The Harvest
The Harvest
CHAPTER 4: THE HARVEST
The fifteen hounds hit the alley like a collapsing wall, and the whole twelve-foot throat of brick and broken glass filled with the sound of iron claws tearing at asphalt. The alpha ran at the center of the wedge, scarred snout peeled back and one torn ear flat against its skull, and it did not slow for the ivory line waiting at the end of the run. Max felt the charge through the tethers before he heard it, ten separate points of pressure bracing in his mind as the skeletons dropped their shoulders behind their shields. He had perhaps seventy points of mana left in the tank, a third of what he could hold, and he turned the number over the way a man counts the rounds left in a magazine. Beside him Marcus sank behind his tower shield and bellowed over the roar of the pack, "Brace, and let the bones take it!" Then the first hound hit the wall.
The impact came up through the soles of Max's boots and rattled his teeth. Hounds slammed into the shields and rebounded in sprays of spit and blood, iron jaws snapping on bone and finding only the dull ivory edge, and the skeletons gave ground by inches and clawed it back. A bone sword punched up through one snarling mouth and out the back of its skull in a shower of teeth and gray matter. A shield rim crushed another muzzle flat against a skeleton's pauldron, and the hound reeled backward with its jaw hanging by a strip of skin. "Burn, you bastard," Elena snarled, and her Firebolt struck a second beast in the chest and lit it from the inside out, so that the stink of scorched fur and cooked fat rolled down the alley. Two were dead before Max finished his first breath, and the pile at the mouth of the alley was already growing another layer.
Then a heavy hound got its jaws around a skeleton's thigh and wrenched, and the bone burst into white splinters that Max felt in his own leg like a slap. The soul-fire in the thing's sockets guttered out, and Jackson was already yelling about the gap as Max turned his hand toward the nearest fresh carcass. Thirty points of mana drained out of him like cold water from a cracked pipe, and a replacement dragged itself out of the sludge and slammed its shield into the hole. Forty-two left, he thought, and he did the arithmetic again: four more casts before the tank ran dry, and twelve hounds still standing. The next beast came over the barricade with its jaws open, and Marcus met it with his spear, driving the iron head through its throat until the point showed behind its skull.
The third carcass slid down the heap, and the world inside Max's skull went sapphire. A chime rang behind his eyes, and the whole squad flinched at once as the same bright pulse ran through all six of them. Somewhere to his left Jackson whooped, half laugh and half sob, "Level six, baby!" The window unfolded across his vision, cold and efficient, as though the last thirty seconds of terror were an entry to be balanced. The numbers settled into place like coins dropped into a till:
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| INDIVIDUAL: MAX WILLIS |
| CLASS PROGRESSION: GRAVE LORD (LEVEL 5 -> LEVEL 6) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 INT, +3 WIS, +3 CON |
| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +3 |
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| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
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The tank refilled so fast it hurt. Warmth ran down his spine and through the hollow in his gut where the mana had been, and the tremor in his hands died as if someone had pressed a thumb on a switch. He spent the three points where the numbers said they belonged, one each into Intelligence, Wisdom and Vitality, and felt INT 35, WIS 35 and VIT 20 click into place. Two hundred and forty-six points of mana stood available again, enough for eight casts, and the tether to his skeletons felt tighter, as if the bones were pulling on him in return. He did not let himself enjoy it, because the alpha was still out there, pacing behind its pack and watching the wall with a patience no animal should have had. "Eyes on the big one," Marcus growled, as though he had read Max's mind.
For a while it was the same ugly work. The skeletons held, the humans stabbed and burned over their shoulders, and the hounds broke themselves against the wall in twos and threes until the barricade was a slick red ramp of carcasses piled four deep. Jackson hacked a lunging hound's foreleg off at the elbow and finished it with a downward chop that sank the broadsword to the crossguard in its neck. Sarah slipped through a gap to hamstring a wounded beast, both daggers sawing through tendon with a wet creak, and Marcus's shield rim stove in a skull with a sound like a dropped melon. Six more died in the span of a minute, and Marcus bellowed the count over the noise: "That's nine, six left, keep it tight!" From the back of the pack the alpha watched every death, and then it did something that raised the hair on Max's arms: it started walking toward the pile.
