Chương 48: Night

Alex reached for his mana to finish it and found almost nothing there. Not empty, but close enough that the difference didn't matter. A thin cold residue at the bottom of a pool that had been an lake two minutes ago, and the moment he tried to pull a real cast out of it his vision grayed at the edges and something behind his eyes lit up with a pain he had never felt before. He let go before it dropped him.

There might have been one weak flicker left in him, a lit rune off a sheet, a half-strength Reinforce Body that would gutter out before it finished, nothing with the weight to end a level fourteen anything. He got a hand under himself and pushed up onto one knee, and that was as far as his body would take him, and there was a boss ten yards away dragging itself toward him with its red eyes still working. He could move. He just couldn't do anything with it. Alex could not carry anyone.

That was the humiliating part, and he sat on a rock at the edge of the ash and watched his family do the work, Jeremy carrying and Liam carrying and Ace walking beside each one with her hand resting on them for no reason except that it seemed wrong not to. They laid them out in a line along the top of the ridge, well back from the bowl, and Liam sank the ground under each and closed it again with a wave of his hand, which was the first time Alex had seen anyone use a class skill for something gentle.

There were no names. That was the thing he kept snagging on. Eleven people, and Alex had heard that number at a gate this morning, and he knew exactly whose eleven these were. They belonged to a settlement of thirty-two that was walking to his home right now. Somebody in that group had been married to one of them. Somebody had spent two days deciding whether it was better to imagine their father eaten or their father lost.

And Alex could not tell any of them which grave was which, because there was no way left to know. He worked through whether Ray should be told at all, and got nowhere good, and then decided he would tell him. A man who had asked whether his people would be made into slaves deserved the truth handed to him rather than managed, and a line of graves on a ridge was still better than not knowing.

"What was it for?" Ace asked. She had come to stand beside him without his noticing, and she was looking down at the burnt circle where the pattern had been.

"I don't know."

"They carried them four hours. In daylight, across open ground, when they could have just." She stopped, and started again.

"It isn't food. You don't arrange food."

"I know."

"So what is it for?" Alex looked at the shape of it, scorched into the ground and still perfectly legible, eleven spaces laid out in an order somebody had chosen.

"we seen one before," he said.

"Inside the fortress. we ran past it and we haven't thought about it since, and now I'm going to think about it constantly." Ace didn't answer. The two of them stood there while the sky went red over a valley of ash, and neither one of them came anywhere near the truth. The wait was longer than the fight by a factor of about twenty. Alex's mana came back the way a lake comes back after a drought, slowly and with no apparent interest in his opinion, and the pain behind his eyes took even longer than that.

He tested himself every so often by trying to raise the smallest possible thread and stopping the instant his vision grayed, which happened for the first hour and a half and then gradually stopped happening. Nobody suggested going home. He noticed that and said nothing about it. The notification arrived about an hour in, and he had been half waiting for it since the last of them stopped moving.

[Outpost Conquered] He remembered this from the fortress, and he remembered getting it wrong at the time, standing there wondering why it had taken so long to appear when everything else in this system arrived the instant it was earned. It wasn't slow. It was deliberate. Killing the last one did not conquer anything. Staying did, a full hour of holding ground with nothing alive left to contest it, as though the system wanted proof you could keep a place and not just empty it.

Liam got his at the same moment and made a small pleased noise. Jeremy read his and put it away without comment. Alex sat with his a little longer than the others, because a second thought had arrived on the heels of the first and it was less comfortable. Stolen story; please report. He'd killed the Canifolk fortress about ten days ago.

And the wave that came after it, the sheepfolk, had been worse than any wave before it, a hundred monsters instead of fifty, two bosses instead of one, the mana pouring out of the dungeon darker and thicker than he'd ever seen it. He'd noticed the escalation at the time and filed it under the difficulty simply climbing. He didn't think it was simply climbing anymore. Conquer a nest, and the pressure had to go somewhere. The system did not seem like the sort of thing that let ground go quiet for free.

He couldn't prove it, sitting here, but the shape of it fit too well to ignore, that every outpost they cleared fed the dungeon behind them, made the next wave heavier, made the thing they were sheltering a hundred and fifty people against grow in exact proportion to how much of the map they took. Which meant the plan his father had made was not free. It was a trade.

Every settlement they saved out here made the wave at home worse, and the only way that math ever came out ahead was if the people they saved got strong enough, fast enough, to stand in the heavier wave when it arrived. Save people and grow the threat in the same motion, and outrun the threat with the people you saved, or drown under it. He turned it over twice, found no hole in it, and decided it changed nothing about today and everything about the timeline. He'd tell his father in the morning.

