Chapter 6: The First Wave
Mark
[Beginner protection period has ended.]
[The First Wave has begun. Survive until every hostile entity in the wave has been eliminated.]
The mist was gone, and so was any chance of pretending this wasn't real.
They came from all four directions at once. That was the part I hadn't planned for. In my head, I figured one area would go first, then another, and I'd have time to shift people around. Nope. Every red dot on the mini-map started moving at the same time, like someone fired a starting gun.
"Sound off!" I said into the mic.
"East. Jungle zombies. Many. Slow," Sera reported, calm as ever.
"West! Wolves! Fast!" That was Lin. Short and shoutable, just like she wanted.
"South. Miners. They have pickaxes and they look angry," Wren said.
"North," Sage said. "Snakes. Alligators. Something very big behind them."
I pulled the north camera up on the center monitor and immediately wished I hadn't. Way back in the swamp, past the cobras and the gators, trees were getting shoved aside. Something huge and black was walking through them.
The bear. The twenty-foot bear I took notes on two days ago. I really hoped it would mind its own business. It did not.
"Altrea, the bear's coming. Don't waste holy arrows on small stuff. Save them for that thing."
"Understood, Creator."
"Everyone else, you've got your directions. Melessy, robots ready to patch walls. Beatrice, keep the arrows coming."
"Already on it, ye don't have to tell me twice!"
"You heard him, maggots! MOVE!"
And just like that, the first wave hit our walls.
Sera
The east was the easiest direction. I knew that. The Creator knew that. That was why he gave it to me, the first and calmest of Altrea's sisters.
The jungle zombies came out of the trees in a long, slow line. They did not run. They did not climb the stone wall, at least not well. The climbers tried, and I shot them off one by one. The crawlers went under the wall's shadow and dragged themselves along the ground, and Melessy's pits caught them. The spikes were pointed up. I checked.
It was steady work. Draw, aim, release. The iron arrowheads Beatrice made went through skulls far better than the old ones. Every time a zombie fell, I watched for the small blue glint of an orb and marked where it landed with my glasses.
[Archery skill increased. Current mastery: Intermediate]
The Creator told us to name ourselves because we would need to be told apart in battle. I understood now that he was right. The east did not need Altrea. It only needed Sera. I liked that.
Mark
East was fine. West was not fine.
The zombie wolves didn't walk. They ran, and they ran in packs. The first few slammed into the outer wall and bounced right off. Our spike pits were between the first and second walls, so the wolves had to actually get over the outer wall before the pits could do anything.
They were figuring out how to do that. The wolves started climbing on top of each other. The ones on the bottom got crushed, and the ones on top used them like a ramp.
"Lin! They're stacking!"
"I see!" Lin started picking off the wolves at the top of the pile, which made the whole thing collapse. It bought time, but she was just one elf with one bow against a whole pack.
Then the south started making noise. A lot of noise. Clink. Clink. Clink. I flipped to the south camera and saw a row of zombified miners hacking at our outer stone wall with their pickaxes. Same slow, heavy swings I watched them use on the mountain cliffs. And our wall was a lot softer than a mountain.
Cracks spread across the stone with every swing.
"Melessy, south wall!"
"On it! Units One through Five, south! Patch those cracks! Units Six through Ten, stay on the west!"
The robots ran to the south wall and started slapping cement into the cracks as fast as the miners made them. It worked, kind of. But it was a race the robots were going to lose. They were patching cement onto a wall that was getting pickaxed from the other side.
I pulled up the drawing of our walls. I'd been waiting to do this.
Upgrading is cheaper than making something new. I already knew that. And I had a whole warehouse full of iron now. I didn't redraw the wall. I just drew iron plating bolted across the outside of the south section, thick plates overlapping like scales. I drew the bolts, the seams, all of it. More detail meant cheaper.
The moment I used my power, the red lights rushed out of the house and flooded across the south wall.
[Mana: 17.5/23.5]
Six mana. On the camera, the next miner swung his pickaxe and hit solid iron. His arm bent in a direction arms don't bend. The miner next to him swung too, and his pickaxe snapped in half.
I may have yelled a little.
"Wren, they've got nothing to hit but iron now. Clean them up."
"With pleasure, Creator."
Melessy
The south was holding. The west was not.
The wolves had made it over the outer wall. Most of them landed right in my spike pits, and I want it written down somewhere that every single spike was pointing UP. But a pit can only hold so many wolves before the wolves start using the other wolves as a floor.
Three of them came out of the pit and charged the second wall. Brick and cement, still fresh. The gate's iron hinges went on last night.
The gate held. The wall next to it didn't. One of the wolves hit a section so hard the bricks shifted.
"Units Six through Ten! Brace that wall!"
Five robots slammed their bodies flat against the inside of the brick. The wall shook. They held.
Then the wolf found the part they weren't holding. It hit the wall again, a little further down. Bricks fell. A gap opened. It was small, but a zombie wolf doesn't need much.
Unit Seven saw it before I did.
Unit Seven left the line without being told. That has never happened. Unit Seven does exactly what it is told and nothing else, which is why it built my pit upside down. But this time, Unit Seven walked over, picked up a bucket of wet cement, and shoved itself into that gap, metal body first.
The wolf bit Unit Seven's arm. Robots do not bleed. Robots do not turn. Unit Seven just looked at the wolf and kept slapping cement into the gap around itself, sealing its own body in place like a plug.
Lin put an arrow through the wolf's eye a second later.
I'm not crying. Dwarves don't cry. It was dusty.
"UNIT SEVEN! Who told you to do that?!"