The alpha climbed the dead. It set one scarred paw on a corpse's ribs and the other on a dead hound's shoulder, mounting the heap the way a man takes stairs, and the bodies of its packmates shifted and slid wetly under its weight. At the crest it gathered itself, haunches bunching beneath a pelt gone black with other animals' blood, and Max understood a moment too late what it meant to do. He screamed, "It's coming over!" It leaped, a hundred pounds heavier than any hound he had seen, and cleared the entire shield wall in a single bound with its belly scraping the skeletons' skulls. Jackson was standing at the lip of the dumpster with his broadsword raised, and he had time to say one word before seven hundred pounds of muscle landed on him. The word was fuck.
He got his left arm up to protect his throat, and the alpha's iron jaws closed on the forearm instead. Max heard the bones go before he saw them, a double crack like green wood snapped over a knee, and then the jagged white end of the radius punched out through the skin in a spray of blood. Jackson's scream climbed into a register that did not sound human, and the sword clattered out of his good hand onto the asphalt. The alpha shook him like a terrier with a rat, flinging his body against the dumpster hard enough to dent the steel, and a rope of torn muscle swung from the ruined arm. Marcus came in roaring, "Get off him, you son of a bitch," and hit it with a full-weight shoulder charge behind the tower shield that knocked the beast sprawling off Jackson's chest, while Elena's Firebolt scorched a smoking stripe along its flank. The alpha rolled up out of the stumble with Jackson's blood running off its jaws and a strip of Jackson's skin still caught between its fangs. Its eyes did not go to Marcus, or to Elena, or to the man screaming at its feet. They went to Max.
Max had been waiting for this since the pack broke from the plaza, and he found, to his own distant surprise, that he was not afraid. Maybe the System had sanded the fear off him, or maybe fear simply took a back seat once the arithmetic was clear. "Come on, then," he breathed. The alpha launched itself with its mouth wide, a red tunnel lined with iron, and the speed aura wrapped around his legs like a hand and gave him exactly the extra ten percent he needed. He dropped under the jaws, felt the hot breath on his scalp, and drove the Crude Bone Dagger up through the soft tissue beneath the animal's left eye. The blade went in to the hilt with a gristly pop, and the alpha's whole weight came down on him and slammed him flat onto the asphalt. Claws raked his thigh and ripped it open from hip to knee, and Max screamed through his teeth and twisted the dagger and felt something inside the skull go soft and give. The beast convulsed once on top of him, its blood pouring hot into his collar, and then it was only a very heavy, very dead thing with its tongue lolling across his chest.
The System did not wait for him to breathe. The chime rang through his skull while he was still pinned under the alpha's bulk, and the sapphire glare lit the underside of the carcass like a lamp behind a curtain. Somewhere above him Elena was screaming, "Max, Max, are you alive under there?" Pain throbbed in his thigh in a hot, rhythmic pulse that matched his heartbeat, and he could feel his blood soaking into the cracked asphalt beneath him. The windows unfolded anyway, patient and indifferent:
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| PARTY NOTIFICATION: G-RANK IRON-FANG HOUND (PACK ALPHA) SLAIN |
| PARTY EXPERIENCE EARNED: +150 CLASS XP | +75 RACE XP |
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: CLASS LEVEL 7 AND RACE LEVEL 4 ACHIEVED |
| CLASS PROGRESSION: GRAVE LORD (LEVEL 6 -> LEVEL 7) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 INT, +3 WIS, +3 CON |
| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +3 |
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| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 3 -> LEVEL 4) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |
| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: MINION CAPACITY THRESHOLD REACHED |
| INTELLIGENCE MILESTONE (40 INT) ATTAINED |
| BASE MINION CAPACITY INCREASED: +1 (TOTAL BASE CAP: 6) |
| TRAIT MODIFIER APPLIED: SOVEREIGN'S AURA (2X MULTIPLIER) |
| NEW MAXIMUM MINION CAPACITY: 12 SKELETAL MINIONS |
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The torn muscle in his thigh knit itself together in a crawling, itching rush that was somehow worse than the wound, flesh and sinew sliding back into place under his ruined trousers as the recovery effect washed through him. He shoved the alpha's carcass off with a shout and a heave, sat up soaked in a stranger's blood, and spent his points: one each into Intelligence, Wisdom and Vitality, which dragged his Intelligence to exactly forty and his Wisdom level with it. Marcus hauled him upright by the collar and said, "You stupid, lucky bastard," with something close to awe in his voice. Max worked the Crude Bone Dagger out of the alpha's eye socket with a wet crunch and wiped it on his sleeve. The cap threshold chimed and his army grew by two, so he raised the biggest corpses he could reach, and twelve skeletons stood in the alley with blue fire in their eyes. The casts cost sixty points of mana he could afford, and he noticed with flat, clinical interest that his hands had started to shake only now that there was nothing left to shake for.
