Tanner had thought that training Saturday morning would be easier than the week before. With his 4 new system levels and large increases to endurance, strength, and speed. He’d thought he’d be able to handle the load much easier. What he hadn’t thought of was that although he’d only earned 70 SP from fighting, the other young fighters in his squad had earned much more since they all had combat systems. After all, one’s core ability was the best way to gain SP, and for combat system users, that meant combat. Tanner on the other hand was support, which meant he got only a few SP’s for fighting.

 

Thinking back he hadn’t really done that much. They’d had a good rotation system to keep everyone fresh and while he’d been in the rotation something like 8 or 10 hours. He was only fighting about two of those hours, and lots of that time had been standing around. He only remembered actually killing 2 demons and they had been fodder of the lowest level.

 

70 SP was piss poor, but he couldn’t really call it unfair. It seemed most people in his squad had earned at least one level so the training intensity had increased. Now they not only had to run for miles they had to do it wearing weighted vests. The extra stats did help some. With vitality being 12 his endurance was ridiculous. It just didn’t make it any less grueling or annoying. The entire training now seemed basically pointless for him. After all, what was the point of running, sparring, and exercising for hours if you weren’t even that tired afterwards? He was sore as hell, but not really tired.

 

His sergeant picked up on his predicament sometime that afternoon. “Spaldman!” He snapped as they were doing burpees. 

 

“Sir!” Tanner replied crisply, but didn’t stop the exercise. 

 

“How many levels did you gain?

 

“Four, sir!”

 

“What is your vitality score?”

 

“Twelve, sir.” Tanner replied again. He heard a sigh from above him.

 

“Stop already.” The Sergeant said. “All this is going to be pointless for you now. Get your ass up and get out of here. You're still coming to the lunch-time classroom lessons, as well as weapons training and sparring. I’ll have to go talk to Sergeant Jergen and find out what he wants you doing the rest of the time.”

 

“Sir!” Tanner replied with relief. He now only had about four hours a day of duties. He’s just weaseled out of something like six hours of exercise and running every day. He left before the sergeant could change his mind.

 

Tanner was enjoying his hard earned time off on Tuesday morning when the sirens started to blare again. He scooped up his rune-sword and pack and ran towards the training yard. When he arrived the rest of the trainees were assembled and he quickly got into line, just as the sergeant led them towards the airfield. They were once more loaded into a transport and whisked off towards the front. They ended up along the same patch of wall, but now that the team was slightly leveled up and had some combat experience. They were now part of the reserve, instead of the reserve's reserve and were placed into the rotation only a few hours after they arrived.

 

Tanner was assigned to a line about 50 yards west of where he'd been last time and the battle seemed much the same but it was obvious they were being harder pressed. Instead of occasionally trickling up the wall in one and two's, now they were getting a pretty constant stream of singletons, with the occasional group of three, four, or even five. His increased speed and strength helped, but it didn't make up for the large increase in the number of enemies.

 

Tanner ducked as a crawler tail whipped passed his face then rammed his rune-blade into its chest. The creature spasmed once before dying and Tanner kicked the corpse off his sword and down into the freezing water below. A cutter scampered up the wall to his right and a large soldier with a shield blocked its slashing scythe-claws as someone farther right rammed a spear into things' guts. Tanner thought that was the end of it until a crawler ran up the cutters back and whipped it's tail down over-top of the man's shield and towards his head. Tanner reacted instantly, slapping the tail away with his blade, and giving the shield guy a moment to kill it with his own sword. 

 

He saved the shield man but he'd been distracted too long. A flicker at the left corner of his eye made him turn his head just in time to see a cutter claw descending for his head. Another cutter must have come up from his left and all his attention had been to his right. Just as his eyes were widening in panic he was saved. The soldier to his left, a hard-faced and hard-eyed girl from his trainee group stomped the creature on the side with one glowing blue foot.

 

She must have used an ability of some sort because the cutter's body deformed around her boot before it was hurled from the wall with such speed that the splash from the river below reached a good bit of the way up the wall. Tanner didn't notice any of that however, as he was watching the claw as it came for him until it suddenly jerked sharply away, brushing just passed his nose as the creature screamed in pain and fury.

 

"Thanks..." He told her, feeling weary as the terror fueled adrenaline drained out of him. He patted his face and nose making sure he hadn't been cut. Even a knick from a demon claw was dangerous. The healers had to cut around the wounds to remove any corrupted flesh before they could heal you. The girl didn't say anything, she just grunted and turned back to look down the wall.

