The Raid
The Raid
CHAPTER 7: THE RAID
Marcus did not scream. He went rigid against the brick the moment his palm touched the window, his jaw locked and the cords of his neck standing out like cables, and for a long minute the only sound he made was a low, grinding hum through his clenched teeth. Max knelt beside him and watched the change happen from the outside, which was somehow worse than feeling it. The sergeant's shoulders thickened under his blood-stiff jacket, his forearms swelled until the leather straps of his vambraces creaked, and the skin across his knuckles went pale and hard as old callus. His tower shield, leaning against the dumpster beside him, rang once like a struck bell, as if it had felt something too. "Come on, Sarge," Jackson muttered, crouched on his other side. "Come on, you stubborn bastard, come back."
He came back at the seven-minute mark, his eyes opening clear and steady, and he sat up without anyone's help and looked at his own hands as if he were checking a weapon for damage. "Iron Bastion," he said hoarsely, "Perfect Evolution, same as you, and it felt like being poured into a mold." He stood, picked up the tower shield with one hand as though it weighed nothing, and set it against the barricade with a sound like a car door closing. Max felt the difference in the alley at once; the line had found its anchor. "No screaming," Jackson said, half disappointed. Marcus glanced at Max and said, "No bloodline, just a man who wants to hold a wall."
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| PARTY MEMBER EVOLUTION COMPLETE: MARCUS HOLLOWAY |
| CLASS: VANGUARD WARRIOR (G) -> IRON BASTION (F) |
| RACE: HUMAN (G) -> HUMAN (F) |
| TITLE GRANTED: [PERFECT EVOLUTION (G-RANK)] |
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* * *
Reyes watched them go down one at a time, and he counted. Elena went next, sitting cross-legged against the van with her staff across her knees, and when the evolution took her a halo of heat bloomed around her body so fierce that the blood on the asphalt beside her dried and cracked like old paint. Jackson went after her and laughed through the whole thing, a high, cracked, frightening laugh, and when he stood up again his scarred forearm was ridged with new muscle and his broadsword had a red sheen that did not wash off. Sarah evolved standing up, in the shadow of the bank wall, and Reyes lost track of her for a full ten seconds even though he was staring right at the spot where she stood. David knelt in the corner and evolved with his eyes closed and his lips moving, and when he opened them a faint gold warmth rolled out of him across the alley, and the bruise on Reyes's own ribs stopped aching without anyone having touched it. Six people, six evolutions, six Perfect Evolution titles. Four minutes on the clock.
Reyes looked down at his own status window and felt sick. Level 6. Theo was at 5, Priya at 4, Luis with his rebuilt hip at 4, and the other five were scattered between 3 and 5. They had spent the whole night behind the skeleton wall watching Max's squad harvest hounds, and every one of those kills had gone into a party they were not part of. He had been a Marine for nine years, and he knew exactly what his people were in a fight like the one coming. They were the ones who died first. They were the reason the line broke.
He thought about it the way he used to think about fire-team rosters, with a cold, practical bitterness. Six to a party. Six, and his nine people standing in the same alley as the strongest six in the sector, close enough to touch, sharing nothing. If the System let a party be fifty strong, his people would be leveling on every kill those skeletons made; they would be worth something at the barricade; they would be able to stand next to Marcus instead of behind him. He stared at the evolved squad and thought, as clearly and as angrily as he had ever thought anything: I wish to God parties could be bigger than six.
He felt foolish the moment he thought it, a grown man wishing at the sky like a kid over a birthday cake. The window opened before he had finished the thought. It did not chime and it did not flash; it was simply there in front of his chest, cold and blue and patient, as though it had been waiting all night for somebody to ask:
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| SYSTEM FUNCTION: RAID GROUP |
| STATUS: AVAILABLE TO ALL INDUCTEES SINCE INTEGRATION |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| - A raid combines up to 25 parties (maximum 150 inductees) |
| - One raid leader; party leaders retain command of their parties |
| - Experience: the killing party receives full experience; all other |
| raid members receive 25% of each kill's experience |
| - Loot: rolls remain with the killing party; raids do not share loot |
| - Party and raid buffs apply to all raid members within range |
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| FORM RAID? [Y/N] |
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Reyes read it twice and then a third time, and on the third time his hands started to shake. Available since integration. It had been there the whole night, through the plaza and the pharmacy and Hal's throat, and nobody had asked. He thought about the eight bodies laid out in a neat row on the pharmacy threshold, and the man in the cardigan, and the woman under the corpse pile. "Theo," he said, and his voice came out wrong. "Get everybody on their feet. Right now." Then he walked across the alley to where Max Willis was standing at the barricade with his back to all of them, and he did not ask permission.