The last five hounds broke the moment the alpha died. Marcus barked, "Don't let them reach the plaza!" They had the look of animals that had just discovered the world had a bottom, and they turned to run, and two went down under the swords before they had made it ten feet. A third reached the mouth of the alley and died to Sarah's daggers in two quick strokes, and a fourth tried to climb the dumpster and took Marcus's spear through the eye. The last, a wounded female with half her face burned to the skull, collapsed at David's feet and began to drag herself away on her forelegs. David stared at her for a long moment with his hands white on his club, and then he brought the club down, and down again, until the skull split and he heard himself making a sound he had never made before. He vomited on his own boots and stood there wiping his mouth, and nobody said a word to him, because there was nothing in the world to say.
Silence settled into the alley in layers, first the wet slap of the last blood running off the dumpsters, then the ragged breathing of six people who had all expected to be dead. Thirty hounds lay in the alley and at its mouth, a steaming drift of bodies stretching from the barricade into the plaza. David got to Jackson before anyone told him to, dropped to his knees in the blood, and set his glowing hands on the ruined arm. "Hold still," he whispered, "please, just hold still." The exposed bone slid back beneath the skin with a slick, grinding noise as Jackson shrieked through his teeth, and the flesh closed over it in a red, puckered seam that would scar for life. When it was done David sat back on his heels, gray-faced, and looked at his palms as though they belonged to someone else. Max looked at the thirty carcasses and caught himself counting them in usable bone.
Looting went fast, because nobody wanted to be standing in the open when the next pack came. The corpses gave up exactly what the tutorial had promised, plain white Common drops that glowed faintly until a hand closed on them: forty-one copper coins in a greasy pile, a double handful of Broken Mana Shards, four Diluted Health Salves, strips of Damaged Pelt, a crude iron dagger and a pair of Cracked Leather Guards. Elena pocketed the shards without being asked, and Max took two for himself, crushing one between his fingers to feel the thin, sour trickle of mana it gave back. "Keep that arm up if you want to keep the arm," Marcus told Jackson, strapping the guards over the healed forearm. Sarah took the dagger, and David, without asking anyone, cut a slab of Raw Beast Meat from the nearest haunch and wrapped it in a pelt. "We'll be hungry in three hours," he said, "and nobody's going to feed us." It was the first thing he had said since the club, and nobody argued with it.
It was Max who broke the quiet, and he did it by looking at his own window. The five-option prompt for his Level 5 skill was still blinking at the edge of his vision, patient as a debt, and he had carried it unopened through two fights. "Everybody open your skill list," he said, his voice hoarser than he expected. "You all passed Class Level 5 a while ago, which means every one of you has a selection waiting, and the choice is permanent." Marcus frowned, and then his eyes unfocused as he found the same blinking prompt he had been waving away. "Do it now," Max said, "while the wall's up and nothing's coming, because nobody should make a permanent choice with a hound on top of them."
Marcus went first, reading his list aloud in the flat voice of a man calling a roll: "Bulwark Stance, Taunting Roar, Piercing Thrust, Iron Resolve, Second Wind." Jackson was propped against a dumpster with the leather guard strapped over his healed arm, and he answered at once. "Taunting Roar, because it drags every hound in the plaza onto the one guy built to take it." Elena shook her head and said, "Bulwark, because you plant your feet and nothing moves you, and that's the whole job." Max offered, "The Roar keeps them off the squishies when the packs get bigger than the wall, but it's your call." Marcus listened to all of them, grunted, and said, "I hold ground, I don't herd, so it's Bulwark Stance." The window flashed, and he rolled his shoulders like a man settling into a new coat.
