The Pack Leader

CHAPTER 8: THE PACK LEADER

The black-plated hound did not charge. It walked out of the smoke at the edge of the plaza with the slow, rolling gait of something that had never needed to hurry, and the hounds around it parted like a crowd making way for a coffin. It was twice the size of the elites that flanked it, its iron spine plates gone dull and black with age and scored with old gouges, and its fangs did not glow orange like theirs but a dull, sullen red, like metal that had been heated and cooled a thousand times. Eight elites fell in around it in a tight wedge. Behind them the regular hounds kept coming out of the avenues, fifty and a hundred and then more, until the far side of the plaza was a single heaving carpet of red fur that Max could not see the end of. "Four hundred," Sarah said from the top of the dumpster. "Give or take. And the big one."

"Raid, listen up," Max said, and his voice carried down the alley along the fourteen threads in his chest in a way it never had before, so that Bev at the van and Reyes on the left heard him as clearly as Marcus at his side. "Big one is the priority. Champions hold it, the wall holds everything else, and nobody, nobody, goes over the barricade after it." He looked at the champion standing at his shoulder, nine feet of fused bone and iron with its violet eyes fixed on the plaza. "You stay with me," he told it, and felt the answer come back down the tether, not words but a weight settling into place. "Three champions forward," he said. "Marcus, it's going to come at the center. Let it."

Reyes passed the word down the left flank in a low, steady voice, and Max heard him through the raid thread telling Kenji and Dwayne to keep their backs to the brick and their weapons low. At the van, Bev had her four lined up shoulder to shoulder with the two skeletons Max had given her, and she was talking to them the way Max imagined she had once talked to a busload of children on a field trip. "Nobody wanders off," she was saying. "Nobody tries to be a hero, we stay together, and we let the bone men do the work." Priya laughed at that, a short, cracked sound, and Luis gripped his club so hard his knuckles cracked. Max turned his back on all of it and looked at the pack leader again, because the pack leader was looking at him.

Max had fought this fight a hundred times on a screen, in another life, and the shape of it was the same: a boss in the middle, adds on the flanks, trash in front to soak the opening cooldowns. The difference was that on a screen nobody's arm came off. He counted the elites, eight, and the champions, three forward and one at his shoulder and one more that the next level would buy him, and he did the arithmetic on what each of them was worth against the big one. It came out badly. The pack leader was too big for one champion and maybe too big for three, and the only thing in the alley that had stopped a charge that size without moving was Marcus.

The regular hounds hit first. They came across the plaza in a flood and broke on the barricade the way they had broken all night, except that there were more of them than ever before and the elites were driving them now, nipping at their flanks like sheepdogs, forcing them into the shields in waves so dense that the dead could not fall down between the living. The skeleton line bowed and held. Elena's Ember Rain came down on the front of the flood in a white-hot sheet, and a hundred hounds caught fire at once and screamed and tore at each other in their panic, and the smoke that rolled back over the alley was so thick with burning fat that it stung Max's eyes. Every one of them that died fed the raid, thirty for the squad and seven for Reyes and Bev, and the numbers rolled through Max's vision so fast that they blurred into a single cold current. Somewhere in that current, the chime rang:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 12 -> LEVEL 13) |

| 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: 72 -> 78 |

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He did not even think about the points; his hands knew the spread by now, three into Intelligence and two each into Wisdom, Vitality and Perception. The refill was a full tank, eleven hundred points and more, and the rule he had made for himself in Wave 2 was simple: a full tank meant a champion. He reached into the corpse pile for five of the heaviest carcasses at the barricade and spent two hundred and fifty points, and the fifth Dread Champion dragged itself up out of the black sludge with a regular hound's skull still half fused into its shoulder like a pauldron. Two more skeletons filled the last of the new slots. "Five," Marcus counted under his breath. "Christ, Max, five."

Elena was burning through her mana faster than Max had ever seen her spend it, Ember Rain after Ember Rain, and between casts she crunched shards and swore at the hounds in a steady, inventive stream that would have made Jackson blush on any other day. David moved behind the line like a man walking through a church, slow and deliberate, and wherever he passed, the War Chaplain's gold warmth rolled out of him and closed the bites and gashes that the skeletons could not prevent. A hound got its jaws on Dwayne's calf through a gap at the left flank, and before anyone could shout, the wound was already sealing under David's light. "I can feel all of you," David said to Max once in passing, as though it were the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, "every cut, like hearing a room full of people breathing." Max understood exactly what he meant.

The pack leader came at the center, exactly as Max had said it would. It did not run even then; it walked into the choke point over the backs of its own burning hounds, and when a skeleton raised its shield in its path it simply bit the shield in half, and the skeleton behind it, and the stone of the barricade's lip behind that. The three forward champions threw their Challenges at it at once, and Max felt the bone-deep pressure of them roll out across the choke point like thunder. The pack leader turned toward the nearest champion with what looked horribly like interest. The eight elites spread out on either side of it in a fan, and the regular hounds poured into the gaps they left, and for twenty seconds the alley was nothing but noise and fire and breaking bone.