* * *
Max turned when Reyes said his name, and he knew from the man's face that something had happened before he saw the window. Reyes did not explain. He simply swiped the window across with two fingers the way Max had seen people share screens in another life, and the cold blue panel slid into the air between them. Max read it once. He felt the floor of his stomach drop away, slowly, like an elevator, and then he felt something much colder settle in its place. "Since integration," he said. "Since integration," Reyes said. "It was there the whole time."
The countdown in the sky read 00:03:04. Marcus was already beside them, and Elena, and then the whole squad, reading over Max's shoulder with the glow of the window on their faces. "Twenty-five percent of every kill," Elena said slowly. "Max, your skeletons have killed more hounds tonight than anybody in this sector." David understood it next, and his face crumpled with a grief so sudden and so total that Max had to look away. "Hal would have been Level 8," David said. "If somebody had looked, Hal would have been Level 8."
"We grieve later," Max said, and he hated how easily it came out of his mouth. "Three minutes. Reyes, you've got nine people and a party holds six, so you're splitting into two." Reyes nodded once, already turning toward his survivors, who were standing in a ragged knot by the van with their weapons in their hands and no idea what was happening. "Five and four," Reyes said. "Theo's with me, he goes where I go. Kenji, Dwayne, Omar, you're with me too." That left Priya, Luis, Marcy and Bev, the sixty-year-old school bus driver who had kept a fire extinguisher as her only weapon until the System gave her a club.
"Who leads the four?" Marcus asked. Priya opened her mouth and closed it again, Luis looked at his rebuilt hip, and Marcy looked at the ground. Bev looked at all of them, and then at the sky, where the countdown read two minutes and twenty seconds. "Oh, for Christ's sake," she said. "I drove forty fourth-graders to the aquarium every spring for nineteen years and never lost one, I can keep four adults alive for an hour. Send me the damn invite." Priya let out a sound that was half laugh and half sob, and moved to stand beside her.
The windows flew. Reyes sent invites to his four, and they accepted with fumbling fingers; Bev sent hers, swearing at the interface the whole time. Then Reyes turned back to Max, and the raid prompt was still open between them. "It wants a raid leader," Reyes said. "It's you." Max started to argue, and Reyes cut him off with a look that had probably once stopped privates in their tracks. "Your skeletons are the wall, your aura is the speed, and your squad is the only reason any of us are alive," he said. "I'm not asking."
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| RAID FORMED: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 |
| RAID LEADER: MAX WILLIS (DREAD MARSHAL, F) |
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| PARTY 1: MAX WILLIS (6/6) |
| PARTY 2: REYES (5/6) |
| PARTY 3: BEV (4/6) |
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| RAID MEMBERS: 15 / 150 | PARTIES: 3 / 25 |
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Max felt it land like a weight settling across his shoulders. Fourteen thin new threads ran out from the center of his chest, not tethers like the ones to his skeletons but something looser and warmer, and he knew without being told where each of the nine new people was standing. They felt it too. Theo gasped and nearly dropped his knife, and Bev grabbed the edge of the van with both hands as the Aura of Dread rolled over them for the first time and their limbs went light. "Holy shit," Kenji whispered, swinging a crowbar through the air and watching it move faster than his eye expected. "Is that what you people have had all night?" The countdown read 00:00:31.
"Positions," Max said, and fifteen people moved. Marcus planted the Iron Bastion's shield at the center of the barricade with the Dread Champion towering behind him like a cathedral made of bone, Reyes took the left with his five, Bev took the van at the back with her four and two skeletons Max peeled off to stand with them. Elena climbed onto a dumpster with fire already crawling up her staff, Jackson rolled his shoulders beside Marcus, and Sarah was simply gone. David stood in the center of the alley, and the gold warmth that came off him now reached every one of them like sunlight through a window. Max stood behind the wall of forty skeletons and one champion and watched the last numbers fall.