Elena's list read like the index of a spell book: Ember Rain, Frost Snare, Arc Lash, Mana Spring, Flame Veil. "Mana Spring would keep me casting all night," she said slowly, "but Ember Rain is the one that actually kills things." Sarah was scrubbing her daggers clean on a dead hound's pelt, and she did not look up. "A pack of thirty will be on top of us long before your spring fills anything," she said. "Pick the one that keeps you alive," Marcus told her. Max said nothing, because he had seen what a burning hound did when it was still running at your friend. Elena closed her eyes and chose Ember Rain, and a faint heat bloomed in the wood of her staff, and the air around her trembled for a second like a road in July.
Jackson's list ran Cleave, Bloodthirst, Berserker's Roar, Guard Break and Leap Strike, and he read it through gritted teeth while David tied off a strip of torn leather. "Leap Strike," he said, grinning with half his mouth, "because next time I want to be the one coming over the wall." Marcus snorted and said, "Jumping at things is how your arm ended up in a hound's gullet." David did not look up from the knot. "Bloodthirst heals you every time you land a hit," he said quietly, "and I can't put you back together every time." The grin faded off Jackson's face; he looked at the new scar crawling along his forearm, then at the heap of dead hounds, and let out a long breath. "Fine," he muttered, "Bloodthirst." The broadsword glowed a dull red for a heartbeat, like a coal someone had just breathed on.
Sarah listened to all of it without speaking, and when her turn came she recited her options in a monotone: Hamstring, Vital Strike, Dust Veil, Blade Flurry, Mark Prey. Elena asked her, "What are you thinking?" Sarah looked back with the dried blood still streaked across her cheek and said, "The next one." Jackson offered, "Blade Flurry, because it sounds cool as hell," and Marcus said, "Hamstring, because hounds are big and legs aren't." She let them both finish. "Vital Strike," she said, and that was the end of the debate. Her daggers took on a faint dark sheen, as though the steel had learned to want something, and she slid them home without another word.
David's list was the longest, because the Battle Medic's tree branched in every direction: Bone Knit, Triage Pulse, Adrenal Shot, Clean Burn, Steady Hands. He whispered the names and then went quiet, staring at his hands. "Triage Pulse," Elena urged, "because it heals all of us at once." Marcus shook his head and said, "Bone Knit, because one arm held together by a spell is the difference between a squad and a funeral." David looked at Jackson, at the seam of fresh scar and the dark crescent of blood still caked on his sleeve. "I put that back together, and I'd never touched a bone before today," he said, so softly the others leaned in to hear. "If it happens again, I want to do it right." He chose Bone Knit, and pale light ran up his arms to the elbows and sank into the skin, and for the first time since the plaza his hands stopped shaking.
Max opened his own window last. The five-option prompt unfolded across his vision, cold and clean, and he read it three times to make sure he had not missed a trap in the wording. Then he read the list aloud, flat as a quartermaster's inventory, so the others could weigh in:
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SKILL SELECTION AVAILABLE (CLASS LEVEL 5) |
| INDIVIDUAL: MAX WILLIS | CLASS: GRAVE LORD (G) |
| SELECT ONE (1) OF FIVE (5) OPTIONS. SELECTION IS PERMANENT. |
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| [1] SOUL SIPHON (PASSIVE) |
| Minion kills restore 2% MAX MP. +0.1% per 10 WIS. |
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| [2] BONE LANCE (ACTIVE | 25 MP | COOLDOWN 3S) |
| Piercing bone javelin. Damage scales with INT. Pierces 2 targets. |
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| [3] OSSEOUS FUSION (ACTIVE | 60 MP) |
| Fuses 2 skeletons into 1 Bone Brute (2 minion slots, ~2.5X stats). |
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| [4] BONE WARD (ACTIVE | 40 MP | COOLDOWN 45S) |
| 10S bone plating absorbs 3X CON in damage, then bursts as shards. |
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| [5] RAISE SKELETAL MINION II (ENHANCEMENT) |
| Mana cost 30 -> 22. Skeleton strength scales with corpse mass. |
| Destroyed minions leave a bone cache (60S): re-raise at half cost. |
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The reactions came in a pile. "Soul Siphon," said Jackson, newly converted to the joys of healing on a hit, "because that's free mana for the rest of the tutorial." Elena countered, "Bone Ward, because you're the one thing in this alley we can't afford to lose." Marcus scratched his jaw and said, "Bone Lance, because a man ought to carry something sharper than a bone toothpick." From the shadow of the bank wall, Sarah asked, "What happens to a necromancer standing in front of a thousand hounds with no corpses?" Nobody had an answer to that, and everyone turned to look at Max, and nobody told him what to pick.
