Chương 6: Star gazing

As the evening wore on, the open field slowly filled in with rows of tents, decent canvas stretched tight enough to actually hold up against weather, each one big enough to give a person somewhere to actually sleep instead of just collapsing on the grass. Looking at the family's combined tutorial point total, Alex figured there'd been just enough to go around. Not extravagant, but enough that nobody would be sleeping exposed tonight.

He stayed near his own tent for a bit, hammer resting against the canvas, javelins propped beside it. People had been treating him with a noticeably different kind of respect since the fight, the kind that came from being the one who'd dropped the biggest threat of the day solo. He wasn't sure he'd earned that yet, not really, but he wasn't about to argue with people being nicer to him either. He didn't know what the rest of this tutorial actually looked like.

Other human groups, other monster waves, whatever the conquest half of this thing actually demanded once it got moving, none of it had any shape yet. Some part of him felt like sitting around a campfire was wasting time he didn't have. But today had already drained everyone, himself included, and pushing for more right now would do more damage to people's bodies than good.

Stepping away from his tent, he noticed the energy around camp dipping lower, exhaustion finally catching up to everyone now that the adrenaline had worn off. A big fire crackled near the center of the camp, Aunt Becky working over it with whatever ingredients the system had been willing to part with. Alex's stomach made the decision for him before his brain finished weighing in, and he made his way over, stomach audibly protesting by the time he reached the circle.

He sat down next to Liam, who was still waiting on his own healing to finish settling, and the two of them watched the food cook in comfortable silence. A few minutes later it was ready, and Alex didn't waste any time getting to it. Liam watched him eat with the kind of expression usually reserved for nature documentaries, somewhere between fascination and mild horror, but Alex didn't care enough to comment on it. He wasn't in much of a mood for conversation tonight.

Once his plate was clean, he peeled off from the fire and walked a little ways from camp, far enough that the noise faded into something more like background hum, and lay back in the grass. Looking at the sky had always been his thing, the one habit that followed him everywhere no matter how busy life got, and tonight was no exception. What greeted him up there stopped him for a second.

The sky was emptier than he expected, and the moon hanging in it looked wrong in a way he couldn't immediately name, the wrong size, the wrong color, craters in patterns that didn't match anything he'd memorized as a kid. The stars scattered around it refused to form a single constellation he recognized, no matter how many times he tried to trace familiar shapes between them. Whatever this place was, it definitely wasn't Earth's sky looking back at him.

Still beautiful, in its own unfamiliar way, but undeniably foreign. He found himself wondering just how big this place actually was. A planet. A moon. Something else entirely that the old words didn't quite cover. He wanted real answers, but the knowledge he'd bought only went so deep, and digging further than that would have to wait for points he didn't currently have. A few minutes into the quiet, footsteps approached from behind him.

Grandpa, sword in hand, apparently unwilling to let the weapon out of his grip even now. Alex had to smile a little at that. Eighty-five years old and still not ready to admit he might need to sit one out. Not that Alex doubted the old man could still do real damage if it came down to it. He stayed relaxed where he lay, hammer resting against his side, and let Grandpa settle into the grass beside him without comment.

"How are you feeling?" Grandpa asked. Alex had never been great at reading exactly what was going on behind his grandfather's face. Eighty-five years tended to carve a person into something stoic, hard to crack open through expression alone. But Grandpa had never needed his face to show how much he cared. It came through in what he did instead, the way he'd shown up here in armor he barely needed at his age, the way he'd sat down next to Alex without being asked.

"Stars look pretty good tonight," Alex said, dodging the actual question without much subtlety. Grandpa let it go, eyes drifting up along with Alex's.

"Don't recognize a single one of these," he said after a moment, squinting at a cluster low on the horizon.

"Used to be able to find Orion blind drunk. This sky's not giving me anything."

"Yeah. Tried for ten minutes before you got here. Nothing lines up."

"Maybe it's upside down." Alex actually laughed at that, a real one, short and surprised out of him.

"Grandpa, it's not upside down."

"How do you know? You said yourself nothing lines up." There was the faintest curl at the corner of his mouth, the closest thing to a smirk Alex had seen on him all day.

"Fair point. I don't know anything right now."

"Welcome to being eighty-five," Grandpa said.

"Took me a lot longer to get comfortable with that than it's taking you." A few minutes later, Dad wandered over, spotting the two of them stretched out in the grass.

"So this is where you two ended up." He dropped down beside them, groaning a little as his knees hit the ground.

"Couldn't sleep yet," Alex said.