Then the pack leader killed a champion. It took the creature's bone greatsword across the iron plates of its spine without flinching, the blade skidding off in a shower of sparks, and then it reared up onto its hind legs and came down on the champion's shoulders with its whole weight, and the nine-foot construct of fused bone folded under it like a lawn chair. Its red-hot jaws closed on the champion's triple-skulled helm, and Max heard the crunch through the tether a half-second before he heard it through the air. The violet light in the champion's eyes went out, and the thing came apart into a heap of smoking bone that the pack leader stood on, and lifted its scarred muzzle, and howled.

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: MINION DESTROYED |

| DREAD CHAMPION (4 SLOTS) | BONE CACHE: N/A (CHAMPIONS LEAVE NO CACHE) |

| ACTIVE CHAMPIONS: 4 / 6 |

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The pain of it was worse than a skeleton, much worse, a white spike behind his left eye that made him stagger and grab the dumpster. Two hundred and fifty points of mana and five carcasses, gone in eight seconds. The bodyguard champion at his shoulder took a half-step forward, as though it had felt its brother die.

"Max!" Elena shouted, and he waved her off and made himself look at the pack leader, really look, the way he used to look at a raid boss in the first thirty seconds of a pull. It had not dodged the champion's sword. It had taken the blow on its spine and let it skid, because the black plates were thick there and thinnest along the throat and belly where its own weight kept it from ever exposing them. "Marcus," he said. "It has to rear up to kill. When it rears, its belly is open."

Marcus did not answer. He simply moved, and the Iron Bastion walked out from behind the skeleton line with his tower shield raised and planted himself directly in front of the pack leader, which turned its huge black head toward him and looked down at him as if it could not believe what it was seeing. The other three champions closed in on its flanks. The pack leader lunged at Marcus, and his shield took the full weight of it and did not move an inch, the Bastion stance locking him to the asphalt so hard that the street cracked in a web under his boots. Its jaws came down on the top edge of the shield and the iron screamed. And then it reared, the way Max had known it would, up onto its hind legs to bring its weight down on the man who would not move, and its belly opened above Marcus like a door.

Sarah came out of nowhere. She went in under the rising beast at a dead sprint in her new paw-soled boots, silent as a held breath, and her daggers went into the soft black flesh beneath its ribs to the hilt. Vital Strike flashed dark along both blades. Jackson came in from the other side and put his broadsword through the same soft place with Bloodthirst blazing red up his whole arm, and the champions' bone greatswords came down on its haunches and its spine and its throat all at once. The pack leader screamed for the first time, a sound like an iron gate being torn off its hinges, and it came down not on Marcus but beside him, rolling in its own spilling entrails across the burning asphalt with three bone blades still buried in it. It took a full minute to die, and in all that minute it never stopped trying to reach Max.

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| RAID NOTIFICATION: IRON-FANG HOUND (ELITE PACK LEADER) SLAIN |

| PARTY 1 EXPERIENCE: +375 CLASS XP | +187 RACE XP (G-RANK, HALVED) |

| PARTY 1 LOOT ROLLS: 6 |

| RESULT: 1X ELITE, 1X RARE, 2X UNCOMMON, 2X COMMON |

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The purple glow rose out of the pack leader's corpse and drifted, slow and patient, past Marcus and past Sarah and past Jackson, all the way up the alley to the barricade, until it stopped in front of Max and hung there in the air at the height of his chest. He knew what it was before he touched it. When his hand closed on it, the light unfolded into a heavy black-red pelt, a full mantle with the pack leader's own black-plated head forming the hood, its iron fangs hanging down over the brow like a crown, and the window that opened beside it was the deep purple of a bruise:

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| ELITE ITEM ACQUIRED: IRON-FANG PACKMASTER MANTLE [1/6] |

| RANK: G | QUALITY: ELITE | ARCHETYPE: SUMMONER |

| STATS: +5 INT, +3 WIS |

| SET BONUSES: (2) PACK HUNGER | (4) MINION RAISING -20% MANA | |

| (6) PACK INSTINCT |

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"Well," Jackson said, wiping red from his face with the back of his wrist and staring at the mantle. "That's just fucking poetic." Max swung it over his shoulders. It was heavy and still warm, and it smelled of iron and old blood, and the moment it settled on him he felt the five points of Intelligence slide into him like a key into a lock, sharpening every tether in his skull a fraction. The hood with its iron fangs hung at his back. Somewhere behind him Reyes said something low to Theo, and Theo laughed, high and nervous, and Max realized that to the people at the back of the alley he must look like something out of a nightmare now: a man in a hound's skin with a dead monster's crown on his shoulders and an army of bone at his feet.

