"Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." — Sun Tzu
Joel spent two hours lying on a ridge above it before he was willing to spend anything else.
The fortress was enormous and intimidating.
The perimeter wall stood three meters high, built from stacked Crawler chitin and watch racks along the inner face held a small armory of femur clubs.
Open fire pits burned with pale Rift-Core flame, and the guards moved between them in slow patrol circuits, and Joel counted them three separate times before he trusted the number.
There were ten of them, and they were not the Brutes he had been killing all week. These were armored Blood-Brutes, Lv. 8 elites wearing harvested plate, with Crawler shell grafted across their shoulders and chests in overlapping sinew-bound scales.
His borrowed memories supplied the classification with the same nursery-rhyme certainty as always, and the certainty said that licensed hunting parties turned around at the sight of even two of these, and that the walls of Caelmont were indirectly funded by everyone who had ever failed to turn around in time.
At the center of the camp, behind its own ring of bone, sat a mound of stacked skulls the size of a house.
The sound came out of it in long, wet, tidal cycles, and once during his watch a massive arm reached out of the mound’s dark entrance, adjusted a boulder the way a sleeping man adjusts a pillow, and withdrew.
The arm alone was thicker than Joel’s whole torso.
The Gore-Ape Chieftain, Lv. 15, Stratum Boss, was home.
’Right,’ Joel thought, running the numbers with the flat calm that two days of miracles had taught him.
’Ten armored elites and a landlord. Last week’s me fought one unarmored one and got a pneumothorax as a souvenir. So the problem is not whether I can win a fight, because I cannot win ten fights. The problem is how to arrange an afternoon where the fights do not happen.’
The camp’s builders had thought about assaults, which was the entire problem with the camp. The walls faced outward, the gates were chokepoints, and the patrols watched the flat ground to the east where any sane army would approach.
Nobody, however, had thought about the sky, and nobody had thought about the western wall, because the western wall sat directly beneath the ridge itself, and above that wall hung a shelf of fractured black stone the width of a tennis court.
The Spire settled, the old hunting memories said. The rock of the First Stratum was cracked all the way through in places, and the shelf above the camp was one of those places.
A hanging scar of stone held up by a central pillar of cracked rock barely two meters wide. The engineers of this world would have called it a load-bearing column.
Joel’s pharmacy training called it a single point of catastrophic failure, and he had spent his entire first career identifying exactly such points in the human body, and the rock was simply a patient that had never been examined.
He circled a kilometer north, climbed, and came down onto the shelf itself on soft feet, and for twenty minutes he walked the hanging field of stone and mapped every crack, because a man who fired a cannon into the wrong fracture would merely wake the neighbors.
The keystone was exactly where the load lines converged, a seamed pillar the size of a door, and Joel stood in front of it with his splinted spear and acknowledged, honestly, the two warnings on the label.
The discharge was 11,200 units. His tolerance was 4,000.
’In the novels,’ he thought, setting his feet as the form began assembling itself down his spine, ’the hero would shout something inspiring right about now, and I refuse, because this is not heroism. This is a demolition order signed by a pharmacist.’
The Meteor Piercer came forward as a single release, and the keystone did not crack so much as cease to exist, and the mountain above the Gore-Ape camp let go of itself all at once.
The sound was beyond loud and into physical, a rolling structural roar that Joel felt through his boot soles before he heard it with his ears, and a third of the ridge became a river.
He was already moving as the shelf failed under him, riding the leading edge of the slide down the slope in a controlled plummet of leaps and slides, and behind him half a million tons of black stone poured onto the western wall of the camp and everything that had been standing on it or near it.
The dust wall swallowed everything. Joel ran into the red earth, his whole body tense.
His shoulder burned from the discharge he had pushed himself to endure, hoping his body would adapt later.
[Ding!]
[Blood-Brute (Lv. 8, Armored) x5 eliminated.]
[Massive EXP gained.]
[Level Up! You are now Level 9.]
[+1 Free Attribute Point allocated to Physique (forced adaptation).]
Five elites dead, and he had not yet thrown a punch, and the remaining five were blind, deafened, and stumbling in the fog of their own demolished home.
He had planned the entire morning around the principle that he could not win a fair fight, and the beautiful discovery of the day was that nothing anywhere obliged him to have one.
He stopped behind a shattered rack of femur clubs and made one last purchase before dropping in among them.
[Fate Point Consumed. The Wheel of Fate spins...]
Click... click... click... clack.
