Chương 51

Finding out people died wasn't on his bucket list today. The two who died were named Corwin and Yeva, and Alex had spoken to neither of them. They'd come in with one of the groups, husband and wife or brother and sister, nobody was sure, and on the third day they'd gone into the dungeon with a handful of others and decided a solo boss looked manageable. It hadn't been. The others had gotten out.

They hadn't, and the story came back to camp in pieces, the way these stories did now, and Alex stood on the wall that evening and made himself hold the two names even though the faces wouldn't come. He hadn't known them. That was the part that sat wrong. A month ago two people dying two hundred feet from where he slept would have been the largest thing that ever happened to him, and now it was a report, delivered between other reports, and he'd caught himself being relieved before he'd finished being sad.

Relieved it was strangers. Relieved it wasn't Katelin, wasn't Mia, wasn't anyone whose face he could call up. The guilt over that relief was the only clean thing he felt about the whole matter, and he let it sit, because it was the correct thing to feel and pretending otherwise would have been worse.

They buried Corwin and Yeva outside the wall, and the camp was quieter that night, and then the next morning it wasn't, because a hundred and forty people cannot stay quiet for grief they didn't personally carry, and the work went on. It always went on. Alex had started to understand that this was not callousness. It was the only way any of them stayed standing. The days ran together after that, the way they did when there was too much in them.

Two more outposts fell, and both were easier than the first two had been, the crew moving through nests now with the economy of people who'd learned the choreography. Five outposts in the week, counting the arachne and the goblins. Somewhere in there the levels started coming faster, and Alex noticed the strange shape of it before he understood it. He hit twelve. The main crew, Liam and Mia and Jeremy and Ace, hit thirteen, and it took him an evening of turning it over to work out why.

Their classes were lower rareity. Uncommon and up carried a lower essence cost per level, so the four of them pulled ahead of him even while he stayed, by a wide margin, the strongest single thing in the camp. It was a lesson worth having. Strength per level and speed of leveling were two different currencies, and he'd been quietly assuming they were the same one. New people kept arriving.

Close to a hundred over the week, absorbed in ones and twenties, the wall's population swelling past anything the camp had been built for. Not everyone said yes. Mia scouted three groups that had refused them and found them banded together, wary, keeping their distance, and her report was the reassuring kind: two people at level ten in each settlement, no more, and all of them a long way off. Not a threat. Not yet. Alex set the three of them at the back of his attention and left them there.

The monsters were the part he didn't like. The scouts kept coming back with the same shape of news, that the nests out past their cleared ring were pulling together, packs merging, the loose scatter of intelligent monsters starting to concentrate. Rumors of Alex's crew had apparently traveled in whatever way rumors traveled among things with red eyes, and the response was consolidation. He couldn't prove the two were connected.

He believed it anyway, and he didn't share the belief widely, because a camp that had just buried two of its own didn't need to hear that the things in the dark were getting organized on purpose. The G rank came on the seventh evening, in the middle of dinner, which was the correct place for it.

Becky had gotten a Cook profession a few days back, and she'd taken it the way she took everything, personally, and a pair of the hunters had brought down something warthog-shaped that afternoon, and the result was the first meal since the old world that had bein magical in nature. The whole family was crammed around a long fire, the twins somewhere underfoot, plates going around, and the noise of it was the specific noise Alex had learned to treasure because he now knew exactly what its absence sounded like.

The notification came up while he was eating. [Rune Scribe has reached Level 10. Profession Rank Up available.] He worked through the reveal quietly, letting the family talk over him. The options were, frankly, a disappointment. He'd hoped for something new at G rank, some fork in the road, and instead the only thing on the list worth taking was Rune Scribe again, Uncommon, the same profession one grade up. He almost resented it.

Then he looked at the stat line and stopped resenting it, because the numbers were double what they'd been. Everything, straight across, doubled per level. The profession that had quietly built most of his mana pool was about to build it twice as fast. He took it. There'd never been a real choice. He looked at the two skills he'd banked on the way up, too. Rune Insight, from level nine, which sharpened his read on runes, let him see a stroke's purpose the way he'd once had to work it out.

And the new one, from ten when he hit G rank. Rune Repair, Uncommon, which turned out to matter more than its dull name suggested, because runes wore down. He'd learned that the hard way, watching his own metal sheets degrade under repeated use, and now he could mend them. It also told him something about the profession's shape, that some scribes got four skills to a rank and some got five, and the difference depended on things the system didn't bother to explain.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. His mastery had moved too. He was sure of it and had no proof, because Polearm Mastery still read Novice on his sheet and probably would until it crossed a threshold he couldn't see, but his hands knew things now they hadn't a week ago. Everything in his arsenal had gotten quietly better through use, thermal and gravity cooperating on command, the glaive an extension of his intent in a way it hadn't been.

The sheet lied by omission. He'd stopped trusting it to tell the whole story. Around him the family was its own kind of status screen.

