Chương 49: Radiant

The difference between fighting with the group and fighting alone with Alex was the difference between a road and a cliff. Katelin had spent two weeks on the cliff. One reckless enormous man walking into things that should have killed him, and her a step behind with her hands already glowing, learning to read exactly how bad a wound was before it turned fatal. She'd gotten good at it. She'd also gotten used to being terrified, which she'd decided at some point was not the same as being safe. This was different.

This was six people who moved like they'd agreed on a plan, and at the front of them, in the armor and behind the shield, her dad. Bartholomew fought the way he did everything, without hurry and without drama, spear and heavy shield, holding a line the way other men held a conversation. Her mother stood back with the mages, Becky's mana coiling and releasing in the tight controlled bursts she'd built over three weeks of refusing to be useless.

Uncle Sam with his oversized axe, Uncle Josh with a blade and a shield, Cassandra off the flank with mana ready. And Katelin behind all of them where a healer belonged, watching for the injury before it happened. They'd fought about this, weeks ago. Her parents had not wanted her going into the dungeon alone with Alex, and they'd been loud about it, her mother especially, something in Becky's voice that Katelin had recognized as fear wearing the costume of an argument. Alex is reckless.

Alex nearly dies for a living. You are fifteen years old. All true, all of it, and Katelin had gone anyway, because the alternative was standing on a wall being safe while people bled, and she had discovered in herself a total inability to do that. They'd made their peace with it eventually. And the strange result of all that terror was that she was now one of the highest-level people in her own family, level nine, sitting even with her father and her uncles, ahead of her own mother. Level nine.

That was the wall now, and it was a real wall. She'd watched the whole group grind against it for two days. It didn't matter how many level nine sheepfolk they put down, the essence came in and the bar barely moved, nine to ten refusing to break no matter how much they fed it.

There was a level twelve boss out here somewhere, two of them, and the family had agreed to avoid them on the sensible grounds that a group topping out at nine had no business fighting something that had nearly ended Alex with an army behind it. The whisper in her head disagreed. She'd started noticing it a while ago, and she didn't love where it had come from. Two weeks of watching Alex do the impossible had left a residue in her, a low constant pressure that sounded a lot like him. Get stronger. Not someday.

Now, because the things out here don't wait for you to be ready. She hadn't asked for his voice to move into her skull, and it had anyway, and the worst part was that it was usually right. She watched the group finish off another cluster of nines, clean and coordinated and going absolutely nowhere, and let the whisper win.

"Hey, Dad." She said it carefully, because she was not a girl who spoke up in the middle of things, and everyone knew it.

"I don't think we're making real progress like this. The nines take forever and the level's not breaking. What if we went after a boss?" Her mother answered before her father could open his mouth.

"That's too dangerous, and it's unnecessary danger." Becky's tone was flat and final.

"Putting ourselves in front of one of those things with family this close, and what happens if someone gets hurt in a way you can't fix. Slow is perfectly fine…" Katelin opened her mouth to push, and Uncle Sam beat her to it, which surprised everyone.

"I think she's right." Becky turned to look at him.

"Grinding the nines is going to take days to move any of us, and we might not have that." Sam set the axe head down against the ground.

"We don't know what Alex and his crew are walking into out there. He's been throwing himself at things even harder since he got that body skill, and if something goes wrong for them, the thing standing between this family and whatever comes next is us, at whatever level we managed to reach. I'd rather reach it faster."

"He's right." Uncle Josh, quieter, from the side.

"I've been thinking the same thing. One boss, a solo one, no pack around it. Six of us, three at the front, two casters, a healer. If we find one alone and we're careful, we can take it. And it might break the wall for all of us at once." Bartholomew had said nothing this whole time. He looked at his daughter for a moment, and then at his wife, and Katelin watched something pass between her parents that she'd seen a hundred times at the dinner table, the whole silent argument compressed into a glance.

"I think we can take one," Bartholomew said finally.

"Carefully. If it's alone." Becky was quiet a beat. Then, "If it's alone. And Katelin stays back, all the way back, and the second it goes wrong we run and don't argue about it."

"The second it goes wrong," Bartholomew agreed. It took them hours to find one. Solo bosses were rare in the dungeon, most of them moving in the center of a pack where the family had no business going, and the group spent the afternoon scouting the edges, avoiding groups, doubling back, until they found what they wanted. A single level twelve sheepfolk moving slow through open ground with nothing around it for a long way in any direction. No pack. No support.

Just the boss, and six people who had decided today was the day. They took a minute to look at it. Then they went. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Bartholomew opened with Taunt, and the boss came at him fast, faster than a thing that size had any right to move, and Katelin's heart climbed into her throat watching it close. Sam and Josh peeled wide to the flanks.

Cassandra's hands came up and a spray of white crystal shards streaked out, Crystal Shard, the skill she'd bought and barely used, and they cracked against the boss's chest and did almost nothing, a scatter of shallow marks. Expected. Nobody had thought the opener would hurt it. Then the boss reached her father, its arm swelling with the red mana glow they all knew now, and it punched.

Bartholomew had every defensive skill he owned running, all three of them, focus and guard and whatever the shield gave him, and it did not matter. The shield dented inward like paper and the whole man left his feet, launched backward, and Katelin was already moving. Her mother and Cassandra cast together, Mana Bind, the same skill from the same class, threads of mana wrapping the boss to lock it. On a level nine it stopped them dead for a second or two.

