Higher Ground

CHAPTER 9: HIGHER GROUND

The three wedges hit the barricade forty seconds apart, and Max understood by the second one that the elites had learned something. They did not come at the center where Marcus stood anymore. The first wedge struck the left flank where Reyes's five held the brick, the second hammered the van at the back of the alley, and only the third came at the shield wall, and behind all three the regular hounds poured in like water finding every crack in a dam at once. Thirty elites and three hundred hounds, split three ways, and every split was aimed at the people instead of the bones. "They're going around the skeletons!" Reyes roared from the left. "They're coming for us, not them!"

"Then the skeletons go to them," Max said, and the army moved. He peeled twenty skeletons off the center and sent them down the left flank in a clattering wave, sent fifteen more to the van, and moved two champions with them, one to each side, so that when the elites reached the people they found nine-foot walls of fused bone waiting in front of them instead. The bodyguard champion did not move from his shoulder. The center thinned to a single rank in front of Marcus, and the Iron Bastion simply set his feet and let the third wedge break on his shield alone, eight elites throwing themselves at one man and one sheet of iron and finding that neither of them would give.

The fight at the left flank was close and ugly. An elite got its glowing jaws around Dwayne's shield arm and dragged him halfway over the barricade before a champion's bone greatsword came down on its spine and broke it in half, and Dwayne fell back into the alley screaming, with the dead hound's iron fangs still sunk in his arm to the gums. Theo pried them out one at a time with his knife while David's gold warmth rolled over both of them. At the van Bev's four fought the way Bev had told them to, together and without heroics, with Priya swinging Hal's club and Marcy and Luis jabbing iron spears through the gaps between skeleton shields while the bone did the dying. Elena stood on the dumpster above all of it and rained fire down on all three fights in turn, swaying on her feet, shards crunching between her teeth like gravel.

The chime rang twice in the middle of it, close together, a class level and then a race level riding in behind it, and Max felt the second one pack his body tighter just as an elite came over the bodyguard champion's shoulder at him. The champion caught it out of the air by the throat. It held the elite there, thrashing, two feet from Max's face with its forge-hot fangs snapping at nothing, and then it closed its bone fist, and the elite's iron-plated neck folded like a soda can. Max did not flinch. He was already reading the window:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 14 -> LEVEL 15) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +9 INT, +9 WIS, +5 CON, +4 VIT |

| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +9 |

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, F-RANK (LEVEL 13 -> LEVEL 14) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

| MINION CAPACITY: 90 -> 102 |

| SKILL SELECTION AVAILABLE (CLASS LEVEL 15): 5 OPTIONS |

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He did not put this one off the way he had put off the Level 5 list. He had read the lists in his head a hundred times since the plaza, the way he used to read patch notes, and he knew what he needed before the window finished opening. The alley had been too small for his army since Level 12, and the raid was spread across three fights at once, and his aura reached ten yards from where he stood and not one yard further. He needed the army itself to carry it:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SKILL SELECTION AVAILABLE (CLASS LEVEL 15) |

| SELECT ONE (1) OF FIVE (5) OPTIONS. SELECTION IS PERMANENT. |

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| [1] LEGION'S MANTLE (PASSIVE | +5% AURA RESERVATION) |

| Allies within 6 yds of any skeleton gain 50% of the AURA OF |

| DREAD speed bonus. Dread Champions project the full aura, |

| speed and DREAD, within 9 yds. Stronger foes resist DREAD by stats. |

| [2] MASS RESURRECTION (ACTIVE | 15 MP PER MINION | COOLDOWN 90S) |

| [3] BONE VOLLEY (ACTIVE | 50 MP | COOLDOWN 20S) |

| [4] MARSHAL'S COMMAND (ACTIVE | 40 MP | COOLDOWN 30S) |

| [5] DREAD CHAMPION II (ENHANCEMENT) |

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He pressed the first line, and nothing in the alley looked any different at all. He felt it through the tethers instead, a pulse running out from his chest down eighty-four threads at once, and then every skeleton in the alley was carrying a small, unseen piece of the aura, and every champion was carrying the whole of it. On the left flank, Reyes's people suddenly moved like they had been fighting together for years, quick and light behind the bone shields, and Kenji let out a startled laugh as his crowbar came around twice as fast as he had swung it. At the van the champion Max had sent there began to radiate the full aura out to nine yards, and the elites around it faltered in mid-lunge, their heads dipping and their white eyes going wide. Dread spread through them like cold water, and the skeletons killed them while they hesitated.

