The Funnel

CHAPTER 5: THE FUNNEL

The alley stank like a slaughterhouse floor, and the stink was a beacon. Thirty dead hounds lay swelling at its mouth beside the black sludge of the ones Max had raised, and every stir of wind carried the warm copper reek of them out across the plaza. Behind the dumpsters Reyes's twelve survivors sat with their backs against the brick, passing a single Diluted Health Salve from hand to hand and not talking. Max stood at the barricade with twelve skeletons in a line in front of him and watched the countdown in the sky tick past two hours and forty-one minutes. "They're going to smell this from a mile off," Sarah said quietly at his shoulder. "That's the idea," Max said.

The first pack found them nineteen minutes later. Ten hounds came down the avenue at a loose, loping trot with their noses to the pavement, following the blood trail the squad had left on its way back from the pharmacy, and they did not even pause when they saw the bone wall. Marcus rolled his neck until it cracked and set his feet. "Ten," he said. "Bulwark's up, Reyes has the left, and nobody leaves the line to chase." Reyes's people scrambled to their feet with their clubs and staves and notched blades, faces white, and the young Shadow Stalker with the bandaged scalp, a kid named Theo, licked his lips and drew his knife. Then the lead hound hit the shields at a dead run, and a skeleton opened its throat on the first stroke, and the world went sapphire before its body stopped moving.

The chime rang through all six of them at once, and Max felt it land somewhere deeper than before, as though two bells had been struck in the same breath. Jackson laughed out loud in the middle of the fighting. "Nine!" he shouted. "Fuck yes, nine!" The window slid open across Max's vision, and for once the System had two pieces of good news to give him:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: CLASS LEVEL 9 AND RACE LEVEL 5 ACHIEVED |

| CLASS PROGRESSION: GRAVE LORD (LEVEL 8 -> LEVEL 9) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 INT, +3 WIS, +3 CON |

| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +3 |

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| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 4 -> LEVEL 5) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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The class and race gains together left his Intelligence sitting at forty-eight, two points shy of the next threshold, and Max did not hesitate. He put two of his free points into Intelligence and the third into Vitality, and the moment INT 50 locked into place a second window chimed on top of the first. His Vitality rose to twenty-five and his health pool to two hundred and fifty, and the bone tethers in his skull suddenly had room for two more. He did not have to look far for raw material, because the first hound was still twitching at his feet:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: MINION CAPACITY THRESHOLD REACHED |

| INTELLIGENCE MILESTONE (50 INT) ATTAINED |

| BASE MINION CAPACITY INCREASED: +1 (TOTAL BASE CAP: 7) |

| TRAIT MODIFIER APPLIED: SOVEREIGN'S AURA (2X MULTIPLIER) |

| NEW MAXIMUM MINION CAPACITY: 14 SKELETAL MINIONS |

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He raised it for twenty-two points of mana, and for the first time he saw what the upgrade had bought him. The skeleton that clawed out of the sludge was not the lean, spare frame he was used to; it stood half a head taller than the others, its ribs as thick as a man's wrist and its shoulders broadened by the six hundred pounds of meat it had been built from. Its bone shield came out of the mana as wide as a car door. "Those new ones are bigger," Jackson said, staring at it over his sword. "Bigger corpse, better bones," Max said, and he raised a second one from the next hound to fall and slotted both of them into the center of the wall.

The rest of the pack died the way the alley had taught them to die. They threw themselves at the shields and found nowhere to go, and the bone swords went through eyes and throats and bellies until the asphalt was a fresh red slick on top of the old brown one. Sarah's Vital Strike dropped one in mid-lunge with a single dark flash at the base of its skull, and Jackson's Bloodthirst flared red as his broadsword went through another's spine. On the left flank Reyes killed one with a thrust through the ear, and Theo hamstrung another and then stabbed it eleven times in the neck while it screamed, long after it had stopped needing to be stabbed. "It's dead, kid," Reyes said, pulling him back by the collar. "It's dead, you can stop now." Eight to the squad, two to the survivors, and the pack was a heap of steaming fur in less than four minutes.

