Chương 72: Leaf Blade

The things that came out of the dungeon that afternoon were built entirely out of edges. Tainted Leaf Blades, the system called them, and the name undersold them. They came out black and chittering, six feet of insect standing upright on limbs that ended in blades, mantis-shaped, their arms scythes and their legs scythes and even the segments between them honed to cutting lines, and a faint corrosive haze hung around each one, the air itself seeming to blur and sour where they passed.

Level fourteen, the common ones, and there were hundreds of them, pouring out of the dungeon mouth in a black bladed tide. Then the mini-bosses. Eight feet tall, five of them, four blades sprouting from each, and every blade glowed with a different element, one wreathed in fire, one dripping a green corrosion that hissed where it touched the ground, one crackling, one cold, so that each mini-boss was a walking arsenal of four different ways to open a person. And behind them, one big boss.

Ten feet, towering over the rest, and where the mini-bosses bristled with blades it carried only one, a single enormous scythe-arm, and somehow that was worse, because it didn't need four. The power came off it in a way Alex felt against his skin from across the field, and the whole camp braced at the sight of it. But the numbers were wrong, and Alex noticed it before the fight even started. Five mini-bosses. One big boss. That was fewer than it should have been.

They'd conquered a good stretch of outposts since the last wave, and by the logic everyone had been operating under, one boss added per outpost cleared, this wave should have been thick with them, a dozen bosses or more marching out of the dark. Instead there were six, and the mob count had climbed the way it always did, but the bosses hadn't kept pace. Alex didn't understand the mechanic behind it.

But he understood the shape of the surprise, and he saw the same realization move through Chris and the others on the wall, a cautious, dawning comfort. If clearing outposts stopped adding bosses at some point, then the ceiling on how hard the waves could get was lower than they'd feared. That thought, half-formed and unspoken in the middle of a battlefield, was going to change how aggressively they expanded. But that was for after. Right now there was a bladed tide coming. Alex opened with the wide one.

He'd grown into a mana pool that could afford it now, level seventeen and a profession that had been quietly stuffing Intelligence and Wisdom into him for weeks, and he built the Star Core up over the field, thermal folded into gravity, gathered broad instead of deep, bigger than he'd ever made it.

He threw it into the front of the charge and the whole leading edge of the leaf-blade tide vanished in a rolling wave of heat and force, the ranks behind it scorched and staggered, dozens down and dozens more injured, limping forward on damaged blades. He still had another cast or two in him, and he saved them, because the bosses were where they'd matter. The camp took it from there, and the camp was a machine now.

Katelin's light rolled out over the line, boost and reinforcement and healing braided together, lifting everyone at once. The mages threw fire and stone and force into the staggered ranks. The archers rained enchanted arrows, half of them cracking with the explosion runes Alex and Cassandra had spent weeks etching, and the injured leaf-blades that had survived the Star Core came apart under the barrage before they reached the wall.

Liam's sand rolled out and grabbed bladed legs and dragged the things down into the churn. It was loud and coordinated and worked, and Alex dashed through the wreckage of the front ranks with Explosive Step cracking under his feet, not stopping to kill, just carving toward the bosses at the back. He caught glimpses as he went, and one of them stopped him cold. Ace. She was in the thick of it, in close where a healer had no business being, and she was fighting like something had come loose in her.

Iron-dust knuckles, punching leaf-blade heads clean off, wading into a cluster of things whose entire bodies were cutting edges, and taking hits for it, blades opening her arms, her shoulder, her side, and every wound closing in green light almost before the blood finished welling. She took a scythe across the ribs and answered it by caving in the thing's skull, took another and returned it doubled, relentless, tireless, unkillable.

She fought like a woman who had learned she could not die and had decided to spend that knowledge, and Alex, dashing past, felt a cold flicker of fear watching her that had nothing to do with the leaf-blades. Because he knew that fight. He'd invented that fight. It was his own recklessness wearing his sister's face, and the irony of it was bitter, that she'd chewed him out for exactly this weeks ago, for gambling with a body that could take more than it should, and now here she was doing it worse than he ever had.

Her offense was the lowest of the whole crew, everyone knew it, she hit like a healer who'd learned to punch rather than a warrior. But it didn't matter, because nothing could put her down, and a fighter who cannot be killed doesn't need to hit hard, she just needs to outlast everything, and Ace had understood that and leaned all the way into it. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. And her hair was going.

Alex saw it even in the middle of the chaos, the locs a little shorter than they'd been that morning, the bloodline feeding her again, trading pieces of her for the healing that kept her standing. She wasn't out of control, not fully, she was still reading the fight, still choosing her moments.

But she was so much further past careful than she'd have let anyone else in the family go, and Alex made a note, in the burning back of his mind, to talk to her about it, knowing exactly how far that talk would get coming from him, of all people. He reached the bosses, and the fight became his. Mia's arrow got there first.

