Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 825: The Night March

Orla came running back down the column.

She took one look at Rudra, and at the great door standing where the east should have been, and she swore under her breath.

"Stop them," she said. "Stop everyone. Right now. Every step they take is a wrong one."

"I walked straight," Rudra said. "I’ve held a heading through storms that sank fleets. I walked straight."

"I’m sure you did. It doesn’t matter." Orla was scanning the dark. "There’s a Strayer out here. It ends direction."

"Ends what?"

"Direction. East, west, forward, back. Inside its ground, none of them mean anything. You think you’re walking a line and you’re walking a ring." She pointed at the edge of the column. "Look."

Almond looked.

At the far edge, a group of thirty or forty people had peeled away from the rest. They were walking quickly and surely, like people who knew exactly where they were going. They were walking straight out into the empty grass.

Farther along, another group was doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

"Marcus," Almond said.

Marcus was already pressing two fingers to his temple. He was gray in the face, and there was dried blood under his nose from the last time.

Voice.

Everyone stop, he said, in forty thousand heads. Stop walking. Sit down where you are. Take the hand of the person beside you and don’t let go. Do not follow anyone who walks away.

The column shuddered to a halt.

Marcus’s eyes rolled up. Natalia caught him before he hit the ground.

"That’s him done," she said. "He’s got nothing left."

"What does it want?" Lily asked.

"It sits in the middle of its ground and waits," Orla said. "Everything inside walks in rings. The rings get smaller. Sooner or later, you walk into its mouth and never know you turned."

"And the ones who wander off?"

"It keeps scavengers. Small Enders, fast ones. They take whoever strays to the outside." Orla’s jaw was tight. "With a hunting party I’d sit tight and wait for dawn. It loses interest in daylight. But I’ve got six people, not forty thousand. You can’t hold forty thousand people still for six hours."

As if to prove it, a scream came from the far dark. It was short.

Almond felt it in his chest like a dropped stone. He had carried every one of them across.

"Then we kill it," he said.

"You can’t find it. That’s the whole point. You can’t walk toward something when there’s no toward."

Rudra had not said anything for a while. He was staring at his own hand, at the fourth word on a line of light.

"Helm," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"It ends direction. Fine. But a heading isn’t something I find. It’s something I choose." He looked up. "I’ve stood at a wheel in fog so thick I couldn’t see my own hands. You don’t steer by what’s out there. You pick a line, and you hold it, and you make the ship believe you."

"It’ll cost you," Orla said. "Raw, like that? You’ll last a few minutes."

"Then somebody had better tell me which line to pick."

Ainen cleared his throat.

"I might be able to help with that," he said.

He stood with his eyes closed and his mouth a little open, like a man tasting a sauce.

Taste.

"It’s there," he said after a moment. "It’s faint. The whole air is wrong, but it’s more wrong in some places." He made a face. "It tastes like a coin spinning on a table. Metal, and dizzy."

"Which way?" Rudra asked.

Ainen raised his arm to point. His arm wavered. It drifted left, then right. He frowned at it.

"I can’t," he said. "I know where it is, and I can’t point at it. That’s a horrible feeling."

"Don’t point. Just tell me stronger or weaker."

Rudra set his feet. He drew a long breath, and let it out.

Helm.

Almond felt it take hold. It was like a hand on the back of his neck, turning his head. For the first time since the door had appeared in the wrong place, there was a forward again. It was narrow, and it belonged to Rudra, but it was there.

"Stay behind me," Rudra said through his teeth. "Right behind. If you step off my line, you’re gone."

They went in a single file. Rudra walked first, with Ainen at his shoulder. Then came Almond, Natalia, Big D, Kael, Hiroshi and Silvester, with a dozen Asuras carrying spears.

Lily did not go with them.

She stood at the edge of the column with Kayla beside her and watched them walk into the dark. It was the hardest thing she had done all night.

"Weaker," Ainen said. Rudra turned a few degrees. "Weaker. Stronger. There. Hold that."

The scavengers found them first.

They came out of the grass without a sound. They were pale and low, the size of large dogs, with too many joints in their legs. There were a dozen of them, and they were very fast.

"Keep walking!" Rudra’s voice was strained. "I can’t stop and hold the line both!"

The first one went for Ainen. Big D stepped across and took it on his forearm. Its teeth went in to the bone. He grunted, lifted his arm with the thing still hanging from it, and brought it down across his knee.

Hiroshi caught the second with both hands and broke its neck. The third got past him and hit Silvester full in the chest.

Silvester went down on his back with the thing on top of him. Its jaws snapped an inch from his face.

"Silvester!" Hiroshi shouted.

Silvester had two broken ribs and a body that was only a body now. He should have stayed down. By every rule there was, he should have stayed down.

Get Up.

He got up.

He did it with the scavenger still attached to him. He simply stood, as if a hand had pulled him to his feet, and the thing lost its grip and fell. He stamped on its skull with his boot.

"It works!" he yelled. He sounded delighted. "Hiroshi, it works! I can just do that!"

"Stop enjoying it and fight!"

Kael cut two of them out of the air with plain steel. A third came at his back. He reached for the wind, three steps’ worth, and was simply not where its teeth closed.

Swiftness.

He took its head off on the way past. Then he stumbled and went to one knee, breathing hard.

"Three steps," he gasped. "That’s all I get. Three steps, and I’m done."

"Stronger," Ainen said, as if nothing was happening around him. His eyes were still shut. "Much stronger. It’s close. It’s right in front of us."

The Strayer sat in a hollow in the grass.

It was low and very wide, like a great pale stone that had grown legs. There were dozens of legs, thin as reeds, folded all around it. It had no head that Almond could see. In the middle of its back was a round pit, and in the pit something turned.