 

Tanner did the same but the rotation was called a moment later and he headed to the back of the line. Tanner's first stint in the rotation lasted four hours. Then they were brought down to the bunker to eat and hit the head. Tanner tracked the girl down while they were resting. She had her back to the bunker wall and was staring slightlessly at the ceiling.

 

"I never got your name." Tanner said as he sat down next to her. "I know we all went through our names at least once but I was so tired the first week of training I don't really remember much of it." He told her.

 

"Grace." She said but didn't add anything else.

 

"Well, thank you again Grace. I was dead."

 

She grunted and Tanner took that as all the affirmation he was going to get. He learned his head back against the wall to match her posture and they sat there in silence until they were called back to the wall. The Next shift on rotation lasted another 6 hours. Before they were sent into the bunker for some sleep and more food. 

 

They were roused out of bed sometime before dawn and sent back to the wall. It was obvious things were getting a bit desperate. The soldiers had been fighting for almost a whole day, and even with the frequent rotations the combat took a hellish toll. Tanner felt weary in a way even his 12 vitality couldn't counteract. He was pretty sure it was mostly mental but mental fatigue was just as bad as the physical kind. The only slightly good news was that the previous days fighting had earned him a whopping 314 SP.

 

The fact he could have earned the same amount from a single session of uninspired sex didn't really help his mood. Still, the wall needed to hold. Even if he died here it would have been for a good reason. That thought buoyed him and he fought onward. The sky was just starting to lighten when everything went wrong. 

 

Snow had started to fall in light flurries sometime while Tanner's squad had been sleeping. It added a layer of un-reality to the battle. Sounds became oddly muffled and the visibility narrowed, not helped by the bright flood-lights. The result was that everyone could only see a few yards in any direction. It made it seem as if he was fighting on some bizzare island with only the few people on either side of him. He'd ended up in a different spot but Grace was still on the same rotation slot he was, only to his right this time.

 

The creatures climbing the wall tapered off until they stopped completely. Tanner took that as a good sign, maybe this was about to be over. Then he heard someone scream. "SPITTER SWARM!" With the snow he couldn't tell where the cry had come from and he looked up from where he was staring down at the water below. All the veterans on the wall started to run in all directions and some even just dove off the back of the wall. A forty-foot drop could be deadly even to someone with a bunch of levels and Tanner took their willingness to leap off as a very bad sign. The noobies like him, and other soldiers not as seasoned, were looking around confused but Tanner had always thought of himself as a follower. Sheep he may be but following the herd was a valid survival tactic. He grabbed Grace by the drag handle on the back of her kit and started running. She slapped at his arms but he'd gotten her off her feet and she didn't have much leverage. With his new strength her weight was fairly easy to handle.

 

His plan was to make the stairs. They were only about twenty-feet away and there he could jump down off the wall without having to go all the way to the ground. He didn't make it. He'd only taken about five steps when he caught a green fog descending from above out of the corner of his eye. Tanner's instincts screamed at him and he dove towards the edge of the wall. A fifty-foot swath of the wall behind him just dissolved, along with at least two-dozen soldiers.

 

He heard screams from soldiers who'd been near the edges as pieces of their bodies just weren't there anymore. Tanner got back to his feet and looked at the devastation. It looked as if some giant creature had just taken a bite of the wall. Worse, the acid cloud, or whatever it had been, seemed to have run down the wall. What had once been a 40 foot bastion, now had a giant hole in it that ended a little more than ten feet off the ground.

 

Tanner could already see demons pouring into the breech and through the wall. Worse were the ones climbing up the sides, or crawling around to come in behind the other fighters still facing outwards in other areas.That was the problem with defending during a siege. As long as it was working it worked exceptionally well, but one hole in the foundation caused the whole thing to unravel.

 

Tanner wasn't sure what the hell he was supposed to do, but a pair of cutters sprinting up the gap in the wall made his options pretty clear. He poured mana into his blade in the way his Sergeant had told all the noobies not to do. They'd all been drilled about how fighting was an endurance game and you needed to save every ounce and energy and mana for when the shit really hit the fan. Well, Tanner counted this as a moment to use everything. It only took a trickle of mana to make a Rune-weapon a deadly weapon against demons but you could use more. 

