The Awakening
The Awakening
CHAPTER 6: THE AWAKENING
Nobody slept. They tried, in shifts, curled against the brick with their weapons in their laps, but every scrape of wind across the plaza jerked someone upright with a hand on a hilt. The forty-six dead hounds at the mouth of the alley had begun to bloat in the heat, and the smell had thickened into something that coated the back of the throat like oil. Max sat on the overturned crate with his eyes on the avenue and his race bar open in the corner of his vision, 445 out of 1,600, and he waited the way a fisherman waits. "Thirty-three," Marcus muttered beside him, as if it were a prayer. "Thirty-three," Max agreed, and eight minutes later the first of them came.
Twelve hounds came up the avenue in a ragged line, lean stragglers from the edges of the first wave, and they did not hesitate when they saw the wall. Max let them come. The skeletons took them at the barricade the way they had taken every pack before them, shields locked and swords working, and the hounds died in the choke point with their iron jaws snapping at bone and finding nothing to break. Every kill flashed across his vision the same way, ninety and ninety and ninety, and the race bar jumped in long, greedy strides. Jackson took one through the ribs with Bloodthirst flaring, and Sarah took another so fast it was dead before it understood it had been hit. Reyes split the skull of the last one on the left flank, and when it was over Max counted eleven kills for the squad and one for the survivors.
"Twenty-two to go," Max said, and Elena laughed, a little wildly, from where she sat crunching a mana shard. "Listen to him," she said. "Like he's counting change." Theo was watching Max from the back of the alley with an expression Max could not read, his rebuilt shoulder still stiff in its sling, and Priya had fallen asleep against the van with Hal's club across her knees. The countdown in the sky read fifty-one minutes. Max raised three skeletons from the fresh corpses to fill the gaps in the wall, and the bone came up out of the sludge thick and heavy and hungry-eyed, and he watched the survivors flinch from each one.
The second attack came from two directions at once. Fourteen hounds hit the barricade and the delivery van at the back of the alley in the same instant, as though they had planned it, and this time Reyes was waiting at the van with three of his people and a skeleton Max had stationed there after Hal. "Back!" Reyes roared. "They're at the back again, hold it, hold it!" Max split the wall without thinking, five skeletons peeling off toward the van in a clattering run, and the first hound to come over the roof landed on a bone sword that went through its throat and out the top of its skull. The second died on Marcus's spear at the front, and the race bar rolled over:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 8 -> LEVEL 9) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |
| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The refill came like cold water down the spine, and Max spent it as fast as it came. A hound at the van got its jaws around one of Reyes's men by the hip and dragged him halfway over the roof before two skeletons pulled it apart between them, and the man came back down with blood pumping from a hole the size of a fist. "David!" Reyes bellowed, and David was already moving, sliding under the van with his hands lit pale. At the front Elena's Ember Rain fell on four hounds packed against the shields, and they burned shrieking, their fur going up like dry grass, and the skeletons put them out with their swords. When it was done the squad had twelve more kills and Reyes's people had two, and the man with the hole in his hip was alive and swearing at David in a high, thin, beautiful voice.
"Ten," Max said, and nobody laughed this time. The timer above the towers read forty-one minutes, and the race bar sat at 915 out of 1,800, so close to the end that he could feel it the way he could feel his skeletons, a pressure at the edge of thought. "Ten more and we're there," Jackson said, flexing his scarred forearm until the knuckles cracked. "Ten more and then what?" David asked quietly. "Then we find out what an evolution actually does," Max said. "One of us does, anyway." Marcus looked at him sideways and did not ask which one of them he meant.
The third attack was eleven hounds, and Max wanted every one of them. They came straight down the blood trail at a dead run, the same mindless line the others had taken, and he opened the wall a fraction to let them pour into the choke point where the shields could close on them like a jaw. Bone swords rose and fell. The fourth died to Sarah's Vital Strike, the sixth to Jackson's broadsword, the eighth with Marcus's spear through its eye, and Reyes killed one on the left that tried to climb the corpse pile. The last of them came over the barricade straight at Max with its mouth open, and he did not wait for it. He stepped into the leap with the speed aura wrapped around his legs and drove the Crude Bone Dagger up under its jaw, and as the hound died on his arm the race bar filled to the end and stopped:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, G-RANK (LEVEL 9 -> LEVEL 10) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +1 TO ALL STATS |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| RACE EVOLUTION AVAILABLE: HUMAN (G-RANK -> F-RANK) |
| CLASS EVOLUTION AVAILABLE: GRAVE LORD (G-RANK -> F-RANK) |
| NOTICE: SIMULTANEOUS EVOLUTION ELIGIBLE FOR PERFECT EVOLUTION TITLE |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
He felt it go through all six of them like a struck bell. Elena gasped, Jackson whooped and then put both hands over his mouth as though he had sworn in church, and Marcus simply closed his eyes and let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for three hours. Sarah read her window twice and then looked at Max, and so did everyone else, and the silence stretched. "Somebody has to go first," David said finally. "Somebody has to find out if it puts you on the floor." The timer in the sky read thirty-three minutes.