Max had been running the numbers since he read the first line, and they kept coming out the same. Soul Siphon was nothing in a lull and a trickle in a fight, Bone Lance would turn him into a gunner standing in front of the wall he needed to stand behind, and Osseous Fusion would trade bodies for quality at the moment he needed both. Bone Ward was a panic button for a problem he intended not to have. What had nearly killed him ten minutes ago was mana, and what had nearly killed Jackson was one hound that went over the wall instead of through it. "Mana is the choke point," he said, "and the skeletons are my whole army, so I'm upgrading the army." He pressed his palm against the fifth line, and the window closed around the decision like a lid:
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| SKILL ACQUIRED: [RAISE SKELETAL MINION II] (ENHANCEMENT) |
| MANA COST REDUCED: 30 MP -> 22 MP |
| MINION STRENGTH NOW SCALES WITH SOURCE CORPSE MASS |
| BONE CACHE: DESTROYED MINIONS LEAVE REMAINS FOR 60S (RE-RAISE: 11 MP) |
| SELECTION LOCKED. NEXT SKILL SELECTION: CLASS LEVEL 10 |
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The change reached him as a sensation rather than a sight, a faint tightening in the pathways the spell ran through, as though a cord that had always been frayed had been braided. He could not test it with all twelve slots full and no empty bone to spend, but the text had been clear enough. Bigger corpses would make better skeletons, and every broken one would leave a seed for a cheap resurrection. He looked at the nearest hound, six hundred pounds of dead meat, and thought about what a thing like that would become in an hour. It was a good feeling, and he hated how good it felt.
Marcus asked the question the rest of them had been circling. "Okay," he said, dragging a forearm across his eyes, "we're leveled, we're stocked, and the wave's hours off, so do we sit in this alley and wait?" Max looked up at the shattered office tower, where the System's sapphire countdown rippled against the glass, and shook his head. "Wave 2 hits in a little over three hours, and if Wave 1 was a preview, it's going to be bigger," he said. "This alley holds twelve skeletons and six people, and against a bigger wave that isn't a defense, it's a grave." He wanted the packs thinned while they were still small, he told them, and every survivor with a weapon standing on one side of a line they had chosen themselves.
"Leaving a choke point is how you die," Sarah said flatly. Elena rounded on her, and her voice cracked on the last word. "People are dying right now while we stand here arguing about it." Jackson flexed his scarred arm and said nothing, and David was staring toward the plaza as though he could already hear it. Marcus looked from one woman to the other, and then at the twelve skeletons waiting in their silent line. "We move, we stay tight, and we're back in this alley before the next wave," he said. "Anybody who breaks formation is on their own."
They went out in formation, the twelve skeletons in a tight wedge with Marcus and Jackson on the points and the rest of the squad inside the arrowhead. Max walked in the middle with the Crude Bone Dagger sheathed on his hip and the taste of blood at the back of his throat. The plaza had become a slaughterhouse floor. Bodies lay in drifts where the hounds had run them down, people in business suits and joggers and pajamas, and the pavement was slick enough in places that the skeletons' feet left clean pale prints in the red. "Jesus Christ," Jackson whispered, and nobody answered him. The transit bus Arthur Pendelton had climbed was on its side with its roof peeled back like a sardine tin, and a single navy dress shoe lay in the road beside it. Max looked at the shoe for a second and then looked away, because it did not belong to the arithmetic.
Seven hounds were feeding in the shadow of the bank's marble steps, their muzzles buried in what was left of a heap of bodies. The sound was low and wet, and Max understood it a moment before his stomach did: it was the sound of something enjoying itself. "Strays," Elena whispered, "split off from the horde to eat." Marcus gave the signal without a word, the skeletons spread into a crescent, Sarah vanished along the wall, and Elena raised her staff with her lips already moving. One of the hounds lifted its head, red to the eyes, and sniffed the air, and the rest followed its gaze like a single animal. Then they came.
