Chương 52: Mirefang

The things that came out of the dungeon were called Tainted Mirefangs, and they were wrong like everything else that had come out of the dungeon. Crocodile-like creatures. That seem to be the blueprint of this monster, low and long and armored, five meters of muscle sheathed in overlapping plate.

But the plate glowed, a sick dark green pulsing under the scales, and around each of them hung a faint haze of the oily abyss energy he'd learned to hate on sight, and the armor itself looked corrupted, grown wrong, patched with darker growths that shouldn't have been part of any living thing. They didn't drag on their bellies the way real crocodiles did.

They rose on their limbs and walked on four legs, which was worse, because a thing that size moving upright was a source of discomfort for anyone they were charging into. And they kept coming. A hundred, and Alex thought that was the wave. Then two hundred, and the count kept growing. Then three hundred, all of them G-rank, level ten and eleven, filling the field in front of the gate until the grass disappeared under green-black armor. Then the bosses.

Five of them, eight meters long, level thirteen, heads the size of doors. And behind those, one more, ten meters, level fifteen, so large it changed the scale of everything around it, and the terror of the whole mass rolled across the outpost like a physical weather. But the outpost's spirit didn't break. That was the thing Alex noticed even before the fear finished settling, and it steadied him more than any headcount could have. A month ago, three hundred monsters would have emptied every stomach on the wall.

Now a hundred and forty armed, enchanted people looked at the horde and set their feet, because they had runic gear now. Bartholomew's shop had been running day and night, because the profession people had turned the whole camp into something that could bite back and, most importantly, because they had grown stronger. The confidence was real, and it was earned. The plan came together in seconds, and it was not a plan that put Alex in front of everything.

"You take the bosses. Delay them, keep the big ones off the line." Chris was already moving people as he said it. He proceeded to instruct different groups, like the mages, on what to do, and Liam and Jeremy were also given their institution manual. Alex heard the shape of it and understood what was being asked, and it wasn't tactical.

He'd spent this whole tutorial as the wall in front of the wall, the thing everyone stood behind, and the family had decided, gently and without saying so, that they didn't need him to be that anymore. That they could hold a field of three hundred without him babysitting the line. He'd been trying to learn to let them. This was the test of it, and the part of him that wanted to plant himself in the middle of everyone he loved and take every hit personally had to be told, firmly, to stand down.

"Understood," he said, and meant it, and it cost him something to mean it. Then Katelin lit up, and the whole line changed. Light poured off her, brighter than anything Alex had anticipated, a wide radiant wash that rolled back over the entire defense and settled into them.

He felt it hit him, a warmth that sank past the skin, mana recovery and body reinforcement and a low steady regeneration all braided together, and it wasn't a huge boost on him specifically, his stats were too high for a little to matter much, but he watched it land on everyone else. Her mana was truly monstrous, definitely higher than his.

"Show off," Liam called back to her.

"Someone has to carry this family," Katelin said, and did not smile, and lit the whole wall a shade brighter out of pure spite. Then the Mirefangs hit, and the fight was on. Alex went for the bosses and left the rest, which was harder than it sounded, because leaving them meant trusting a thousand things happening in his peripheral vision.

Warriors on the line used Taunt to peel monsters off each other, arrows came down in enchanted volleys hard enough to punch through corrupted plate, and the melee held and did not need him. He made himself not look. He put his head down and cut a path through the horde toward the big ones, Cleaving Strike opening a lane, and behind him the family fought its own war and won it foot by foot. He caught glimpses anyway, because he couldn't help it.

Ace, out on the line, the first Mirefang that came at her was sent reeling by a punch that cracked its jaw sideways, and then her hands green again, mending a warrior beside her in the same breath, healing and hitting in one continuous motion that a month ago would have been unthinkable from her.

Jeremy was a streak of lightning down the flank, never staying in one place for more than a heartbeat—arriving just in time to pull someone from danger, then turning around to strike down the threat that would have killed them, saving one life even as he ended another, moving endlessly between the two without ever slowing.

Liam's sand rolling out in a great slow wave, grabbing crocodile legs, dragging them down, and he wasn't burning through his pool wastefully anymore; he was pacing it, banking it, holding as many of the monsters back as he could without emptying his mana reserves. Cassandra's crystals, pink now, cracking against armor in bright, sharp bursts, holding a section of the line on her own. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

It was working like a tuned machine, steadily increasing its effectiveness. Alex cut toward the bosses and felt a fierce, complicated pride. The people around him had become that machine. Each fighter had found their role and together they were doing what none of them could have managed alone.

The horde reached the wall once, a surge that got the crocodiles up against the base, and the warriors charged down to meet it with boost-light flaring off them, reaction and speed and strength all lifted by the support classes, and the counterattack threw the mirefangs back in a storm of fire and earth and crystal and pink light and loud, overlapping explosions.