 

The runes on his blade flared alight and the steel nearly hummed with all the mana he was dumping into it. The temperature around him dropped even further as the 'Ice' rune on his blade came fully active. Tanner faked a lunge at the closest monster just as it was climbing up out of the gap and onto the top of the wall. Its sickle arms snapped down but Tanner was already leaning away and they missed him by inches and they slammed into the hard stone of the wall causing one of the claws to break. He slashed the monster across one leg, the mana infused blade sheared through the limb with supernatural sharpness and froze the stump closed even as the monster screamed. Tanner rolled away from the monster and came up in a classic lunge, backfoot extended and sword forward just in time to skewer the second cutter through the belly as it came up over the wall. 

 

He pulled back his blade and spun away from the clumsy counter-attack of the first cutter as it tried to jump on his back. With only three legs and one claw it lacked the eerie spider-like grace it had before and Tanner's speed let him circle it, hitting it with two more disabling wounds before impaling it as well. He was just turning to see how Grace was doing when he felt her back slam into his. He turned his head and saw her dueling three monsters of her own. They must have crawled up the outside of the wall. With all the defenders in the area fled or dead there was nothing stopping them from coming in the old fashion way. 

 

Grace's rune-weapons were hand-axes with tiny handles and hugely oversized heads. The weapons seemed to wrap her hands like some type of fist weapon but she used them with a power and grace that Tanner couldn't have hoped to match. She chopped one crawler into sushi and used her 'super stomp' on a cutter right beside it. Tanner was forced to turn back as more demons crawled up out of the gap in the wall. The two fought there back to back in the snow with the screams of the dying and the rage-filled cries of demons all around them. 

 

Tanner didn't know how long they fought there. It couldn't have been long but it felt like an eternity of frantic dodges and singing steel. The runes on his sword were flicking with a lack of mana when reinforcements finally arrived. A solid block of fighters pushed up the stairs and hacked down all the demons who'd made the top of the wall before spreading out to resume their posts. A Sergeant grabbed Tanner and Grace and shoved them back into rotation but they hadn't even made it to the front of the line before they were pulled off the wall. 

 

Tanner collapsed into the same spot against the wall he'd left hours earlier and stared off at nothing. His body was wrung out. Using that much mana that quickly in combat combined with the peaks and valleys of adrenaline highs made him feel like he'd been awake for days instead of four hours or so. He didn't even notice when Grace sat down next to him until she spoke.

 

"What is your System? I didn't see you use a single ability or spell even when we both almost died up there." She asked. Tanner turned to look at her. No-one would call her pretty. She had a blocky homely face with short-brown hair and serious blue eyes. She was muscular for a woman, although she didn't seem to be as over-built as Sandra was. He noticed the bandage on her arm and looked down at it.

 

"Got nicked during that mess. Burned like hell until a medic cut out part of my bicep. Says I'll have to live with it until I get back to base." Tanner nodded. He was kind of amazed he hadn't gotten cut. There had been at least a dozen close-calls.

 

"It's a support system. People I have sex with get buffs." He said wearily. She grunted and the two lapsed into silence again but after a few seconds she spoke back up.

 

"You're serious aren't you?" She asked with a sort of exhausted incredulity.

 

He nodded but didn't say anything. There wasn't much to say.

 

The last charge seemed to have taken the fight out of the demons. Before he'd even had to go back on shift the last of the surviving horde had been killed and the wall was no longer under attack. He'd found out that apparently today's little fiasco wasn't all that uncommon. There was a type of ranged demon called a 'spitter' who looked a bit like a really screwed up bullfrog. They could spit a glob of super-costic acid a good three hundred yards. The demons who lead the hordes liked to gather them into a 'swarm' and fire their payloads all at once and concentrated. It was basically an instant wall-breech. 

 

SOP was to flee the top of the wall, re-organize around the breach, and retake the walls rather than try to hold during the bombardment and subsequent flanking. Apparently their trainers hadn't gotten to that particular situation yet and it had killed almost half their twenty-man noobie squad, including Jeremie who'd been the closest thing he had to a friend in this place. 

 

Tanner's thoughts were dark as they flew back to base. It was nearing noon on Wednesday when they got back and He'd been told he needed to report to weapons training at 10:00 Thursday morning. Tanner really wasn't in the mood but the problem with the military was that you didn't get to refuse.