The fight lasted less than a minute. Elena screamed for everyone to get down, and her Ember Rain fell in a glittering curtain over the pack, a hundred burning motes that clung to fur and flesh, and two hounds went down shrieking as their hides blistered and ran. The skeletons met the rest with shield and sword, and one hound lost its lower jaw to a bone blade and kept coming, until a second blade took the top of its skull. A big male clamped onto a skeleton's arm and tore it off at the shoulder, and the thing fell apart in a clatter of pale bone that did not vanish but lay glowing faintly where it had dropped. "Half price," Max muttered, and he spent eleven points of mana to haul it back to its feet. The fourth hound took Marcus's spear through the shoulder and Sarah's Vital Strike through the base of the skull, a dark bright blow that dropped it mid-stride, and the sapphire light came again as it fell.
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| INDIVIDUAL: MAX WILLIS |
| CLASS PROGRESSION: GRAVE LORD (LEVEL 7 -> LEVEL 8) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 INT, +3 WIS, +3 CON |
| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +3 |
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| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The level took the weariness out of his bones. He spent his three points the way he had spent all the others, one each into Intelligence, Wisdom and Vitality, and felt INT 44, WIS 44 and VIT 23 settle into place. The last three hounds died while he was still reading the window, one to the skeletons, one to Jackson's broadsword as Bloodthirst pulled a thin red warmth up his sword arm, and one to Marcus's Bulwark Stance, which turned the beast's lunge into a dead stop against the shield and let Sarah open its throat from behind. "Oh, I like that," Jackson breathed, flexing his fingers as the warmth spread. Seven carcasses lay steaming in the shadow of the bank, and a pale scatter of loot glowed up through the blood. Nobody moved to collect it, because from somewhere to the east, beyond a block of smoking storefronts, the ring of steel on bone and the raw, ragged noise of people screaming for help had begun to reach them. "East," Sarah said, already moving.
They found the pharmacy two blocks on, a squat brick building with a green cross hanging by one bolt over a doorway that had been barricaded with shelving and a vending machine. Seven hounds were throwing themselves against the barricade, and two more lay dead on the threshold with their skulls staved in, half buried in the rubble they had died trying to climb. Behind the shelving a ragged line of survivors fought with whatever the System had given them: a former soldier in a tactical vest with an iron shortsword notched like a saw, a young Shadow Stalker who had slashed a looter's arm open in the plaza less than an hour ago and now bled from a gash across his scalp, a woman with a cracked staff and an empty look, a heavyset man swinging a club slick to the elbow. There were maybe a dozen of them left standing. The soldier was roaring, "Hold the door, hold the fucking door!" A hound had hooked its jaws through a gap in the shelving and dragged a man's leg out to the knee, and he was screaming in a way that Max would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life.
Max did not need to give an order. The wedge hit the pack from the flank while the hounds were still facing the door, and twelve bone blades went into them from behind before they could turn. Marcus took a lunging beast on the Bulwark and held it for a heartbeat while Sarah went in under its belly and Vital Strike opened its spine, and Elena's Ember Rain fell on the two chewing at the door, so that they spun away burning and ripping at their own flanks and ran straight onto skeleton shields. David slid through the gap in the shelving with his hands already glowing, found the man with the mangled leg, and put his palms on the exposed bone. "Bone Knit," he whispered, and the shattered shin straightened under his fingers, and the man's scream broke into a sob. The seventh hound died on the soldier's sword, a lucky thrust through the roof of its mouth that left him standing over it with his chest heaving and blood sheeting off his blade.
For a few seconds nobody spoke. The soldier wiped his blade on a dead hound's pelt, looked at the skeletons standing in the street with their swords dripping, and then at Max, and Max watched him decide not to be afraid. "Reyes," he said, offering a bloody hand. "Ex-Marine, Vanguard Warrior, and you just saved twelve people." He nodded at the threshold, where eight bodies lay in a neat row that someone had taken the care to arrange. "We started with twenty, and we were holding until the shop ran out of shelves." Behind him the survivors were staring at the skeletons with the glazed, naked fear of people watching something that should not be on their side. The woman with the cracked staff took a step backward and whispered a word that sounded like a prayer.
Max took the hand because he needed the information that came with it. "Packs of every size out there," Reyes said, "the biggest running fifty strong, and anybody caught in the open without a wall at their back is already dead." Max told him about the alley, the choke point and the twelve skeletons, and about Wave 2, which the System had promised would be bigger than the first. "Bring your people," he said. "Stay inside the formation while we move, hold the left side of the line under Marcus when we reach the alley, and don't run, don't scatter, and take whatever those corpses drop." Reyes held his eyes for a long moment and said, "That's not an offer." "No," Max agreed, "but it's the best one you'll get today." Reyes looked at the dead in their neat row, at the survivors behind him, at the twelve silent skeletons in the street, and said yes.