On this thing it barely caught, a stagger, a half-beat hitch in its movement, but a half-beat was a currency the family had learned to spend. Katelin hit her father with everything she had, felt the bones settle and the wind come back into him, and shoved a spare shield into his hands, one she'd been carrying for exactly this, because she'd learned two weeks ago that the plan always breaks and the healer who plans for the break is the one who saves people.

Bartholomew was back on his feet and charging before the boss shook the binds off. After that it became a machine, ugly and loud and working. The binds kept landing, never holding, always buying the half-beat. Sam's axe came down on the boss's shoulder and bit deep and didn't fell it. The boss spun and punched for Sam, caught a bind mid-motion that dragged the blow just wide, and Sam used the opening to dash behind it.

Josh drove a Power Strike into the back of its knee, staggered it, and then took a kick square in the shield and went flying, and Katelin was already running to where he'd land, catching him, pouring green into him before he'd finished sliding. She was everywhere. That was the shape of her fight, not a position but a constant motion between falling bodies, and she understood in the middle of it that this was what she was for.

Cassandra switched off the binds and started throwing crystal at the boss's eyes, sharp bright shards that made it scream and flinch and gave the front line their openings. Becky held the binds steady and alone now, jaw set, hands shaking with the strain of it. Every strike the boss threw got turned on a shield that cracked a little more each time, and every one they threw back landed a little cleaner. It took ten minutes.

Ten full minutes of a fight that never once felt won, the boss grinding down under empowered strikes to the neck from Sam and Josh, its strength bleeding out of it a fraction at a time, until Sam's axe and Josh's blade came down together on a throat already opened three times over and the thing finally, finally stopped moving. The group stood in the sudden quiet, breathing hard, nobody quite believing it. Katelin looked at the corpse and thought about Alex.

Because this had nearly ended them, six people at level nine, ten minutes of everything they had, a dented shield graveyard and a healer run to empty. And Alex tanked these. He stood in front of one of these and let it punch him and felt a bruise. She'd known he was strong. She had not, until this exact moment with her hands still shaking, understood the size of the gap, and the whisper in her head got louder and pointed at it. Then the notification came, and she smiled. [Level Up. Level 10.] She told the family to hold on, sat down in the grass beside a dead boss, and pulled up the screens she'd been waiting two weeks to see. Her affinity came first. Light, High tier. She stared at the words for several seconds, genuinely caught off guard. Light? She had expected something closer to Life, something that would fit neatly with the healer she had chosen on the very first day.

She hadn't picked it because she understood healing or had any particular talent for it; she'd chosen it because she'd wanted to keep people breathing. Yet after two weeks of running between falling bodies, pouring every ounce of herself into keeping others alive, and maybe light could help with that. High tier. Not the peak.

She knew that even as she read it, knew that Liam had come home last night with two affinities and one of them a word the packet didn't print, knew that whatever her brother had, hers sat a rung below it. She looked at the word High for a moment, and then she put it down, because she'd already decided how she was going to feel about it. She and Liam had never been close.

He was loud and she was not, he filled a room and she left it, and somewhere in childhood they'd quietly agreed to be siblings who didn't overlap much. She didn't resent him. But she'd spent seventeen years watching things come easy to Liam, watching him be brilliant without appearing to try, and she had learned the only thing she could do about it, which was work. If his affinity was higher, then she would train harder. If he practiced three hours, she would practice six. Talent she couldn't control.

The hours were hers, and she intended to spend more of them than anyone in this family, and she would catch him, and she would pass him, and she would do it the slow ugly honest way because that was the only way she had. The class was next. Radiant Healer, Uncommon. The profession under it: Light Florist, Uncommon. And the skill that came with the class made her breath catch, because it wasn't a patch-the-wound heal like the ones she'd been rationing.

It was a field, a slow radiant warmth that poured off her and mended anyone standing in it over time, uncommon-rank strong, and when she activated it just to see, light spilled off her skin and washed across the whole exhausted group at once, and slowly she watched her father's bruises fade and her mother's shaking hands steady and Uncle Josh straighten up out of his hunch. Everyone stared at her, lit up in the dungeon's false light, glowing like something out of the stories the twins liked.

"Okay," Sam said.

"That's new." Katelin stood up, and for the first time she could remember, she wanted to be looked at.

"Let's find another one," she said. They did. It took hours more of careful scouting, and the second boss came with two minions attached, which made it harder, but they were level ten now, most of them, and they'd done it once and knew the shape of it. Katelin's field ran the whole fight, and nobody flew as far, and nobody stayed down as long. They came out of the dungeon in the last of the light with two boss kills behind them and every one of them at level ten.

Every one except Becky, who'd started the day at seven and ended it at nine, and who Katelin caught looking at her own status with an expression she recognized, because she'd worn it herself for two weeks. The look of someone a step behind, deciding to close the gap. The camp was loud when they came through the gate, but it was the good loud, the sound of new people arriving and being fed rather than anything gone wrong.

Katelin took it in, the fresh faces, the settling-in, and then she saw Alex's crew coming back across the field from the other direction, filthy and sun-worn and moving like people who'd done something enormous, and Alex out front the way he always was. He looked stronger. He always looked stronger. Katelin flexed her fingers and felt the warmth waiting under her skin, the radiant thing she hadn't had this morning, and for once the whisper in her head wasn't a pressure. It was a plan. She wanted to show him.

She wanted to show all of them. And underneath that, quieter, aimed at a loud brother who'd come home last night with a word above the top of the chart, she wanted to catch up, and then she wanted to keep going. She started toward the fire, already thinking about tomorrow.