She'd been drawing since the wave began, charging a single shot the whole fight, and it crossed the field faster than sight and took one of the five mini-bosses through the head, and the thing dropped instantly, dead before it registered the threat. Four mini-bosses and the big one left, and they turned their attention onto Alex all at once, and the fight got fast. He led with Planetary Lock.

The evolved skill snapped out and caught the whole cluster, the gravitational tether locking onto them, and the mini-bosses that tried to spread out and flank him found they couldn't leave his orbit, hauled back toward him no matter how they scrambled.

It kept them close, kept them from splitting his attention across too much ground, and Alex went to work with the new glaive, the one Bartholomew had made, thermal and gravity running through it now that he could hold both easily, and it cut leaf-blade limbs off in long arcs. The four mini-bosses spun into a whirling defense, four sets of elemental blades cutting at him from every angle, and here his body earned its keep.

The blades scored across him, fire and cold and corrosion and crackling force, and his skin, his forged, metal-turned skin, held. It shouldn't have. Anyone else would have been ribbons. He took cuts that would have flayed a normal fighter and they left him barely marked, and he waded through the storm of edges and took the mini-bosses apart one at a time, Cleaving Strike opening them, the glaive finishing them. Somewhere in the middle of it, something clicked.

He'd been fighting with the glaive for a month, grinding the mastery without it moving, background furniture on his sheet. And in the thick of four bosses, reading the arcs, placing every cut, some threshold he couldn't see gave way, and his hands knew things they hadn't a second before, the weapon suddenly an extension of intent in a way it hadn't quite been. [polearm mastery changed to Glaive mastery] [Glaive Mastery has advanced to Apprentice.] He didn't stop to admire it.

He felt the difference, the cuts coming cleaner and cheaper, and he used it, and the last two mini-bosses fell apart under a mastery that had just gotten sharper mid-swing with the assist of an arrow flying from the outpost's wall. Then the big boss moved, and it was fast.

Faster than a thing that size had any right to be, the single enormous scythe-arm coming around in a blur, and Alex got the glaive up to block and the boss's blade caught the haft and drove through his guard, and the scythe bit into his side, along the ribs, and Alex felt it. It got through. Not deep, his skin turned most of it, but the edge found his ribs and there was lightning riding it, a crackling force that lanced through him and locked his muscles for a half second. It should have been worse.

It should have opened his whole side. But his bones had been forged too, harder than his flesh, and the blade that should have cracked through them skidded off, and the lightning that should have dropped him found a body too dense to move much. The boss pulled back for its sword and started cutting Alex up like minced meat, barely cutting past his skin as alex's glavie mastry barley kept up, but the speed of this boss was too fast. Then Alex decided to go kamikaze. He answered it before it could pull back.

Planetary Lock was still holding the big boss in his range, and Alex used the half-second he'd bought and cast the compact Star Core, everything poured into a single dense point rather than spread wide, right against the thing's chest. He turned away as it went off. The explosion was contained and total, a small furious sun detonating point-blank against a ten-foot horror, and when the light cleared the big boss was gone, scoured, nothing left of it but a scorch mark and a settling of ash.

The field went quiet not long after. Without their bosses, the leaf-blades came apart fast under the camp's coordinated fire, and the last of them fell to arrows and sand and spellwork, and the wave ended. Nobody had died. Alex stood in the aftermath, his side aching and skin mending where the lightning had gone through, the wound already closing under his slow regeneration, and took stock.

Injuries everywhere, some ugly, but the healers had held, and Katelin's field had held, and every person who'd stood on that wall was going to walk off it. A medium difficulty wave, but a clean win. The second one in a row where the numbers had come in lower than the dread had promised. He should have felt the relief of it. Some of him did.

But as he walked back through the camp, past the people cleaning up and tending the wounded, he watched them watch him, and he understood that the win had cost him something anyway. They'd seen the Star Cores. They'd seen him delete the front of an army in one cast and the big boss in another, seen him wade through a storm of blades that would have killed any of them and come out barely scratched.

And where a month ago that would have been the most comforting sight in the world, now it just widened the gap between him and them, made him stranger, made the fear that had settled on him after Carl a little more permanent. He was the thing that could do that. And they had all just watched him do it again. The camp leadership gathered that evening, and the conversation turned, cautious and hopeful, toward the thing the wave had shown them. Fewer bosses than expected. Minimal injuries. No deaths.

If the waves weren't going to keep scaling the way they'd feared, then the careful, conservative pace they'd been keeping was leaving opportunity on the table. There were people out there dying. There were outposts to take and levels to gain and a whole tutorial's worth of ground they'd been too cautious to claim. It was time, they decided, to expand. Alex sat at the edge of the fire and listened, and agreed, and did not yet know what the expansion would walk them into.