They moved out with the survivors in the middle of the formation, twelve walking wounded and twelve walking dead. Three strays came out of a side street before they had gone a block, lean and mangy compared to the pack they had left behind, and the skeletons dropped two of them in a single clean rush. The last got as far as Marcus's shield, where Bulwark Stance turned its lunge into a dead stop, and it died with Elena's staff cracking down on its skull. Max felt the final flash of experience flicker across his mind, small and bright, and then he checked the number and almost laughed. Jackson caught the look on his face and asked, "How close?" Max shook his head and said, "Fifty points, and not a single hound left to give them to me."
From the top of a parking structure at the edge of the plaza they could see how much worse it was. Half a mile off, a pack the size of a football team was tearing at the walls of a food court, fifty hounds working in concert with their heads down and their haunches pumping, and the screaming from inside had a thin, high, hopeless quality that carried across the whole district. "A pack that size would roll the alley in seconds," Reyes said quietly. Elena said, "There are people in there," and it was not a question. Max counted the hounds twice: fifty of them was three thousand experience and a wall of fangs he could not yet break. "Not today," he said, "because a squad that dies chasing numbers is worth nothing at the barricade, and we'll come back for packs like that when the army's bigger." He turned his back on the food court, and the screaming followed them all the way down the stairs.
Back at the mouth of the alley, with the survivors sorting their wounds behind the dumpsters and the skeletons standing in a bone-white line across the road, Max finally let himself check. He pulled his status window into the air in front of his chest, and the cold blue glow slid across the blood drying on his hands. He read it the way he used to read a raid log, looking for the leak in the numbers, the place where a small thing was about to become a bigger one:
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| NAME: MAX WILLIS | RACE: HUMAN (G-RANK) | CLASS: GRAVE LORD (G) |
| LEVEL: 8 (750/800 XP) | RACE LEVEL: 4 (675/700 XP) |
| BLOODLINE: DREAD SOVEREIGN (LOCKED @ LEVEL 10) |
| HP: 230/230 | MP: 352/410 (262 AVAILABLE | 90 RESERVED) |
| STR: 13 | AGI: 13 | VIT: 23 | CON: 37 | INT: 44 | WIS: 44 | PER: 13 |
| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS: 0 |
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| SKILL: [RAISE SKELETAL MINION II] | COST: 22 MP (BONE CACHE: 11 MP) |
| SKILL: [AURA OF MOMENTUM] | +10% SPEED | 22% OF MAX MP RESERVED |
| MINIONS: 12 / 12 SKELETAL |
| NEXT EVOLUTION: LEVEL 10 (CLASS AND RACE) |
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Fifty experience points from Level 9, and twenty-five from his next Race level. The two numbers sat side by side in the window like a pair of dice. Max closed it, and the sky answered with another that was not his, a wide pale rectangle unrolling across the glass faces of the towers and lighting the whole street the color of a hospital:
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| SECTOR 77 STATUS UPDATE |
| ELAPSED: 01:12:36 | NEXT WAVE: WAVE 2 IN 02:47:24 |
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| INDUCTEES REMAINING: 1,204 / 2,500 (48.2%) |
| BEASTS REMAINING: 1,983 / 2,500 (79.3%) |
| BEASTS CULLED: 517 |
| ATTRITION RATE: WITHIN PROJECTED PARAMETERS |
| WAVE 2 SIZE: ESCALATED (EXACT FIGURE WITHHELD) |
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He stood there while the numbers hung over him. More than half of the people who had arrived in Sector 77 were already dead, nearly four of every five beasts were still alive, and in two hours and forty-seven minutes the System would open its portals again. Marcus came up beside him, read the sky, and spat into the gutter. "Half of them gone in an hour," he said, "so what happens to the other half by morning?" "That depends on how many of them are standing behind us," Max said, and he felt the weight of twelve skeletons and twelve survivors and five people at his back settle into the same arithmetic as everything else. He did the division in his head, because it was the only kind of prayer he had left. At sixty points a hound, there was enough experience left walking these streets to make a monster out of whoever lived long enough to collect it, and Max Willis intended to be the one who collected.