Chương 53: The Ceiling

The meeting happened that evening, and for once nobody argued. They gathered at the fire with the mirefang blood barely washed off, and Chris laid out the thing they'd all started to see, and the shape of it was simple and unwelcome. Every wave climbed. That much they'd known from the start, the levels creeping up week over week no matter what anyone did. But there was a second pattern underneath the first, and this wave had made it impossible to ignore. Every outpost they conquered added to the waves. Not vaguely.

Precisely. One more boss, and fifty more monsters, per outpost, stacked onto everything the dungeon already threw at them. Alex ran the numbers out loud, because somebody had to say them.

"We've cleared five. That's why tonight had six bosses and three hundred bodies instead of one boss and fifty." He looked around the fire.

"Clear five more and we're looking at ten bosses and six hundred monsters every wave. There's a point where the bosses alone are more than we can put down before they reach the wall, and I don't know exactly where that point is, but I know we're walking toward it, and I know the walk speeds up every time we take a nest."

"So we stop," Bartholomew said.

"For a while. Not forever." Chris nodded.

"We keep scouting. We keep bringing people in, that's the part that helps us without hurting us, every group we absorb is more hands on the wall and nothing added to the dungeon. But we stop going out and taking outposts until we've grown into the difficulty we've already bought. Give the camp time to catch up to the waves before we make the waves worse." It landed easily, because everyone had felt the mirefang wave in their arms. Alex wasn't upset by it.

There was even something in him that welcomed the pause, because he'd been running at a full sprint for a month and the idea of days he could spend on his own craft instead of somebody else's fortress sounded, quietly, like a gift. The class notification had come during the wave and he'd shelved it until now. Level thirteen, and a new skill with it, and he pulled it up at the fire while the meeting broke into smaller conversations.

[New Skill: Solar Empowerment (Rare)] [Solar Empowerment: The user's physical capabilities are strengthened by direct sunlight. Effect scales with the intensity and proximity of the nearest star's light, peaking at solar noon.] He read it three times, and each time it landed harder, because of what it meant and because of what it was. The nearest star. His star affinity, made into a skill that fed on the actual sun, strongest when the sun sat highest.

It was the most on-the-nose thing the system had ever handed him, a warrior who drew strength from the light he'd spent his whole life looking up at, and some part of him that had taped star charts to a childhood ceiling wanted to laugh. Grandpa would have loved it. He let that thought have its second and set it down. Practically, it was enormous. A physical boost that cost him little, just standing in daylight, and more of it the closer to noon he fought.

Most of his fights so far had happened whenever they happened. Now there was a clock he could fight around, a window in the middle of every day when he'd be strictly stronger than at any other hour, and he started rearranging his sense of the world around it before he'd even stood up from the fire. He picked it without hesitation. There'd never been a choice. The next few days ran smooth, the way days did when nobody was marching anywhere.

He spent them split between the dungeon and his craft, and the craft was where the real gains hid. His profession climbed. His runes got cleaner and stronger and started doing things beyond light and heat and explosion, and he felt himself getting quietly more dangerous in a direction most of the camp couldn't see, because none of it showed up as a slash or a bolt. It showed up as everyone around him being better equipped than they'd been the week before. And he played with Star Core.

He'd made peace with the fact that he couldn't make it much stronger. The skill was what it was, a compressed knot of fire and gravity, and pushing the raw power higher meant control he didn't have yet and mana he couldn't spare. But strength wasn't the only thing a skill could be, and one afternoon on the wall, turning the core over in his hands, he started asking a different question. Not how hot. How wide.

He'd built the thing as a star, and the whole logic of a star was the crush, gravity pulling everything inward to a single furious point. But a star wasn't only its core. It had an outside, layers of gas that weren't where the fusion happened but still did real work holding the shape, still burned, still glowed. He'd been ignoring all of that in his rush to make the center hotter.

So he stopped rushing the center and started feeding the outside, letting the gravity gather more material into the burn without condensing all of it to the same white point, building the sphere out instead of down. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. The core went red but still unstable; Alex could feel it. The sta core wasn't hard white like it usually ran.

A whitish red, larger, less concentrated, the color of a cooler and vaster fire, and when he threw it in the dungeon and it went off, the explosion wasn't hotter than his usual Star Core. It was bigger. The blast rolled out across a noticeably wider circle, less scouring at the center and more punishing throughout, and Alex stood, looking at the broad scorch mark, understanding exactly what he'd made. The white version was a sniper's answer, everything poured into one point, made for a single hard target.

The red one was a crowd's answer, the same skill spread thin across a wide field, made for exactly the kind of horde he kept ending up in front of. Same skill. No new notification, nothing changed on his sheet. He'd just found a second way to hold it. He filed it as the most useful afternoon he'd spent in a while, and did not yet know how soon he'd need the wide one.