In the lull afterward Elena cooked. She set a slab of David's Raw Beast Meat on the lid of a dumpster and held a thread of fire under it until the fat spat and the fibers went gray, and the smell of it made Max's stomach clench with a hunger he had completely forgotten he could feel. It tasted like scorched liver and copper, and every one of them ate it. A heavyset survivor with a club, a man who had introduced himself as Hal and said he used to sell insurance, chewed his share slowly and grinned at nobody in particular. "Guess what nobody's buying anymore," he said, and Jackson laughed so hard he choked. Even Sarah smiled, briefly, before she went back to watching the avenue.

Max ate standing up, with one eye on his status window. The Level 9 bar was filling at the same steady sixty points a kill as before, and the Race bar beneath it crept along at half that, the way it always had. Eighteen or nineteen more kills would put him at the edge of Level 10 and evolution, and the bloodline line at the bottom of his status had begun to feel less like a promise and more like a door with light under it. "What's Level 10 do?" David asked him quietly, watching him read. "Evolution," Max said. "And whatever the Dread Sovereign is, it wakes up."

The second pack did not come from the plaza. The far end of the alley opened onto a narrow service lane that the squad had blocked with an overturned delivery van, and seven hounds came over the roof of it without a sound, landing among the survivors in the dark at the back of the alley before anyone knew they were there. Hal was the first to see them, and he got his club halfway up before a hound took him by the throat and shook. The sound his neck made was a wet, grinding crack, and his body flapped in the beast's jaws like a coat on a line while his blood sprayed across the brick in a fan as wide as a man's arms. Priya, the woman with the cracked staff, screamed his name, and the second hound was already on her before the scream had finished leaving her mouth.

Max spun the wall without thinking, and it was like turning his own body. Six skeletons peeled off the barricade and came down the alley in a clattering run, and the two big ones he had just raised hit the hound on Priya so hard that it folded against the van with its ribs caved in. Marcus left his Bulwark at the front, roaring, and drove his spear through a hound that had its jaws in a survivor's calf. "They're in the back," he bellowed, "get to the back!" Elena's Ember Rain fell in a burning sheet over the van, and two hounds came off its roof alight and screaming. Sarah killed one in the dark without anybody seeing how, and David knelt over Priya with his hands already glowing and blood up to his wrists. By the time it was over the squad had killed seven and Reyes and Theo had killed two more that came over the van behind the first wave, and Hal was lying on his back with no throat and his club still in his hand.

They stood around him in a loose ring while the brick dripped. Priya held his hand and sobbed in long, dry heaves that sounded like someone being sick, and Theo stood with his knife hanging at his side and stared at the hole where Hal's throat had been. Max looked at the body and could not stop the thought that came next, because it came in the same cold voice as all the other arithmetic. Two hundred and fifty pounds, freshly dead, a full human skeleton already shaped for a sword and shield, no transformation needed. Theo saw where his eyes had gone. "Don't you fucking dare," the kid said, and his voice cracked in half. "I wasn't going to," Max said, and he was not sure whether that was the truth.

Marcus found him at the barricade a few minutes later, after they had dragged Hal to the back of the alley and covered him with a pelt. "You were thinking about it," the sergeant said, low enough that only Max could hear. "I was thinking about it," Max admitted. "If the wall breaks and it's him or Priya, I'll think about it again, and I won't ask anybody's permission." Marcus was quiet for a long moment, looking out at the avenue. "Then let's make sure the wall doesn't break," he said finally, and he clapped Max once on the shoulder, hard, and went back to his place in the line.

The third pack was six hounds and it barely lasted a minute. They came straight up the avenue at a dead run and hit the wall like birds hitting a window, and five of them died on the bone swords and Marcus's spear while Reyes finished the sixth with a two-handed chop that took most of its head off. Max watched the Level 9 bar fill on each kill, sixty and sixty and sixty, until the last kill pushed it to the very end and the System did something it had never done before. The bar did not roll over. It filled to the edge and began to pulse, a slow, heavy white-gold throb like a second heartbeat, and a window opened across Max's vision with a chime so deep he felt it in his teeth:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: CLASS EVOLUTION THRESHOLD REACHED |