"Blacksmith," Bartholomew was saying, to nobody in particular, still turning the word over a day after he'd picked it.

"I've never made anything in my life. Fixed a fence once. Badly."

"You'll be making our weapons by the end of the month," Alex said.

"Real ones. Store gear is store gear, but a smith who levels alongside the people he's arming is going to leave the store behind fast." Bartholomew looked pleased and pretended not to. Most of the camp had come out Common, that was the truth of it, Common classes and Common professions and Mid affinities with a scattering of High, and not one other Peak in the whole hundred and forty. His family were the anomalies and they knew it now, even the ones who didn't know the full weight of the words on their sheets.

Gardens had started appearing in the open spaces between tents, Ace's and Katelin's mostly, rows of things that would be medicine in a month. Craft stalls were going up. The camp was starting to look less like a place people were surviving and more like a place people lived.

"Con is a defensive stat," Alex said, at one point, to Liam, having finally gotten a look at his cousin's sheet.

"It's a fine stat."

"You have seven points in it, Liam. Seven. A stiff breeze is a threat to you."

"I got two just from mom's cooking this week, so it's already going up." Liam waved a fork toward Becky, who did not look over but clearly heard, because something in her shoulders acknowledged the compliment.

"Turns out a Cook profession puts something real in the food. Anyone low enough gets a couple points out of a week of it, and I am gloriously low, so I got the full two. So technically Aunt Becky is doing more for my Constitution than I ever would, and I intend to let her. And I'm buying a defensive skill, I've already decided, something that puts a wall between me and the world so I can throw sand from behind it like a civilized person. I don't need to grind Constitution.

I need to not be standing where the hitting happens."

"Put points in Constitution, Liam."

"I will."

"You won't."

"I probably won't," Liam admitted, and Alex let it go, because a portal-smith who emptied his own pool in one cast and had seven Constitution was going to learn this lesson eventually in a way no lecture would teach him, and Alex would be there to heal-adjacent it when he did. The food thing stuck with him, though, after the conversation moved on. He'd been eating Becky's cooking all week same as everyone, and his own Constitution hadn't twitched.

He'd assumed the buff was nothing until Liam mentioned it, and once he pulled the numbers apart he understood why he'd missed it. The food had a ceiling. Anyone under ten Constitution got two points from a week of it, anyone between ten and twenty got one, and anyone already above twenty got nothing at all. Liam at seven had felt the whole of it.

Alex, sitting at thirty-eight with a Rare class that turned his flesh toward metal, was so far past the cutoff that Becky could have cooked for him every meal for a year and moved nothing. It was a small thing, but it sat with him, because it was the shape of a larger pattern he kept running into. The higher he climbed, the less the ordinary sources of strength did for him, and the more he was going to have to find his gains in places nobody else could reach.

He asked about the class, gently, because Liam had gone a little quiet about it. Portal Smith was Rare, the only Rare profession in the camp, and Liam admitted the materials to actually craft a portal were expensive enough that he hadn't been able to do much with it yet, and the other option from his first skill wich imbues items with spacial mana takes time to create.. Alex felt for him. It was a strange thing, to hold the biggest gift at the fire and not be able to open it.

He also knew Liam, and knew that a seventeen-year-old genius told he couldn't afford his own power was a seventeen-year-old who would find the money if he had to sell the shirts off the rest of them. Then the week ran out, and the morning of the wave came, and it was not like the mornings that had come before it. The close-combat fighters lined up and were handed potions, two healing each, distributed by the alchemists, of whom the camp now had several, though Mia was plainly the best of them.

The mages got a bottle each of mana regeneration, harder to brew than the healing potions and rarer for it. The archers' quivers had gone strange and wonderful, every shaft carrying something now, sharpening on most, explosion on a growing number, the work of the camp's two Rune Scribes across a solid week of evenings.

Alex and Cassandra were still the only two, though Liam had mentioned in passing that he'd been offered the profession and turned it down for the portals, which Alex thought was the right call and said so. He stood on the wall and looked out at a hundred and forty people armed to the teeth, enchanted, potioned, waiting, and felt the thing he'd been building toward for a week settle into place. He was a little uneasy about the conquered outposts, about the heavier wave he knew the week's work had bought.

He'd told his father about it, and they'd decided together that the strength they'd gained had to outrun the difficulty they'd invited, and this morning was the first test of whether the trade held. But he looked at the line, and he looked at his family standing in it, and the unease didn't win. Because Jeremy and Ace had been holding back all this time. There'd never been enough enemies, or the fights had ended too fast, or the risk to the people behind them was too high to cut loose.

He'd watched both of them fight at a fraction of what they had, and he knew it, and now the camp was strong enough and deep enough that they didn't have to babysit a line anymore. Whatever came out of that dungeon this morning, his sister and her husband were finally going to get to open all the way up, and Alex found he was looking forward to seeing it almost as much as he was bracing for the wave itself.

He rolled his shoulders, felt the quiet density of the forged body settle, and watched the dungeon start to darken.