"Me," Max said. Marcus started to object and Max cut him off with a raised hand. "It's my wall," he said. "If it drops me, the skeletons hold their last order, and they don't need me awake to keep killing anything that walks into that choke point. If it drops you, Marcus, there's nobody at the front with a shield." Marcus held his eyes for a long moment, then jerked his chin at the brick wall behind the dumpsters. "Sit down first," the sergeant said. "If you're going to fall over, you're going to fall over sitting down."
Max sat with his back against the bank's wall, his dagger across his knees and his skeletons standing in a bone-white line between him and the avenue, and he opened the window. The System did not ask him whether he was ready. It simply laid the choice out in front of him, cold and complete, the way it had laid out his class in the induction room a lifetime ago:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SIMULTANEOUS EVOLUTION AVAILABLE |
| CLASS: GRAVE LORD (G) | RACE: HUMAN (G) | BOTH AT MILESTONE |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| SELECT CLASS EVOLUTION PATH: |
| [1] OSSUARY LORD (INT, WIS, CON) |
| [2] DREAD MARSHAL (INT, WIS, CON, VIT) |
| [3] DEATHCALLER (INT, WIS, AGI) |
| [4] CHARNEL WARDEN (CON, VIT, INT) |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| INITIATE EVOLUTION? [Y/N] |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
He did not need to read the options twice, because one of them had his own name written across it in a language older than the System. Dread. His trait was Sovereign's Aura and his bloodline was the Dread Sovereign, and the System had set a path in front of him that tied the two together like a knot. "Dread Marshal," he said out loud, so the others would know, and pressed his palm to the second line. Then he said yes, and the world went white.
The class went first. It did not hurt, not at first; it felt like being rewritten, a cold hand moving through the pathways the Grave Lord had carved into his skull and rerouting them one by one, the way water finds new channels when a dam breaks. He felt the old aura tear loose from its moorings and come back heavier, darker, a weight that settled over the alley like the shadow of a cloud. He felt the tethers to his skeletons thicken from threads into cables. When he opened his eyes the window was already waiting:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| CLASS EVOLUTION COMPLETE: GRAVE LORD (G) -> DREAD MARSHAL (F) |
| LEVEL 10 GRANTED: +9 INT, +9 WIS, +5 CON, +4 VIT, +9 FREE POINTS |
| (SAME GAINS AT EACH DREAD MARSHAL LEVEL HEREAFTER) |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| [AURA OF MOMENTUM] EVOLVED -> [AURA OF DREAD] |
| - Allies and minions in radius: +5% move/attack/cast speed (base) |
| - Enemies in radius suffer DREAD (scales with WIS): hesitate or flee |
| - Mana reservation: -2% per 10 WIS (minimum 5%) |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| NEW CLASS PASSIVE: [DREADBOUND LEGION] |
| - Skeletons carry the aura: enemies within 2 yds suffer DREAD |
| - Skeletons are immune to fear and stagger |
| - +15% minion damage against hesitating or fleeing enemies |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The race came next, and the race hurt. It started in his bones, a deep, grinding ache like growing pains compressed into seconds, and then it was in his muscles, every fiber pulling tight and then tighter, and then in his skin, which burned as though he had been lying in the sun for a week. He heard himself groan and could not stop it. The body he had brought with him from a dark apartment and a gaming chair was being taken apart and put back together a fraction denser, a fraction harder, a fraction less human than it had been. When it stopped, he was soaked in sweat and he could hear Elena's heartbeat from six feet away:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| RACE EVOLUTION COMPLETE: HUMAN (G-RANK) -> HUMAN (F-RANK) |
| FUTURE RACE LEVEL GAINS: +3 TO ALL STATS PER LEVEL |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| PERFECT EVOLUTION ACHIEVED (CLASS AND RACE EVOLVED SIMULTANEOUSLY) |
| TITLE GRANTED: [PERFECT EVOLUTION (G-RANK)] | +5 TO ALL STATS |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| TRAIT EVOLVED: SOVEREIGN'S AURA (G) -> SOVEREIGN'S AURA (F) |
| MINION CAPACITY MULTIPLIER: 2X -> 6X |
| AURA EFFECTIVENESS MULTIPLIER: 2X -> 6X |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
"Max?" Elena said carefully. "Max, are you with us?" He opened his mouth to tell her he was fine, and the bloodline woke up.
