Chương 78: Riders

The expansion had a rhythm now. They'd hit a problem as they cleared further out, a boring, practical problem, which was that the cleared ground kept growing and the outposts kept getting further away. A month ago the nearest nest was an hour's walk. Now the frontier was half a day out in any direction, and a team that spent six hours walking to an outpost and six hours walking back had no day left to actually fight, and the expansion had started to choke on its own success.

William fixed it, which was how Alex met William. He was a short, calm man, one of the newer arrivals, and he had the specific unhurried steadiness of a person who'd spent his life around animals and learned their patience. A zookeeper, before the world ended.

He'd taken a Mage class on the first day like half the camp, and when he'd hit ten and ranked up, the system had looked at whatever he was underneath and handed him Beast Tamer, and William had walked out into the field beyond the walls and come back leading gazelles. Not monsters. That was the thing Alex kept having to remind himself.

The tutorial had monsters, the corrupted things that came out of the dungeon, but it also had ordinary beasts, animals living out on the plains that weren't tainted and weren't hostile, just wildlife, and William could tame those. The gazelles were the best of them, horse-sized, long-legged, faster than anything a person could walk, calm under a rider once William had worked his quiet magic on them.

He treated them like they were his charges rather than the camp's equipment, named them, fussed over their legs after a long ride, talked to them low and easy in a way that made the enormous skittish things go still and trusting.

"This is Dorothy," he told Alex, the first time, patting a gazelle's flank.

"She's a steady one. She won't spook. You'll want her if you're not used to riding." He said it without any awareness that he was talking to the most feared man in the camp, and Alex appreciated that more than he could have said. The gazelles changed everything. Each team took two, and suddenly the half-day journeys were ninety minutes, and the expansion that had been choking on distance opened back up, teams ranging out across the widened frontier and coming back the same day with another outpost taken.

Alex privately hoped William wouldn't get hurt or overworked, because the whole rhythm of the camp now leaned on his gazelles, and a camp that depended this heavily on one short calm man and his tamed animals was a camp with a quiet vulnerability in it. But that was a worry for a stable week. For now, the riders rode. Alex's team was small, and it was small on purpose. After Carl, he hadn't wanted a crowd around him in a fight. He'd narrowed down to two, and they made a strange, effective trio.

Katelin, his cousin, whose boost and healing let the other two fight like they had nothing to lose, keeping them topped up and recovered so Alex could throw himself at a nest and Cassandra could burn her crystals freely. And Cassandra herself, ranged and precise, her pink diamond raining down control while Alex anchored the middle. They didn't need to talk much. They'd worked out the shape of it over a dozen outposts, and it hummed. The only friction was the gazelles, and it wasn't really friction.

There were three of them and they took two mounts, which meant two of them rode together, and the two that rode together were Alex and Cassandra, because Katelin had claimed her own gazelle on day one and defended the claim with the total immovability of a fifteen-year-old who did not want to share.

So Alex and Cassandra shared, Alex in front because he was bigger, Cassandra behind, and there was a closeness to it that neither of them remarked on and both of them were aware of, the practical proximity of two people on one animal, and it was fine, it was completely fine, and Alex would have preferred not to think about it at all. Katelin thought about it enough for all three of them.

She'd caught something, somewhere over the last few outings, some quality in the way the two adults were around each other, and she had responded to it the way she responded to most things she didn't like, which was to make a face and pretend it wasn't happening. She didn't tease them. Katelin didn't tease.

She just looked at the two of them sharing a gazelle with an expression of frank teenage distaste, like she'd found something unpleasant on her shoe, and then pointedly turned Dorothy's head away and rode ahead so she didn't have to watch. Alex noticed. He chose, wisely, to say nothing, and Cassandra chose the same, and the whole unspoken thing rode along with them to every outpost and back, unaddressed by anyone except a disgusted teenager.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The outposts fell easily now, and the falling taught them something. They'd finally worked out the boss pattern, sitting down one evening with every wave they could remember and every outpost they'd cleared. The old assumption, one boss added per outpost, had been wrong, and they could see now exactly how wrong.

The first five outposts had each added a single mini-boss, one apiece, which was what had fooled them into thinking it scaled forever. But it didn't. After that fifth one, the mini-bosses stopped coming per-outpost, and instead the big bosses arrived at intervals, wide ones. The first big boss had shown up around the sixth outpost. The pattern suggested the second big boss came somewhere around fifty outposts cleared, and the third not until a hundred and fifty.

