Chương 65: The Overworked Man

Alex settled into a routine which he had missed since the ambush. He spent the mornings with the runes to help his runescribe class caught up. He and Cassandra had a rhythm now, worn in over weeks, the two of them set up in the same stretch of open ground with their sheets and their pens, and they'd stopped needing to explain themselves to each other.

She'd hold up a botched inscription and he'd name the flaw before she asked, or he'd hit a wall on some finicky bit of Orravyn script and she'd see the thing he'd missed, coming at it from the mage's angle instead of the warrior's. They worked well together and left it at that. There was no rush to it and no reaching for more, just two people who were good at the same rare thing keeping each other company while they got better at it, and the camp's gear improved a little more with every session.

Half the settlement carried something one of them had made now. That was enough. That was a good thing to be, to each other and to the camp both. The afternoons he split between the dungeon and his own training, and the training was where the frustration lived. Mana Manipulation would not move.

Everything else came, thermal sharper by the day, gravity more cooperative, Star Core easier to shape in both its forms, but the plain basic skill of pushing raw mana around stayed stubbornly Novice no matter how many hours he fed it. Liam had told him there was no shortcut, just ten thousand hours of being bad at it, and Alex believed him and kept grinding anyway, freehand engraving in the dark, shaping and unshaping, wasteful and slow, because the only way past the wall was through it.

It was on the day that he finally cornered his father about the thing that had been bothering him since the stargazing. He found Chris where he always was, near the wall with the whole camp's business flowing through him, a runner leaving as Alex arrived, a question answered mid-stride, the endless small administration of six hundred people funneling through one man. Alex waited for a gap, and when it came he didn't ease into it.

"You're level seven." Chris didn't look up from the tally he was reading.

"I'm aware of my own level, yes."

"Dad."

"Alex." His father set the tally down and gave him the patient look he gave people who were about to tell him something he already knew.

"Say it."

"You're level seven and everyone in this camp who fights is past ten, and many are past fifteen, and your stats arentup to par at all" Alex kept his voice even, because he wasn't angry, he was scared, and the two felt close from the inside.

"If this place ever gets hit hard enough that the wall comes down, you're one of the most important people here and one of the easiest to kill." Chris was quiet a moment. He didn't argue the point, because it wasn't arguable, and that was one of the things Alex had always respected about his father, that he didn't waste breath defending indefensible ground.

"I got my first few levels in the opening days," Chris said.

"Before this. When it was forty of us and a dungeon and no wall, everybody fought, including me, and I climbed as fast as anyone." He gestured at the camp around them, the tents, the shops, the six hundred people.

"And then it became this. And running this, feeding this, keeping this many people from tearing each other apart over tent assignments and water and old grudges, it turns out that's a full-time job that nobody else can do, and every hour I'd spend in the dungeon is an hour this place spends without anyone holding it together." He shrugged, tired.

"So I made a trade. I stopped getting stronger so the camp could. I'm not proud of the number on my sheet. But I don't know who runs this if I'm out leveling."

"I hear you." Alex meant it.

"And I'm not asking you to abandon the camp for a week to grind. But Dad, there has to be something. Delegate a piece of it. Take an afternoon twice a week and go into the dungeon with a group that'll keep you safe and just, climb. Even a little. Level seven to level twelve isn't much time in the grand scheme, and it's the difference between you dying the moment something reaches you and you being able to hold your own for the minute it takes for help to come."

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"You sound like your mother."

"Mom's right about most things. Annoyingly enough." That got a small huff out of Chris, the closest he came to a laugh most days. He looked out over the camp for a moment, weighing it, the leader's habit of turning a thing over before committing to it.

"I'll think about it." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"You're right that it's aweakeness but I just keep looking at everything that needs doing and not finding the free time to think about my self." He glanced at his son.

"But I'll find it. Twice a week. Someone can cover the tent assignments without me for a few hours without the whole thing collapsing, probably."

"Probably."

"Your confidence is overwhelming." Chris almost smiled, and then something lightened in his face, a piece of good news he'd been sitting on.

"You want to hear something that'll cheer you up, since you're so worried about your parents dying. Your mother hit G rank." Alex blinked.

"Mom's level ten?"

"Level ten. Earth mage, common class, nothing fancy, she'll be the first to tell you she's not going to be throwing mountains arround" There was real warmth in it now, the overworked man lighting up about his wife.

"But she's been going out with one of the steady groups, quietly, not making a thing of it, and she crossed ten two days ago and didn't even mention it until I saw it on her sheet. Just, chilling, she said. Fighting a little. Leveling up." He shook his head, fond.

"Your mother has been the least worried person in this entire camp since the day we arrived, and she's stronger than half the people losing sleep over it. Including, I suspect, you." Alex found himself grinning, some of the weight he'd been carrying easing at the image, his mother who'd sat under the alien stars telling him to be a person, quietly getting to G rank without a word of fuss because it needed doing and worrying about it wasn't her way.

"That does cheer me up, actually."

"I thought it might. So take some of your own advice." Chris picked his tally back up, the conversation folding back into the endless work.

"Your mother figured out how to be strong and be a person at the same time. She's just living, and getting stronger while she does it, and she's happier than any of us. There might be a lesson in that for both of us." Alex left him to his tallies and thought about that for the rest of the afternoon. The routine held for the next day, runes and dungeon and training, the camp humming along, and it was good, and Alex let himself have it. He saw the twins twice more. He ate with the family.

He worked the wall his mana manipulation like a man attacking a boulder with a spoon, and felt it not move, and kept going. It was, he thought once, walking back to his tent under the rune lights, the closest thing to peace he'd had since a portal opened in a field and took his grandfather. When the plan came together to take the next outpost, it came together easily, because they'd done this a dozen times.

Chris made good on the promise from the night of the ambush and sent a scout with them, a lean quiet man named Ron, one of the survivors from the first settlement they'd taken people in from, who'd turned out to have a real knack for moving through open country without being seen. He didn't say much.

He watched everything, and he'd been out past the cleared ring more than anyone since the scouts started ranging, and Alex was glad to have eyes that were actually built for seeing rather than a crew of fighters squinting at the horizon and hoping.

"There's an outpost northwest," Ron said, laying it out for them with the economy of a man who didn't waste words.

"Small. I've watched it two days. Nothing organized about it, no leaders like the last one, just a nest. Wind types, from what I could see. It's clean. If there was a trap in it, I'd have found it." He paused.

"Butlets be prepared for the worst I'll be watching the whole time."

"That's the right instinct," Alex said.

"We move careful. All of us carrying an eye out, not just Ron. Last time nearly cost us everything and we walked in blind. We don't walk in blind again." They geared up in the morning, the crew plus Ron, and headed out under a gray sky toward the outpost northwest, and Alex felt steady in a way he hadn't the last time, a scout ahead of them, his family healed and rested, his father maybe finally about to get off level seven, his mother quietly at G rank being the least worried person alive.

It was a good few days, those days. He would think about them later, the way you think about the last good stretch of something once you know it was the last, and wonder if he could have felt it coming, and know that he couldn't have.