The sky tore open at exactly zero. All three portals ripped wide at once with a shriek of metal on metal, wider than they had been for Wave 1, and the ground under the alley shuddered hard enough to rattle glass loose from the towers. The System's announcement spread across the sky in letters thirty feet high, and for once it did not withhold anything:
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| WARNING: BEAST WAVE 2 HAS COMMENCED |
| SPAWNING 3,500 G-RANK IRON-FANG HOUNDS |
| ELITE VARIANTS DETECTED: 525 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The first elites came out of the portals in the front ranks, and Max saw immediately why the System had bothered to count them. They were half again the size of the hounds he had spent the night killing, with iron plates grown along their spines like the armor of a beetle and fangs that glowed a dull, forge-hot orange. Their eyes were white instead of red. They did not run in the loose, frenzied packs of the regular hounds; they ran in wedges, three and four together, and the regular hounds moved around them the way water moves around rocks. "Elites in the front," Marcus said. "Smart dogs." Max said nothing, because he was already counting the distance to the alley and doing the arithmetic on how many skeletons each wedge would cost him.
The first wedge hit the wall ninety seconds after the portals opened. Four elites struck the shields together, and for the first time all night the bone line bent and kept bending, two skeletons in the front rank collapsing as iron-plated shoulders smashed through their shields and their skulls. A third skeleton went down with an elite's glowing fangs sunk into its spine, and the bone hissed and smoked where the hot iron touched it. Max felt three tethers snap at once, a triple flash of cold pain behind his eyes. "Champion!" he said, and the Dread Champion moved.
It came through the skeleton line like a truck through a fence. Its Challenge rolled out across the choke point as a low, bone-deep pressure that Max felt in his own teeth, and all four elites turned toward it at once, abandoning the gap they had torn in the wall. The champion's bone greatsword came down on the first one's iron spine plates and sheared clean through them in a burst of sparks, and the elite folded in half with a sound like a dropped anvil. The champion was fighting barely eight yards in front of Max, inside the edge of his own Aura of Dread, and the Dreadbound chill clinging to its bones did the rest at arm's length; Max watched the other three elites hesitate, their white eyes flickering, their heads dipping low the way hounds do when they hear something bigger than themselves. That half-second of hesitation was all the skeletons needed, and the Dreadbound bonus turned every bone sword into a cleaver.
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| RAID NOTIFICATION: G-RANK IRON-FANG HOUND (ELITE) SLAIN |
| PARTY 1 EXPERIENCE: +150 CLASS XP | +75 RACE XP (G-RANK, HALVED) |
| RAID SHARE (PARTIES 2-3): +37 CLASS XP | +18 RACE XP |
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Max had braced himself for the halving, and it still stung to see it in writing: half of what an elite was really worth, because the System considered him too big for G-Rank prey now. But behind him he heard Kenji whoop, a raw, astonished sound, and Reyes say "Jesus Christ" very quietly, and he understood that for the nine people in Parties 2 and 3 a quarter of an elite was more experience than they had earned in an hour of fighting. Every kill his wall made now fed fifteen people instead of six. He re-raised the three fallen skeletons from their bone caches for eleven points apiece before the caches could fade, and shoved them back into the line.
The fighting settled into something terrible and rhythmic. Regular hounds came in their hundreds and broke on the wall, and every few minutes another wedge of elites came with them, and every wedge cost him skeletons and paid him back in bone. Elena's Ember Rain had become something else entirely since her evolution, a falling curtain of white-hot cinders that set the regular hounds burning like torches and left the elites smoking and screaming with their spine plates glowing cherry red. Jackson waded into the gaps the elites opened with his broadsword sheathed in red light, and every hit he landed knit some wound on his body closed. Sarah killed elites from directions that did not exist, and David's gold warmth kept washing over the line like a tide, closing cuts before anyone noticed they had them. Somewhere in the middle of it, the System rang:
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 10 -> LEVEL 11) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +9 INT, +9 WIS, +5 CON, +4 VIT |
| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +9 |
| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
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Nine points, and the first level as a Dread Marshal felt like the first deep breath after surfacing. He spent them standing in the middle of the alley with hounds screaming twenty feet away: three into Intelligence, two into Wisdom, two into Vitality and two into Perception, because with sixty bodies to track at once the thing he was running short of was not speed but eyes. His Intelligence crossed eighty, and with the bloodline's five percent the minion cap climbed from fifty-four to sixty, and his aura's reservation dropped to eleven percent as his Wisdom passed eighty. He did not wait to admire it, because the level had refilled his tank to the brim and the skill had room for six champions. He reached into the pile for five elite carcasses and spent two hundred and fifty points in one cold surge, and a second Dread Champion dragged itself upright with iron plates fused across its spine, and he did not send this one to the wall but stood it at his own shoulder, a nine-foot bodyguard for the one man the whole raid could not afford to lose; then he spent the rest on twelve more skeletons to fill the slots that were left.
