Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 223: Chapter 223: What Comes Across the Plain (1)

Chapter 223: What Comes Across the Plain (1)

Nothing came on the first day.

Nothing came on the second.

Two hundred and six people worked a construction site knowing that somebody had voted to kill them.

Petta stopped sleeping. She laid block all day and sat up all night with her back to a barrel, watching the north.

A rigger from the second shift walked up to Halvers on the morning of the second day and could not get the words out.

Halvers put a hand on his shoulder, said "It is all right, lad," and had him on the noon transport with full pay and nothing on his record.

Nobody said a word about it. Two or three men looked at their boots.

"That is what they are counting on," Odran said quietly, watching the transport go. "They do not even have to come. They just have to not come, for long enough."

Draven checked the map twice a day.

He did it standing at the northern edge of the site with his eyes half closed.

Fifty miles of clear ground. Every rock. Every rise. Every living thing on it.

Nothing.

’They are being careful,’ he thought. ’Good. Careful men move slowly, and slow is the only thing I need.’

On the third night he opened the map and the plain was not empty anymore.

[The Omniscient Cartographer’s World Map]

The world unfolded in his mind in fine blue geometry, and out past the northwestern edge of the clear zone, sixty-one biological signatures were moving in a loose crescent.

Behind them, nine human ones.

Draven stood very still.

The sixty-one were moving forward at a slow, uneven, driven pace. The nine were not. They came to the boundary where the tower’s clean air met the standing fog, and they stopped there, and they did not take one step further.

’Handlers,’ he thought. ’They will not enter the light.’

He measured the distance and the pace.

Four hours.

Two hundred and six people were about to be attacked, and he had four hours of warning, and not one of them knew yet.

Then he looked at the nine again, and the calm went out of him.

Seven of the human signatures read clean. Ordinary mercenary mana, low, unremarkable.

Two did not.

Two of them had something coiled through them that the map rendered in a color he had seen exactly twice before.

Once in a private nightclub room in Sector Four, sitting in the chest of a woman he had killed at a table.

Once wrapped around a man’s spinal column in a cavern under Bastion Six, before he pulled it out with his bare hands.

Miasma. Deep, established, and old.

’The Church is standing in the fog line of a Capital operation.’

Draven closed the map.

He walked back through the site and found Halvers at the base of the tower.

"Four hours," Draven said. "Sixty-one beasts, driven. Nine handlers who will not come past the fog line."

Halvers went gray, and then went to work, because he had been a foreman for thirty-one years and that was what the job did to a man.

"Sella!" he bellowed. "Kill the ovens! Everyone below the trench line in ninety minutes!"

Draven caught Aegon by the shoulder as he went past.

"Two of the handlers are Cult."

Aegon stopped dead.

"The Capital would never," he said.

"The Capital did not." Draven kept his voice down. "Kest ordered an accident. Beasts wander, no evidence, nobody hangs. That is a coward’s plan but it is an ordinary one. Somebody in his chain has improved it."

He looked north into the dark.

"He does not know they are there."

"You are certain?"

"A man who wanted the Eclipse in his operation would not have spent eleven minutes talking his own Senate out of a fleet." Draven let go of his shoulder. "He thinks he is running this. He is being used as a delivery cart."

He had one more thing to do and three hours to do it in, and he had been putting it off for four days.

Draven sat down on an empty crate behind the water tanker where nobody could see him and opened his interface.

DING.

---

[Monthly Sign-In available. Overdue: 5 days.]

[Consecutive Sign-in Record: Day 155.]

---

He had never once missed a day.

Not in the hospital, not in the sewers, not on the night he killed Neville, not in a stone cell in Thaldrasil wearing another man’s body.

Every morning of five months, without ceremony, because the one rule of the thing that had put him in this world was that you showed up.

Most days it was junk. A stamina potion. A basic combat knife. A tiny fraction of passive regen.

He took it anyway, every time, and he put it in the warehouse and forgot about it.

"Sign in," Draven said.

---

[Monthly Reward: Heartwood Accelerant (Mythic Consumable)]

[Description: Administered to the root system of a World Tree. Compresses natural maturation cycles. Effect is permanent and irreversible.]

