Chương 71: The Look on Their Faces

Day thirty-five began with the best sleep Alex had gotten in a long time, and went downhill the moment he stepped outside. He'd slept more than twelve hours. His body had needed it, the days had been long and the nights longer, and he woke feeling almost human, rested in a way he hadn't been since the scream. He got dressed without much thought, the comfortable armored pants he'd taken to wearing, shirtless of course.

Then he pulled on the pants, and he went out into the morning to find Cassandra and the runes, and the camp reminded him, immediately and without mercy, what he was now. It was the first time he'd really walked through the camp in a while. He'd been keeping to the edges, to his tent and the rune-work ground and the dungeon, moving at the margins of a place that had hundreds of people now feeling like hundreds of people with negative opinions about him.

He allowed himself to take the atmosphere in because the fog had thinned and some part of him had decided it was time to stop hiding at the seams of his own home. People saw him coming, and something moved through them. Not everyone. But enough. A woman he half-knew stopped talking mid-sentence and found something to look at on the ground. Two men working a repair went very still and very focused on their work until he'd passed.

The conversation didn't stop, exactly, but it changed, dropped, thinned in his wake and picked back up behind him, and Alex walked through it with his face set and his eyes forward and felt every one of them. He didn't blame them. That was the part that sat in his chest like a stone he'd swallowed.

He was enormous, and shirtless, and he'd gotten more so over the last month, the muscle harder and more defined, ripped in a way that had stopped looking like fitness and started looking like something built for one purpose, and they had all seen, or heard, what that purpose could do in a heartbeat to a man's skull. A month ago his size had been the most reassuring thing in the camp, the big one, the one who stood in front.

Now they looked at the same body and saw the thing that had killed Carl in less time than it took to scream, and the reassurance had curdled into something else, and there was no un-ringing that bell. Then he passed the children, and it got worse. They were near the fire, the same patch of ground where they always were, a knot of kids who a week ago had been climbing on him and standing on his chest and shrieking with joy. They saw him coming. And they scattered.

Most of them just ran, quick and instinctive, the way children run from a thing they've been told to be afraid of, off toward the tents without looking back. And one of them, a small girl Alex didn't know by name, one of the ones Carl used to play swords with, took one look at him and burst into tears. Alex stopped walking.

He stood there in the middle of the path with a crying child fleeing from the sight of him, and he did not go toward her, because going toward her was the worst thing he could do, and he had never in his life felt more like the monster they'd decided he was. He'd killed a man to protect a child, and now children cried when they saw him, and there was a cruelty in that so complete he couldn't even be angry at it.

"Uncle Alex!" Two voices, at once, and Alex turned, and there they were. Jake and John came barreling toward him from the direction the other kids had fled, against the current, John in front and loud, Jake a step behind and watchful, and neither of them had a scrap of fear in them.

They hit him at the knees and John started climbing immediately, demanding to know where he'd been, why he never came around, whether he was done being sad, all in one breath, and Jake wrapped himself around Alex's arm and looked up at him with the plain uncomplicated love of a kid who had decided a long time ago exactly who his uncle was and had not revised the decision for anything. Something in Alex's chest cracked and warmed at the same time.

"Hey," he managed, and crouched down to their level, and let John climb him and pulled Jake in close.

"I've been around. Just busy."

"The other kids ran away from you," Jake said quietly, watching Alex's face with that unsettling childish perceptiveness.

"How come?"

"Because they don't know me as well as you do," Alex said, which was the truest simple thing he could think of.

"You two know me. They're still figuring me out."

"They're being dumb," John announced, with total confidence.

"You're the strongest. Everybody knows that." He played with them for a minute, let John win a wrestling match that was never in doubt, and then their mother called them off to eat, and they went, John waving the whole way, Jake looking back once to make sure Alex was okay, and Alex stood up feeling both better and worse than before they'd arrived. He found Cassandra at the rune-work ground, and the morning finally turned.

She was already set up, surrounded by the day's work, dozens of weapons and pieces of armor laid out around her, arrows that needed re-enchanting, gear whose runes had gone soft and needed mending. She looked up when he approached, and she smiled at him, an ordinary smile, glad-to-see-you and nothing else, no fear in it anywhere, and Alex felt some knot in his shoulders he hadn't known was there come loose. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"You slept," she said.

"Finally. You look like a person again."

"Twelve hours. Maybe more."

"Good. You probably needed more." She waved a hand at the spread of gear around her.

"And now you get to pay for it, because I've been holding all of this for you, and my Rune Repair only stretches so far before my head starts to hurt." They settled in to work, the two of them a few feet apart, and Alex felt the whole morning ease. Whatever the rest of the camp had decided he was, here was one person who looked at him and saw Alex, and asked him to fix runes, and complained about her headache, and treated him like a colleague instead of a loaded weapon.

He'd never fully appreciated how much he needed one ordinary thing until the whole world went strange around him and Cassandra stayed the one place it didn't. The work was familiar and quiet. Runes were like writing in pencil, Alex had come to think of them, and a pencil line didn't last forever.

