Chương 41: Chicago

They talked about nothing for a while first, which was how his father ran a meeting he cared about. The group settled onto the flat ground where the spar had happened, Mia sitting cross-legged with her bow across her knees, Liam still narrating his own performance in the wave to anyone whose ears were technically available, two of the uncles lowering themselves down with the sound effects of men in their forties who had fought all afternoon.

Bartholomew arrived last and remained standing, spear planted, because he had apparently decided sitting was for people who hadn't sprinted forty meters in armor for nothing. Somebody asked about the sheepfolk. Somebody else made a joke about the tentacles that landed badly and got groaned at. Alex pulled his engraving kit out while they went, the pen and a few sheets, and started laying strokes down on a fresh page with half his attention, because his hands had been useless for two hours and he was tired of that.

Then Chris cleared his throat, and the conversation stopped without anyone deciding it should.

"I've been sitting on this all day," his father said.

"I want to say it while everybody's here and nobody's bleeding."

"That's a narrow window in this camp," Bartholomew said.

"It is. So." Chris looked around the circle.

"Here's the thing I can't stop thinking about. We're doing well. I want to be careful saying that, because the second I say it out loud someone's going to remind me of the burials, and they'd be right to. But look at our situation. We have a wall. We have a hundred and some people fed every day. We took a wave of a hundred with two G ranks this afternoon and came out the other side with a broken nose."

"A very painful broken nose," Jeremy said.

"You have my sympathy and my daughter." Chris let the small laugh happen and then went past it.

"My point is this. Every group we've met has been worse off than us. Cassandra's people came in at thirty-two out of what they started with, and they were the lucky ones, they had a leader who kept them moving. The scouts have been telling me what's out there and none of it is good. And I keep landing on the same place. If we're one of the strongest settlements in this tutorial, and I think we might be, then sitting behind this wall being safe while people two hours' walk from here get taken apart is a decision.

It's not neutral. We'd be choosing it." Nobody said anything for a second.

"I don't want us to become the kind of people who do that," Chris said.

"That's the whole speech. We got lucky in ways I can't explain, and I'd like us to spend some of it." Alex looked up from the page. He'd expected the practical version of this conversation. His father was the one who did headcounts and food math and rotation schedules, and it had honestly never occurred to Alex that the man had spent an entire day chewing on whether they were behaving decently. That was the thing about Chris that people underestimated, including, Alex.

"How would it actually work?" Mia asked. Quiet, direct, the question everyone else was building toward.

"That's where I need all of you." Chris nodded at her.

"Most of the real fighters here are at level ten or about to be. Alex is past it. Once the rest of you cross that line, I don't think the dungeon is the best use of you anymore. I think you go out. Find the other settlements, find the monster outposts, work out what's actually happening past our sight line, and where we can, get to people before something else does."

"That works better than you think," Alex said, and the group turned toward him.

"Not just morally. The outposts pay more. Whatever the system counts as essence, the intelligent ones give it up at a rate the dungeon can't touch. The Canifolk fortress put more into me in a night than a week of runs did. So going out isn't a sacrifice for our leveling, it's faster leveling that also happens to save people. Those two things pointing the same direction is rare enough that I'd take it seriously."

"How much faster?" one of the uncles asked.

"Enough that I'd have done it anyway." Alex shrugged.

"The wave today was harder than the last one, and the next one will be harder than today. We can't stay level ten and hope."

"Then we need more hands too," Bartholomew said.

"Every group we bring in is another twenty bodies on that wall."

"Agreed, and that's the second thing." Alex set the pen down properly now.

"We recruit. Aggressively. Every survivor group we find gets the offer, and I don't think we should be picky about it. Not because we're generous, though we are, but because a wave doesn't care how much you like the person standing next to you. We took a hundred today with two bosses. Whatever comes next will be a hundred and fifty with three." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

He watched that land around the circle, and watched most of them arrive at the same uncomfortable arithmetic he'd arrived at yesterday.

"There's another reason," Chris said, and here his voice changed slightly, and Alex sat up.

"I wasn't going to bring this up, but it's connected. Have any of you noticed where everyone is from?" Silence for a beat. Then Liam, who noticed everything eventually and out of order: "They're all local."

"Every single group. Cassandra's people are from the north side. The three families that came in before them, Cicero and Oak Park. The ones the scouts found last week, Evanston." Chris opened a hand.