| CLASS: GRAVE LORD | LEVEL 9 (1,100 / 1,100 XP) |

| STATUS: READY FOR EVOLUTION (LEVEL 10, F-RANK) |

| INITIATE CLASS EVOLUTION? [Y/N] |

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| EXCESS CLASS EXPERIENCE (50 XP) REDIRECTED TO RACE PROGRESSION |

| RACE: HUMAN, G-RANK | LEVEL 5 (625 / 1,000 XP) |

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"Ready for evolution," Jackson read off his own window, and his voice cracked with something that was almost joy. "Holy shit, we can evolve right now." Elena checked hers, then Marcus, then Sarah and David, and the same pulsing bar sat in every one of their eyes. Max read his window three times, and the catch in it fell into place all at once, the way the answer to a puzzle always did. "We can evolve the class," he said slowly, "but race is still at 5, and class and race only give you the Perfect Evolution title if they evolve together." Marcus asked, "And what does a title get us?" "Plus five to every stat, permanently," Max said, "and it only gets bigger at the next rank."

"So we either evolve now and lose the title, or we sit at 9 until race catches up," Elena said. David did the math out loud, his lips moving, and his face fell: "Race is five levels behind, and it moves at half speed." "We decide after, because none of us knows what an evolution actually does to you," Max said, "and for all we know it drops you on your face for an hour, and I'm not finding that out with a hound on top of me." He opened his mouth to say more and never got to, because Sarah had climbed onto the dumpster lid with her daggers in her hands and was staring out across the plaza with a stillness he had learned to be afraid of. "Then nobody's evolving anything," she said. "Look."

It was the food court pack. Max knew it before he could count it, because nothing else in the sector moved like that, forty-odd hounds running shoulder to shoulder in a single blood-dark mass with their heads down and their muzzles black to the eyes. The ground shook faintly under them. They came across the plaza at a flat, tireless gallop, straight down the blood trail the other three packs had followed, and the sound of their claws on the asphalt was like hail on a tin roof. Behind the dumpsters one of Reyes's survivors began to cry, and another began to pray, and Reyes snapped at both of them to shut up and pick up a weapon. "There's no running from that," Marcus said. "So we hold."

Max had fourteen slots and twelve skeletons, the back-alley fight having cost him two whose caches faded while he was busy keeping Priya alive, and the third pack had left him a pile of fresh carcasses to fill the gap. He raised two more in quick succession for forty-four points of mana, and they came up big and dense and hungry-eyed, and he set them on top of the corpse pile at the barricade where the last alpha had used the dead as a ramp. "Elena, how much have you got?" he asked. "Two Ember Rains, maybe three if I eat every shard I've got," she said, already crunching one between her teeth. "Wait till they're piled up in the choke point and drop the first one on the pile," Max said. "Not before."

"Left side, you hold your ground or you die where you stand," Reyes was telling his people, walking down the line and putting his hand on each of their shoulders in turn. Theo nodded, white to the lips, and Priya picked up Hal's club because her staff had cracked through the middle. Jackson stood beside Marcus with his broadsword in both hands and his scarred forearm wrapped in the leather guard, and he was grinning the way people grin when they are about to vomit. David stood behind them with his hands glowing faintly, already lit. Sarah slid off the dumpster and disappeared into the shadow of the bank wall, and Max stood in the center of the formation with the Crude Bone Dagger in his hand and fourteen tethers humming in his skull like taut wire.

The pack hit the wall at full gallop. The front rank of skeletons rocked back a full step under the weight, bone feet skidding in the blood, and for one awful heartbeat Max felt the whole line bend like a bow. Then the two big skeletons on the corpse pile brought their swords down, and the line held, and the hounds behind the front rank piled into the ones in front with nowhere to go. Jaws snapped and iron fangs shrieked off bone, and the noise in the narrow alley was so loud it stopped being sound and became a pressure on the chest. A hound got its head between two shields and Marcus put his spear through its eye, and the first of the forty-six died with the shaft still standing out of its skull.

Max felt the kill land, and something was wrong with it. The usual flicker came, but it came in the wrong place, the class bar sitting full and pulsing and untouched while the race bar beneath it jumped forward like it had been kicked. A second kill fell, then a third, and the party notification flashed across his vision with each one, and he stared at the numbers while the alley roared around him:

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| PARTY NOTIFICATION: G-RANK IRON-FANG HOUND SLAIN |

| PARTY EXPERIENCE EARNED: +0 CLASS XP (CAPPED) | +90 RACE XP (FUNNELED) |

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Ninety. Not thirty, ninety: the sixty his class would have earned if its bar had anywhere left to put it, rerouted, and the thirty his race would have gotten anyway, all poured into the same bar. "It's all going to race," he said out loud, to nobody, and then louder, to everyone: "Every point we earn is going to race now, all of it!" Elena heard him over the roar and shouted back, "Is that good?" Max watched the race bar lurch forward again as a skeleton beheaded a hound at the top of the pile, three times faster than he had ever seen it move. "It's very good," he yelled, "if we live long enough to spend it!"

