Chương 55: Let me solo them

The water came down, and everything broke apart at once. Liam's hands were already up, sand tearing out of the ground into a wall to meet the flood, and for a second Alex thought it would hold. Then the water hit the sand and soaked it, and wet sand was not a wall, it was a heavy sodden mess that sagged and slid, and Liam swore and dropped it and threw himself sideways as the flood crashed through where it had been.

The five of them scattered, and the scattering was the point, because the instant they were apart the leaders were on them, each one going for the opponent it had chosen, and the neat single crew Alex had walked in with came apart into five separate fights across a widening field. A blur went for Mia, fast, an assassin's opening.

Alex saw it and could do nothing, already committed to his own ground, and watched the box on her back take the hit meant for her spine and shatter, spilling the thing inside onto the grass, and then the water and the bodies and the noise closed over the sight of her. The mossback's twig caught Jeremy's leg mid-stride, hauling him up short as he tried to reach Mia, and the bark-skinned thing's voice carried over the chaos, delighted, and that fight had its own gravity now and pulled Jeremy into it.

Liam's flood-fight dragged toward the back of the field, the three-meter tidekin driving him away from the others, and Alex heard his cousin say something that sounded like an insult before the water swallowed the words.

Ace turned to help Jeremy and never got the chance, because the embermole came out of the churn low and fast and opened her shoulder to the bone, and she went tumbling, and green light closed the wound even as she rolled, and when she came up her face had gone somewhere Alex had only seen once before, in a story about a boy and a locker in the tenth grade. Four fights, four of his people, each alone with a thing built to beat them.

And Alex stood in front of two hundred and fifty monsters and a pale silver-eyed leader making music, and understood that this was the whole design. Split them. Hold him. Let the four specialists do their work, and then bring everyone back to finish anyone standing. He looked across the fracturing field at his family, each of them alone, and every instinct he owned screamed at him to go, to reach them, to be the wall again. [Echoling level 20] The Echoling read it off his face.

"I wouldn't." Its voice cut through the noise with that awful musical edge, pitched exactly for him.

"If you take one step toward your friends, I will turn every ranged attack in this army onto whichever of them you're running to. Two hundred and fifty of us, all at once, on one target." It let that sit.

"I don't think even you get there in time. So here's the arrangement. You fight me and my two hundred and fifty. You keep me busy, I keep you from them, and we see which of us runs out first. Cleaner for everyone." Alex's mind ran the whole thing in a cold half-second, and hated every part of it, and could not find the hole. Because it was true. He could go to any one of them. He was fast enough and strong enough to reach one fight and turn it.

But the second he moved, the Echoling made good on the threat, and a barrage from two hundred and fifty throats fell on Jeremy or Mia or Liam or Ace, and none of them could take that, not while already fighting for their lives against a leader. His speed didn't matter if leaving cost someone their life. The trap wasn't the army. The trap was that helping got someone killed. So the only way through was the ugly one.

Every one of them had to win their own fight, alone, and Alex had to hold the largest piece of the board so none of those private fights became two-against-one. If he broke free and helped early, the odds of losing someone climbed. If he held the horde and trusted the four of them to be better than the things sent to kill them, they had a chance. It was the exact thing he'd been learning for a month, forced now at the worst possible moment. Trust them. Let them fight. Be the anchor, not the savior.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. He set his feet and looked at the army and made himself stop looking at his family.

"Fine," he said.

"Come here." He opened with the wide one. Star Core came up over his palm, and instead of crushing it to the white point, he fed it out the way he'd practiced on the wall, gravity gathering the burn broad instead of deep, the sphere swelling and going that deep angry red. He poured mana into it, more than he'd ever put in one, building it out and out, and the closest monsters started backing away because even Tainted knew a bad idea when they saw one glowing. He threw it into the middle of the army.

The field turned red and white and roared. The wide core went off across a huge circle, less a spear than a flood of heat and force, and when the light cleared and Alex could see again, the front of the army was gone and a great swath behind it was burning. He looked for the damage and found it staggering, dozens down, the water-adjacent ones, the tidekin-kin, especially savaged, many with fourth-degree burns across half their bodies, out of the fight if not yet dead.

He counted the gap in the horde at fifty, maybe more.

"You thought we hadn't prepared for that," the Echoling said, and it did not sound as confident as its words. Because it had prepared, and Alex saw how. Right before he'd thrown, the pale thing had opened its mouth and let out a low resonant tone, and Alex had felt it wash over the army, and now he understood what it had done. The sound had hardened them against fire. Boosted the whole army's heat resistance in one note, dropping his Star Core's damage well below what it should have been. Fifty dead was fifty.

It should have been a hundred and fifty. That was the counter. That was why they'd sent this one against him specifically. They'd watched his star skill during the mirefang wave, learned roughly how much fire he could bring, and put in front of him the one thing that could turn a whole army's skin against flame. His single best weapon, halved before it landed. Fine. He had more than one weapon.

He pulled a javelin from his back, one of the five, explosion-runed and mana-heavy, and threw it into a dense knot of monsters. It went off like a grenade, killing most of ten and shredding the rest, and Alex threw the second before the first finished, and the third, walking explosions across the army wherever the bodies clustered thickest. The Echoling's fire-resistance song did nothing against a rune detonating inside a crowd.

The thing snarled and started barking orders, and the army surged forward at him all at once. He met it with his hands, and here was the part they hadn't scouted. They knew his fire. They did not know his body. They'd built their whole plan around the star skill and the assumption that a mage who threw suns was soft up close, the way mages were, and Alex Morningstar was not a mage. He was three hundred pounds of forged flesh with Solar Empowerment humming under his skin, and the sun was climbing toward noon.

He drank the mana potion Mia had made him, and then the other one she'd handed him before they left, the one that Ace had insisted on, and he felt the whole day tilt as the sun crested toward its highest point. Solar Empowerment peaked. His strength and his speed lifted by half, everything already monstrous about him made monstrous and a half, and he waded into two hundred monsters like a man walking into surf. It stopped being a fight and became work.

His glaive hummed with thermal and gravity and came around in long arcs that took monsters apart, three and four at a stroke, and where the glaive was busy his fist went through a chest, and where a thing got behind him the butt-spike found it without him looking. The Echoling's ethereal shield settled over the army, the same defense-boost it had thrown up during the wave, and it did nothing. It did nothing at all, because a little more resilience meant nothing to a strike that already overkilled by triple.

Alex became, in the middle of that army, something closer to a natural disaster than a person, and the monsters that could not run because the abyss would not let them run, because they were hungry for his life in a way that overrode fear, kept coming into the grinder, and the grinder did not stop. He took hits. Water blasts from the ranged ones, fire from others, the occasional combination attack that landed clean, and none of it did much, and what did get through the regeneration quietly mended in the background.

He restrained himself from Star Core, even the wide one, because the fire-resistance song made it a poor trade now, and every ordinary swing was worth more. So he swung. And swung. And the army thinned around him, red-eyed things falling in windrows, and the pale leader's music started to sound less like a war-song and more like something trying to hold panic at a distance.

Alex fought toward noon, and noon made him worse, and somewhere out at the edges of the horde four other fights were happening that he would not let himself watch, because watching cost lives, and the only gift he could give the people he loved right now was to be so terrible in the center of this field that nothing was left over to send against them. He cut, and he burned, and he held the line that was his whole body, and he trusted them.