Getting Stronger By Marrying And Investing In Abandoned Villainesses

The wall in the west of the city was called the Sixth Wall, which told Theo that there had been five others.

He came down off the rooftops and walked in through a gate that nobody was guarding, and the first thing he found on the other side of it was not soldiers. It was people.

Tens of thousands of them, packed into the last third of a city, sitting.

That was the detail that got him. They were not running and they were not screaming and they were not organising. They were sitting in the streets with their bundles beside them, in rows along the walls of the houses, families keeping together, boots off and bare feet flat on the cobbles, and they were waiting for a thing they had already accepted.

A woman was even combing her daughter’s hair. She worked from the ends upward, the way you do when you do not want to pull, and she had a ribbon held in her teeth for afterwards.

Theo found it strange. The people felt more dead than the horde that was coming to make them that way.

He found the command post by walking uphill until people started carrying paper.

It was a wine merchant’s house with the front wall broken out of it, the cellar hatch propped open and the empty racks stacked out in the yard for firewood, and inside it a woman in a scorched half-cuirass was standing over a map with both fists on the table, and she did not look up when he came in.

"If that’s about the eastern cistern, it’s gone."

"It’s not."

"Then it’s about the flour, and the flour is also gone."

"I don’t need your food too. I’m self-sufficient."

The woman looked up. She looked at him for a while without saying anything, the way a person looks at a delivery they did not order.

Her name, he would learn in about a minute, was Captain Hessa Duun, and she had been holding the west of Alderkeep for nineteen days, and Theo’s Genesis Eyes told him a number about her that he did not like at all.

[Rank Potential: B] [Current Rank: Enhanced Realm - Middle Stage] [Status: exhaustion — critical. Mana pathways strained. Has not slept more than ninety minutes at a stretch in eleven days.]

The information about her was rather limited, and different too. It was like his eyes could see the obvious alone for now, aside from her rank. No skill list, no history, none of the long quiet paragraph they usually handed him about a person’s worst day.

"You’re one of those people... the Climbers."

"Is that what you call us?"

She straightened up. "You are going to die. It’s best you find a return stone and go back outside."

Theo frowned, unappreciative of the tone.

The lady continued though.

"There were thirty-one of you, four months ago, when this started in the east. They were very good. Some of them were extraordinary."

Her jaw moved, and she stilled it with two fingers.

"You’ll meet them. They’re out there in the front rank."

The room got quiet.

’...Oh.’

’The last group of candidates is in the tide.’

Captain Duun gave him ten minutes, which was, he understood, an enormous gift.

The Inheritance had come up out of the eastern quarter thirty-eight days ago. Nobody knew from what. The first four walls fell in the first nine days, because nobody understood yet that killing the defenders made the problem worse, and the Fifth Wall fell eleven days ago and took four thousand soldiers with it, and every one of those four thousand had got up again about a minute later, in their own armour, wearing their own faces.

"Is that why you stopped attacking? Because every man you lose stands against you."

"You’re wrong. They don’t just stand against you. They stand against you even better, stronger than when they stood with you."

Captain Duun tightened her hand on the edge of the table.

"They don’t lose the training, they seem to tap into their potential with its powers. My second, Ilbrec, can now put a spear through a shield at forty paces. He killed six of mine on Tuesday."

She put her hands flat on the map.

"So you tell me how you hold a wall against that. You tell me how you tell a boy on the firing step that the worst thing that can happen to him today is not dying."

Theo did not have an answer for that either.

"How long have you got?"

"Two days. Perhaps three."

Duun shrugged, and it was the flattest gesture Theo had ever seen a person make.

"It’s not a siege. It’s a tide. And it will simply come and overwhelm us. There’s nothing to do but wait. You understand me now?"

Theo turned that over.

"Isn’t running away an option?"

Captain Duun chuckled.

"I think this death is a kinder option."

***

After talking to the Captain he went up onto the wall, because he wanted to see it.