The second wave of elites came at the van. Six of them, coming over the roof of the delivery truck at the back of the alley in a clattering iron wave, and Bev's four and the two skeletons Max had left with them were all that stood in the way. Max felt one of the skeletons die and then the other, and he turned with his heart in his throat and saw Bev standing in front of Luis with her club in both hands and an elite's glowing jaws a foot from her face. "Not today, you ugly son of a bitch," Bev snarled, and swung. The club bounced off its iron snout, and the elite lunged, and Priya put Hal's club into the side of its head so hard the iron plate over its eye crumpled inward.
Max sent ten skeletons back down the alley at a run, and Reyes came with them, his notched shortsword already moving. The elites at the van turned on the skeletons in a frenzy of hot iron and breaking bone, and the fight in that narrow back corner was the ugliest of the whole wave: bone splinters flying like shrapnel, hounds screaming with skeleton swords jammed in their mouths, Luis on the ground with his hands over his head and Marcy dragging him backward by the collar. Theo darted in under an elite's belly and opened it with his knife, and its hot entrails spilled out across the asphalt in a steaming red rope that hissed where it touched the iron of its own fallen plates, and a skeleton's sword finished it. Reyes killed the last of them with a two-handed thrust through the soft flesh under its jaw, and stood over it gasping. Party 2 had its first elite.
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| RAID NOTIFICATION: G-RANK IRON-FANG HOUND (ELITE) SLAIN BY PARTY 2 |
| PARTY 2 LOOT ROLLS: 5 | RESULT: 1X UNCOMMON, 2X COMMON, 2X NO DROP |
| RAID SHARE (PARTIES 1, 3): +37 CLASS XP | +18 RACE XP |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Reyes looked up at Max across the length of the alley with blood on his face and an expression Max would remember for a long time, a soldier's expression, the look of a man who had just watched his people stop being a liability. Their five rolls had turned up copper, a cracked guard and one green glow that became a pair of Sturdy Leather Boots, and Omar was already lacing them on with shaking fingers. Theo had gone up two levels during the fight at the van, and Priya three, and Bev was staring at her own window with her mouth open. "Level 7," Bev said to nobody. "I was Level 4 ten minutes ago." Max raised replacements for the two dead skeletons at the van and turned back to the front, where the regular hounds had started climbing their own dead again, and he felt the race bar roll over as an elite died on Marcus's spear:
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, F-RANK (LEVEL 10 -> LEVEL 11) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 TO ALL STATS |
| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Three to every stat. It was the first race level since his evolution, and it felt different from the ones before, heavier and denser, as though his body were being packed rather than filled. He felt his strength and his speed and his perception rise together, and with the recovery effect washing through him he did the arithmetic in a heartbeat. Four skeletons had fallen at the front while he was busy with the van, and their caches had faded unspent, which left exactly the four slots a champion needed. A third Dread Champion rose out of the corpse pile for another two hundred and fifty points, and forty-eight skeletons stood around the three of them in ranks of plain bone armor, and the hounds were dying faster than they could climb the dead.
The first set piece dropped eleven minutes into the wave. Sarah killed an elite on the far left of the barricade with a single dark stroke through the base of its skull, and when she bent to touch the faint purple glow that rose from its corpse, she went still. "Max," she said, and he had never heard her say his name before. She held up a pair of soft, dark hide boots with padded soles shaped like a hound's paws, and the window that hovered beside her was the color of a bruise:
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| ELITE ITEM ACQUIRED: IRON-FANG STALKER TREADS [1/6] |
| RANK: G | QUALITY: ELITE | ARCHETYPE: SKIRMISHER |
| STATS: +5 AGI, +3 PER |
| SET BONUSES: (2) +10% MOVEMENT SPEED | (4) HUNTER'S MARK | |
| (6) PACK TACTICS |
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"Set piece," Max said. "Matched to your class, one of six." Sarah looked at the boots for exactly one second longer, then sat down on the dumpster lid in the middle of a battle and pulled them on. When she stood up again she made no sound at all on the bloody asphalt. Two minutes later Marcus's personal roll on an elite came up purple as well, and he pulled a heavy iron-plated helm shaped from a hound's skull out of the glow and jammed it onto his head without a word; Elena got a Greater Stat Elixir on the same kill and drank it on the spot, and four points of Intelligence settled into her with a shudder. "Two pieces and an elixir in fifteen minutes," Jackson said, staring at all three of them. "Where the hell is mine?"
