Chương 77: Veilfox

The number was what got everyone, at first. They came out of the dungeon as foxes, or as things that had been foxes once, and Alex could see the ghost of beauty in them even through the corruption. White fur gone gray and filthy, stained with the dark oily wrongness of the Abyss, elegant creatures that something had taken real care to ruin. Tainted Veilfoxes, and they poured out of the dungeon mouth in numbers that climbed and did not stop.

[Tainted veilfox level 15] [Tainted veilfox level 17] [Tainted veilfox level 19] A hundred. Then three hundred, which was normal. Then a thousand, which was not, and then two thousand, and Alex felt the wall tense around him, because two thousand was what they accounted for. And then the number kept going. Three thousand. Five.

It blew past every estimate the camp had built, past what the outpost counts said should be possible, until the field in front of the wall was a sea of gray fur, ten thousand of them, twelve, more than anyone could count, a tide of corrupted foxes stretching back into the dungeon dark. Something felt wrong about it. Alex felt it in his gut, a number that didn't fit the pattern they'd spent weeks learning, and for a moment a cold thought went through him, that something had changed, that the rules had shifted.

Then he looked closer, really looked, with the perception he'd bought so dearly, and understood. Most of them weren't real. He could see it once he knew to look. The foxes flickered, subtly, the way heat shimmers over stone, and the ones at the edges had a thinness to them, a lack of weight. And the tell, the thing that gave it away, was the ground. The real foxes ran across dirt and kicked it up, brown streaking their gray fur, their paws marked with the earth they crossed. The clones were clean.

Perfectly, impossibly clean, no dirt on them anywhere, because they'd never actually touched the ground they appeared to run across. They were light and image and nothing else.

"They're illusions," mai called.

"Most of them. Each real one's making copies of itself, five to one, maybe more." The word went along the wall, and Alex watched the panic that had been building drain back out of the line as people understood. Twelve thousand foxes was a nightmare. Two thousand real foxes hiding inside ten thousand phantoms was a hard morning. The difference was everything, and it changed the whole shape of the fight before it started.

Katelin's light rolled out over all of them, and Alex felt it settle in, and it was different now, broader and stronger than it had been. She'd grown into her class, one of the stronger mages in the camp, and her field did more and more. It lifted stamina, quickened recovery, kept a thousand people fighting longer and harder than their bodies alone would allow.

She stood behind the line and held the entire camp up with a skill that asked nothing of the people it saved, and the fear that clung to Alex had never once touched her, because what she did was so plainly, purely good that no one could look at it and be afraid. Then the foxes hit, and Liam decided to end the argument early.

Alex felt the mana move before he saw it, a vast slow gathering, and turned to see his cousin with one hand jammed into the storage device's socket, drawing on the reserve the whole camp had spent weeks filling. Liam didn't need the device to be strong. Alex knew that, everyone knew that, Liam emptied his own considerable pool in one big working every fight. But the device meant he didn't have to stop at one.

It extended him, let him pour out past his own limit into the camp's saved store, and Liam took that gift and did something with it that Alex had never seen him do. He turned part of the battlefield into a mini desert. Sand erupted across a huge swath of ground, not thrown but made, the earth itself converting under his will, and it rolled out sticky and heavy and grabbed at everything that touched it.

The real foxes bogged down in it, their paws catching, half of them coated in clinging sand within seconds, and the phantoms ran across it leaving no mark because phantoms left no marks, which made them even easier to pick out. Then the sand rose. Spikes erupted from it, impaling. Great hands of sand reached up and closed on fox after fox and crushed them.

A third of the real foxes died in the first minute, and most of the survivors were injured, staggering, sand-caked and slowing, and the camp's archers and mages fell on the softened ranks and tore them apart. It was the most powerful single display Alex had ever seen from his cousin, and it was not free. The ten mini-bosses moved through the chaos, and Alex saw them for what they were, ten real ones wearing the appearance of fifty, the same clone trick scaled up. Liam saw them too, and he wasn't done.

He gathered one more working, bigger than everything that had come before, and a hand of sand the size of a house rose up and came down across the mini-bosses, and crushed 2 of the ten in a single fall. And then Liam dropped with blood coming from everywhere. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Alex was moving before his cousin hit the ground, but Ace was closer, already there, green light pouring out.

Liam was bleeding from his nose, his eyes, the corners of his mouth, the specific ruin of a mana pool pushed catastrophically past its limit, and he was smiling, unconscious and smiling, because he'd done the thing and he'd felt it work. Ace's healing caught him, steadied him, and Alex heard her mutter that he was alive, just spent, just an idiot, and Alex let out the breath he'd been holding. The device had helped Liam reach further than he ever had. It hadn't made him careful about it.