"Figured I'd come complain about the sky with Grandpa instead."

"Smart use of your time." Dad tilted his head back, scanning the same unfamiliar stretch of stars.

"Anybody figured out what we're actually looking at?"

"Nope," Grandpa said.

"Your son thinks it might be upside down."

"It's not upside down."

"That's what I told him," Alex said. Dad snorted. It didn't take long before a handful of other men trickled over too, drawn by the same idea, settling into the grass one by one with the particular groan of people whose bodies had taken a real beating that day. Uncle Sam dropped down across from Alex, still favoring one arm.

"You holding up?" he asked Alex.

"Better than you, looks like."

"Don't start with me. That snake nearly had both of us." Sam shook his head, though there wasn't much heat in it.

"Good call telling me to back off, by the way. Wouldn't have admitted it an hour ago, but you were right."

"Wasn't trying to be a hero. Just didn't want you eating it instead of me."

"Touching," Sam said dryly, and a couple of the other men laughed. Grandpa had always had a thing for stargazing, that much the whole family knew, though Alex doubted any of them understood the sky quite the way he did. The conversation drifted from there, half-serious guesses about what kind of place could have a moon shaped wrong and stars arranged into nothing recognizable, nobody landing on an actual answer, everybody seemingly fine with that for tonight.

The whole scene struck Alex as faintly ridiculous if he stepped back far enough, a circle of grown men dressed head to toe in armor and carrying swords, lying in a field staring up at constellations that belonged to nobody. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Alex wanted to bring up everything he'd learned from the knowledge he'd bought, the death rate, the mismatch between how today had felt and how dangerous this tutorial was supposed to be, but he let it sit for now. Tonight, everyone needed this more than they needed another problem to chew on. He didn't know how they were going to survive the next sixty days, not with any real confidence, but he knew he'd give everything he had to make sure his family came out the other side of it.

Looking around at the faces lit by firelight and starlight that didn't belong to any sky he'd ever known, he had the feeling everyone else lying here felt exactly the same way. He woke early the next morning, fully geared before the sun had finished climbing. Stepping outside, he found Uncle Bartholomew and a couple of the neighbors already on watch, eyes on the treeline.

They mentioned hearing animal sounds drifting out of the forest overnight, nothing that had actually approached the camp, just enough noise to keep everyone's nerves up a notch higher than they'd like. It had to be somewhere around seven in the morning. Alex stood there for a second, the cool air doing more to wake him up than anything else had so far, and decided there wasn't any point putting off what needed to happen next. He needed to get stronger, and waiting around wasn't going to make that happen on its own.

He found his dad already awake, talking quietly with his mom inside their tent about everything that had gotten built overnight. The wall was finished. It had appeared all at once, the way most things from the system tended to, plain wood with nothing magical baked into it, no glow, no hum, nothing that would have impressed anybody back home. But plain or not, it was enough to give the kids and the healers a real line of protection, which was worth more than how it looked. Alex stepped in and got straight to it.

"Tutorial's been too easy so far. I bought the basic knowledge package last night, and based on what it told me, what we went through yesterday doesn't line up with what we should be expecting. Death rate by the end of a tutorial like this is supposed to sit somewhere between thirty and fifty percent. I think things are about to get a lot harder, and soon. I don't know why it's been this gentle on us so far, but we can't keep assuming it'll stay this way.

We need to get stronger, fast, faster than feels comfortable. I'm the only one who's leveled so far, and if the next wave brings something bigger, we're not ready for it. We also don't know anything about what's actually around us." His dad nodded along, unsurprised.

"I know, I know. You're not the only one who bought that knowledge pack, so we're already on the same page about most of this. First thing we're doing today is putting together a scouting party, get eyes on what's actually out there. I want a one-mile radius around camp covered to start, then we expand from there once we know it's safe to. We also need eyes on that dungeon. Basic knowledge says there's almost always something worth growing from inside one, but the risk might be too high to justify going in yet.

We don't know enough to make that call cleanly right now."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"Put together three to five people. Try to get at least one Ranger if you can, ideally someone with actual scouting instincts, but beyond that, pick who you trust. Just make sure everyone comes back." Alex didn't fully believe this was going to be the easy walk his dad's tone made it sound like, but he understood the necessity of it regardless. After eating, he ran through a quick set of push-ups, more out of habit than anything else, and noticed almost immediately that something about his body felt different.

Stronger than it should after one day and one fight. He pulled up his status to check.