Every time a rune fired, every time mana ran through the strokes, the inscription wore a little, blurred at the edges the way a pencil mark smudges under a thumb, and after enough use the lines lost their shape, and the rune weakened toward uselessness. Rune Repair was the eraser and the sharpener both, mending the blurred strokes back to crisp, restoring what use had worn away.

They both had the skill, which was the only reason the camp's gear stayed functional at all, because half the settlement carried something one of them had made, and all of it degraded, and all of it came back to the two of them eventually.

"Your hair looks nice," Alex said, somewhere in the second hour, because it did, and because saying an ordinary thing to an ordinary person felt like a small act of defiance against a morning that had been anything but. Cassandra glanced up, and there was a flicker of surprise, and then a pleased sort of ease.

"Thank you. I finally had time to do it properly." She touched the braids, done up in a neat bob, her natural hair worked into it, and it did look fresh, cared-for, the work of someone who'd spent real time on it.

"The aunties have been teaching me their patterns. Well, I say teaching; mostly we just sit around and braid each other's hair and gossip. I did Aunt Becky's the other day. She did mine back, sort of; she's better at feeding people than braiding them." She smiled ruefully.

"She keeps feeding me, actually. I've told her I've gained weight, and she just says good and puts more on the plate. I can barely eat anymore. There's no arguing with her."

"You've been braiding your own hair a long time, I'm guessing," Alex said.

"You're too good at it for it to be new."

"Since I was a kid." Something passed briefly behind her eyes, there and gone, an old thing she didn't dig into.

"Nobody was going to do it for me, so I learned. Turns out it's one of the few skills from the old world that still means something, everybody wants their hair done, and nobody has a salon anymore." She looked at him, and her mouth quirked.

"Unlike some of us. What is happening up there, exactly?" Alex reached up and touched his own hair, which was a messy afro that had not seen anything resembling grooming in longer than he wanted to admit.

"This is a lifestyle choice."

"That is not a lifestyle choice. That's a surrender."

"It's low maintenance."

"It's a bird's nest." She was grinning now, and it was the first fully unguarded thing anyone had aimed at him all day.

"And I notice you're not even trying to grow a beard to balance it out. A man your size, no beard? It would look cool on you."

"I can't," Alex admitted, and there was something almost funny about saying I-, most feared man in the camp confessing his one genuine physical failing.

"Bad genetics. I've tried. It comes in like six sad patches and gives up. My whole life I wanted a beard, and my face refuses to participate." Cassandra laughed, a real one, and Alex found himself almost smiling, and it struck him how strange and good it was that in the middle of the worst stretch of his life, sitting with this woman fixing runes was the most relaxed he ever felt. She was easy in a way almost nothing else was.

He didn't have to be the strongest thing in the camp with her, the weapon he had chosen to be. He could just be a guy with a bird's nest and no beard, complaining about his genetics. He was starting to understand, a kind of rest he couldn't get anywhere else. They worked through the pile as the camp went about its morning around them.

Alex noticed, half-listening, the wall itself had gotten better, enhanced with a kind of stonework that clearly hadn't come from the tutorial store, which meant someone among the newer arrivals had an architecture-related class and had put it to use. The camp kept surprising him like that, absorbing skills he'd never have thought to look for, becoming more than the sum of the desperate people who kept walking in from the dark.

Cassandra set down a mended blade and stretched, and looked at the remaining pile, and said, almost idly, "You know what we actually need? A way to store mana. Somewhere it holds, so it's there when you want it, instead of everyone running dry at the worst possible moment." She turned a thought over as she said it.

"If we could build something that held a real reserve, and let people draw from it, it'd change how half the camp fights. I keep chewing on whether it's even possible with runes."

"That sounds hard," Alex said.

"Extremely hard. Maybe impossible. But." She shrugged and went back to work.

"I keep thinking about it." Alex kept that in mind, more interested than he let on, and then Bartholomew's voice cut across the yard, calling his name, and Alex looked up to see his uncle crossing toward them with something long wrapped in cloth across both arms, wearing the specific look of a craftsman who had made a thing he was proud of.

"It's done," Bartholomew said, unwrapped it, and held out the new glaive. It was the best thing his uncle had ever made, and Alex knew it the moment he took it. Eight feet of it, the blade covering nearly a third of the length, balanced despite the size, an uncommon-grade weapon that had left the store's work behind entirely.

Alex turned it in his hands and felt how right it sat, and already his mind was running ahead to the enchantments, the dozens of runes he'd lay into it, the heat channels and the reinforcements and the sharpness, the way he'd make his uncle's best work into something no store would ever sell.

"It's perfect," Alex said, and meant it, and Bartholomew tried not to look pleased and failed. Anticipation for the next few hours was already on his mind. The wave was coming. He could feel the dungeon's rhythm in his bones by now. But that was later. Right now, there was a glaive to enchant, and runes to fix. he let himself have the morning while it lasted