[Result: x8,000 Multiplier Achieved.]
[Selection B Confirmed: Cellular Regeneration.]
[Target: Host Body (pre-emptive application).]
[Bonus Effect: ’Undying Vigor’ (minor wounds mend instantly) restored for approximately 6 hours.]
[Fate Point Balance: 1.]
The heat settled into his tissue like a warm coat, and Joel walked into the dust with a spear at 8/80 durability, a grandmaster technique in his mind, and an afternoon appointment he intended to keep.
The first Brute found him through the dust and charged with its club high, and Joel could have taken it clean through the eye seam without being touched, instead he let the swing come, rolling with it so that it caught him across the ribs at an angle that bent armor and bone together.
The pain arrived fast, the regeneration processed it in seconds, and the system logged the transaction while the Brute was still recovering from its follow-through.
[Ding!]
[+0.2 Physique detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
[Lethal engagement survived (armored elite, restricted visibility).]
[Survival Accumulation: 35%.]
The Brute died against the wall of its own demolished fortress, and Joel moved through the dust to the next one.
The second elite caught him half-loaded and buried a fist into his hip that lifted him off the ground, and he gave ground, let the wound exist, and paid the monster back through the seam under its shoulder plate while its arm was still extended.
The third swung a broken femur like a maul and opened a gash across his back that would have ended any ordinary week, and the gash closed while he pivoted, and the counter-thrust went home through the throat.
Each wound was a deposit, and each deposit was logged, and his body kept quietly rewriting its own specifications.
[Ding!]
[+0.2 Strength detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
[Survival Accumulation: 69%.]
[Ding!]
[+0.2 Strength detected. Micro-adaptation logged.]
The last Brute was the biggest, a Lv. 9 warden with twin clubs and a chitin collar, and it did not blunder in the dust like the others, because it had simply waited beside the skull mound for the intruder to come to it.
Joel considered the geometry, decided that the fight was worth finishing fast rather than profitably, and took the warden’s best swing against his guard purely because blocking it properly protected the spear, and the impact rang down both his arms and cracked another plate off the shaft.
The Meteor Piercer that answered it traveled through the collar, the neck, and the far wall of the bone palisade, in that order.
[Ding!]
[Blood-Brute (Lv. 9, Warden) eliminated.]
[Lethal engagement survived against a statistically superior entity.]
[Survival Accumulation: 100%.]
[Gauge converting...]
[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 2.]
Joel stood in the settling dust among nine elite corpses, harvested four Standard Rift-Cores in the ninety seconds of silence that remained, and decided to check in with the system.
[========== STATUS PROFILE =========]
Name: Joel
Level: 9
Class: [Flesh-Guide] (F)
Fate Points: 2
[--- Core Attributes ---]
Strength: 11.4
Agility: 14
Physique: 20.0
Mana: 4 / 4
[--- Active Skills ---]
• Meteor Piercer (Rare) - Lv. 1
[--- Passive Skills ---]
• Flesh Mending (F): accelerates natural recovery. Negligible.
• Undying Vigor: active, 5 hours 40 minutes remaining.
[--- Inventory ---]
• Rift-Iron Spear (Standard Issue, splinted), 5/80.
• Rift-Core (Fragment) x46.
• Rift-Core (Standard) x5.
• Sinew Cord: 9 meters.
[=================================]
The tidal breathing had stopped.
That was how he knew the appointment had arrived, because the skull mound had gone silent in the way an entire basin goes silent when the thing at the top of the food chain stops sleeping.
Joel heard stone grind against stone as a boulder larger than the camp gates was pushed aside from within.
The Gore-Ape Chieftain came out of its lair standing four meters tall, and it carried a stone pillar in each of its lower hands, and the dust slid off crimson fur that covered slabs of muscle no bestiary entry had really prepared him for.
Its small dark eyes swept once across the demolished western wall, the nine corpses, and the avalanche that had done it, and then those eyes came down and settled, with terrible specificity, on the single bloodstained figure standing in the middle of the wreckage.
[Ding!]
[Hostile detected: Gore-Ape Chieftain (Lv. 15, Stratum Boss).]
[System Note: the tree has noticed the axe.]
Joel Carrow rolled his damaged shoulder until it cracked, set his feet in the settling ash, and smiled at the four-armed landlord for the first time in two lives, because he had come to the heart of the Barrens with six hours of immortality, one working cannon, and a receipt for half the garrison.
"Now then," he said politely. "Let us discuss the rent."