 

****************************************************

 

Sergeant Jergen limped into the commander's office. One leg was bandaged heavily and he walked with the help of a crutch. He nodded to the two guards outside the commander’s door and went in.

 

The commander was looking over a map for the area and the Sergeant came to attention the best he could and saluted. She waved him towards a chair.

 

“Sit down already, there’s no need for that.” She said impatiently. 

 

“I’d rather not. It’s a pain in the ass trying to get back up once I’ve sat down.” Jergen said honestly.

 

“Casualties?” She asked, moving on. 

 

“52 dead, and at least 200 wounded, 40 of those critically.”The three spitter swarms hit almost at the same time. They did a number on us but the walls weren’t completely breached. The veterans acted quickly and held the gap from the ground while others went to retake the walls. We had one engineer with a building system on site and he managed to fix one of the walls almost instantly. Was only a little exciting.” He reported.

 

“Then why were there 52 dead, and why are you using a crutch?” She asked calmly.

 

“Some of the greenies were on the wall when it happened. Hit them pretty much dead on… Just bad luck all around. Killed something like 10 of them, and another dozen inexperienced kids from other squads. Half our casualties were in that one spot.” He said, his voce somber.

 

The commander closed her eyes for a moment. She hated losing anyone but the kids were the worst. Eighteen was a hell of an age to die when with some levels they could have lived a few hundred years.

 

“And the leg?” She asked finally.

 

“Greater crawler tried to sneak in while things were hairy. I stopped it but the bastard chewed up my leg. It looks like a hot mess but I’ve had worse.” He said gruffly. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t press him. A greater crawler was nothing to mess around with. If one of those had gotten to this side of the wall it could have killed hundreds before being put down.

 

“Did you get the core?” She asked. The man reached into a pocket of his uniform and pulled out a black gem the size of a golf-ball. It seemed to suck in the light around it and just looking at the thing made her vaguely nauseous.

 

“Well, the brass ought to be happy with that. Maybe we can get some real supplies and soldiers out here.” She said finally.

 

“And what about your little project?” Jergen asked. She smiled then and Jergen had to remind himself that she was older than him by a good margin and his commanding officer.

 

“Very well. We managed to extract four entire tanker loads of raw mana from the gore in the river over the last month. That’s enough to buy us two new transport shuttles or some better Rune-Weapons, plus a big bonus for the soldiers.” 

 

“God knows they need it. Moral is in the tank right now and the demons aren't letting up at all. That’s eight hordes in the last two months. Something is stirring them up.” Jergen said bitterly.

 

“I think there’s a lord out there. We just need to find it.” The commander said thoughtfully. Jergen’s eyes widened.

 

“And what the hell are we going to do if we do find a demon lord?” Jergen asked incredulously. “No-one has even seen one for three years and the last time they did it nearly single-handedly collapsed the battleline in France. It took a Tier 5 [Battlemage] to chase it off, not kill mind you, just make it retreat.” 

 

“If we find it, then the [Dream Knife] will have to take the field again.” She said with hard eyes. Jergen jerked back as if he'd been struck but rolled his neck then sighed. Then the commander's face softened and she smiled.

 

“And how’s our base's newest male escort doing?”

 

Jergen shook his head and snorted. ”Sergeant Hamilton came to me Saturday to say he’d hit level five and had been excused from his group's physical training. He wanted me to find something to do with him during his off hours. I went and talked to Nightbridge and apparently she’d sent over someone to ply his trade on. A specialist who’d lost half an arm against a gibberling. Apparently she wasn’t doing very well and her arm would take way more healing to fix than we have. At least weeks of intensive healing and we’ve only got 15 real healers on the whole damn base, including the ones we got in the draft. No way can they spare that much time for 1 soldier.”

 

“Anyway, I think it mostly just as an experiment to see what he could do for her. You know how Nightbridge can be sometimes, but it apparently went so well she wasn’t sure how to react. She seemed honestly amazed at the turn-around and I think she wanted to try the boy on for a ride herself. I was curious to see whether her embarrassment about seducing a boy 1/3rd her age or her scientific curiosity would win out.” 

 

The Commander snorted. “Well, as long as we're getting some work out of him. Go talk to the engineers and have them build some more barracks. Apparently there’s another draft coming in soon, battle systems this time.We’ll need to have somewhere to put them.”

 

Jergen saluted, then turned on his heel and left.