The third wedge broke on Marcus a minute later, and then the whole assault was breaking, the regular hounds peeling off and running with the dread in them and the skeletons chasing them down in ranks. Max spent his nine points standing in the blood, three into Intelligence and two each into Wisdom, Vitality and Perception, and filled his twelve new slots out of the corpse pile. A hundred and two slots. The alley had been built for a pair of dumpsters and a handful of garbage bags, and now it held seventy-eight skeletons and six champions and fifteen living people, and there was not room left in it to turn around.

* * *

The lull came at 8:41, the way the lulls always came, all at once and without warning, as though the wave had simply run out of hounds to throw at this particular alley for the moment. Max climbed onto the dumpster beside Elena and looked down at what he had. Skeletons stood packed shoulder to shoulder from the bank wall to the office tower, spilling out of the alley mouth into the plaza because there was nowhere left to put them. Two champions were standing in the street outside the barricade because they did not fit behind it. "We can't stay here," he said.

Everybody turned to look at him, and he saw on their faces that they had all been thinking it. "Say it out loud," Marcus said, settling onto a crate with his shield across his knees. Max did. The alley was a choke point for six people and a dozen skeletons, and it had been perfect for that, but he had eighty-four minions filling a hundred and two slots now, and it would be more by noon. Legion's Mantle only worked if the skeletons could spread out around the people they were protecting, and right now they were stacked so deep that half of them could not reach a hound. "And the raid holds a hundred and fifty," he said. "We've got fifteen. Somewhere out there there's another hundred people hiding in pharmacies who don't know a raid exists."

While they argued, the raid's loot lay glowing in the mouth of the alley, and nobody had the heart to leave it. Theo and Kenji went among the dead hounds with a sack, coming back with copper and cracked guards and broken mana shards, and twice with the green glow of something better: a pair of Lesser Health Potions and an Intact Fang as long as a forearm that Dwayne claimed as a trophy for his ruined arm. Max watched them sort it on the lid of a dumpster with the absorbed care of children trading cards. Three hours ago these people had been dying in a pharmacy. Now they were arguing over loot splits, and he could not decide whether that was the best sign he had seen all day or the worst.

"Leaving the alley mid-wave is how you die," Sarah said from the shadow of the bank wall, as flatly as she had said it the first time. "I'm not saying we stay forever. I'm saying not now." Elena shook her head at her and said, "There were people screaming in that food court three hours ago. Some of them might still be alive." Jackson, wiping Bloodthirst-red off his broadsword, said he didn't care where they went as long as it had more room to swing in. David said nothing at all, and Max saw him looking at Dwayne's arm and doing a different kind of arithmetic.

"Where, though?" Bev asked. She was sitting on the van's bumper with her club across her knees and Luis asleep against her shoulder. "Because I've got four people who can't run a mile, and I'm not moving them anywhere I can't hold."

Reyes answered before Max could. "The parking structure at the east edge of the plaza," he said. "We climbed it this morning to look at the food court. Five levels of concrete, two ramps in and two stairwells, a roof you can see half the sector from, and enough floor space on every level to park two hundred cars." He looked at Max. "Or two hundred skeletons."

David spoke for the first time in an hour, and everyone turned to listen, because David almost never spoke. "I can't heal people in a hallway," he said quietly. "Every time it gets bad, everybody's packed so tight I can't reach the person who's bleeding, and the War Chaplain warmth only reaches so far." He held up his hands, which were stained to the wrist with Dwayne's blood. "Give me a floor where I can walk between people, and I'll keep twice as many of them alive." Marcus looked at him for a long moment, and then at Max, and gave a single slow nod.

Max had been thinking about the same place since he had stood on its roof and turned his back on the food court. He closed his eyes and laid it out in his head the way he would have laid out a raid instance: two vehicle ramps that narrowed to a single lane, stairwells that could be blocked with a single champion each, open floors where Legion's Mantle could stretch out to its full reach, and a roof where Elena could see everything coming from a quarter-mile off. "It's better than this," he said slowly. "It's better than anything we've got. But Sarah's right about the timing." Marcus nodded. "We hold here till the wave thins out," the sergeant said. "Then we move, and we move all at once, and nobody stops for loot."

* * *

The second assault came at 8:53 and did not give them time to finish the argument. It was smaller than the first, two hundred-odd hounds and twenty elites, but it came at the alley from the plaza and from the service lane behind the van at the same time, and for six terrible minutes the skeletons were fighting in two directions at once in a space where they could barely lift their swords. A skeleton at the back rank was crushed against the brick by its own comrades as the line surged, its ribs snapping inward under the press of bone shields with nowhere to go. Max felt it die and felt nothing that could be replaced, because there was no room to raise anything into. It was the clearest argument for the parking structure that anyone could have made.

