Chương 45: Bloodline

Nobody in the scouting party talked on the walk to the fire, which was how Alex knew. Four had gone out that morning light and quietly pleased with themselves. Four came back walking like their boots were heavier. Bartholomew set a pace that didn't invite conversation, and one of the younger scouts, a woman from the Evanston group whose name Alex still didn't have, kept her eyes on the ground in front of her feet.

Chris had the fire built up when they got there, most of the leads and a few of the uncles pulled in around it. As Bartholomew opened his mouth to start, the dungeon group came through the gate. They came through grinning. Liam was in front, walking about four inches off the ground, and behind him Mia and Jeremy and Ace all wore the loose look of people who'd gotten what they went in for. Even Katelin was smiling, though hers had an edge of complaint in it.

Chris looked at their faces, then at his brother's, and made a call.

"Sit down and hold whatever that is," he told Liam, not unkindly.

"Bart first." The grins came down as the group registered the room they'd walked into. Bartholomew stood and didn't bother easing into it.

"We found four outposts today. Human ones." He let it sit.

"Three of them are dead." The fire popped. Nobody spoke.

"First one, two hours northwest. Walls up, gate open, nobody moving. We watched it twenty minutes before we went in, which was twenty minutes we didn't need." His jaw worked.

"It got raided. Not a wave, a raid. Something came over the wall and everything after that happened inside. Blood in the tents. Blood on the inside of the gate, which means people got that far and no further."

"How many?" Chris asked.

"We didn't count. I'll be honest about that, we stopped going into tents after the first few." His voice stayed flat and dropped lower.

"Thirty. Forty. Second outpost was the same, an hour east, and it had been longer. Third one was the worst and I'm not going to describe it." Ace had gone still beside Jeremy, her face closed in the way it closed when she was managing herself.

"The fourth had people in it," Bartholomew said, and the whole fire moved.

"Alive?"

"Alive. South, maybe three hours. We didn't approach, they've been hit recently and four armed strangers walking up wasn't going to go well for anyone." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"But they're standing. Wall's damaged and patched. Not many people out in the open. A group that survived something and is deciding whether they can survive the next one." The fire was quiet a while.

"The death rate," an uncle said.

"The number they gave us at the start. Fifty percent."

"Yeah." Bartholomew nodded.

"I've been chewing on that all afternoon. I don't think fifty's right. I think fifty was optimistic." Alex worked through the part he didn't want to. Four settlements in one day, by four people, over a small piece of ground. Three slaughtered. If that ratio held anywhere close across the tutorial, then everything he'd assumed about this place was wrong. He'd been thinking of their camp as slightly better than average. It wasn't.

It was an outlier, a place where things had gone strangely right while everywhere else went the way places went. The worse question arrived on its own.

"Why haven't we been raided?" He hadn't meant to say it aloud. Every head turned.

"We've had waves. Everybody gets waves, that's the dungeon, that's scheduled." He was working it as he spoke.

"Those three outposts weren't killed by a wave. Something walked to them and went over the wall on purpose. So why hasn't anything walked to us?"

"Because we're stronger," Liam offered.

"They don't know that. Nothing scouted us." Alex shook his head.

"It's the fortress." His father got there a half second behind him.

"The Canifolk," Chris said.

"Nearest intelligent nest to us. Ours. The one that was going to come through that gate eventually, and we killed it before it got the chance. By accident, because we were chasing levels." His voice went strange.

"Those three outposts had a nest near them too. Everybody does. They just didn't get to theirs first." Nobody had anything for that. It reframed the whole month. Alex had spent two days flagellating himself over the fortress, the risk, the arm, the near-death, the way he'd gambled with people who hadn't been asked. Ace had a list. Jeremy had a speech. And the reckless, nearly-fatal thing he'd done was the only reason a hundred people were still breathing behind this wall. He didn't feel vindicated.

He felt sick, and it took him a moment to place why. Because it was luck. He hadn't cleared that fortress as defense, he'd cleared it because it was there and he wanted to be stronger. Three settlements were dead for want of a plan nobody in this tutorial had thought to make, and his camp lived because he'd been ambitious on the right week.

"Then we make it not luck," Chris said, reading it off his son's face.

"That's the plan from last night and it just got more urgent. Survivors first. Tomorrow, early. We offer them everything, wall, food, healers, and if they'd rather stay, we at least tell them about the nests."