Alex watched a section of the wave simply come apart under the coordinated barrage and thought, they don't need me, and it was the best thing he'd felt all night. Then he broke through to the bosses, and it became his fight. Six of them, arrayed and waiting, ichor dripping black from mouths full of teeth.

Alex opened with Taunt, hauling their attention onto him, and grabbed the first of the javelins Bartholomew had made him, the heavy ones, each one carved with an explosion rune he and Cassandra had packed with as much mana as the shaft could hold. He threw it at the largest, the level fifteen, and it detonated against the thing's flank in a crack that staggered even it.

Mia's arrows arrived at the same moment, blinding fast, blinding most of the bosses with precise shots to the eyes, and the explosions and the blindness threw the whole cluster into disarray, and Alex spent it. Cleaving Strike took the legs out from under one of the smaller bosses, dropping them bleeding and black. He moved through the confusion cutting scales as thermal mana ran through the glavie he used.

Support from mia was also coming in heavy, and when four of them gathered too close, charging him at once, he did the thing he'd been saving. He cast Star Core. It came up fast now, his hands sure of the shape, thermal folded into gravity, the core shrinking to a white point that hurt to look at. He threw it into the middle of the four and turned away, and the field went white behind him, and when it cleared, four of the bosses were done, scoured, the ground under them turned to ash.

He barely had time to be impressed with himself before the last one moved. The largest, the level fifteen, still alive, its mouth opening wide and a dark green light gathering at the back of its throat, brighter and brighter, and Alex's instincts screamed a half second before the beam fired. He got his arm up. The beam hit it, and hit his chest, and for the first time in a long time something got through. It burned.

Genuinely burned, past the forged body, past everything, his skin searing under it like a bad sunburn turned all the way up, a second-degree scald blooming across his forearm and part of his chest, the smell of it reaching his own nose. Not fatal. Not close to fatal. But real damage, the first thing to properly hurt him since the field where his heart had stopped, and the shock of feeling it was almost worse than the pain. The boss was spent from the beam and barely standing. Alex did not give it a second chance.

He drank the healing potion Katelin had pressed into his hand before the fight. The worst of the burn dulled almost immediately. Then he charged. His Cleaving Strike came down on the creature's skull as its mouth hung open. This time the attack broke through. His weapon tore through the fifteen meter horror from its jaw to the side of its skull. It still did not die. The Tenatus monster refused to fall. Its foul blood clung to Alex's weapon as it staggered and lunged at him.

An arrow from Mia struck it from the side. The creature barely flinched, but the distraction was enough. Alex drove forward and forced his weapon into its open jaw. He poured a massive amount of mana into another Cleaving Strike. The attack tore through its skull This time, it stayed dead. The field was ending around him.

He looked up, and the wave was mostly gone, the last of the mirefangs collapsing under Liam's sand and Mia's arrows and the mage barrage, Jeremy still flickering along the edges cleaning up, Ace already moving through the wounded with her hands lit. At the same time, pieces of scales clung to clothes. The dome of overlapping attacks that had held the wall for the last stretch was flickering out, no longer needed. Nobody had died.

Injuries everywhere, some bad, but the healers had held, Katelin's field had held, and every single person who'd stood on that wall was going to walk off it. Alex stood in the wreckage of six bosses and let that land, because it was the thing that mattered and it had not been true two waves ago. Ace found him a minute later and made a sound at the state of his arm.

"That's a burn. That's an actual burn, on you." She had his forearm before he could argue, green light pouring into the scald, the seared skin knitting back toward whole under her hands.

"How?"

"The big one. Some kind of breath weapon. Seems like that one is quite a bit stronger than the normal bosses we got before ""Then next time you get your whole self behind a shield when the big one opens its mouth." She worked in silence for a moment, mending, and when she finished the arm was pink and new and only faintly tender.

"There. But I want you to remember it hurt. You've started acting as nothing can touch you, and something just did."

"I noticed," Alex said. Cassandra came up while Ace was still working, and Alex caught the look on her face before she smoothed it over, and it was worry, plain and unguarded for the half second before she hid it.

"You're alright?" she asked.

"yeah. It was nothing."

"It didn't look like nothing." She stopped, seemed to decide she'd said enough, and settled for standing there a moment longer than she needed to before she went to help with the wounded. Alex didn't make anything of it. There was nothing to make of it. She seems to be a really caring person to people. He flexed the healed arm, felt the memory of the burn under the new skin, and turned to help clear the field. And that was when he felt it. Not a sound. Not anything he could point to.

Just the specific prickle of being looked at, coming from somewhere out past the wall, out in the dark grass and the treeline where nothing should have been watching. He turned toward it and saw nothing, of course, an empty field and a black horizon and the ordinary dark, and after a moment he decided it was in his head, the aftermath of a long fight, nerves still firing at shadows. He let it go, and went to help lift the dead mirefangs off the people they'd fallen on, and did not think about it again.

Out past the treeline, a sets of eyes that were no longer red watched the big human walk his field, and took careful note of everything he'd shown them, and made no sound at all.