Name: Alex Morningstar Age: 21 Level: 2 Race: Human (H) Class: Warrior Strength: 18 Dexterity: 11 Constitution: 14 Perception: 8 Intelligence: 11 Wisdom: 9 Skills: Identify (Common), Power Strike (Common), Reinforce Body (Common) Body Cultivation: None Mana Cultivation: None Bloodline: None He'd put both of his free points from leveling into Intelligence each time, on top of using Power Strike and Reinforce Body in combat, trying to stay deliberate about strengthening the side of himself that wasn't already his biggest asset.

Mana didn't show up anywhere on the sheet itself, more of a felt sense than a number, but Alex was fairly confident his reserves had grown some too. Eighteen strength, though, that one gave him pause. Even among Olympic-level lifters, that number sat well outside anything a human body should reasonably produce, and based on the math he could work out in his head, the gains from his two level-ups should have left him at seventeen, not eighteen.

Intelligence carried the same kind of discrepancy, one point higher than the careful tally he kept in his head said it should be. The only thing he'd actually done differently yesterday was fight, really fight, for the first time in his life. Maybe combat itself counted as training somehow, accelerated by the system in a way normal training never could be. He'd been lifting for years, and nothing about years of dedicated work in a gym should produce a jump like that from a single afternoon.

Then again, the system had already proven it didn't play by rules he understood. He filed it away under shenanigans, same as everything else that didn't add up cleanly, and let himself get a little excited at the idea of what real equipment might do for him if he ever got his hands on a proper barbell again. With the sun climbing higher, Alex went looking for his first recruit. Liam was the obvious choice, someone he'd already spoken to plenty and who clearly had energy to spare even after getting grazed yesterday.

Alex felt a small twist of guilt asking him, knowingly putting a seventeen-year-old in harm's way, but the work needed doing regardless. Liam said yes before Alex even finished the question, practically vibrating with the idea of being useful. The two of them found their next recruit standing near the wall. Mia, one of the neighbors, someone Alex had barely spoken two words to before today.

She lived alone in a nearby apartment, had graduated college a couple of years back, and had apparently played a fair amount of competitive tennis growing up, decently athletic by anyone's standard, though nowhere close to Alex's level. She'd picked Ranger and carried a bow with what looked like genuine confidence in how to use it.

"Mia, right?" Alex said, and she looked up from restringing something on her bow, wary in the particular way of someone who already suspected she was about to be asked for a favor.

"That's me. You're the one who killed the big snake."

"That's also me." Alex rubbed the back of his neck.

"We're putting together a small group to scout the area, figure out what's actually around us before it figures us out first. We need a Ranger, and you're pretty much the only one we've got." Mia's eyes flicked toward the treeline, then back to him.

"How dangerous are we talking?"

"Honestly? No idea. That's the point of going."

"Reassuring." She exhaled through her nose, half a laugh.

"I've never shot at anything that wasn't a paper target in my life."

"Neither had I before yesterday, and I did fine," Alex said.

"We need someone who can actually hit what they aim at from a distance. That's worth more out there than confidence is." She considered that for a second, turning the bow over once in her hands.

"If I say no, who else is going?"

"Honestly, nobody is good. You'd be doing us a real favor." Mia sighed, but there was something almost relieved in it, like she'd wanted a reason to say yes and just needed someone to ask properly.

"Fine. But if I die out there, I'm haunting you specifically."

"Fair trade." The last name on Alex's list was Jeremy, and that one came with its own knot of guilt attached. He didn't love the idea of pulling his sister's husband into something this uncertain, knowing exactly how Ace would react if anything happened to him out there. When he found the two of them together to ask, Ace went quiet for a second, jaw tight, before pointing a finger between them.

"Both of you are coming back. In one piece. Do you understand me?"

"We'll be careful," Jeremy said.

"That's not what I asked." She looked at Alex specifically now.

"If anything happens to either of you out there, I will find the body, I will heal it back to life just long enough to yell at it, and then I will kill it again myself. Are we clear?"

"Crystal," Alex said.

"Good." She kissed Jeremy on the cheek like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened at all.

"Be safe. Both of you." They geared up together before heading out. Alex with his hammer, shield and the new javelins. Liam with a dagger he sincerely hoped he'd never need to use. Mia with her bow, already moving like she'd done this a hundred times before. Jeremy with spear and shield, steady as ever despite everything. Walking through the gate cut into the wood wall the system had provided, the four of them stepped out into open grass and scattered treeline, the unfamiliar sky still hanging pale overhead.

Alex hoped, more than he let himself say out loud, that there'd be nothing out here worth worrying about.