It was not like the class and it was not like the race. It came from somewhere underneath both of them, somewhere he had never known was there, as though a door had been sealed in the floor of his soul his whole life and someone on the other side had just kicked it open. Pain went through him like a lightning strike, white and total, and his spine arched off the brick so hard that his skull cracked against the wall. Black veins crawled up his throat and across his jaw like ink spreading through water. Blood ran from his nose in a thick, steady sheet, and then from the corners of his eyes, and the sound that came out of him was not a scream so much as something being torn. Every skeleton in the alley turned its head toward him at the same instant, soul-fire guttering, and the survivors behind the dumpsters scrambled backward over each other to get away from them.
"Hold him!" Marcus was shouting. "Jackson, his legs, hold his fucking legs!" Jackson threw himself across Max's knees and Marcus pinned his shoulders to the wall with both hands, and Max thrashed under them with a strength that sent Marcus's boots skidding in the blood. David dropped beside him with his hands blazing white and pressed them flat to Max's chest. "Bone Knit," he said, and then again, and then a third time, and then he pulled his hands back and stared at them in horror. "There's nothing broken," he said. "There's nothing broken, it's not his body, I can't touch it!"
Max did not hear any of it. He was somewhere else, somewhere cold and vast and very old, and there was something there with him. He could not see it, but he could feel it the way he felt his skeletons, a presence at the far end of a tether that ran back through his blood and past his father and his father's father and further, into a dark where there had once been a throne. It looked at him, and it weighed him the way he had always weighed a corpse, for what could be built out of it. Then, without a word, it settled into him like a crown being lowered onto a head, and the pain stopped as though it had been cut with a knife:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| LATENT BLOODLINE AWAKENED: DREAD SOVEREIGN |
| - Intelligence increased by 5% |
| - Minion strength, speed and durability increased by 5% |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| FURTHER BLOODLINE PROPERTIES: LOCKED |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
He came back to the alley lying on his side in a pool of his own blood with Elena's hand cupped against his cheek. Jackson was still lying across his legs, and Marcus was crouched in front of him with an expression Max had never seen on the sergeant's face before, which he realized after a second was fear. "Four minutes," Jackson said hoarsely. "You were screaming for four fucking minutes, man." Max sat up slowly, wiping blood from his eyes with the back of his wrist, and found his hands were perfectly steady. "It felt like longer," he said. His voice came out lower than he remembered, rough at the edges, and Theo, standing at the edge of the group with his knife half drawn, took a step back without seeming to know he had done it.
Elena asked, "What was that, Max, because that wasn't the class or the race, that was something else?" Max looked down at his hands, at the black veins already fading back under the skin of his wrists. "The bloodline," he said, "and it's called the Dread Sovereign, and I don't think it's finished telling me what that means." Sarah had not moved from her post on the dumpster through any of it, and she looked down at him with her daggers in her hands and asked flatly, "Is it going to happen to us?" "No," Max said, "not unless you've got something sleeping in your blood that you never told anybody about."
The skeletons had changed while he was gone. Every one of the fourteen in the wall had grown plain bone armor over its frame, rough plates fused across the ribs and shoulders and shins as though the bone had simply decided to grow thicker, and their soul-fire had darkened from bright blue to a deep, bruised violet. When Max looked at the avenue past them, he could feel the edges of the new aura lying across the pavement like a cold fog. A rat that had been picking at a dead hound at the mouth of the alley froze, shivered, and then fled into a storm drain as though something had screamed at it. "Jesus," Jackson whispered. "Even the rats are scared of you now."
