Duskbound

Spending decarmas on gear was one thing. Even the compass was justifiable, and that was before considering that it had proved useful enough that Jensen's master had borrowed it. Wasting it on disposables because he'd gotten himself backed into a corner was a different story. His father wasn't going to be happy.

But that would only be a problem if Jensen was alive to hear the old man complain about it, so he didn't hesitate. Internally wincing, he bought three alchemical bombs from the system store for two thousand decarmas each, more than ten times what an alchemist could have charged him. But an alchemist couldn't make the bombs appear in his hands, and that was what he needed.

The first one went back down the street to the approaching mob, where it could do the most damage and hopefully slow them down. It exploded, igniting the air in a bloom of fire that shot up higher than the roofs. Monsters were hurled in every direction, including toward Jensen. Fortunately, they were in no condition to do anything remotely resembling threatening.

Maybe I can convince Master Torwin to part with one of those champion seeds and recoup the cost. Then Dad never has to know.

The other two bombs went to the crowd in front of him. They were scattered, too far apart for even a pair of explosions to catch them all. Jensen got maybe half of them, judging by the cascade of notifications the system dropped on him, but the ones still alive were injured. Before he could take action to finish any of the monsters off, the house to his right groaned alarmingly.

It had a huge chunk of wood missing from the side, enough that the front was starting to sag. The more it tilted forward, the faster it shifted. Oh, hell. Jensen took off at a run, picking a path that led him away from the collapsing house and through the depleted ranks of the monsters. He made it forty or fifty feet before a great boom shook the entire street. Chunks of flying stone and wood filled the air as a dust cloud rolled outward.

Eight more kill notifications all came in on top of each other. I guess the system counts a house dropping on them as my fault, he thought with a wry smile. A few of the ones from the pursuing mob that had been thrown backwards by his first bomb were just now climbing to their feet, all of them relatively uninjured due to either distance or just a high physical stat. There were probably a handful on the other side of the wreckage, as well, but Jensen was less concerned about them for the moment.

Now that he'd evened the odds a bit, he thought he could probably finish off the leftovers. His bow came up, an arrow appeared on the string, and he got to work.

[You have advanced to level 20. +1 Physical, +1 free point.]

[You have unlocked a new class skill slot.]

[A class evolution is available.]

The first two notifications weren't a surprise. He'd known he was going to level up again any time now, and winning a fight against so many monsters had been enough to push him over the edge. The third notification, though, was a different story. He was almost afraid to open it up and see what the options were. Torwin had seemed convinced that [Ranger] wouldn't be among them, and that Jensen should focus his efforts elsewhere.

There were still monsters alive, so he resisted the temptation to investigate the prompt. Later, once he was safe, he'd see what his choices were. It would probably be best to wait for Torwin to return before making a decision, but it wouldn't hurt to take some time to form his own thoughts. Before that, he needed to pick off the survivors and then get back to the town hall.

I hope I didn't screw anything up for her when I dropped that house. There's no way they didn't hear that all over town.

* * *

It was quickly becoming apparent that whatever this business with the corrupted seeds was, today was merely the culmination of months or years of work. There were plenty of uninfected people, but they were all noncombatants. More than that, they were classes that used tools, not weapons. The watch had all been taken over. All the logging crews were in the same state. Anyone who had jobs that had anything to do with monsters, even incidentally, seemed to have been targeted.

That left a lot of farmers, carpenters, cooks, and seamstresses in town, and Sildra had already saved a dozen of them held in individual rooms. They'd all been tied to a table like Mrs. Coru, and through them, Sildra had learned where the rest of the town was. In hindsight, it wasn't that surprising that the corrupted seed bearers had stuffed their prisoners in the town's jail, except for the fact that there were only five cells and they'd stuffed hundreds of people into them.

Townsfolk had been dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, either through some sort of lie if the attacker was someone they trusted or just by raw force if there wasn't a corrupted person close to them. They'd been shoved into cells, packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and when they'd run out of room, they'd locked the overflow into small offices and put guards on them. A few people had been killed trying to fight back, but the corrupted faction of the town had overwhelmed them before any real resistance could form.

They were debating how best to overwhelm the corrupted seed bearers left to guard the prisoners, a difficult proposition considering Sildra's ax was the only weapon they had between them, when a bone-rattling crash shook the whole building. Everything immediately went wrong at that point. Some people panicked and ran for the door. Others started yelling for everyone else to calm down, inadvertently drawing the attention of the guards in the process.

Two of them rushed down the hall, saw the freed prisoners, and immediately attacked. The closest human found himself skewered on a spear before anyone could react, then the fighting started for real. Sildra found herself caught in a press of bodies as some people surged forward to attack the monsters and others tried to flee to safety. As the only person with an actual weapon, she'd have thought the rescued prisoners would make way for her to get to the fight, but that wasn't the case.

By the time she got to the forefront, both of the monsters were dead, along with four other people. The only upside to the fiasco was that it brought their weapon count from one to three, not that either of the two men who claimed those wood-cutting axes knew much about how to use them in a fight. Splitting a log on a stump was not the same as a battle to the death with a monster that looked like one of their neighbors.

The other unfortunate side effect was that about half the people who'd been laying on the floor in the assembly hall were up and on their feet, now. It seemed that whatever toll the transformation took on them, they recovered from it quite quickly. The remaining members of the town watch were organizing and arming them, which left Sildra's group of nine townsfolk with three axes up against about twenty-five monsters, all of whom had either a spear or an ax.

Their only options were to retreat or to fight, and with everyone having a loved one still stuffed in one of those jail cells, there was very little argument about which course to take. "We're falling back," she ordered. "We need reinforcements and weapons, and we're not going to find either here. Head out the back, stick together, arm yourselves, and we'll regroup at the general store down the street."

There was some harshly whispered arguing, but in the end, no one thought they could stand up to thirty or more monsters with just three axes and no real combat experience besides Sildra's. As soon as she explained that her skills only worked when the moon was up and that she was no stronger than anyone else right now, what little fight they had left went out of them.

She could only hope that Jensen had been successful, that the booming sound was his doing and that it meant good news. Much as she hated to admit it, without his help, she didn't see a way to rescue everyone else. Short of getting a pickaxe and digging a tunnel from the nearest cellar, there was no way to get under town hall and into those cells without crossing the assembly room, which meant a ridiculously one-sided fight.

Maybe a window I can come in through... No, the stairs going up and down are at the back of the hall. If I came in from the second floor, I could take the staircase directly down. I wouldn't have to cross the floor then, just go down a single flight of stairs. It's possible nobody would notice. That's assuming there aren't more of them upstairs, though. I have no idea what's going on up there.

Every plan had risks, so many that she couldn't see any that didn't end with her getting killed. Even now, with what she'd already done, there was a chance the monsters would kill their remaining prisoners. She was hoping the bodies were too valuable alive, but that hope was based on the idea that they needed somebody who was still breathing to put one of their seeds in.

Everything she'd seen so far supported that idea, but there was so much Sildra didn't know. It was a risk, doing what she'd done, but she'd saved eight people by taking it. And she'd confirmed that her mother wasn't among the corrupted, which meant she was probably in a cell.

She couldn't give up, not as long as there was a chance, but she had to admit, she didn't have a clue how to proceed.