As it turns out, teaching people how to fight in the middle of one isn’t easy. There’s a lot of noise — guns shooting, skills activating, monsters howling in pain and anger. Kinda’ hard to make myself understood over all the commotion.
But we manage, even if just barely at first. I have about twenty melee fighters, ten casters, and who knows how many gunmen on the rooftops offering support.
I order the fighters into two lines, one right at the mouth of the barricade and the other some fifty feet behind on the street. The first line, that I’m a part of, tries to hold back the tide. Kill if you can, get out of the way if you can’t. The second line handles any monsters that get past us.
The casters are mostly elemental mages, mainly earth, fire, and ice. Those guys are on barricade duty, casting walls and spikes just outside of the actual barricade. They overdo it at first, so I have to teach them restraint and mana conservation.
“Only cast new walls when the old ones are about to give way! And do it in turns, make sure half of you have disposable mana at any one point! If you can’t see over the barricade, coordinate with the guys on the roofs!”
It’s weird that they don’t know the very basics, but then again, most of them probably didn’t play any video games past the occasional party game or mobile gacha. Even Pops and the other cops suffer from this limitation, they’re treating the whole thing like a normal war since that’s all they know.
It’s a small wonder they made it through the night as well as they did.
Positions are easy, but coordination proves a lot more difficult. People forget to call their skills half the time, and the other half, they mostly waste them. I myself am forced to jump over the barricade every so often in order to use ground pound effectively, but it’s worth the risk. My frenzy stays topped up throughout the battle, only dipping when the occasional monster gets a hit in.
A 10% increase in all attributes might not sound like much, but it’s a god send. As is the mental clarity brought on by the bloodlust, keeping the pain, fatigue, and doubt at bay. They’re still there, at the edges of my being, locked in a tug of war over my mind against the bubbling rage. But they can’t sink their claws into me, and for that I am thankful.
Emily stops shooting arrows shortly after the start of the battle, and I look up for her with worry.
If any of the monsters got her, I’ll—
To my relief, I find that’s not the case. She’s safe, just out of arrows. That detail slipped my mind, and she didn’t say anything either.
Too late to do anything about it now, she has to stand aside for the rest of it.
But we don’t really need her or the gunmen, anyway. We fall into a steady rhythm after a while, and we hold up just fine. I keep an eye on everyone, learning to read when they’re out of mana or stamina, or when they need to heal. When that happens, I send them to the back line to swap with someone else.
I’m rewarded for my efforts with a notification that makes me jump for joy.
General skill acquired: Analyze - Level 1.
Of course. It makes sense now that I think about it. That’s probably how Karen got it as well, she coordinated her group for hours before I found them. I don’t have time to go into the appropriate tab and check it out, but I try it on the closest human. She’s a young asian woman with jet black hair, about Emily’s size but swinging a sledgehammer like my own.
Aiko Nakamura - Level 13.
Race: Human, Female.
Titles: None.
Class: Bruiser (adept).
A health bar appears over her head, about three quarters full. I can’t see the exact value, but even an estimate is better than nothing. Next up I focus on one of the monsters, and I can see its health as well now.
And the best thing of all, the skill doesn’t drain anything and it doesn’t have a cooldown. The only limitation seems to be distance to the target, and the fact that I can only analyze one being at a time.
I use it for the rest of the battle, which allows me to coordinate the fighters better than before. Now I can point out which monsters we should focus on, and I can keep easier track of everyone’s physical condition.
The tide of monsters slowly turns to a trickle, and about half an hour in, they finally stop coming.
“That’s the last of them!” Someone yells from one of the roofs.
Cheers erupt all around, and I grin. I let them have their little celebration for a minute, and I join in as well. We share fist bumps and high fives with close-by fighters.
“Okay, everyone take five to heal and regain your stamina! I want a handful of you from the backline on that barricade to deal with any stragglers!”
There’s some displeased grumbling all around, but a few of the guys give me over the top salutes accompanied with a booming “aye, aye, cap!”
I step away from the carnage as my frenzy decays, but I don’t make it twenty steps before I fall on my ass. I’d been right at the mouth of the meat grinder throughout all of it, and now I’m feeling the effects. A couple of guys help me to the closest wall, and I stay there, back propped against it as I catch my breath.
Emily comes down, going through the monster corpses to retrieve her arrows. Pops appears as well, this time thankfully having taken some stairs instead of jumping, and he slumps down next to me.
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“That…was something,” he says.
“Yeah.”
He smiles and slaps my shoulder. “I knew it, my sons can kick monster ass for days.”
I don’t have the energy to answer, so I just close my eyes and chuckle.
----------------------------------------
I absolutely don’t feel like it, but after about five minutes, I get to my feet and return to work. Some of the others want to go off and check on their loved ones, but Pops and I stop them. More complaints are thrown around, but they all pitch in to help.
“Those of you with higher strength, I want you guys to throw all this junk back onto the barricade. I need a couple of guys with me, we’ll move the cars back into place. Earth type mages, start making walls outside. Waist height, we only want them to slow down and break up future hordes.”
I end up with Pops and another guy named Anthony, who is a level 15 adept class called Shockweaver. He isn’t some kind of lightning mage, though, but some weird hand to hand fighter. He was in the first line with me throughout the battle, using karate chops to launch shockwaves at the monsters. They were cool, and they even worked at times.