The elites came at the van again, and this time Party 3 was ready. Bev had moved her people back three yards, inside the reach of the champion Max had stationed there, and when the elites came over the van's roof they landed inside nine yards of dread and stalled, and Priya's club caught the first one across the snout before it could recover. Marcy put a spear through its eye. Bev herself killed the second one with three overhand swings of her club, grunting with each one like a woman chopping wood, and when it was dead she stood over it breathing hard and looked at her window and laughed out loud. "Level 10," she announced to the alley at large. "Sixty years old and Level 10, and I used to need a cane on cold days."

Max's own window rang again before the assault broke, the class bar rolling over as a pair of elites died under the center champions' greatswords. He took the points the usual way and felt the minion cap open again, and he did not even try to fill the new slots; there was nowhere in the alley to stand them. Then the purple glow rose out of the second of those two elites and drifted up the alley to him, and he caught it out of the air before it had finished floating:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 15 -> LEVEL 16) |

| 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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| ELITE ITEM ACQUIRED: IRON-FANG PACKMASTER GRIPS [2/6] |

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

| STATS: +5 INT, +3 WIS |

| SET BONUS ACTIVE: (2) PACK HUNGER, EACH MINION KILL RESTORES 3 MP |

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The gauntlets were black hide with iron fangs set across the knuckles, and the moment he pulled them on the set bonus woke up and he felt the first trickle of it. A skeleton killed a hound at the barricade, and three points of mana came back to him; another killed another, and three more came. With eighty minions killing at once it was not a trickle at all but a steady, warm current, mana flowing back into him from every kill his army made, and for the first time since the plaza he understood how deep the well could get. "Two pieces," Jackson said, watching him flex his fingers. "You're going to be insufferable when you've got all six."

Elena got her first piece four minutes later, from a burning elite that died at the foot of her dumpster, a long hide robe stitched with iron rings that began to glow the moment she put it on. "Hexweave Hauberk," she read off the window, and then, as she cast her next Ember Rain and the rings flared white along her sleeves, "oh, that's beautiful." Marcus got an Uncommon Iron-Tip Spear from the same kill and looked at it with an expression of such deep, weary betrayal that Jackson had to turn away to laugh. David got nothing, again, and said nothing about it, again, and went back to closing Dwayne's arm.

* * *

The second lull came at 9:09, and it was the last one they waited for. Sarah climbed the fire escape on the office tower to the third floor and came back down five minutes later with her face set. "The wave's thinning," she said. "Maybe a thousand left across the whole sector, and they're spread out in packs of twenty and thirty, hunting." She paused.

"And there are people in the food court. Somebody's flashing a mirror from the roof. Three short, three long, three short." Marcus closed his eyes for a moment. "SOS," he said. "Somebody up there knows Morse."

That settled it. Nobody argued for staying, not even Sarah, who simply nodded once and started checking the straps on her treads. Max laid out the plan standing on the dumpster with the whole raid looking up at him: the skeletons in a hollow square with the living in the middle, champions at the four corners and one at his own shoulder, Marcus at the point of the square and Elena on his left with fire ready. They would go to the food court first, pull out whoever was flashing that mirror, and then cut east to the parking structure and take the ramps. "Nobody stops for loot," Max said. "Nobody breaks the square. If you fall down, the bones pick you up."

They went out at 9:14. The square moved across the plaza like something out of an old war painting, nearly eighty skeletons in plain bone armor walking in step around fifteen people, with six nine-foot champions striding at the corners and the Aura of Dread rolling out ahead of it in a cold, invisible tide. Every skeleton carried half of the aura's speed to the people near it, and every champion carried the whole thing, and the effect on the raid was extraordinary; Luis, who had been limping all morning on his rebuilt hip, kept pace without seeming to notice. The hounds in the plaza saw them coming and did not charge. They flattened their ears and slunk sideways out of the path of the square, and the ones that were too slow died with skeleton swords in their spines while they hesitated.

The plaza they crossed was not the plaza they had arrived in. The bodies of the first night lay where they had fallen, swollen in the morning heat, and the hounds had been at most of them; in places the asphalt was so slick with old blood that the skeletons' bone feet slid on it. They passed a city bus turned on its side with its windows smashed and a dozen dead men and women inside who had tried to hold it as a fort and failed. They passed a ring of dead hounds around a lamppost, and at its center a young woman with a sword in her hand and no throat, who had taken eleven of them with her. Nobody spoke. Max made himself look at every one of them, because somewhere in the arithmetic they counted too.

