Chương 66: Explosive Step

The idea had come to Alex in the middle of the night, the way the good ones did, and it had come from his own feet. He'd been thinking about the ambush. Specifically about the water, the way the tidekin's kin had shoved him around the field like furniture, the way he'd stood there being moved and unable to stop it, and underneath that, the older problem, the one Jeremy had beaten into him in a spar weeks ago. He couldn't touch fast things.

He was strong past reason and tough past reason and slow, relatively, a very large man who arrived a half-beat late to anything quick. He had a Dash skill, a cheap common thing that gave him one short burst of speed, and it had never been enough, one straight-line lunge and then he was flat-footed again. But he'd spent a month learning to make explosions. He understood, better than almost anyone alive, how to put a great deal of force into a very small space and make it go off exactly when and where he wanted.

And force that goes off in one direction pushes everything in the other. So he'd gotten up in the dark and gone out past the tents and tried to blow himself sideways. The first attempt nearly broke his ankle. He channeled thermal down into the ground under one foot, compressed it the way he compressed a thermal into dash, and let it go, and the explosion threw him a good four meters through the air in a direction he had not entirely chosen, and he landed badly and sat in the dirt reassessing his life choices.

But he'd moved. Fast, faster than Dash, in a burst that came from his own body rather than a skill's fixed track, and the principle was sound. He just had to learn to aim it. He worked it for a day or two, in the mornings before the runes, and it was the loudest training anyone in the camp had ever done. That was the thing he hadn't anticipated. Every step cracked like a gunshot.

A thermal explosion going off was loud, and this was a small, directed version of the same event happening under his heel, and there was no quiet version of it, no way to muffle a controlled explosion. He'd blow himself across the practice ground, d and the report would roll across the whole camp and set every head turning, and Bartholomew came sprinting the first morning with his spear out before he understood it was just Alex learning to walk again.

After that, people got used to it, the way they'd gotten used to the crater in the field, but Alex noted the volume and marked it as a cost. A movement skill that announced itself to everything within half a mile was not a movement skill for sneaking anywhere. He started to aim it. Mostly. And the skill agreed with him that he'd made something. [Dash has evolved into Explosive Step (Uncommon).] He read the notification with real satisfaction, because he'd built this.

Not bought it, not been handed it at a level-up, built it, out of his own thermal work and a month of understanding explosions and a stubborn refusal to keep being the slow one. It was his, in a way that Star Core was his, made rather than granted. It changed how he could fight, and he felt the shape of the change immediately, and he also felt its limit. The speed was there now.

He could burst in any direction, redirect mid-motion with a second step, close a gap that used to be uncloseable in a crack of thermal force. What he couldn't do was see fast enough to use all of it. That was the other half of his slowness, the half no movement skill would fix, his perception simply wasn't sharp, never had been, the one stat that had always lagged behind the rest of him. He could move to intercept a fast thing now. He still had trouble reading where the fast thing was going in time to move.

Speed of body he'd solved. Speed of sight was a different wall, and he added it to the list of things to grind, right next to the mana manipulation that wouldn't budge. Stolen novel; please report. The outpost gave him his first real test, and the outpost obliged by being full of exactly the wrong enemies for his old self and the right ones for his new skill. Birds.

That was what the wind nest turned out to be tainted things with wingspans wider than a man was tall, fast and evasive and impossible to pin, diving and wheeling and never staying still, the precise sort of enemy that had always made Alex feel like a bear swatting at hornets.

Ron had scouted it clean, no leaders, no organization, just a nest of fast, corrupt fliers, and he settled onto a rise at the perimeter to watch the horizon while the crew went in, and did not fight, because watching was his whole job and he was good at it. Alex went in and, for the first time, chased. The birds dove, and he wasn't there, an Explosive Step cracking him sideways out of the strike path.

One wheeled to flee, and he stepped after it, the report of his own movement flinging him into its arc, glaive coming around to take it out of the air. He couldn't catch all of them, his sight still lost the quick ones, still arrived late to the fastest dives, but he caught so many more than he ever could have, closing gaps that used to be walls, punishing evasion that used to be safe.

Every crack of the skill threw him where he needed to be, and the birds that had been built to stay away from grounded fighters found the ground coming up to meet them. The rest of the crew worked around him, cleaner and faster than the ambush, no strong leaders to counter them, no army, just a nest that came apart under a coordinated team. Mia took the high fliers out of the sky with shots that didn't miss. Jeremy flickered through the low ones.

Liam's sand fouled their landings and dragged them down where the others could finish them. It was almost easy, after the ambush, a clean fight against an enemy that couldn't organize, and they cleared it and held the hour and took the outpost with nobody worse than winded. They sat out the conquest hour on the rise beside Ron, and Liam brought up the thing that had been sitting under all of them since the ambush.

"I keep thinking about how this could've gone," he said, watching the last of the nest smolder.

"This one was clean. Ron scouted it, no trap, easy. But the last one was clean too, right up until it wasn't, and if Ron hadn't, if Mia hadn't seen through the invisibility, we would have walked into that the same way we walked into this." He pulled his knees up.

"We got lucky the difference between a clean outpost and a death trap was one skill check."

"The portal," Alex said.

"The portal." Liam nodded, serious in the way he only got about this one thing.

"I'm close. Days. Based on what I know, we should be able to teleport from danger." He looked at Alex.

"Then we can be a little more at ease." Alex nodded, because he'd thought the same thing standing over the sandy arch in the dark. Liam's answer was better. It didn't depend on being the strongest thing in every fight, which was a bet that got harder to win the further out into the world they went.

"Finish it," Alex said.

"Whatever you need, whatever it costs, finish it. I'll help pour mana into the thing if that speeds it up."

"Nah, it needs spacial mana." Liam almost smiled, and then his eyes went back to the smoldering nest, and the worry stayed on him, the specific worry of a boy who'd watched his family nearly die and had decided, in his own way, to make sure it never got that close again. They walked home under a clearing sky, the outpost taken, Explosive Step proven, the crew whole and easy with each other in the way of people who'd fought well together and lost no one.

Alex tested the skill the whole way back, cracking himself ahead of the group and waiting for them to catch up, then doing it again, learning the aim of it, grinning like an idiot every time the ground threw him where he wanted to go. It was a good day. One of the best in a while. He'd remember that too, later. How good the day had been, right up until the night.