Emily joins us as well, though she takes her spot in my shadow and doesn’t do much. As the others take care of their parts, we tackle the cars.
“We won’t budge that,” Anthony says as we get to the first vehicle. “It was easy to get them into place last night, we just needed to push them. But with all this shit on the road, we’ll have to lift it to get it anywhere.”
I understand his apprehension. This is a pick-up truck that easily weighs a few tons, and the street is filled with corpses and broken furniture. But I make monsters explode with a sledgehammer, and he does it with his bare fists. Pretty sure we have the highest strength attributes here, so I want to give it a try.
“We’ll lift it, then,” I say.
Anthony sighs, rolling his shoulders. Him and Pops go to the back of the pick-up while I take the front. The engine block is bound to be the single heaviest thing.
“One, two, and lift!”
The vehicle groans, its frame bending as we pull. My back and legs burn with the effort, and Pops makes a face like he’s about to shit himself. Ever so slowly, though, the tires leave the ground.
“Come on, boys!” I force out the words. “Put…your backs…into it!”
“I’ll put…my front…into…” Pops starts, but he pops a vein in his left eye.
It turns red in a blink and he shuts up after that.
Moving the pick-up is agony. We have to do this fiddly crab walk, dodging tripping hazards the entire way. But we get it done, and the mere fact that we could amazes me. How much stronger will all of us get with levels? How strong will I get as an expert class? The excitement I felt when the system appeared returns, and I have to actively fight it back.
“What do we do with the corpses?” Aiko asks.
The small Japanese woman is manhandling a fridge easily twice her size all on her own. She gets it to the barricade and hoists it up, turning red as a beet with the effort.
“Add them to the pile,” I say. “The bigger we can make that thing, the better.”
I use analyze on her again, but nothing in her description has changed. She didn’t level up from the fight. I use it on a few of the others as well, trying to get used to the skill.
When I aim it at Pops, all I get back is a bunch of gibberish.
Thomas P@%#A$ - Level &^
Race: @F#T$^
Warning: Analyze has failed to collect data.
That’s surprising. I turn to Emily and try the skill on her as well, but it works just fine.
Emilia Faust - Level 13.
Race: Human-Veluthrian hybrid, Female.
Titles: None.
Class: Arrow Conductor (adept).
With her race change, she’s an even bigger surprise than Pops. She lingers close to me, bow in her hands as she watches everyone. I take her in for a long moment, trying to see how she’s different from a standard human. Nothing jumps out.
When she notices me staring, she stares back quizzically. She checks the front of her tracksuit for stains, then she rubs a hand on her cheeks. Her eyes scream what’s wrong at me, but I wave her off and say, “nothing.”
She doesn’t seem convinced, but she doesn’t pursue it further than that. I turn back to Pops and tell him about how the skill failed on him.
He scratches his head. “It’s not one of my own skills getting in the way, I don’t have anything that would block you.”
We talk about it a little more, but we can’t figure out why analyze is failing. Pops ends up telling me about his class and level himself. He picked Enforcer, no surprise there, but he’s level god damned 22. That’s possibly the highest level around.
We spend some more time putting things back into place, and I chat with Pops when we take breaks. I tell him about Mike’s situation, and in return, he tells me about what’s been happening here.
“That Karen lady and her group held up the northern barricade. Jessica’s group and their pets held the southern one. We held here, and the eastern side was held by some others. They came with some Brent guy who said you helped him last night.”
“Losses?”
“A few here and there,” Pops says. “Monsters slipped in pretty much everywhere.”
He then goes on to tell me about what happened while I slept. This apparently wasn’t the first attack, but the second. The horde still kept its initial direction of travel even without the boss, but they split up into smaller groups.
“The first was a weaker assault,” Pops says. “Only a hundred monsters or so, and they spread out around the perimeter. The second assault was stronger, but it would’ve been much worse if you and Emily didn’t kill the boss.”
“Yeah.”
The second attack was also the one that woke me up, so it’s all over. At least for now.
“They’ll attack again,” I say. “There are two more bosses, and we have no idea where they even are. We need to start sending teams out there to look for them.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Pops says. “William is already putting together a few teams to look for more survivors and supplies. We could ask them to keep an eye out for the bosses as well.”
“I’ll go sign up for that as well. I need to reach Mike anyway, so I might as well do some other work while I’m out.”
“Okay, just…be careful out there.”
We spend a few more minutes talking as we finish rebuilding the barricade, and I remember to ask about Mom as well. I feel terrible for not doing it sooner, what kind of son am I? But I guess I just subconsciously assumed she must be fine since she’s with Pops and he’s okay.
Thankfully, she is. Pops says she’s somewhere around here, helping take care of the incoming children. I should go check in with her, but the prospect scares me. She’s not a helicopter parent by any means, but she’s still my mother. Worrying over her kids is part of the job description.
I can already imagine how she’d react if she saw me like this. Oh no, my baby! What happened to you? Followed shortly after by you’re not leaving my side again, and where’s your father? I’ll kill him!
Yeah, better to put that off at least until I shower and get a change of clothes.