It was a smooth dark lump the size of a barrel. It spun slowly and steadily, and never stopped.

Looking at it made his eyes slide away. Twice he found that he was staring at the grass beside it instead.

"I can’t hold this," Rudra said. His whole body was shaking. "Whatever you’re going to do, do it now."

"It hears through the ground," one of Orla’s scouts whispered. She had come with them. "Footsteps. The second you move on it, those legs come up, and they’re faster than they look."

Almond looked back the way they had come.

He could not see the column. But he knew where Lily was standing, because Rudra’s line ran straight back to her.

He raised his hand over his head, and closed his fist.

Far behind him, Lily saw it. The rings of the higher layers hung pale across the sky, and they gave just enough light to see by.

She did not walk forward. She stayed exactly where she was, with Kayla’s hand on her arm, and she looked at the hollow in the grass a quarter of a mile away.

Hush.

It was nothing like using an imprint raw. It did not tear at her. It was like closing a door.

Every sound in the hollow went out.

Almond could not hear his own breath. He could not hear the grass. The Strayer’s thin legs, which had begun to twitch, went still again. It was listening to a silence, and the silence told it nothing.

Natalia pointed.

Mark.

A dull red spot bloomed at the bottom of the pit, right where the spinning lump joined the body.

Almond stepped down into the hollow.

He did not need to creep. He walked. He had Ainen’s cleaver in his hand, and a small gray orb sitting quiet inside him. He reached for it for the first time.

Quiet Edge.

It cost almost nothing. That was what surprised him. He felt it take hold, light and sure, like picking up a tool by its handle.

Sever.

The line showed under the red mark, thin as a hair.

He cut.

The cleaver made no sound going in, and none coming out. The Strayer never knew. The dark lump stopped turning. It rolled once in its pit and lay still.

And the world came back.

It came back all at once, like a shoulder going into its socket. East was east again. Almond knew where the door was, and where the column was. Far ahead, he could feel a faint pull that might have been a line of white stones.

Rudra let go of his heading and fell flat on his back in the grass.

"I am never doing that again," he said to the sky.

Marcus woke up long enough to count.

"Twenty-three walked off before I stopped them," he said. His voice was a thread. "We’ve found nineteen. They’re shaken, but they’re whole."

"And the other four?" Almond asked.

Marcus did not answer.

Orla’s scouts had found them out in the grass, where the scavengers had been. They carried them back wrapped in gray cloaks.

Almond stood over the four shapes for a long time. Nobody tried to move him.

He had carried all of them across. He had said everyone, and a whole kingdom had said it with him. They had not even lasted one night.

"Their names," Big D said quietly. He had come up beside him, with his torn arm bound in a strip of someone’s shirt.

Marcus gave them. There were two Asuras, and one man from Skytheum. There was also a woman who had been a construct in Rudra’s fleet for nine years before she woke.

Big D listened to each one. He did not write anything down.

"I have them," he said.

Almond nodded. He did not trust his voice.

A little way off, Lily stood with her hand resting low on her stomach. She was looking at the four cloaks too.

They did not leave the Strayer where it lay.

Rudra crawled to the pit on his hands and knees. He put both palms flat on the dark lump that had ended every direction for a mile around.

"The last one turned to dust on me," he said. "Let’s see if you’re any better."

Helm.

The lump did not crumble. It folded in on itself, smooth and slow, the same way the bell had folded for Lily. It left behind a sphere the color of deep water.

[Power Orb: True Heading]

[Quality: E]

[Choose a heading. You and all who follow you cannot be turned from it.]

It sank into his hands. His status changed.

[Life Rank: E]

Rudra stared at it. Then, lying there in the wet grass, he began to laugh.

"It fit," he said. "It ends direction, and I keep one. Of course it fit."

Kael had been turning one of the dead scavengers over with his foot. He bent down and cut a long white tendon from the back of its leg.

"I’d like more than three steps," he said.

Swiftness.

The tendon curled up like a leaf in a fire. It left a small pale orb.

[Power Orb: Quickstep]

[Quality: F]

[Six steps at full speed. Then rest.]

"Six," Kael said. He closed his fist around it, and it was gone. "That’s twice as many as I had. I’ll take it."

Orla had watched both of them without a word.

"Two E ranks," she said at last. "In one night. From people who came through a Door at sunset." She shook her head slowly. "The warden is not going to believe a word I say."

They reached Greywatch as the sky turned gray.

It stood on a low hill. A ring of white stones ran all the way around its foot, each one as tall as a child and set a few paces from the next. Inside the ring were fields, and a wooden wall, and the roofs of a small town.

People were already standing on the wall. There were more of them every minute. They were looking down at forty thousand strangers walking out of the dawn.

A few scavengers had trailed the column through the last hour of the night. They stopped at the white stones as if they had hit a wall of glass. They paced back and forth along the line, and did not cross it.

Almond watched them. Then he watched the wounded and the children go through the gap in the stones, one after another, until six hundred had passed.

The line was full.

Everyone else sat down in the grass outside it. There were thirty-nine thousand of them.

Orla stood beside him.

"You can’t stay out here," she said. "A week, maybe, with the people you’ve got. Then something big comes."

"I know."

"There are three more sanctuaries within four days’ walk. They’re all smaller than this one."

"Then that doesn’t help us."

Orla was silent for a moment. She seemed to be making up her mind.

"There is one place that could hold you," she said. "All of you, with room left over. Nobody has lived in it for two hundred years."

Almond turned to look at her.

"Why not?" he asked.

"I’ll let the warden tell you that," Orla said. "She’s the one who lost a husband finding out."