Down the length of the alley the raid had gone quiet. Kenji was staring at the dead pack leader with his crowbar hanging from one hand, Theo had climbed onto the hood of the van to see over the skeletons, and Bev had her hand pressed flat against her chest as if to keep her heart where it belonged. They had all felt it die through the raid, Max realized, the way he had felt the champion die through its tether; the System had paid every one of them a quarter of that kill, and the share alone was worth more than anything most of them had killed all night. Marcy whispered, "Did we just do that?" "He did that," Luis said, and he did not sound sure whether he was grateful or afraid.

The eight elites did not break when their leader died. They went mad. They threw themselves at the skeleton line in a frenzy, iron plates screeching on bone shields, and two of them went over the barricade at the left flank where Reyes's five were standing, and the fight there turned bloody and close. Kenji took an elite's glowing fangs through his forearm and screamed, and Reyes put his shortsword into its eye socket and twisted until it stopped, and the elite fell dead across Kenji's legs with its hot jaws still locked on his arm. David was there in seconds, the War Chaplain's gold warmth rolling ahead of him, and Max saw Kenji's face go from gray to merely pale as the burns closed. The second elite died under three skeletons and Dwayne's crowbar. Party 2 had its second elite of the wave, and they whooped like men who had just won the lottery.

Jackson got his piece from the last of the eight. He had been fighting at the center of the line beside Marcus all through the frenzy, and when the final elite went down under his broadsword with its throat opened to the spine, the purple light rose out of it and went straight to him. He caught it in one bloody hand and stood there in the middle of the battle holding a pair of iron-clawed gauntlets, staring at them as if he did not believe they were real. "Finally," he said, almost reverently. "Ravager Grips, one of six." He pulled them on over his torn knuckles, flexed his fingers until the iron claws on the tips scraped together, and grinned at Max with his whole face. "Okay," he said. "Okay, now we're even."

The rest of the rolls on the elites came up the way the System's tables said they would, which meant mostly white, with a steady scatter of green and the occasional flash of blue among it. Elena got two Lesser Mana Vials and drank one standing up, and Sarah pulled a Rare skill book for [Night Vision] out of a blue glow and pocketed it without comment. Marcus got a Low-Grade Beast Core, an Iron-Tip Spear he did not need and a pile of copper from eight elites in a row, and said, flatly, that the System clearly hated shield men. David got a Lesser Health Potion and a Rare Identification Scroll from the pack leader's own rolls, looked at both, and handed the potion to Kenji without a word. It was the cold arithmetic of drop rates, Max thought, and it was going to make some of them rich and leave others with nothing, and there was nothing anybody could do about it but keep killing.

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, F-RANK (LEVEL 11 -> LEVEL 12) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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The race level came on the heels of the elites' deaths, and it came with another full tank. Max did not hesitate. Four of his skeletons had fallen in the elite frenzy and their caches had faded while he was watching Kenji, which left exactly four empty slots, and he reached into the pile of elite carcasses at the barricade, iron-plated and heavy, and spent two hundred and fifty points again. The new champion came up out of the sludge broader than any of the others, built from elite bone with black iron plates fused across its back and the dull orange glow of their fangs still burning in the seams of its jaw. "Elite bone makes better champions," he murmured, and the champion at his shoulder turned its head as though it had understood. Five champions now, with the bodyguard at his side.

The four hundred regular hounds had become two hundred, and then a hundred, and then a few dozen survivors scattered across the plaza with their leaders dead and nothing driving them. The skeletons went out after them in ranks, and the Aura of Dread rode out with them as far as it could reach, and Max watched hounds that had been snarling a moment before drop their heads and slink sideways as the dread touched them. They died hesitating. Each one paid the squad and the raid, and each one pushed the bar closer, until a hound died with a skeleton's sword through its spine on the far side of the barricade and the chime rang again:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 13 -> LEVEL 14) |

| 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: 78 -> 90 |

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Another full tank, and a slot for the champion the pack leader had killed. Max raised the sixth from the pack leader's own corpse along with four of its elites, and what came up out of that sludge made even the other champions seem small: eleven feet of black bone, its skull built around the pack leader's own black-plated head, its fangs still glowing that dull, sullen red. It turned its head and looked at the plaza where it had died, and Max felt something come back down the tether that was almost, but not quite, hunger. Twelve more skeletons filled the new slots behind it. Six champions now, every slot the skill would give him, and a wall of skeletons three ranks deep stretching from the bank wall to the office tower.