"And after?" Jeremy asked.

"After, if the team's willing, we take one. Maybe two. Whatever we can do without burying anybody." Chris looked around the fire.

"Not for levels. Every nest we clear is a settlement that gets to keep existing whether they ever hear our name or not." Alex watched it settle into all of them at once. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"We can do two," he said. The mood took a while to lift, and it lifted the way it always did with this family, which was Liam being unable to contain himself past ninety seconds.

"Can I go now? I've been sitting on this for hours and I'm going to injure myself."

"Go," Chris said, and looked relieved to say it. Liam stood like a man who'd rehearsed standing.

"So. We hit ten, all four of us, right at the end, boss room, very cinematic, I want that on the record." He was already talking faster.

"Affinity first. And this is the part somebody needs to explain to me, because I got two."

"Two," Ace said.

"Two. Nobody warned me that was on the menu." One finger.

"First is Space, Mid tier, fine, I can live with Space." Second finger.

"The other one the system calls Sand. Peak tier."

"What's Peak?" an uncle asked.

"That's my question. It's not in the packet. Packet goes Low, Mid, High, then stops, like whoever wrote it never met anyone worth a fourth word." Liam shrugged, unbothered by a tier that Alex was fairly sure should have staggered him.

"So either it's a mistake or it's very good. I've decided very good. And before anyone says it, yes, I already had sand. I've been throwing it around for two weeks. Turns out I was good at it for a reason nobody told me about." Alex kept his face still and said nothing, because he knew what a rank above the top of the packet was worth, and he'd been carrying his own version for three days. He waited until Liam glanced over and gave him a small shake of the head. Later.

Liam, who could keep a secret only when told there was one, caught it and moved on.

"Class." He clapped.

"Sand Arcanist. Uncommon."

"Sand wizard," Mia said.

"Sand Arcanist. It has dignity. I've had four hours with the sand wizard joke, I've heard every version." He grinned.

"New skill's Grind. I turn things to grains, and I mean things, not just sand. And my Sand Manipulation upgraded, stronger, cheaper, longer reach, so I move more of it, faster, and it listens better. And if something isn't sand yet." He spread his hands.

"See previous skill." Silence while everyone worked out what that meant.

"You can turn a wall into sand," Alex said.

"I can turn a wall into sand and then move the sand." Liam looked unwell with delight.

"Haven't tested it. Want to test it immediately. Uncle Chris, can I have a wall?"

"No."

"Understood." Liam took a breath, and his face changed into something quieter, and Alex sat up.

"Profession."

"That bad?"

"Portal Smith. Rare." The word stopped everything. Alex heard himself say "Rare," heard how it sounded coming from the man with the Rare class, and didn't care.

"Rare. Space profession. I build portals." Liam wasn't only enjoying himself now. He looked shaken by his own sentence.

"Before anyone gets excited, hear the limits, because they're enormous. Costs insane mana. One portal empties me, and I've got the biggest pool here. And the medium matters, metal's a terrible conductor for space, which is apparently a fact. So everything I make right now is one use. Opens, something goes through, done."

"How long does it stay open?" Jeremy asked, immediately, the way he asked everything.

"Short. And Jeremy." Liam pointed.

"Do not get caught in it while it closes. The knowledge was clear about that in a way I didn't want to ask about." Nobody laughed. Alex looked at his cousin, seventeen, out of high school three weeks and already holding something the world went to war over. A one-shot, mana-emptying portal was near useless in a fight. It was also space, folded on demand, by a kid who'd be level twenty in a month and forty in a year. He thought about a version of Liam a decade out and felt the ground move.

"That's the biggest thing anyone here got," he said.

"Mine included."

"I know," Liam said, flat. Then he brightened.

"It's very cool though."

"It's very cool."

"Thank you." Jeremy went next, and went short, because that was Jeremy.

"Two affinities as well, so it's not just him." He nodded at Liam.

"Spear, High. Lightning, High. Which is why I've been moving the way I've been moving." He turned a hand over and a thin lick of white light ran between his fingers and vanished.

"Class is Thunder Knight, Uncommon. The speed's the class. Bought that step skill off the store a week ago and it's been feeding off the affinity since without me knowing."

"So the flashing around," Alex said.

"That's permanent."