Unit Seven pointed at the wall. Then at the wolf. Then at the house. The Creator's house.
When a wall breaks, you fix it faster. If anything gets past the second wall, you protect that house with your metal bodies. I said that. I said exactly that, last night.
"...Good work, Unit Seven."
Altrea
The bear reached the north wall.
On the Creator's camera, it had looked big. In person, it was a mountain made of rotting fur. It did not climb the outer wall. It simply walked through it. Stone exploded in every direction, and the cobras and alligators that had been hissing at the wall poured in behind it.
Sage was firing as fast as she could, and the smaller undead were falling. But the bear kept coming. It walked straight into the spike pits between the walls, and the spikes went into its legs, and it did not care. It pulled its feet out of the pit and kept walking.
I fired my first holy arrow.
It struck the bear's shoulder, and the gold light flared, and the flesh around it sizzled and smoked. The bear roared so loud that the windows on the Creator's house rattled. It hurt the bear. It hurt it badly.
But it did not stop it.
I fired again. And again. Each arrow burned. Each arrow made it stagger. It was still coming toward the second wall, and behind the second wall was the house, and inside the house was my Creator.
"Creator, the holy arrows are effective, but it is too large. I need it to hold still."
"Hold still," he repeated. I could hear him thinking. "Okay. Okay. Give me two minutes."
"I can give you one."
"Then one!"
Mark
One minute. Cool. Totally fine.
I pulled up the walls drawing again, and this time I zoomed in on the space between the outer wall and the second wall on the north side. Right where the bear was walking.
I didn't have time to draw anything fancy, so I drew something simple. A net. A big iron chain net, hung on hooks along the top of the second wall, with a release lever on each side. I drew every link of the chain. Not because I had time to, but because I didn't have the mana not to. Detailed is cheap. Vague is expensive. My fingers were moving faster than they ever had in my life.
I drew the last hook and hit it.
[Mana: 7.5/23.5]
Ten mana. The red lights shot out of the house toward the north wall.
"Melessy! North wall! There's a lever on each side, pull them both when the bear's under it!"
"There's a WHAT?!"
"Just trust me!"
On the camera, the bear reached the second wall and reared up on its back legs, taller than the wall itself, ready to smash right through it.
"NOW!"
Two robots yanked the levers. A wall of iron chain fell straight down onto the bear's head and shoulders, heavy enough that it dragged the bear back down onto all fours. The bear thrashed. The chain held. The robots grabbed the edges and pinned them down, and Melessy grabbed one too, yelling the whole time. Beatrice came running from the smithy and grabbed another corner, her hammer tucked under her arm.
The bear's head was stuck. For about three seconds, it held perfectly still.
That was all Altrea needed.
She fired one holy arrow straight through the gap in the chain and into the bear's eye. The light didn't flare this time. It exploded. Gold light poured out of the bear's head, its eye, its mouth, and the whole giant thing shuddered, went stiff, and then collapsed into a pile of steaming rot on top of the net.
Beatrice smacked it on the nose with her hammer for good measure.
[Altrea has leveled up.]
[Altrea has leveled up.]
[Altrea has leveled up.]
I leaned back in my chair, and my whole body went limp. Turns out I'd been holding my breath for the entire minute.
Mark
The rest of the wave was cleanup.
Without the bear, the swamp critters fell apart. Sage and Altrea picked off the last cobras. Wren finished the miners, who had mostly given up on the south wall and were just standing there with broken pickaxes looking confused. Lin and the robots handled the wolves that were still stuck in the pit. Sera finished the east about an hour before everybody else and then politely asked if anyone needed help.
When the last red dot on the mini-map blinked out, a screen popped up in front of me.
[First Wave survived.]
[Rewards distributed:
Lesser Mana Orb x1
Region Map Fragment x1
The Second Wave will arrive in 7 days.]
[Notice: World chat will be unlocked once a sufficient portion of surviving humanity has cleared their first three waves.]
I read the last line three times. So world chat wasn't coming any time soon, and the system was more or less telling me that a lot of people weren't going to make it to wave three. Great. Love that. Very encouraging.
The orb was bigger than the crude ones, and a deeper blue. I put on my glasses.
[Lesser Mana Orb: Increases max mana by 1.]
The map fragment was a rolled-up piece of old paper. When I unrolled it, it showed our little desert square in the middle, with the swamp, the tundra, the jungle, and the mountains around it. Past those, the map just faded out into nothing. Except along the edges, where someone had written words in a language I didn't recognize. I put it on my desk for later. That was a problem for future Mark.
Everyone came inside one by one, and nobody said much. Altrea came in last and set a pile of small blue orbs on my desk. Fourteen crude ones. She lined them up in perfect little rows.
I absorbed the crude orbs first, then the lesser one.
[Mana: 2.0/31.5]
Thirty-one and a half max. Two days ago, I almost passed out making one elf. Now I could make an elf, a dwarf, and still have mana left over. As soon as I had the mana back, that is.
I looked around the living room. Sera, Lin, Wren, and Sage were asleep in a pile on the couch, still wearing their glasses. Beatrice was eating chicken nuggets out of the box. Melessy was standing by the window, glaring outside, where a robot with a dented arm and a chunk of dried cement stuck to its chest was patrolling the second wall all by itself.
Nobody told Unit Seven to do that, either.
"Creator," Altrea said. She was standing by my chair, still in her armor, still a little out of breath. "We survived."
"Yeah," I said. "We did."
Seven days. Thirty-one and a half mana. A map with words I couldn't read. And a second wave that was probably going to be worse.
But first, I was going to take the longest nap of my life.