Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 734: Someone Else’s Wall (1/2)

The stretch two territories down the rim belonged to a kingdom called Solmire, ranked 2,141st, and on the Hub map it was dying by degrees.

Marcus watched it through the lull, and the more he watched, the worse the shape of it got. The red was not flickering the way a hard-pressed territory flickered. It was deepening, steady and patient, the color of something bleeding out. And the mission hanging over it had already doubled its contribution price once, which meant the Hub itself had raised its estimate of how bad things were down there.

"Talk me through it," Big D said, coming up beside him on the rise.

"Two of the towers that turned away from us reached them an hour ago. Their line was already thin before that." Marcus pulled the territory’s feed wide so the old man could see it. "And here is the part that matters. They are dying faster than they can come back."

That was the true meaning of the red, and every admin on the rim knew how to read it. Every kingdom of the upper layer kept its own revival methods, in whatever form its power allowed, and a defense line was only ever as strong as the gap between how fast its people fell and how fast it could return them. Solmire’s gap had gone the wrong way. Their fighters were dying quicker than their method could restore, and once a kingdom fell behind that curve, it did not catch up. It drowned.

The Regalons had their own method, and it was better than most, and it was currently a hundred days deep in another world. The Geneline that every member of the family carried could be called back from death by one man, and that man was inside a Legendary Exceed Cave with the sky between them. Nobody on the stretch had said it out loud all night. Nobody had needed to. It was in the rotation discipline and the double-checked counts and every careful order Marcus had given since sundown. Until Almond walked back out of the sky, the family fought without its net, and so the family did not fall.

"So the question," Big D rasped, "is whether we can afford to save someone else while being that careful with ourselves."

"The question is whether we can afford not to." Marcus brought up the rim’s larger picture. "If Solmire’s stretch fails, the dark pours through the gap and hits the territories on both sides of it from behind. That flank rolls, and it rolls toward us. We can pay a little now on their wall, or a lot later on ours."

Big D was quiet a moment. Then he grunted, which from him was a signed order. "Take the mission. But we hold our ground first, that has not changed. You do not strip this stretch to dress that one."

"I am not sending the stretch." Marcus was already keying the acceptance. "I am sending a spearhead."

[Mission accepted: Reinforce the Solmire territory. Difficulty: Severe. Contribution: escalating.]

The spearhead assembled in minutes, because it had chosen itself hours ago. Hiroshi, because a collapsing line needed a center and he was one. Kayla and her best rescue squads, because the mission was as much about the dying as the dead. And Ainen’s family, all four of them, because they were the heaviest mobile force the stretch could spare, and because Saffa had taken one look at Solmire’s feed and started giving orders as if the decision were already made.

"Fraisea rides the data the whole way in," she said, cinching her gear. "Clovelle moves us. Gopu, you do not range ahead, you stay above me until we see what is eating them. Kayla, your people hold our middle. Anyone argues, argue on the move."

"I was not going to argue," Hiroshi said mildly.

"You were going to lead from the front. Same thing."

They did not march the two territories. Clovelle laced Null-Step anchors along the rim’s rear line as fast as she could seed them, and the spearhead crossed the distance in folding jumps, the world stuttering past in slabs of war-light and darkness, and Fraisea read Solmire’s feed aloud between steps in her flat calm voice, and the numbers got worse with every jump.

"Their west anchor point is gone. Revival queue is nine hundred deep and their method restores forty a minute. The towers are standing in their killing ground, they cannot reach the legs." A pause, one more jump, the light of someone else’s burning wall growing ahead. "New signature with the towers. Fast movers, but large. Not runners. I do not have a shape for them yet."

Then there were no more jumps, and they had a shape for them.

Solmire’s stretch was a horror lit orange. Half its wall was rubble, its war-lights were dying in sections, and its fighters, humans and tall grey-skinned folk in scorched livery, were not holding a line anymore so much as holding knots, clusters of the living back to back among their own dead. The two towers stood untouched in the middle of it all like monuments, and around their feet moved the new things, and the new things were the reason the knots were shrinking.

They were hounds the size of houses, plated like the towers were plated, and they did not attack the clusters of fighters. They attacked the ground under them, diving into it like black water, bursting up beneath formations and scattering the living toward the smaller runners that waited. It was not hunting. It was processing.

A Solmire officer saw the spearhead arrive and stumbled toward them with his sword arm hanging wrong, and the look on his gray face was past hope and out the other side. "Whoever you are," he rasped, "our queue is nine hundred souls and climbing. Whatever you came to do, do it fast, because we are almost out of people to lose twice."

"We came to stop the losing," Hiroshi said. "Where do you need your wall back first?"

"Everywhere." The officer laughed, an awful sound. "The east knot has our revival array in it. If that falls, the nine hundred do not come back at all."

"Then that is the wall." Hiroshi was already moving, and the spearhead moved with him, and the mission began the way all real fights begin, with too many problems and one decision.

Saffa took the ground itself away from the hounds.

She walked out ahead of the east knot into the open killing field, alone, which drew every plated head on that half of the stretch toward her, and she let the Frost Domain fall with everything the long night had fed into it. The earth for three hundred paces froze past stone-hard into something older and stiller, and the first hound that dived at the ground beneath her hit it like a bird hitting glass. It surfaced stunned, half-buried, and Cryo-Sunder Lance took it through the exposed joint of its neck.

"They swim in soft ground," she called back, cold rolling off her voice along with everything else. "So nobody stands on soft ground. Fight on my ice or fight in the air, those are the choices."

The Solmire fighters did not need telling twice. The east knot pulled itself onto the frozen ground, and for the first time in an hour, the earth under their feet stopped trying to eat them.

Clovelle went after the hounds that fled the ice. Micro-Singularity Thread stitched itself across their escape lines at knee height, and the great plated things ran into wire that space itself had drawn and folded around it, collapsing inward with a sound like the world clearing its throat. She flicked between her anchors along the knot’s edge, unhurried, precise, and where the hounds tried to circle wide, Spatial Shear Bloom opened its petals over them and they came apart along clean silent lines.