They lived long enough to see the first one land. The fifth kill went down under Jackson's broadsword with Bloodthirst flaring red up his arm, and the race bar filled and rolled over, and the chime rang, and all six of them were suddenly full again. It was like being dragged out of deep water by the hair. Max's mana had been sinking toward a third, and his thigh was bleeding where a hound had ripped it with a lucky claw between two shields, and both were gone in an instant:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 5 -> LEVEL 6) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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He understood then what the funnel really meant, and it was more than speed. Every race level refilled the tank, and every race level was now three times closer than it had been, which meant the squad would be dragged back from the edge again and again for as long as the hounds kept coming. "Don't save anything!" he shouted. "Every level refills us, so spend it all!" Elena did not need to be told twice, and her first Ember Rain fell on the pile at the choke point in a burning sheet that turned nine hounds into a writhing, shrieking bonfire. The stench of cooking meat and burning hair rolled over the barricade so thickly that Priya doubled over and retched, and then straightened up and swung Hal's club into the face of a hound that came through the smoke at her.

The skeletons were dying now, too. A pair of hounds ripped one of the old, spare-framed ones apart between them like a wishbone, and it collapsed into a heap of glowing fragments that Max snatched back from the dead for eleven points before the cache could fade. Another lost its skull to an iron bite and came back from the cache seconds later, new bone grinding together in the mud. He was spending mana as fast as he could think it, twenty-two and eleven and eleven again, and each time the tank ran low a race level came along and filled it. On the left flank a hound dragged one of Reyes's survivors over the dumpster by the hair, a quiet man in a cardigan whose name Max had never learned, and the man was gone into the pack before anyone could reach him. They heard him for about four seconds.

Theo went down a few minutes later with a hound on top of him and its jaws locked around his shoulder, and David went over the line after him, which nobody had told him to do. He hit the hound with his club in the side of the head three times, as hard as he had hit the burned female in the alley, until it let go, and then he was on his knees in the gore with his hands on the boy's mangled shoulder and his mouth moving. "Bone Knit," he said, and then he said it again, and the shattered joint ground back together under his palms. Sarah came out of nowhere and killed the hound with a single dark stroke while it was still shaking its head. The eighteenth kill fell a second later, and the chime rang again:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 6 -> LEVEL 7) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |

| WISDOM MILESTONE (50 WIS): AURA RESERVATION REDUCED 22% -> 21% |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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The second Ember Rain came down on the corpse pile and the third right after it, Elena swaying on her feet with mana shards crunching between her teeth like hard candy. The pack had stopped coming in waves and simply become a single grinding mass at the mouth of the alley, climbing over its own dead to reach the skeletons on top of the pile and being cut down as it climbed. Marcus held the center with Bulwark Stance and his spear arm working like a piston, and his shield was so thick with blood and hair that it looked furred. Jackson had stopped laughing and was simply swinging, each kill sending a thin red wash of Bloodthirst back up his arm and into the wounds the hounds kept giving him. "How many?" Marcus shouted. "Twenty-something!" Max shouted back, and that was a lie, because he knew exactly how many it was.

It was thirty-three when the pack made its last real push, and it came the way the alpha had, over the top. Six hounds went up the pile together in a crimson wave, trampling the burning carcasses, and two of them made it past the big skeletons and came down inside the line among the survivors. Reyes met one in the air with his shortsword and they went over together in a snarling tangle, and Max sent two skeletons back into the alley to tear it off him. The other landed six feet from Max and turned on him with its mouth open. He had done this once already today, and he did it again, dropping under the jaws and driving the dagger up under its chin into the soft floor of its skull, and this time he did not even close his eyes. That kill was the thirty-fourth, and it filled the bar for the third time in twenty minutes:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 7 -> LEVEL 8) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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After that, the pack broke. The last dozen hounds turned and tried to run back across the plaza, and Max let the skeletons off their leash and sent them after the stragglers in a pale, clattering hunt. Four more died to the squad in the open street, and the survivors, who had found their courage in the last ten minutes, chased down and killed eight more between them with clubs and knives and a broken staff. The rest of the forty-six were already dead in the alley, piled six deep across the barricade in a mound that smoked and hissed and twitched. When it was over, nothing was moving at the mouth of the alley except the blood, which was still running downhill in slow, dark rivulets toward the storm drains.

