. Katelin got to Alex about four seconds later, and she did not lead with a question.

"Sit still."

"I'm fine, honestly. Save it for the wall."

"Everyone says they're fine." Her kit was already open.

"You got hit by two G ranks."

"And I felt maybe one of them." He turned his forearm over, showed her the unmarked skin, then the unmarked chest, then the back where a fist the size of a dinner plate had launched him across a field. Nothing. Not a bruise, not a scrape, not a red mark.

"The class does what it says. I'm not being brave, I'm being accurate." Katelin looked at him for a long, flat moment, fifteen years old and entirely unimpressed.

"You'd say the exact same thing if your ribs were in three pieces."

"Probably."

"So that's why I don't take your word for it." She put one hand on his shoulder anyway and let a thin wash of green run through him, not a real heal, more of an audit, and Alex sat still and let her have it because she'd earned the right to check him a dozen dungeon runs ago. When the light faded she seemed satisfied, or at least willing to stop.

"Nothing. You're actually fine."

"That's what I said."

"It's different when I say it," Katelin said, and moved on to the next person, and Alex found himself smiling at her back. The field took most of the afternoon to deal with. There were somewhere north of a hundred bodies out there, and nobody wanted to touch a single one of them.

Up close the sheepfolk were worse than they'd been at a sprint, the wool matted into flesh that had never decided what it was, the little tentacles gone slack and gray and still somehow looking like they might start again, and the smell had gotten going in the sun.

The camp handled it the way it handled everything now, badly at first and then with grim efficiency, teams working in shifts with cloth tied over their faces, dragging carcasses to the far side of the field on canvas sheets, breaking the drag runs into short stretches so nobody had to be near one for long. Alex did more than his share, because he could, and because his share was the only useful currency he had left with his mana pool sitting at a rounding error.

Two of the level nines at a time, one over each shoulder, out and back, out and back. It was the least heroic work of the entire day and probably the most necessary. What stuck with him was the progression. The first wave had sent snakes, and the snakes had been snakes, just too big and wrong in the eye. The dogs after them had been dogs.

The bulls had been bulls with something ugly happening under the hide, and now this, a thing that had stopped being an animal at all somewhere on its way out of the dungeon, wearing tentacles and human musculature like a bad idea. The corruption was accelerating. Whatever was pouring out of that entrance was doing it worse each time, and the mana had come out of the hole dark and oily this morning in a way that his instincts had hated on sight. This story originates from Royal Road.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. He turned that over while he worked, decided he had nowhere to put it, and set it down. Not because it didn't matter. Because it mattered and he had no information, and chewing on a problem with no data was a good way to be tired and no smarter. Jeremy found him near the end of it, when the field was mostly clear and the sun had started to lean.

"Walk with me a minute." They went out past the drag lines, far enough that the noise of the camp thinned behind them, and Jeremy stopped and stood with his hands on his hips looking at nothing in particular, and Alex waited, because Jeremy assembling a sentence was a process you did not rush.

"I talked to Ace last night," Jeremy said.

"After."

"Okay."

"About the field. Two days ago. Me yelling at you." He worked his jaw once.

"I've been thinking about it since, and I want to say it right. I wasn't wrong about what you did. You were reckless, and somebody had to put that in front of you, and I'd say the same thing again."

"You would," Alex agreed.

"You'd be right."

"But I said it standing over you shouting, when you'd just come out of nearly dying. Ace pointed that out. Took her about four words." He exhaled through his nose.

"The way I said it was about me being scared, not about you being wrong. And you had already been through the worst night of your life, and what you got from me was somebody hollering into your face about it. That wasn't fair. I'm sorry for the way I did it." Alex took a few seconds with that, because he wanted to answer it honestly rather than fast.

"It's fine," he said.

"And I mean that, not the polite version. I needed to hear what you said. Nobody else was going to say it, everybody else in this camp looks at me and sees the thing that killed the G rank. You looked at me and saw a guy who nearly got his sister killed being stupid, and you said so." He shrugged.

"The volume didn't hurt me. I've got a thick skull, ask my mother. The content is what stuck, and the content was right." Jeremy nodded slowly.

"I'm not good at this part," he said.

"I know. It's honestly kind of relaxing. You're the only person in the family who doesn't wrap things in eleven layers."

"Ace does that."

"Ace weaponizes it."

"She does," Jeremy agreed, with the deep feeling of a man who had been married to it for a decade, and something eased between them that had been tight since the field. They walked back slowly, and Alex found himself doing something he'd never had much cause to do, which was actually think about the man beside him. He and Jeremy had never been close. That was the plain truth of it and neither of them had ever pretended otherwise.

There were eight years between Alex and his sister, a gap his parents had explained to him exactly once, with the mild embarrassment of two people admitting they had decided to try something new a long while after they thought they were done, and had gotten Alex out of it. Which meant that when Ace met Jeremy, she'd been in high school and Alex had been a kid whose primary interests were dinosaurs and being carried. He'd only ever gotten the story secondhand.

Ace at seventeen had been a tomboy of the specific and dangerous variety, more interested in getting into fights than getting into college, a girl who solved most problems with her hands and considered that a personality. And Jeremy had been the quiet one with the computers, a nerd in the least social sense of the word, who by every account had never raised his voice at her once in the entire time he'd known her. Nobody in the family had predicted it working. It had worked immediately and never stopped.

Then college, and the twins, and the family meeting Alex had been thirteen for and understood about forty percent of. He remembered the noise of it, aunts with opinions, uncles with different opinions, and he remembered that underneath all the noise everyone had closed around her fast and completely, because that was what this family did when the plan fell apart.

Ace had carried and delivered two boys and gone right back to school with them on her hip, married Jeremy the year after she finished, and clawed her way through medical training with two toddlers in the house, and she had put a doctor's coat on for the first time about a year ago. None of which, Alex was fairly sure, happens without the quiet one. That was the part he'd never said to Jeremy and probably never would.

His sister had been a brawler with no direction and a short fuse, and somewhere in the middle of loving a boy who didn't yell, she'd found out she wanted to fix people. Alex didn't think Jeremy had done that to her. He thought Jeremy had just been steady long enough for her to do it herself, which was somehow a bigger thing.

And he thought about Jake and John, who had been in their parents' wedding as unsteady toddlers in tiny formal wear and were currently, somewhere behind that wall, running a game with no rules and no adult supervision. Everything about how those two boys had arrived had been backward and unplanned and messy, and they'd turned out to be the best thing in the entire family, and now they were alive because their father was fast enough to appear behind a monster in a flash of light. It all worked out, Alex thought.

Not the way anybody drew it up. It worked out anyway. They reached the edge of the camp, and Jeremy stopped walking.

"One more thing," he said.

"Go ahead."

"That skill of yours. The body." Jeremy was looking at him now with a different expression entirely, and Alex recognized it, because it was the same one Liam wore around a new spell and the same one Alex himself had worn over a compressed sun. Not concern. Curiosity with an appetite.

"You stood there and let twenty mages shoot you this morning and it told you nothing except that mages can't hurt you. That's not useful information. Nobody out there is going to fight you like a firing squad."

"That's fair."

"So spar me," Jeremy said.

"Your defence might be good, but I doubt you are good with your weapon"