The fight at the food court was the hardest of the morning. Forty hounds and a dozen elites had been circling the building for an hour, trying to dig through a collapsed loading-dock door, and when the square came around the corner they turned on it all at once with the desperate fury of animals that had been denied their prey. Two champions met the elites head-on while the skeletons closed around the hounds like a fist. One of the corner champions lost its left arm at the shoulder to an elite's glowing jaws and fought on one-handed, swinging its greatsword like a club, and Jackson went in under the elite and opened its belly with Bloodthirst blazing. When the last of them died, the race bar rolled over:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: RACE LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| RACE PROGRESSION: HUMAN, F-RANK (LEVEL 14 -> LEVEL 15) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +3 TO ALL STATS |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The survivors came out of the food court's walk-in freezer, seven of them, blue-lipped and shaking and so thin with fear that they looked like they had not eaten in a week instead of a night. A man in a cook's apron came out first with a meat cleaver in each hand, and a woman behind him held a pocket mirror so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. They saw the skeletons and stopped dead. "It's okay," Elena said, stepping forward with her hands open, her Hexweave robe still glowing faintly. "They're ours. You're safe." The cook looked at the eighty skeletons and the six champions and the man in the hound's-skin mantle standing in the middle of them, and he started to cry, and he did not seem to know why.

Max offered them the raid the way Reyes had offered it to him, by swiping the window across, and he watched the cook read it with his lips moving. "Twenty-five percent," the man said hoarsely. "Of every kill those things make?" Max nodded. The cook looked at his six people huddled behind him, and then he formed a party with them right there in the food court's ruined loading dock, his thick fingers clumsy on the interface, and accepted the invite to the raid. Party 4. Seven people who had been dying in a freezer an hour ago walked out into the square with the aura settling over them and their legs suddenly light, and the woman with the mirror laughed out loud at the feeling of it.

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| RAID UPDATE: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 |

| PARTY 4 JOINED: OKONKWO (6/6) |

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

| NOTICE: PARTY CAPACITY IS 6. ONE (1) INDUCTEE UNASSIGNED. |

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The System, which never explained anything, had found something to say after all. Seven was one too many for a party, and the cook, whose name was Okonkwo, stared at the notice with the stricken face of a man being asked to choose one of his own to leave behind. Max did not let him. "Reyes has room," he said. "Party 2 has one open slot." Reyes sent the invite before Max had finished saying it, and the youngest of the seven, a narrow-shouldered kid in a busboy's shirt, accepted it with shaking fingers and went to stand beside Theo. Twenty-two people in the raid now. Four parties, a hundred and fourteen minion slots, and a parking garage waiting five hundred yards to the east.

They took the garage at 9:41. The ramps were empty except for a pair of hounds asleep in the shade of a pillar on the first level, and the skeletons killed them before they woke. The square flowed up the ramp and spread out across the concrete floor the way water fills a basin, and Max felt Legion's Mantle stretch out at last to its full reach, eighty-odd invisible pockets of aura scattered across a space big enough to hold them all, every living person in the raid standing inside the speed of it. He raised twelve more skeletons from the dead hounds scattered along the street below the garage, right where they lay, filling every slot he had, then posted a champion at the top of each ramp and one in each stairwell, kept the sixth at his shoulder, and stood in the middle of the second floor and let himself breathe. For the first time since 2:14 that morning, there was room.

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

| LEVEL: 16 (14,002/17,083 XP) | RACE LEVEL: 15 (2,751/11,389 XP) |

| RAID: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 (LEADER) | 22 MEMBERS | 4 PARTIES |

| HP: 930/930 | MP: 1,288/1,720 (1,116 AVAILABLE | 172 RESERVED) |

| STR: 39 | AGI: 41 | VIT: 93 | CON: 101 | INT: 175 | WIS: 157 | PER: 51 |

| GEAR: PACKMASTER MANTLE, GRIPS [2/6] | (2) PACK HUNGER ACTIVE |

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| SKILL: [AURA OF DREAD] | +30% SPEED | 10% OF MAX MP RESERVED |

| PASSIVE: [LEGION'S MANTLE] | SKELETONS 6 YDS (50%) | CHAMPIONS 9 YDS |

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

| MINIONS: 90 SKELETONS + 6 CHAMPIONS (114 / 114 SLOTS) |

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| WAVE 2 STATUS: 9:44 AM |

| HOUNDS REMAINING: 770 / 3,500 | ELITES REMAINING: 216 / 525 |

| INDUCTEES REMAINING: 912 / 2,500 |

| NEXT WAVE: WAVE 3 IN 01:46:00 |

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Reyes came up the ramp behind him with Theo and the busboy at his heels, and stood beside Max looking out over the plaza from the garage's open side. From up here they could see the alley where they had spent the night, a dark slot between two buildings with a hill of dead hounds in its mouth, and it looked impossibly small. "Nine hundred and twelve people left in the sector," Reyes said quietly. "And we've got twenty-two of them." Max looked at the raid's member count in the corner of his vision, at the hundred and twenty-eight empty slots behind it, and then at the plaza beyond the garage, where somewhere in all those broken towers someone else was hiding with a mirror. "Then we go get more," he said.