Cassandra was there for most of it, the two of them working their sheets a few feet apart the way they did now, and he showed her the red core and she made him do it twice more so she could watch the gravity work, and asked the kind of precise questions that made him understand his own skill better in the answering. Their rune partnership had become the steadiest thing in his days.

She was the only person in camp who could follow him into the weeds of the profession, and he'd stopped guessing alone, and that was worth more than he'd expected when he'd had become her teacher, which lasted a day at most. Now they were partners. Liam surfaced now and then to report on the portals, always the same report, delivered with more restraint than was natural for him. Progress. Levels.

No actual portal yet, the crafting materials still beyond him, but soon, he kept saying, soon, and Alex heard the strain under the cheer and didn't push. It couldn't be easy, holding the biggest gift at the fire and being unable to open it, watching everyone else's professions produce results while his produced only promises. Alex gave him room.

A seventeen-year-old genius told he couldn't afford his own power was going to solve that problem eventually, probably in a way that alarmed everyone, and Alex intended to be standing nearby when he did. The camp kept growing around all of it. Bartholomew's shop was doing real business now, and Alex received most of the arrows for his rune work from his uncle rather than the store, because the family smith was leveling alongside the people he armed and his work had seen steady progress.

Craft stalls of every kind were going up. People were finding the balance between fighting and their professions, and Alex had noticed something about professions in general that he turned over more than once. None of them helped directly in a fight. Not one produced a mana slash or a bolt. They made the things that helped, weapons and armor and potions and enchanted arrows, but the professions themselves stayed a step back from the killing, quietly building the arsenal everyone else fought with.

His runes were the same. He'd equipped a decent amount of the camp's and never once used the profession to strike a blow himself. New people arrived nearly every day, from further and further out, and most of them came bruised or missing pieces, and Alex was glad every time there was room for one more. He wasn't in the dungeon for all of it, because the balance he was chasing kept him on the wall as often as under it, and it was there, on the wall, that he first noticed Carl.

A newer refugee, some kind of mage, friendly in the easy way of a man who wanted to be liked and mostly succeeded. He got on with people. He played with the kids, Jake and John and the growing swarm of them, and had a knack for it, and Alex saw him out there more than once running some game with no rules while a dozen children shrieked around him. Alex meant to talk to him properly, thought a few times that he should, a competent mage was worth knowing and the man seemed decent.

But there was always a rune to finish, always another sheet, always the next thing, and the intention never quite became a conversation. He filed Carl under people to get to know when things slow down, and things did not slow down, and he let it sit. Then the wave came, and it was the easy kind. They'd conquered nothing since the Mirefangs, so the levels climbed but the numbers didn't. No extra boss.

The camp met a wave that was only stronger, not larger, with a force that had spent a week getting stronger itself, and it was over faster and cleaner than any wave in memory. More injuries than usual came from people who'd been reckless in the dungeon, but the healers were sharp now, and nobody died. The decision to stop conquering proved itself in a single night, and the family agreed to hold to it another week. There was one more thing, and it was Ace who made it happen, over Alex's mild objection.

"You're buying a regeneration skill." She said it flatly in the tent, the way she said things she'd already decided.

"There's an Uncommon one in the store. It's expensive and I don't care."

"I heal fine. And I've got you to heal me anyway."

"I heal you when I'm standing next to you. You keep ending up in fights where I'm not standing next to you, and you keep acting like you have nine lives." She held his eyes.

"Nothing has killed you yet. But I healed that burn days ago, and now pretending you've forgotten about it. Buy the skill. It won't heal you the way I can, but any healing at all could be the difference between you dying and walking out of a fight when I'm not there." He'd accumulated the points across a month of essence, battle and dungeon both, and the number was finally there. He looked at her, then bought it.

[Regeneration (Uncommon)] It knit ordinary damage back slowly, nothing like Ace's hands, but steady and constant. A low background mend that would run whether or not anyone was near enough to save him. He felt it settle in, a quiet new baseline, and understood she was right. Believing he'd be fine had killed better men than him, and the whole point of getting strong was to protect people. He couldn't do that dead.

"Done," he told her.

"Such a hard head. Just stop making me watch you gamble with the one thing you can't replace." She was already turning to leave, shaking her head.

"You're my little brother." As she walked away, she mumbled under her breath, "You still need a spanking."

"Did you say something?"

"Nope. Just stay alive, and don't have me save your butt every five days." The days rolled on after that, smooth and full, runes and the dungeon and the growing camp, and Alex let himself believe, for a little while, that the pause was going to hold. Out past the cleared ring, in nests that had gone quiet and strange, five factions that should have been mindlessly attacking anything nearby were learning to share the same ground.