The last window was waiting for him, patient, the way the Level 5 list had waited. He read the five options once, slowly, and every one of them was a good weapon in a different hand. Marshal's Command would let him drive the wall like a fist, Harrowing Shriek would break packs before they reached him, and Corpse Burst would turn every dead thing in the alley into a bomb. Aura of Dread II was the biggest number on the list. But there was a line he kept coming back to, because he remembered the alpha going over the wall and landing on Jackson, and he remembered how small his skeletons had looked beside it:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SKILL SELECTION AVAILABLE (CLASS LEVEL 10) |
| INDIVIDUAL: MAX WILLIS | CLASS: DREAD MARSHAL (F) |
| SELECT ONE (1) OF FIVE (5) OPTIONS. SELECTION IS PERMANENT. |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| [1] MARSHAL'S COMMAND (ACTIVE | 40 MP | COOLDOWN 30S) |
| [2] HARROWING SHRIEK (ACTIVE | 60 MP | COOLDOWN 60S) |
| [3] DREAD CHAMPION (ACTIVE | 250 MP | 1 ACTIVE MAX, BASE) |
| Fuse 5 corpses into a single champion (occupies 4 minion slots). |
| Stats ~5X a skeleton; scale with total corpse mass and Max's INT. |
| CHALLENGE: forces the strongest enemy in range to fight it. |
| BONE FEAST: absorbs nearby bone caches to repair itself. |
| [4] CORPSE BURST (ACTIVE | 20 MP) |
| [5] AURA OF DREAD II (ENHANCEMENT) |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
"Three," he said, and the System took it. Wave 1 had taught him that a wall of small bones could hold anything that came at it one at a time, but sooner or later something was going to come that was bigger than the wall, and he wanted a monster of his own waiting for it. The confirmation told him Sovereign's Aura had already multiplied the limit, six champions where the skill allowed one, and his mana told him he could afford exactly one of them tonight. He did not wait to test it. Five of the biggest hound carcasses lay in the corpse pile at the barricade, and he reached for all of them at once and spent two hundred and fifty points of mana in a single cold surge that made his teeth ache and grayed the edges of his vision.
The five corpses came apart together. Their flesh liquefied and ran off the pile in a black flood that hissed where it touched the asphalt, and their bones rose out of the sludge and found each other in the air, clattering and grinding, shoulder blades locking into shoulder blades and spines winding together like the strands of a rope. What stood up out of the pile was nine feet tall, broad as a car through the chest, its skull built from three hound skulls fused into a single long-jawed helm with iron fangs still set in the bone. Plain bone armor sheathed it from shoulder to shin. In its hands the mana hardened into a bone greatsword as long as Max was tall, and its eyes lit violet, and it turned its head and looked at him and waited.
Behind the dumpsters one of Reyes's survivors began to pray out loud, and nobody told him to stop. Reyes himself stood very still with his notched shortsword hanging at his side and stared up at the thing on the pile. "What is that?" he asked quietly. "That," Max said, "is what we point at anything that's too big for the wall." Marcus walked around the champion once, slowly, the way a man walks around a used car, and then he looked at Max and grinned for the first time all night. "Christ," the sergeant said. "I take back every bad thing I ever thought about necromancers."
Max spent his nine free points sitting on the crate with his window open, because the arithmetic was where he was most at home. One point into Intelligence brought it to an even seventy, and the bloodline's five percent pushed it to seventy-three, and he watched his minion cap climb to a number he had to read twice. Three into Wisdom set it at seventy, and with the evolved aura now shedding two percent of its reservation for every ten points instead of one, the cost of keeping it lit fell to thirteen percent; three into Vitality brought his health to four hundred and twenty; and two into Agility, because he had already gone under two hounds' jaws with a dagger today and did not intend to be slower the third time. Fifty-four. The wall that had started the night as six skeletons could now be fifty-four of them, and every one of them could carry the dread with it.
The others were already reading their own windows. "Okay," Marcus said, settling onto a crate with a groan, "my turn to show my homework." Each of them had the same simultaneous evolution waiting, and the same Perfect Evolution title hanging at the end of it, and each of them had a list of paths and a list of skills to choose from. Marcus read out, "Iron Bastion, Warlord or Spear Sentinel, and Bastion's all shield, Warlord buffs the people around me, and Sentinel's all reach." Jackson said the Warlord, because Marcus already gave orders like one, and Elena said the Bastion, because nothing alive had moved him off that barricade all night. "Max's got the army," Marcus said slowly. "What this squad needs from me is a wall that doesn't move, so it's the Bastion."
Elena's paths read Pyromancer, Storm Caller and Arcanist, and she did not even pretend to think about it. "Pyromancer," she said. "Ember Rain gets an upgrade at Level 10, and I've watched it turn nine hounds into a bonfire." Sarah asked whether Storm Caller would let her hit things at range, and Elena admitted it probably would, and then said she did not care. "I like fire," she said simply. "Fire works." For her skill she was torn between Flame Wall, which would let her seal the van at the back of the alley in a single cast, and Mana Font, which would keep her casting through a wave, and the argument over that one went back and forth across the alley for two full minutes.