The mob count still climbed the old way, fifty more monsters per outpost, steady and predictable. But the bosses, the truly dangerous part, scaled far slower than anyone had feared. Which meant the ceiling was low enough to run at. They'd conquered around fifty-four outposts now, and the reckoning of it, worked out over that long evening, said they could push much further before the waves became genuinely dangerous. A hundred and fifty outposts. Maybe more.

The deaths had been almost nothing, injuries mostly, the waves hard but survivable, and if clearing outposts gave levels and gave points and only slowly made the waves worse, then the smart move, the aggressive move, was to clear as many as they possibly could before the tutorial ended and the final tally came due. Push toward a hundred and fifty. See where the real ceiling was. Squeeze every level and every point out of the time they had left.

It was a good plan, built on good reasoning, and Alex believed in it, and it was made irrelevant three days later by two scouts coming through Liam's gate. The camp had a rhythm for scouts now too. Liam's main gate stood finished at the center of the settlement, and the scouts carried his recall talismans, and when one of them appeared in a rush of displaced air without their gazelle, it meant something had gone wrong badly enough that they'd spent the one-way token to get home fast. It didn't happen often.

It happened twice that week, and both times it stopped Alex's heart for the half-second before he understood which scout it was. The first came through mid-afternoon, gasping, and the leadership gathered fast, the Morningstars and a few others, William among them now, drawn into the circle by his gazelles and his usefulness.

"One of the outposts is gone," the scout said, once he had his breath.

"The fused one. The three groups that joined up together but wouldn't join us." Alex knew the ones. Three settlements that had banded together for safety and refused every overture the camp had made, keeping their distance, doing well enough on their own that they hadn't needed anyone. Mia had scouted them weeks ago and come back reassured, two level-tens each, no threat, a long way off. They'd been fine. They'd been doing well.

"Demolished," the scout said.

"The wall's down. Everyone, everyone's dead, I didn't see a single person alive. It wasn't a wave, it was, there was something in it, something huge, I saw a silhouette over the wreckage, tall, tusks, bigger than anything I've seen come out of a dungeon, and the second it turned toward where I was hiding I hit the talisman and I was gone. I didn't wait to see more." His hands were shaking.

"I'm sorry. I didn't wait."

"You did right," Chris said quietly.

"You did exactly right." The mood in the circle changed, went cold and careful, and before it had finished changing the second scout came through the gate.

"Army," she said, before anyone could ask.

"There's an army moving. A thousand, at least, maybe more. And it's coming this direction." Alex felt the floor of the whole thing drop.

"It's not monsters," she went on, fast, getting it all out.

"That's the part. It's not a wave and it's not a nest. It's a mix. Monsters and people. There are humans in it, marching with it, armed, fighting for it, and they look, they look wrong. Not tainted, not red-eyed. Just, empty. Dead in the eyes. Like whatever's left in there doesn't want to be doing what it's doing. And there are bosses keeping them in line, and sometimes one of the humans just gets killed, casually, to keep the rest afraid." She swallowed.

"They hit another outpost while I watched. One that wouldn't join us. The humans were fighting for the monster but they looked forced" The circle was silent. Alex stood in it and understood, with a cold that went all the way down, that this was the thing he'd never prepared for. He'd made himself into a weapon against monsters. Against the dungeon, the nests, the corrupted things that deserved to die.

He had never once, in all his training, in all his building, prepared himself for an army of enslaved people being driven at his wall.

"How long," Chris asked.

"They're moving slow. Deliberate. But steady." The scout's voice was flat.

"Two hours. Maybe a little more. And then they'll be at the wall." Chris turned to the camp, and the leader came down over him like armor, and he started giving the orders that would ready fifteen hundred people for the worst thing they'd ever faced. Charge the mana store. Distribute every potion. Fix what runes could be fixed in two hours. Get the children behind the deepest wall.

And Alex stood in the middle of the mobilizing camp with the return talisman heavy in his pocket and a dread he'd never felt before settling into his chest, because for the first time since the world ended, the thing coming for them was going to wear a human face, and he did not know how he was going to fight it.