The searchlight found a man in a black coat and a black mask.
Not a college boy in a sweaty T-shirt with an iron rod. Alex had cast the illusion the moment he heard the helicopter, the same one he had put on the summon on Sunday, and it had settled over him a half second before the light did. Black coat to the knees. South City mask. Hood up. From the air, he would look exactly like the man on the water tank.
Which was the point. If the army was going to see someone at a crack in the middle of the night, it had to be Zeon.
A voice came from a loudspeaker on the helicopter.
Voice- " YOU ON THE GROUND. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. "
Alex didn't stay where he was. He walked towards the crack.
Behind him the trucks stopped at the edge of the dead grass and soldiers jumped down, forty of them maybe, rifles up, the red dots of their laser sights crawling over his coat. Somebody was shouting in Hindi to hold fire. A white Gypsy came bouncing over the mud last of all and stopped, and a man got out of the passenger side without hurrying.
Colonel Arvind Varma, in uniform this time, with a pistol on his belt that he did not touch.
He looked at the dead Stalker lying near the kiln wall, six metres of it, with an iron rod still standing up out of its skull. Then he looked at the masked man.
Varma- " You said you'd stop talking if we followed the boy. "
Alex let the echo into his voice.
Zeon- " You didn't follow the boy. You followed the crack. I was here first. "
Varma- " How long have you known about this one? "
Zeon- " Long enough. Tell your men to get back to the trucks, Colonel. "
Varma- " Why? "
The ground answered for him.
The kiln field lifted again, higher this time, half a metre, and dropped. The soldiers nearest the crack fell over. The old kiln wall, which had stood for maybe sixty years, folded in on itself with a long sigh of bricks. And out of the dust, slowly, the way a man climbs out of a well, came the Brute.
It was eight metres tall when it stood up. Grey plates of something like stone covered its shoulders and chest, layered like the scales of a pangolin. Its arms hung down to its knees and ended in fists the size of a Nano car. It had a small head for its body, set low between the shoulders, and in it two yellow eyes the size of plates.
[Rift Brute · Lv 62 · Armoured · Slow to turn]
Lv 62. Alex was Tier 5, Stage 4. In a straight fight, it would kill him. Not quickly, perhaps, but it would.
Someone opened fire.
Then everyone did. Forty rifles. The noise was enormous, and the bullets sparked off the grey plates like rain on a tin roof. The Brute didn't even look down. It took one step forward, picked up the nearest army truck by its front bumper, and threw it.
The truck flew end over end across the field.
There were two soldiers still in the back.
Alex teleported. He came out of the air beside the truck as it turned over the second time, grabbed the canvas frame with one hand, and pushed down with every bit of Stage 4 in his body. It was like catching a falling building. His shoulder screamed. The truck slowed, slid, hit the ground on its wheels with a crash that broke every window, and stopped.
Two young soldiers stared at him from the back, white-faced, holding each other.
Zeon- " Out. Now. Run to the road. "
They ran.
Alex turned and looked at the Brute, and thought.
Slow to turn. The panel had told him that for a reason. Armoured on the front. Heavy. Very heavy. It had broken the kiln wall just by standing up.
And it was standing on a brick kiln.
Old kilns like this one were more than a chimney and a wall. Underneath them ran the flues, long tunnels of brick where the fire had once travelled from the furnace to the chimney. He had seen one of them when the Stalker came up. Hollow ground. Old bricks. Sixty years of rain.
The ground would hold a man. It was holding the Brute only because the Brute had not yet gone to the wrong place.
Alex threw a fire spell straight at its face.
It did nothing to the plates. That was not the point. The Brute roared and turned towards him, slowly, the whole huge body turning like a ship, and took one step, then another.
Alex walked backwards. He kept just out of reach of those arms. Fire again, in its eyes. Another step. The soldiers by the trucks were shouting at him to get away, and he could hear Varma's voice under theirs telling them to hold fire, hold fire, he is moving it, let him move it.