There were supposed to be eight hundred on that stretch. There were maybe three hundred, and a hundred of them were sitting down with their backs to the parapet and their weapons across their laps, out of the wind.

He walked the length of it slowly with his eyes open, and what he saw took the bottom out of his stomach in a way that the tide had not managed.

[Rank Potential: C]

A boy of about seventeen with a spear, asleep sitting up.

[Rank Potential: D]

[Rank Potential: B]

A woman with a burn up one arm, sharpening the same edge she had already sharpened.

[Rank Potential: D]

[Rank Potential: A]

Theo stopped walking.

’I wonder if my eyes can tell a Climber different from someone from the Tower.’

He turned round and found the man with A-rank Potential.

It was an old man in a leather apron sitting on an ammunition crate with a hammer across his knees, sixty years old at the least, with hands like a docker and one eye that had gone milky. He was not a soldier. There was no unit mark on him and nobody had given him a place on the step. He was the wall’s smith, and he had a hammer because it was his hammer.

[Name: Marrick Vell]

[Potential: A]

[Current Rank: Mundane Realm - Middle Stage]

[Note: He had never truly tested to certify his ability and skills, and was forty-one when the Tower Association’s testing programme reached this district, and the district was not tested.]

Theo stood in the middle of a doomed wall in a city that was going to fall in two days, and felt the old familiar thing move in his chest, the thing that had made him walk into a rooftop flat and ask a woman in a wheelchair to marry him.

’There is an A-rank potential sitting on a box waiting to die and nobody has ever once looked at him.’

[You have found a Target with a High Potential]

[You can invest actions in this Target but will only receive rewards when the actions pay-off]

[Note: This is a Free Investment available due to the nature of the system, you cannot receive exclusive system rewards for this kind of investment]

Theo silently sat beside the man. And said nothing. The man glanced beside him for a moment, then went back to his hammer, turning it over on his knees and setting it down again the same way round.

***

The other candidates had come in over the course of the afternoon, and by evening most of them had found their way to the west.

They had formed themselves into groups the way people do, and the groups had formed themselves around whoever was loudest.

The guy Theo remembered named Brandy was in a group of eleven.

"—so we hold the Sixth as a delaying position and take the bridge," he was saying, in the yard behind the command post, to a semicircle of tired candidates. "The river’s the only real line in this city. We cross, we drop the bridge, and the tide is the far side’s problem."

"There are sixty thousand civilians on this side of the river," somebody said.

"There are sixty thousand civilians in a scenario," Brandy said. "This is a trial. Nobody here is real except us."

Theo, sitting on a low wall at the back with a bowl of his own stew, put his spoon down.

"The panel said it wasn’t a simulation," he said.

Every head in the yard turned except the man sitting next to him.

Brandy looked at him the way you look at something that has spoken up on a bus.

"...And you are?"

"The Sky’s Husband."

Somebody laughed. Theo let them.

"The system said, and I’m quoting it because I read it twice, the scenario is not a simulation, injuries are real, death is real." He picked his spoon back up. "It didn’t say ours."

The yard was quiet.

Then Brandy chuckled.

"The fuck, how better is it supposed to specify? Bro, it’s not my fault you’re slow to understand."

He hissed and turned away from Theo. While the man beside Theo glanced at him.

Not long after that, a few of the Climbers who had arrived with Theo went to the bridge.

Theo watched them go from the wall in the last of the light, and beside him the man watched them too.

Eventually he spoke for the first time.

"Will you go?"

"Not yet..."

"Why not? What are you waiting for?"

Theo thought about how to answer that honestly. There was really no best way.

He sighed.

"I think it’s best I learn from their mistake."

The man stared at him for a moment. Then he chuckled, and then he laughed properly, with his shoulders in it.

When he was done, his good eye went to the sword on Theo’s hip.

"If it’s anything, I can sharpen your sword for you?"

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