Jackson's list ran Bloodreaver, Berserker and Blade Champion. "Bloodreaver," he said at once. "It builds on Bloodthirst, and I'm not giving up the only thing that's kept my arm attached." David said quietly that the Berserker would hit harder, and Jackson looked at the scar on his forearm and shook his head. "Hitting harder's how I ended up in a hound's mouth," he said. "Hitting harder and not dying is better." Sarah read her own options in her usual flat monotone, Nightblade, Assassin and Hunter, and when Elena asked which one, she said, "Assassin," and nothing else, and nobody bothered to argue.
David took the longest. His paths read Field Surgeon, War Chaplain and Plague Doctor, and he stared at the last one for a long time with an expression Max could not read. "Plague Doctor's damage," he said finally. "Poisons, rot, things that make hounds sick from the inside." Marcus said a medic who could kill was still a medic, and Elena said a medic who could heal six people at once was worth more than one who could kill one hound slowly. David looked at Max then, as though Max might give him the answer, and Max shook his head. "It's your call," Max said. "Pick the one you'll still want when it's a hundred people screaming instead of six."
David looked at the man with the healed hip, and at Theo's rebuilt shoulder, and at the dark stain against the brick where Hal had died. "War Chaplain," he said, "because it heals everybody near me while I fight." Marcus nodded once, and Elena squeezed his arm, and David let out a breath that sounded as though it had been in him since the plaza. Reyes had been listening to all of it from the back of the alley with his arms folded and his face unreadable. "My people aren't at Level 10," he said, "and most of them aren't at five." Max looked at the nine survivors behind him, at their notched blades and broken staves, and he did the arithmetic. "Then stay on the left, stay alive," he said, "and stand close enough to the wall to get the kills."
He spent the next ten minutes raising. The mana regenerated under his new Wisdom faster than he had ever felt it come back, and he crunched a handful of Elena's spare shards and spent every point as it arrived, twenty-two at a time. The skeletons came up out of the corpse pile in armored ranks, one after another, until the wall at the mouth of the alley was three deep and the survivors were pressed back against the van with nowhere left to stand. Thirty-five skeletons and a champion. When he finally stopped, his head was pounding and his mana bar was a sliver above its reservation, and the whole mouth of the alley was a forest of violet eyes:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NAME: MAX WILLIS | RACE: HUMAN (F-RANK) | CLASS: DREAD MARSHAL (F) |
| LEVEL: 10 (0/1,500 XP) | RACE LEVEL: 10 (15/1,500 XP) |
| TITLE: [PERFECT EVOLUTION (G-RANK)] | +5 TO ALL STATS |
| BLOODLINE: DREAD SOVEREIGN (AWAKENED) | +5% INT, +5% MINIONS |
| HP: 420/420 | MP: 274/700 (183 AVAILABLE | 91 RESERVED) |
| STR: 24 | AGI: 26 | VIT: 42 | CON: 56 | INT: 73 | WIS: 70 | PER: 24 |
| TRAIT: SOVEREIGN'S AURA (F) | 6X MINION CAP, 6X AURA EFFECT |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| SKILL: [RAISE SKELETAL MINION II] (F) | 22 MP (CACHE: 11 MP) |
| SKILL: [AURA OF DREAD] | +30% SPEED | 13% OF MAX MP RESERVED |
| SKILL: [DREAD CHAMPION] | 250 MP | 6 ACTIVE MAX (1 BASE X6) |
| PASSIVE: [DREADBOUND LEGION] |
| MINIONS: 35 SKELETONS + 1 CHAMPION (39 / 54 SLOTS) |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Marcus came and stood beside him at the barricade and looked at the window over his shoulder. "Fifty-four," the sergeant said. "Last night you had six." Max closed the window and looked up at the sky, where the countdown had stopped being blue at all and burned a steady, bloody crimson against the dark glass of the towers. Out past the plaza, all three portal scars were glowing now, faint and pulsing, like wounds that had not finished bleeding. The air had gone cold again, and the cold had a weight to it that he could feel in his new bones:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SECTOR 77 STATUS UPDATE |
| NEXT WAVE: WAVE 2 IN 00:10:00 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WARNING: WAVE 2 PORTALS STABILIZING. PREPARE FOR ENGAGEMENT. |
| WAVE 2 SIZE: ESCALATED (EXACT FIGURE WITHHELD) |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
"Ten minutes," Marcus said. He pulled up his own window and looked at it for a long moment, at the evolution waiting with the Iron Bastion highlighted at the top, and then he looked at Max. "If it does to me what it did to you, I'm going to be on the ground screaming when that wave hits," he said. "It won't," Max said. "Yours doesn't have anything sleeping in it." Marcus breathed out through his nose, set his tower shield against the dumpster, and sat down with his back to the brick. "Then hold my wall," he said, and pressed his palm to the window.