Two more steps. The ground made a sound under the Brute's foot like a biscuit breaking.
Now.
Alex put both his palms on the earth and pushed an earth spell down into it, not to lift but to loosen. Sixty years of old mortar became sand in one second.
The Brute's left leg went through the ground up to the hip. Then its right leg went through. Then the whole flue tunnel collapsed under it with a roar of bricks and dust, and the Brute dropped into the earth up to its chest, its huge arms caught out on either side, its small head and yellow eyes left sticking up at ground level.
It roared and pulled. The ground shook. It would get out. In maybe a minute it would get out.
Alex didn't give it a minute.
The kiln chimney was still standing. Forty metres of brick, cracked from the ground shaking, leaning slightly already. He teleported to its base, put his hand on it, and found the crack that ran up its side. Then he pushed wind through that crack like a wedge.
The chimney leaned. Leaned more. And fell, with a sound he would hear in his sleep, straight down onto the small head between the stone shoulders.
When the dust cleared there was a pile of bricks where the Brute's head had been, and one grey arm, twitching, and then not twitching.
[Rift Brute defeated · Sync +196%]
The panel didn't stop there.
[Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 5/5 · Complete] [Vessel Sync: Tier 6 unlocked · Stage 1/5]
It hit him like the first breath after being underwater. Everything inside him opened at once, a door he hadn't known was closed. His shoulder, which had been screaming since the truck, simply stopped hurting. The mana in his body, which had been a river for weeks, became something wider. He could feel every soldier on the field. Every heartbeat. He could feel the crack behind the rubble, like a cold mouth, and the shape of the world on the other side of it.
[Tier 10 Release cooldown: 1 day → 22 hours]
Small. But it would grow. Everything would grow now.
He stood on the bricks, in the mask, breathing.
Across the field, every soldier was looking at him. A few of them had their phones out. One of them, he noticed, had a camera fixed on his helmet, its little red light blinking.
So this would be on video by morning. A masked man catching a falling truck. A masked man burying a monster under a chimney.
Fine. Let it be. Zeon was supposed to be seen. Alex was not.
Varma walked over the broken ground towards him and stopped at a respectful distance.
Varma- " We have a device for the crack. It seals them. For a few months, usually. "
Zeon- " Use it. "
Varma made a hand signal. Four soldiers ran forward with something that looked like a steel suitcase with a battery attached, set it beside the crack, and ran back. There was a deep thump, and the cold hum in Alex's teeth stopped. Just stopped, like a fridge switching off.
Varma- " My men would be dead without you. Two of them for sure. "
Zeon- " Then don't waste them on watching a college boy. "
Varma- " Is that what this is? You saving my men, so I feel I owe you? "
Zeon- " You do owe me. "
For the first time, Varma laughed. A short, surprised laugh.
Varma- " Yes. I suppose I do. "
Alex teleported away before anyone could ask him to take off the mask.
He came out in his own back bedroom at 2:41 AM, dropped the illusion, and sat on the floor against the bed. His T-shirt was destroyed. His hands were black. He was smiling, and he couldn't stop.
Tier six.
His phone had eleven messages on it, all from Riya, each shorter than the last. The final one was only a question mark.
Alex- " Alive. The crack is closed. The army closed it. "
Riya- " I know. It went quiet. It's so quiet I can hear the fan. "
Alex- " Is that good? "
Riya- " I don't know. I've never heard one stop before. "
He read that twice. Then he typed sleep, and she sent back a sleeping emoji, and he put the phone on the bed.
He was getting up to wash his hands when the panel opened by itself, without him calling it, gold at the edges instead of blue. He had seen that colour only once before, long ago, on the day the system had told him that some rewards would be held until his body could carry them.
[Saved reward unlocked: Dungeon Master (Seed)] [Plant the seed to begin. Warning: it cannot be moved once planted.]