"I've been asking everyone I meet, and I have not yet found one person in this tutorial who wasn't within about forty miles of my house when the system arrived."

"So the tutorial pulled by geography," Alex said slowly.

"That's my guess. And here's why I care." His father leaned forward.

"If this thing puts us back where it took us from, then everyone we're standing next to right now is going to spawn back into the same city. Same suburbs. Same roads. Which means whatever we build in here, the relationships, the trust, the fact that Cassandra's archers know how to fight beside our mages, all of that goes home with us. Every person we bring in now is a person who lives twenty minutes away when this is over." The circle went very quiet, and Alex felt the shape of the thing settle over him.

He'd been thinking about after the tutorial as a fog. Something abstract, some other world's problem, a door at the end of a hallway. His father had been thinking about it as Chicago. About whether there would be anybody left in Chicago who knew how to hold a line, and whether those people would know each other.

"That's the argument," Chris finished.

"We're not building a camp. We're building whatever it is we take home." They hashed out the practical version after that, and it went faster than Alex expected because nobody was arguing about the goal anymore. Two outposts cleared every five days, minimum, adjusted by what they knew and who was standing. That was the target. A separate scouting team, small and fast, whose entire job was to look and come back, no engagements, no heroics, mapping settlements and monster nests and the ground between them.

The scouts would start tomorrow, since there was no version of tomorrow where anyone had enough information to walk out and hit something. The fighters would go when the fighters had information, and not one hour before, and Alex heard his own promise to Ace inside that rule and let it be. By the time it broke up the sky was fully dark, and Alex had gotten exactly nothing done with his hands. So he stayed out and got to work.

He started with light, because light was the rune he could already write, and it went the way it had gone the night before, cleanly on the fourth attempt, a small pale sphere lifting off the page and holding steady. He fed it a trickle of mana. It brightened. He fed it more, watching for where the ceiling was, and found it in the worst possible way when the paper under the inscription went brown, then gray, then crumbled at the edges like something pulled out of a fire. Alex sat looking at his ruined page.

The problem announced itself immediately. The rune was a set of instructions and the mana had to run through those instructions, and paper was not built to have force run through it. Every activation cooked the page a little, and the harder he pushed the rune, the faster the medium died. He had a growing pile of dead sheets to prove it and he'd been treating them as the cost of practice, when actually they'd been telling him something the whole time. The rune was never the limit. The paper was.

Which meant the fix was obvious and he should have gotten there yesterday. He bought metal sheets. Thin ones, cheap, the kind of scrap the store apparently kept around for exactly this, and he scored the first light rune into one with the engraving pen and felt the difference on the very first activation. The strokes bit into the surface instead of sitting on top of it.

The mana ran and the metal simply took it, no browning, no crumbling, and the sphere that came up off the sheet was brighter than any he'd made and stayed lit for a good deal longer, glowing patiently in the dark while Alex turned the sheet over in his hands like a man who had just discovered the wheel. Better medium, better rune. It was almost insultingly simple.

He worked through his mana on that, and then, because he had a habit now of pushing at whatever wall was nearest, he went looking for the next rune in the Orravyn basics and found heat. Heat was harder. The strokes were more numerous and the tolerances tighter, and his first three attempts produced nothing but a warm sheet and a mild sense of insult.

The fourth worked, a low steady radiance coming off the metal, enough to be uncomfortable to hold and nowhere near enough to be a weapon, and he sat there feeling the warmth against his palm and thinking, with the specific greed of a man who had once compressed a fireball into a sun, about what a stronger version of this might look like. Not tonight. Tonight his mana was gone and his hands had gotten quiet again, which was most of what he'd come out here for.

[Rune Scribe: Level 3] One level in an evening, and Alex looked at the notifications with the same mild suspicion he'd had the first night, that this was somehow too generous, that a system this stingy with everything else shouldn't be handing him progress for the most relaxing thing he did all day. He decided not to interrogate a gift. The stats were real, and Intelligence and Wisdom were exactly the columns he needed fattened, and the profession was quietly rebuilding his mana pool while pretending to be a hobby.

He packed the kit, and ran polearm forms in the dark until his shoulders complained, and then sat down and worked mana manipulation until the shapes stopped fighting him. He was asleep four minutes after he got horizontal, with a metal sheet still glowing faintly beside his bedroll, because he'd forgotten to tell it to stop. His father was walking toward them with Mia at his shoulder and Liam trailing behind, a couple of the uncles in tow.