I never got to make my speech.
I'd stood up — I was going to say something, something brave and probably stupid about second lines — and I had exactly half a breath of the whole atrium turning to look at the porter who'd forgotten his place, when the eastern wall came apart.
Not breached. Apart. A section of welded cars folded inward like wet cardboard, and through the gap came something I hadn't catalogued, because it wasn't a Straggler and it wasn't a Guardian. It was long and low and fast, and it had the sick boy's night-sound coming out of it in reverse — a call that answered his, that had been drawn here by him exactly as Reyes said, and behind it in the dark poured Stragglers, a dozen, two dozen, the whole herd that grey thread had been steering all along.
The enclave's strong classes were good. I'll give them that. Reyes was in the gap before the dust cleared, a wall of a man turning himself into a literal wall, ice-spears screaming past his shoulders into the dark. For about ten seconds it looked like the sorting had been right — like strength in front really was enough.
Then the low fast thing went under him.
Not through. Under — around the wall, the way water goes around a wall, because that's the thing about being a wall: everything a wall is good at is the thing a clever enemy walks around. And on the other side of Reyes, undefended, was the dry fountain, and Nour, and a ten-year-old who couldn't run.
Everyone else in that atrium had one hammer. I watched three ice-throwers all try to hit the same fast-moving target and miss, because their whole class was throw the ice, and the ice was wrong for this, and they didn't have a second option. I watched the stone-skinned woman stand her ground magnificently in a place the monster simply wasn't going. A hundred people with a hundred powers, and every power was a nail-hammer swinging at a screw.
I didn't have a hammer. I had a toolbox. And I had spent every day since the sky broke learning the one thing none of them had bothered to: what all my garbage could do at the same time.
"NOUR, DOWN!" I was already moving. Short Step — one percent, eight inches — but eight inches placed exactly between the boy and the thing's jaws, and I arrived there with the world's smallest teleport and the world's most useless flame and a plan I'd built in the half-second I had.
Straggler's Call first. Three percent of a monster's steering-voice — I couldn't command the horde, but I could put one grey thread of wrong-way into the low fast thing's ear, and for a quarter-second it hesitated, confused, its own language turned against it.
Into that quarter-second, Umbral Grip. Five percent now. Not enough to hold it — enough to hitch one limb, enough to make it open.
And into that — the plates spreading, the soft place showing, the exact geometry I'd learned on forty smaller monsters at six in the morning — I put twelve percent of my own flame, past the breakpoint, hot enough to crack a shell from the inside, placed in the one seam a hundred ice-spears could never have found because ice-spears are proud and fat and my flame is small and mine and goes anywhere.
The thing came apart around my fire.
I didn't stop. Nour's boy was bleeding from the fall — I put my hands on him, one percent of Mend, gold light so faint it was almost an apology, but it was enough to slow the worst of it while I turned to the gap where two dozen Stragglers were still pouring through and Reyes was holding the line alone and tiring.
"REYES." He turned, saw me — saw the porter, standing in a circle of monster-ash with gold light on his hands. "The herd's steered. There's a caller in the back. Kill the caller, the rest scatter. I'll show you where — grab my flame when I throw it, follow the light."
He didn't ask how a porter knew that. There wasn't time, and Reyes, whatever else he was, had never once in his life been slow to use a working tool. I threw a flare of Warden's Inferno up over the horde — my useless two-percent campfire, good for exactly one thing, which was being a bright arrow in the dark pointing there — and Reyes went where it pointed and hit the caller like a building falling over, and the horde, unsteered, broke and ran back into the night.
Then it was quiet, and there was gold light fading on my hands, and the whole atrium was looking at me.
Nobody was looking at the floor anymore.
[Wave repelled.] +860 XP. [Level Up! ×3] Copyist → Lv. 11Six skills. Six ones and twos and threes and twelves. You just out-fought a hundred people who each had more raw power than your entire toolbox combined.The System is required to remain neutral.The System is finding this difficult.
Reyes crossed the atrium to me slowly, ash on his shoulders, and looked at me for a long time. Then he looked at the word floating over my head — the one the scout had read and dismissed a day ago.
"Copyist," he said. Quiet. "The worst class."
"Yeah," I said. My hands were shaking again. They always shook, after. "Everybody says that."
The boy at the fountain coughed, and breathed — badly, but he breathed — and Nour looked at me with an expression I didn't have a name for yet.
And over by the ruined gate, sitting neatly in the ash as though it had been there the whole time, the cat watched the entire atrium rearrange itself around the porter who carried stuff, and its cold old font came up slow, and for the first time it didn't sound amused.
That, it said, is precisely what we tied the leashes to prevent.Enjoy the applause, Leo.I have to go make a report now. And you are not going to like who I make it to.