It was exactly the kind of thing Chris would want to know before he sent anyone out to conquer a fifth. They ate sitting in the burnt grass with their backs to the graves, and the conversation went where conversations go when five exhausted people have nowhere to be.

"Alright, theory," Liam said, around a mouthful.

"The circles are how they level."

"Explain," Alex said.

"They're intelligent. We keep saying that like it's a threat rating, but think about what it actually means. They have a system too. They have to, or how does a level fourteen spider woman exist." He waved his food at the bowl.

"So if they have a system, they have a way of getting stronger, and if hauling eleven bodies four hours is worth doing, then bodies are worth something to them that they aren't worth to us."

"That's grim," Ace said.

"It's grim and it explains the raid. They didn't come to Ray's wall to eat. They came shopping." Alex turned that over and could not find the hole in it, which bothered him more than a hole would have.

"It doesn't explain the arrangement. If you needed bodies you'd pile them."

"Unless the pattern is part of it."

"Then it's a ritual, not a mechanic."

"Why not both?" Liam said.

"The system gave me a profession for writing shapes on metal. You want to tell me shapes don't do anything?" That landed harder than Alex liked. He thought about a rune, and the way mana obeyed the strokes and not the man, and about eleven people laid out with spaces between them in an order somebody had chosen, and put his food down.

"We're going to find out eventually," Ace said, in the voice she used to end rounds.

"Probably by walking into one that hasn't finished yet." Nobody wanted to follow that, so nobody did. Mia had gone through her quiver twice by then, counting, and Alex watched her separate out the two heavy arrows she had left and set them apart from everything else with a care she gave to nothing else she owned. It was full dark before he could hold a light rune off a metal sheet without flinching, and that had been the test he'd set for himself. He held it for a slow count of ten.

Then he put the sheet away and stood up, and everybody else stood up because he had.

"One more," he said.

"The nest the scouts marked northeast. It's an hour. Then we go home."

"You're at what, half?" Ace asked.

"Two thirds. And I'm not the one who has to do the work on this one."

"That's the correct answer," she said, "which makes me suspicious of it." The second nest was goblins, or whatever goblins had turned into out here, small and quick and hunched, their skin split open in a dozen places by wriggling appendages that came out to taste the air and went back in. There were maybe sixty of them. One of tehm al level 13, and same ceremony like the rest, which Alex noticed and filed and did not mention. It was almost easy, and that was its own strange feeling.

They came in fast in the dark with Liam's ground work laid before the first one screamed, and Alex never came close to needing anything he didn't have. He barely use any skill with liam going all out, his sand had become more deadly not only stranguling but also stabbing all in its domain. Mia's ordinary arrows did most of the rest, and she spent the three main explosive arrow into thegobblin's head sending it's skull flying everywhere. While she stood extremely far away. The whole thing took eleven minutes.

Jeremy got hurt. He got hurt because he charged. He blinked into the middle of a cluster of goblins instead of picking them off the edge, and one of them got under his guard and opened a long line across his ribs before he cleared out, and Ace closed it in the field with her jaw set so hard Alex could hear it from six feet away.

"Sorry, i underestimated them" Jeremy said.

"Don't."

"It was an honest mistake." Ace shook her head.

"What im i gonna do with you people." she didnt seem that absent since it was only a minor damage and jeremy's natural regainaration would have being sufficient in healing him. But but alex was definatly gonna take advantage of this opportunity. Alex crouched down beside them, waited until Jeremy looked at him, and kept his face absolutely straight.

"I've been told," he said, "that if you're about to do something with a real chance of going bad, you tell people first. So they can call it stupid to your face instead of after." Jeremy closed his eyes.

"I walked into that," he said.

"You did. And I want you to know I'm going to be talking about it for a long time." Ace laughed, once, surprised out of her, and then pressed her mouth flat and went back to work, and Jeremy lay in the grass under the wrong stars and accepted his sentence. Then they sat out the hour, because that was the rule now and nobody felt like finding out what happened if you left early.

They ate the last of the food among sixty dead things and Alex tipped his head back and looked at constellations he would never learn the names of, and thought about how strange it was that the hardest part of taking a place was the standing around afterward. [Outpost Conquered] Two in one day. They got up sore and filthy and quietly satisfied, and turned north.

"Home," Alex said.

"There should be about thirty new people in it."