---

Draven read it twice.

’One leaf every seven days.’

That was the obstacle he was facing. The system always provides things that will ensure the survival of Humanity. And at this moment, speeding up the construction of Miasma Clearing Towers and expanding Human influence on the Continent is the right path moving forward.

He turned the phrasing over. Compresses natural maturation cycles. Not produces leaves. Not increases yield.

It was not a shortcut around the Warden’s rule. It was a way to make the tree older.

And a grown World Tree, the Warden had said, is not a plant. It is a place. She feeds her own soil. She holds her own weather. She begins, in time, to make spirits of her own.

’And she becomes the single loudest source of clean mana on the continent,’ Draven thought, ’sitting in a garden inside my own city, where every living thing that can feel it will feel it.’

He put the vial in his inventory without using it.

Then he looked at the rest of the warehouse.

Five months. A hundred and fifty-odd daily rewards, banked and ignored, because what use did a Level 100 Vector user have for a basic combat knife.

He scrolled the list.

Stamina potions, one hundred and thirty-one. Low-grade healing draughts, ninety-four. Basic combat knives, forty-eight. Mana crystals, dozens. Rope. Ration bars. A crate of cheap iron caltrops from Day 88 that he had laughed at.

Draven stood up.

’I have been carrying an armory for five months and calling it garbage.’

"Halvers. Get me your foremen."

They came at a run, eleven of them, and Draven set his hand on the ground and started emptying five months of the System’s small change into the ash.

Crates. Sacks. Bundles.

The foremen stared.

"Every worker gets a knife," Draven said. "Every worker. Cooks included."

"They do not know how to use a knife," a foreman said.

"They are not going to fight with it," Draven said. "Nobody here is fighting tonight. The knife is so that if something is on top of you and there is no one else, you are not empty-handed for the four seconds it takes us to reach you."

He kicked a sack over.

"Stamina draughts. One each, in the pocket, not the pack. If you are running, drink it. Do not save it for later, there is no later."

"Healing draughts to the trench line, all ninety-four, Sella holds them because Sella is the only one on this site who will not lose the crate."

"Rope to the riggers. Caltrops to Odran, seed the north approach outside the berm and mind where you put your own feet."

The foremen went, hauling sacks.

Sella opened one of the crates, took out a plain iron knife, and turned it over in her hand.

"Where in all the hells did this come from?" she said.

"Storage," Draven said.

She gave him a look that said she had raised four children and buried a husband and could smell a half-answer at forty paces.

She did not ask again.

Petta got a knife and a stamina draught. She held the knife wrong, in a hard little fist, like a trowel.

"I lay block," she said.

"I know," Draven said. "You will keep laying block. This is for the four seconds."

She looked up at him.

"You are not scared at all."

"No."

"How?"

"Because I have known they were coming since sunset," Draven said, "and I have known exactly where every single one of them is standing the entire time."

Ninety minutes out, he pulled the squad in behind the tower base.

"Sixty-one beasts, staggered release. They will not come as one wave. When you think it is finished, it is not finished."

"Handlers?" Lucien asked.

"Nine, holding the fog line northwest. Seven mercenary. Two Cult."

Nyx’s head came up.

"Yes," Draven said. "Yours. You go out when the first wave commits, not before. I want one of the Cultists breathing and I want the cages intact."

"The cages."

"They shipped sixty live beasts across four hundred miles of Wildlands. That takes crates, and crates have stamps." Draven looked around at them. "Dead animals on a plain is exactly the story Kest wants told. A Capital serial number is a different story."

Aegon was frowning. "And us?"

"Nobody gets within thirty meters of a worker."

Then Draven reached up and pushed his hood back.

"And we do this with our faces showing."

The squad went quiet.

"Captain," Reina said carefully. "We have been dead for six weeks."

"We were dead so that this tower could get built without the Capital dropping a fleet on it," Draven said. "The tower is standing. It is running. Fifty miles of this continent has air in it for the first time in a hundred years."

He looked north, at four hours of empty dark.

"The lie has done its work. From tonight, they can look straight at us."r

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