He stood among them for a moment with the mantle heavy on his shoulders and let himself feel the size of it. Seventy-two tethers ran out of his skull into seventy-two bodies, and he could feel every one of them the way he could feel his own fingers: the slow turn of heads on bone necks, the weight of shields, the patient, endless readiness of things that never got tired. Three hours ago he had been terrified of a single hound going over a dumpster. Now he was standing in a hound's skin at the head of an army, and the thing that frightened him most was not the hounds at all, but how natural it felt. The Dread Sovereign, whatever it was, had settled into him like a crown, and the crown fit.

He spent his points and, for the first time, noticed something stop. His Wisdom had climbed past a hundred and ten, and the aura's reservation, which had been falling two percent at a time since his evolution, sat at five percent and would not go lower. Five percent of thirteen hundred and fifty points, sixty-seven points of mana to keep a thirty percent speed buff and a field of dread rolling across the whole alley, and everything else free to spend. "That's the floor," he said to nobody in particular. "Minimum upkeep." Elena, who had been standing close enough to hear him, laughed shakily. "Max," she said, "you're the only person in the world who'd sound disappointed about that."

Sarah dropped off the dumpster and landed beside him without a sound, the Stalker Treads swallowing the noise of her landing completely. She looked at the mantle on his shoulders, then up at the eleven-foot champion with the pack leader's skull, then back at him. "You know they're going to start coming for you specifically," she said. "The smart ones already are." Max thought about the pack leader dragging itself across the asphalt toward him with its guts in the street, and he did not argue. "Then they come to the one place in this sector with six champions standing in it," he said, "so let them."

The final race level of the fight came as the last of the four hundred died. The plaza was quiet afterward in the way it was only ever quiet between pushes, a ringing, smoking stillness full of the tick of cooling iron plates and the drip of blood off the dumpsters. Max felt his body pack itself tighter one more time, strength and speed and toughness rising together, and the bodyguard champion at his shoulder shifted its weight as if it felt it too:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, F-RANK (LEVEL 12 -> LEVEL 13) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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Bev was sitting on the bumper of the van with her club across her knees and her eyes closed, and when Max walked back down the alley to check on her people, she opened one eye and held up her status window without a word. Level 9. Priya was at 8 and Luis at 7, and Marcy, who had spent the whole wave dragging people out of the way of things that wanted to eat them, was at 8 and staring at her own window with tears running down her face. "We didn't kill but four of those things all morning," Bev said hoarsely. "We stood back here and you killed them, and we got stronger anyway." Max did not know what to say to that, so he said, "That's the point," and she nodded slowly, as though he had said something much more important.

Reyes met him at the left flank with Kenji's blood dried brown on his sleeves. "Kenji's at 9," he said. "Theo's at 10. He's going to evolve tonight if we live through today, and so am I."

He looked past Max at the six champions standing in the smoke, at the wall of skeletons, at the man in the hound's-skin mantle, and he shook his head slowly. "Three hours ago we were dying in a pharmacy," he said. "Now I've got a kid who can evolve before lunch." Max looked at the plaza, where the smoke was thinning and the next pack was already gathering at the far end of the avenue, and pulled up his window. "Before lunch," he said, "we have to survive breakfast."

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| NAME: MAX WILLIS | RACE: HUMAN (F-RANK) | CLASS: DREAD MARSHAL (F) |

| LEVEL: 14 (5,126/7,593 XP) | RACE LEVEL: 13 (1,519/5,062 XP) |

| RAID: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 (LEADER) | 15 MEMBERS |

| HP: 750/750 | MP: 703/1,350 (636 AVAILABLE | 67 RESERVED) |

| STR: 33 | AGI: 35 | VIT: 75 | CON: 85 | INT: 138 | WIS: 126 | PER: 41 |

| GEAR: IRON-FANG PACKMASTER MANTLE [1/6] (+5 INT, +3 WIS) |

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| SKILL: [AURA OF DREAD] | +30% SPEED | 5% OF MAX MP RESERVED (FLOOR) |

| SKILL: [DREAD CHAMPION] | 250 MP | 6 / 6 ACTIVE |

| MINIONS: 66 SKELETONS + 6 CHAMPIONS (90 / 90 SLOTS) |

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| WAVE 2 STATUS: 8:16 AM |

| HOUNDS REMAINING: 2,002 / 3,500 | ELITES REMAINING: 353 / 525 |

| INDUCTEES REMAINING: 961 / 2,500 |

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Two thousand hounds and three hundred and fifty elites still out there, and every elite carried six rolls for the squad. Max looked down at the hound's-skin mantle on his shoulders and thought about the other five pieces of it walking around the plaza on four legs, waiting to be killed. The champion at his shoulder turned its triple-skulled head toward the avenue, where the next pack had finished gathering, and Max followed its gaze. Thirty elites this time, maybe more, running in three wedges with a long red tide of hounds behind them. "Here they come," Marcus said, and set his shield, and the raid set itself behind him.