Alex- " Who told you that? "
The ogre didn't answer. It pulled its legs out of the earth and stood up, and kept standing up. Four metres tall, maybe more. The frost around the crack spread under its feet. The surviving hounds crawled away from it on their bellies.
Alex asked again, in its own language this time.
Alex- " Little god. Who told you that word? "
Ogre- " The white ones. "
Its voice was like rocks rolling inside a drum.
Ogre- " White ones burn our home. Burn, burn, every day. They say, there is a god hiding on the other side. Small god. Weak god. Kill him, and we stop burning. "
It lifted one huge hand and pointed at him.
Ogre- " You smell like god. "
Then it swung.
Alex dodged backwards and the fist hit the ground where he had been standing. The whole field jumped. Grass and mud flew up in a wave. Outside the red wall people screamed again, and he felt the barrier shudder as the shockwave hit it from inside.
That was the real problem. Not the ogre. The wall.
He had built the barrier to hold small things. Every time the ogre hit the ground, the wall shook and drank more of his mana to stay up. If he kept fighting at Tier 5, dodging and poking like with the hounds, the ogre would win slowly. Not by hurting him. By making him choose between the fight and the wall. And beyond the wall there were two thousand people with phones.
The ogre swung again. He went under the arm this time and cut at the back of its knee with a shot put held like a stone. It roared, but the skin was thick, and it barely bled.
Alex- " Okay. Different plan. "
The panel in the corner of his eye ticked down again.
[Barrier integrity: 44% · falling]
He did the maths while dodging a third swing. Tier 6 for one second, in his bedroom, had felt like someone pushing a nail into the back of his eyes. Since then he had gained one stage, and the second test at the kiln had hurt less. Two seconds would be worse. Two seconds with a real target, real force going out through his arm, would be much worse. And after that, no more Tier 6 for hours. If something bigger came out after this one, he would be standing there with a Tier 5 body and a sore chest.
But if he didn't, the wall would fall in two minutes.
The ogre grabbed a dead hound by the leg and threw it at him like a sandbag. He let it hit his shoulder and roll off. It stank of the battery smell from the kiln, ten times stronger.
Fine. Two seconds it was.
He stopped moving and stood in the middle of the field.
The ogre stopped too, confused. Prey was supposed to run.
Alex raised his left hand and pulled at the barrier with his mind.
All twelve runes answered at once. The red wall around the whole field, two storeys high and a hundred metres wide, started to shrink. It slid inward across the grass like a closing curtain, over the dead hounds, over the frost, and the living hounds ran from it straight into the crack and vanished. The wall kept shrinking. Fifty metres. Twenty. Ten.
The ogre turned around, too slowly, and understood too late.
The wall closed into a ring around its body at the height of its chest and locked. A red collar of solid mana as thick as a car tyre. Both arms trapped against its sides. It roared and pulled, and the ring held, because now all of the barrier's mana was packed into one tiny circle instead of a whole field.
And Alex didn't have to hold a wall around two thousand people anymore.
[Tier 6 · burst mode · 2s]
He changed.
Only for two seconds. That was all he allowed. His body went cold, then hot, and something behind his eyes cracked like ice on a pond. The mask's eye-holes glowed red from the inside. He crossed the distance to the ogre in a single step. He didn't remember making the step.
He hit it once, open palm, in the centre of its chest above the ring.
The ogre's body folded backwards like wet cardboard. The ground under it collapsed. It fell into its own crack and the crack swallowed it, and then the crack itself shuddered, coughed out a burst of cold air, and closed like a mouth snapping shut.
Silence. Just the sound of a speaker somewhere outside, finally coming back to life halfway through a song.
[Tier 6 burst ended · internal damage: minor · cooldown 12h] [Rift Ogre-Chief (Lv 88) defeated · EXP +2,400] [Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 3/5]
Alex coughed. His mouth tasted like iron. He wiped the blood off his lips under the mask and spat into the grass.
Alex- " Minor. Sure. "
He stood there for a moment in the middle of the wrecked field, breathing. The frost was already melting into the grass. The dead hounds were going soft at the edges, turning to black smoke that rose a little and then fell flat, like smoke from a wet fire. When the smoke cleared, each one had left something behind in the mud. Small grey pebbles, a little bigger than the one from the kiln.
Cores.
Even now, with blood in his mouth and a van to catch, the old king in him couldn't leave money on the ground. He walked the field in a quick circle and the pebbles vanished one by one into his inventory as he passed. Eleven of them. The ogre had taken its own core into the hole with it. A pity. That one would have been worth something.
Near the long-jump pit, the sports teacher groaned and started to sit up. Alex left before the man's eyes could focus.
Then he remembered the van.
He teleported to the east gate and appeared next to the driver's window. Ansel was still turning the key. He looked up and saw a masked man in a dark coat standing at the window, and for a second he didn't move at all.
Then his hand went to the sun pendant on his chest.
White-gold fire burst out of the pendant and filled the cabin. It was cheap holy magic, very cheap, the kind of thing a low priest in Zaroth's Holy Kingdom might use against ghosts. But it was aimed at a demon god's aura, and Alex was not in a mood to be gentle. He put his hand straight through the fire, grabbed the pendant, and closed his fist.
The fire went out. The metal turned to powder between his fingers.
His palm stung. A red burn spread across it, real, shaped like a little sun. He looked at it with real interest. Holy fire had actually hurt him. On Earth. From a piece of metal you could buy for five hundred rupees.
He touched Ansel's forehead. The man slumped onto the steering wheel, asleep. Mohan, in the back, tried to open the sliding door and run. Alex looked at him through the glass, and Mohan sat down again very quietly with both hands on his knees.
Mohan- " I-I-I'm just the driver, sir. I mean, not the driver, he's the driver. I'm just… I only… "
Alex- " Quiet. "
Mohan became quiet so fast that his teeth clicked. Sweat was running down from his hairline into his collar, and his handkerchief was twisted into a rope in his hands. On the back of his right hand there was a fresh half-circle of teeth marks.
Alex almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Alex opened the back door.
Riya was sitting curled up against the far wall of the van, her glasses crooked, her hands still half-raised to her ears. Her eyes went to the mask. Then to his coat. Then, slowly, down to his running shoes, which were still the cheap white ones with the blue stripe, still covered in fresh track dust.
She looked back at the mask.
Riya- " …Alex? "
Her voice was very small. Outside, far away, the first police siren had started, thin and rising.
He could have lied. A change of voice, a little push of illusion, and she would remember a stranger. He had done it to the Activa man yesterday without thinking twice. But she was looking at his shoes, and then at his face, the way she looked at people's lips when she was trying hard to understand them. Not scared. Concentrating. As if he was one more lecture she had to read twice.
And something in him didn't want to push into that head. Not this one. Not the girl who had bitten a grown man's hand while the whole world was screaming inside her skull.
He said nothing.
Riya- " It stopped. The singing. It stopped when you… whatever you did. "
Alex- " Can you walk? "
She nodded. He helped her out of the van and pointed towards the crowd near the gate, where he could already see Sara pushing her way through, still furious, still looking.
Alex- " Go to Sara. You never saw me. "
Riya stared at him.
Riya- " Your hand is burning. "
He looked down. The little sun-shaped burn on his palm had not faded. It was glowing. Faint white light was crawling up from it along the veins of his wrist, slowly, like a fuse.
And in the driver's seat, the sleeping Ansel opened his eyes. They were completely white. When he spoke, it was not his voice.
Ansel- " There you are. "