That was going to be a conversation, later, when the boy woke up grinning about the giant sand hand. Alex added it to the growing list of people in his family who'd learned they were powerful and forgotten to be careful, and turned to the bosses, because five mini-bosses and however many big ones were still out there, and Liam was down. The remaining fights fell to the rest of them, and they rose to it.

Mia's arrows came down like judgment, precise and constant, taking real foxes out of the tide and never once wasting a shot on a phantom, her perception sharp enough to tell them apart at range. The mini bosses also received arrows, as they seemed to be lacking in defense. Each arrow that struck them took them out, as long as Mia could land the shot. Jeremy flickered through the field in cracks of white light, killing the mini-bosses Liam had left, fast enough that their evasion didn't matter.

And the big bosses, when they came, were a different problem entirely. There were fewer of them than the count had suggested, the same illusion trick, but the real ones were fast, agile in a way that made them maddening, and they had the foxes' gift turned up to something dangerous. They could switch. A big boss would be here, and Alex would commit to it, and it would swap places with one of its own clones ten meters away, leaving Alex's strike to pass through an image while the real thing reappeared behind him.

It was the exact kind of enemy his kit hated, fast and slippery and dishonest, everything his strength and his slow perception were worst against. So he did the thing he'd built for exactly this, and learned it wasn't enough. Planetary Lock snapped out and caught a big boss, the gravitational tether taking hold, and Alex charged in behind it certain the thing was pinned. It swapped anyway.

The boss traded places with one of its clones ten meters off, and the tether did nothing to stop it, because the switch wasn't movement, it was like teleportatation and alex's skill wasnt a spacial lock. Alex's Cleaving Strike came down on empty air where the boss had been a half-second before, the ground cracking under a blow that hit nothing at all. He turned, found it, charged again. It switched again.

He swung, and hit a phantom, the clone bursting into nothing under his glaive while the real boss reappeared behind him and raked its claws down his back. He spun, swung, air. Chased it across the churned field, Explosive Step cracking him from one position to the next, and every time he arrived where the boss was, the boss was already somewhere else, laughing at him in the only language a fox knew, which was not being there.

His perception, the stat he'd never gotten high enough, lost the real one among the fakes again and again, and he burned mana and temper both swinging at a thing that would not hold still long enough to be hit. It was the exact fight his kit was worst at, and Planetary Lock, the answer he'd been so sure of, was no answer at all. Cassandra fixed it. She'd been watching him flail, reading the fight the way she read everything, and she saw the thing he couldn't in the middle of his own frustration.

The switch needed the clone. The boss couldn't swap to open ground, only to a body it had already placed, and it couldn't swap at all if it couldn't move to set the trade up. So she stopped trying to help Alex find the real one and started taking the real one's freedom instead.

Her chains of pink diamond snaked out, and where the boss actually was, the true body with the dirt on its fur where it had touched the ground, she bound it, links of hardened crystal seizing one limb and then another and then all of them, pinning the thing in place so completely it couldn't gather itself to swap.

The boss thrashed against the chains and could not switch, because switching took a heartbeat of movement it no longer had, and suddenly the slippery evasive thing was just a fast animal held fast, no clone to flee into, no trade to make.

"Now," Cassandra called, and Alex was already moving. He didn't miss this time. The boss was where the chains held it and nowhere else, and Cleaving Strike came down on a body that could not slip away, and this time it landed, and this time it counted.

Jeremy came in with him, flickering around the bound boss too fast for it to track even if it could have moved, Fatal Thrust punching through when the opening came, and when a second boss tried to flank them Cassandra's chains found it too, seizing its limbs before it could set up a single swap. Jeremy took one hit, a slash across his shoulder, and Ace's light found him from across the field and closed it before it slowed him.

The power couple, someone had started calling them, and watching Ace heal her husband mid-stride while he killed, Alex understood why. Between Cassandra's chains and Alex's strength and Jeremy's speed, the bosses that had built their whole existence on being impossible to pin found themselves pinned, and once they couldn't run, once they couldn't trade themselves for their own lies, the rest was just work.

They took them apart one at a time, and the great illusion of the veilfox wave, twelve thousand foxes and fifty bosses, collapsed down to what it had always really been, a hard fight against a manageable enemy hiding behind a curtain of lies. The field cleared. The illusions winked out as their casters died, whole swaths of the fox tide simply vanishing, until the ground that had looked like a sea of gray fur was just churned earth and Liam's slowly settling desert and a scatter of real corpses. Nobody had died.

There were injuries, some bad, the way there always were. But the healers had held, and Katelin's field had held, and Liam should wake up soon. Alex stood in Liam's cooling desert, which slowly turned back to grass. The mages could choose whether they wanted to make something permanent or not, which cost more mana than a temporary effect. Looking at the number that had terrified them all at the start- twelve thousand- and thinking about how little of it had been real.

But even if it was, Alex doubted the outpost would have fallen.