Two of Reyes's people were dead, the man in the cardigan and a woman who had been crushed under the corpse pile when it shifted, and Reyes stood over her body for a long time without saying anything. Theo's shoulder was whole again but he could not stop shaking, and Priya sat against the wall with Hal's club across her knees and a stranger's blood drying on her face. Jackson had started laughing again, high and breathless, and Marcus let him do it. David was sitting in the blood with his eyes closed, and Elena was asleep sitting up with a shard still in her hand. Sarah was the only one still standing guard, and when Max looked at her she gave him one small nod, which from Sarah was a eulogy and a medal at the same time.

Max pulled up his status window with hands that were no longer shaking at all. He wondered, distantly, when that had stopped. The cold blue glow lit the gore on his sleeves, and he read the numbers slowly, the way he had once read loot tables, hunting for the one that mattered:

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| NAME: MAX WILLIS | RACE: HUMAN (G-RANK) | CLASS: GRAVE LORD (G) |

| LEVEL: 9 (1,100/1,100, EVOLUTION READY) | RACE LEVEL: 8 (445/1,600 XP) |

| BLOODLINE: DREAD SOVEREIGN (LOCKED @ LEVEL 10) |

| HP: 196/280 | MP: 241/500 (136 AVAILABLE | 105 RESERVED) |

| STR: 17 | AGI: 17 | VIT: 28 | CON: 44 | INT: 53 | WIS: 51 | PER: 17 |

| 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 | 21% OF MAX MP RESERVED |

| MINIONS: 11 / 14 SKELETAL |

| XP FUNNEL: ACTIVE (100% TO RACE) | 2,955 RACE XP TO LEVEL 10 |

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Two thousand nine hundred and fifty-five race experience, he thought, and divided it by ninety without meaning to. Thirty-three hounds, give or take, and then Level 10 for class and race in the same breath, the Perfect Evolution title, the bloodline, and whatever the Dread Sovereign turned out to be. Marcus lowered himself onto an overturned crate beside him with a groan that came from somewhere around his knees. He asked, "Evolve now, or wait for the title?" "Wait," Max said, "because thirty-three hounds gets us both, with the title on top." Marcus looked out at the mound of dead hounds, at the bone-white line of skeletons standing in the smoke, and at the sky over the towers, and he laughed once without any humor in it at all. "Wave 2's going to bring a hell of a lot more than thirty-three."

As if the System had been listening, the countdown in the sky rolled down through its last seconds, and every face in the alley turned up to watch it. The numbers turned from blue to a deep, bloody crimson as they dropped, and the air went cold the way it had in the induction room, a sudden dry chill that raised every hair on Max's arms. Somewhere out past the plaza, faint and far away, the first of the three portal scars began to glow again like a coal being breathed on. Max watched the last digits fall, and he found he was not afraid of them either:

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| SECTOR 77 STATUS UPDATE |

| ELAPSED: 03:00:00 | NEXT WAVE: WAVE 2 IN 01:00:00 |

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| INDUCTEES REMAINING: 1,036 / 2,500 (41.4%) |

| BEASTS REMAINING: 1,488 / 2,500 (59.5%) |

| BEASTS CULLED: 1,012 |

| WARNING: WAVE 2 PORTALS STABILIZING. PREPARE FOR ENGAGEMENT. |

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One hour. Behind him Reyes was counting his survivors out loud, nine where there had been twelve, and Jackson had finally stopped laughing. Max turned his back on the sky and looked at the mound of dead hounds piled across the barricade, forty-six of them still warm, every one a skeleton waiting to happen. "Everybody eat something," he said. "Everybody sleep if you can. In fifty-nine minutes, the System's going to bring us our thirty-three hounds, and I intend to collect every one of them."