"That's mine now." Jeremy almost looked pleased, which for him was a performance.

"Profession's Adventurer. Common. Far as I can tell it means the system approves of me leaving the house."

"It gave you a job for going outside," Ace said.

"It gave me a job for going outside. I intend to be very good at it." Mia went third and almost got away with saying nothing before Liam turned bodily toward her.

"Horizon Archer," she said.

"Uncommon. Built around distance. Further the shot, the more it does."

"Of course it is," Liam said.

"You've never let anything get close to you in your life."

"That's the idea." Even, but Alex caught the satisfaction under it.

"Affinity's Kinetic. Peak." That landed. A couple of the uncles who'd read a packet went quiet.

"Two Peaks in one family," one said.

"That's not supposed to happen."

"We're an unusual family," Mia said, and looked back into the flames, and didn't offer the profession until Ace nudged her.

"Alchemist. Uncommon. I make things. Reagents, mixtures. Poisons, if it comes to that." The fire went quiet in a different way, and Alex watched people reassess the quietest one of them.

"Poison," Ace said.

"Among other things."

"Mia. You're the nice one."

"I can be the nice one who makes poison." This time Alex was sure the corner of her mouth moved.

"Alright. Me." Ace was brisk.

"Class is Verdant Fist, Uncommon. Before anyone makes the joke, yes, it's a healing class, and no, I don't know why it wants me hitting things. Half the skills are green and gentle and the other half are the opposite. I get the impression the system wants me mending a problem and knocking one down in the same afternoon. Profession's Gardener, Common, I grow what makes the medicine." She let the laugh happen, and then her voice changed, and Alex noticed before he understood.

"The thing is, I didn't get an affinity." That pulled him around.

"At all?" Liam said.

"You have to get one. Everybody gets one."

"I know. I read the same packet you did. Level ten, affinity, class, profession, that's the order and that's the list." Ace turned her hands over in her lap, looking at them like they'd explain themselves.

"I got the class and the profession. Where the affinity should've been, there was something else. The system didn't call it an affinity. It called it a bloodline." Nobody spoke, because nobody at the fire knew what that meant, and it showed.

"Emerald Dragon. That's the whole entry. Two words, no description, no skill, no stat. It sits on my sheet where the affinity line should be." She exhaled.

"And I can feel it. That's the part I can't explain. Since it showed up I've felt a pull toward growing things, toward anything alive. Like I love the garden and the trees and the people more than I did last week, and it isn't a mood, it's under the mood, coming from wherever the words came from. But it doesn't do anything. I can't cast it. Can't point it at a wound. It's a feeling and a name." Alex didn't like how it settled in him. He didn't have a word for a bloodline, but he knew what it wasn't.

It wasn't an affinity, which meant the system had reached into the one slot everyone got and put something else in his sister's, something with a dragon's name that spoke through her like a second pulse and did nothing. He had a Perfect nobody was supposed to have. Mia and Liam had Peaks the packet never printed. Ace had a thing the packet had no category for. Four people at one fire, each holding something the ordinary world had no room for, and no way to turn it that read as coincidence.

"You should look into it," he said, level.

"I intend to." Her chin came up.

"There's a knowledge pack on bloodlines in the store. I checked tonight. It costs a stupid amount, more than any single pack we've bought, more than your rune guides combined." She said it straight at him, the doctor voice, the one that had already decided and was informing the record.

"So not this week. But I'm buying it. I want to know what's living in me before it decides to tell me itself."

"Emerald Dragon," Bartholomew repeated, the way a man repeats a thing to make it hold still.

"Emerald Dragon. Your guess is as good as mine, Bart. I'm a doctor, not a fantasy novel." That got the first real laugh of the night, and after it the whole thing loosened into ordinary noise, everyone over everyone, Liam trying to get Chris to donate a section of wall to science, Katelin loudly informing nobody that she was the only one here who hadn't hit ten and took it personally, an uncle asking Mia about the word horizon. Alex sat back and let it go past him.

Three settlements dead, one hanging on, and a fire full of people each handed something the world called rare, two of them something it barely had a word for, one of them something it had no word for at all. Same day. He was starting to accept they always would be. He went to bed a while later and lay in the dark running mana through his fingers, shaping and unshaping, until his hands got slow. Early start. Three hours south. He was asleep before he finished the thought.