The purple drops were the ones everybody stared at, but they were not the only ones. Green and blue light had been rising off the elite corpses all morning between the skeletons' feet: Lesser Health Potions and Lesser Mana Vials, Intact Fangs as long as a man's hand, a Low-Grade Beast Core that David turned over in his fingers like a stone from a riverbed. Elena pulled a Rare Attribute Essence out of a blue glow and gained a permanent point of Wisdom with a gasp, and Jackson got a Standard Health Potion and a skill book for [Pounce] that he stared at for a long moment and then tucked into his belt for later. None of it was the kind of thing that made a man shout. All of it was the kind of thing that kept him alive.
The second class level came during the worst push of the wave so far. A pack of two hundred regular hounds came down the avenue at once with nearly thirty elites driving them like sheepdogs, and they hit the barricade so hard that the whole front rank of skeletons went down together, and for one awful moment there was nothing between Marcus's shield and the hounds but air. Marcus held. The Iron Bastion's stance locked him to the asphalt like a bolt through steel, and three elites slammed into his shield at once and bounced off it like birds off glass. Three Challenges rolled out from the three champions at once, dragging the elites toward them, and broke the push into pieces, and Max re-raised the front rank from their caches in a single desperate surge of mana, eleven points and eleven points and eleven points again. When the push broke, the chime rang:
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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |
| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 11 -> LEVEL 12) |
| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +9 INT, +9 WIS, +5 CON, +4 VIT |
| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +9 |
| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |
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| MINION CAPACITY: 60 -> 72 (INT 101, INCLUDING BLOODLINE) |
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He spent the points the same way, three into Intelligence and two each into Wisdom, Vitality and Perception, and his Intelligence crossed a hundred for the first time with the bloodline's help. Seventy-two slots. His mana pool had grown to nine hundred and eighty, and his aura now held back only nine percent of it, and for the first time since the plaza he had more mana than he could spend in a single breath. He looked at the corpse pile at the barricade, a hill of iron-plated carcasses as tall as a man, and reached for five of the biggest elites at once. The fourth Dread Champion clawed its way out of the black sludge with iron plates still fused across its spine and orange heat glowing in the seams of its new bone armor, and every hound in the choke point flinched, and eight more skeletons rose out of the pile behind it to fill the slots that were left.
Four champions now, three standing in a line across the mouth of the alley and the fourth looming at his shoulder where it had stood since Level 11, with fifty-six skeletons arrayed around them in a wall of violet eyes, and the waves of hounds still coming down the avenue in their hundreds. Somewhere behind him Bev was laughing at her own status window, and Reyes was barking at his five to hold the left. Max stood at the center of it all, with fourteen raid threads humming in his chest and sixty minion tethers singing in his skull, and he let himself look at the numbers for one moment before the next push came:
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| NAME: MAX WILLIS | RACE: HUMAN (F-RANK) | CLASS: DREAD MARSHAL (F) |
| LEVEL: 12 (1,021/3,375 XP) | RACE LEVEL: 11 (894/2,250 XP) |
| RAID: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 (LEADER) | 15 MEMBERS |
| HP: 570/570 | MP: 412/980 (324 AVAILABLE | 88 RESERVED) |
| STR: 27 | AGI: 29 | VIT: 57 | CON: 69 | INT: 101 | WIS: 95 | PER: 31 |
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| SKILL: [AURA OF DREAD] | +30% SPEED | 9% OF MAX MP RESERVED |
| SKILL: [DREAD CHAMPION] | 250 MP | 4 / 6 ACTIVE |
| MINIONS: 56 SKELETONS + 4 CHAMPIONS (72 / 72 SLOTS) |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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| WAVE 2 STATUS: 7:52 AM |
| HOUNDS REMAINING: 2,611 / 3,500 | ELITES REMAINING: 402 / 525 |
| INDUCTEES REMAINING: 978 / 2,500 |
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Four hundred and two elites still out there, and every one of them carried six rolls for his squad and five for Reyes and four for Bev. Max watched the next wedge forming at the far end of the avenue, eight elites this time, and behind them something he had not seen before: a hound twice the size of the others, its iron plates gone black with age, walking rather than running, with the others parting around it the way the regular hounds parted around the elites. It stopped at the edge of the plaza and lifted its head, and Max felt it look at him across three hundred yards of blood and smoke. "Marcus," he said quietly. "What's that?" Marcus followed his gaze, and for a long moment he did not answer. "That," the sergeant said at last, "is the dog that's going to tell us how good those champions really are."