The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 026: Ember Hounds

He had perhaps five seconds before someone shouted, and he used them badly.

Ethan rolled over and shook Hal Dunning by the shoulder. "Get up. Quietly. Wake Wrenna."

"Eh?" Hal blinked. "What is it?"

"Something's out there."

"Something?"

"Eleven somethings. Don't shout. Get behind the cart."

Hal looked at him for a long moment. Then, to Ethan's surprise, the old porter just nodded, rolled onto his knees, and began shuffling toward the cook's cart. A man who had carried loads for twenty years knew when to trust his gut. Wrenna was already awake, glaring at nothing, and she followed.

The window opened. He let his eyes slide across the dark, and the pulses came into focus, each one wrapped in gold.

[Ember Hound. Level 10. Vitality: 90. Attack: scorching bite. Weakness: sudden cooling. A doused hide cracks. Understanding: 8%.]

Cooling. He glanced at the cook's cart. Two barrels of drinking water, lashed to the tailboard.

Then Selka, at the edge of the firelight, lifted her head.

"Hargo," she said, not loudly. "Hargo. Something's wrong with the dark."

The hounds came.

They came all at once, out of the night in a rolling wave of orange and black. They were the size of mastiffs. Their fur looked like cooling coals, dark and cracked, with seams of dull red light glowing under the hide. Where their paws touched the dust, the ground blackened. Their breath came in puffs of smoke, and the smell hit the camp like a forge door thrown open.

"Fire!" Doran yelled, with great confidence, and flung a gout of flame at the nearest.

It hit the hound in the chest and vanished into its hide like water into sand. The creature snarled. The glow under its ribs brightened.

"Oh," said Doran, in a very small voice.

"You idiot!" Selka's bowstring thrummed. An arrow took one of the hounds in the shoulder and it yelped, but did not slow. "They eat fire!"

"I didn't know!"

"Form up!" bellowed Hargo, wading through the camp with his axe raised. His face was shining. "Form on me! Iron Heron, form on me, I'll cut down the whole--"

A hound leapt at him from the left.

He swung. The axe took it across the flank and it spun away, shrieking, but not before one clawed paw raked the length of his forearm. A line of blood opened, bright in the firelight. Hargo looked down at it.

The color went out of his face.

"I'm hit," he whispered.

"It's a scratch!" Selka shouted.

"I'm hit."

He dropped the axe. He turned and ran, straight out of the firelight into the dark, bawling, and nobody saw him again for the next ten minutes.

Bram Holt stood up.

He did it slowly. He took the tower shield off his back, slid his arm into the straps, and drew the short sword from his belt in one smooth motion, like a man picking up his tools. Then he planted himself at the mouth of the hollow, between the fire and the dark, and said in a voice like gravel:

"Selka. Doran. Behind me. Porters to the cart."

Three hounds hit his shield at once.

The sound was like a hammer on an anvil. Sparks flew. Bram rocked back a step, set his feet, and shoved. The nearest hound went tumbling. His sword came down, cleaving, and the animal's shriek cut off in the middle. A second lunged at his knee. His shield dropped, caught it, smashed it into the rock.

Behind him Selka fired, shot after shot, calm now, nailing hounds in the eye. Doran stood with his mouth open.

But there were too many, and they weren't all going for the shield.

Four of them split off, circling wide, low and fast. They hit the cook's cart from the side. Pol shouted and swung his ladle. Mira yelped and ducked behind the wheel. One hound's jaws snapped on a corner of the tailboard and wood turned black and burst into flame.

"Hal! Wrenna! Down!"

Ethan was already moving.

He didn't think. Scurry ran through his legs, and the world went quick and clear. He came off the ground, hit the cart in three bounds, and tore the first water barrel loose from its lashings. It was heavy, forty liters of cold well water. His arms felt it. It felt good.

A hound turned toward him, mouth wide.

He swung the barrel and let it go.

It struck the creature full in the chest. The staves burst. Water roared over its hide, and where it touched, steam exploded in a white cloud. The hound screamed. Its glow guttered, faded to grey. A web of cracks ran across its flank, sudden, deep, like frost on glass.

Cooling.

Ethan drew the rivet hammer from his belt.

It took one blow. He brought it down on the cracked hide behind the creature's ear, with everything Level 8 and four skills could give him, and the shell broke like pottery. The hound went limp.

Something snarled behind him.

He spun. A second hound had a grip on Wrenna's pack. She was on her back in the dust, kicking, her face white. Hal had thrown himself on the creature's flank and was beating it with both fists, and it was ignoring him.

Ethan didn't have a barrel left. He had a hammer, and the other half of Pol's water, still sloshing in a bucket by the fire.

"Mira!" he shouted.

She was already up. She'd gone silent. He didn't hear her feet at all, just a shape sliding past the flames like a shadow, snatching the bucket by its handle. She swung it in a wide, wet arc and the water caught the hound along the spine.

It shrieked and reared. The hide cracked from nape to tail.

Ethan smashed its skull.

It was over in a few minutes. Afterward the camp was very quiet.

Eleven hounds, nine of them dead. The other two had broken off at some silent signal and slunk back into the dark. The air stank of burnt hair and wet stone. Bram stood at the mouth of the hollow with his shield dented and his chest heaving. Selka was sitting on a rock with her bow across her knees and her hands shaking. Doran hadn't moved from where he'd frozen.

Hal Dunning crouched over Wrenna, checking her arm. Mira had gone back to Pol's side. She caught Ethan's eye, and her mouth twitched.

Not a word, he thought, and she nodded.

He crouched beside the nearest corpse, the one he'd killed first, and it was already beginning to smolder.

[Ember Hound defeated. Level 9 reached.]

[Absorb Ember Hound? Understanding: 53%.]

He thought about it. Fire resistance had been useful today. A good deal more useful than the fireball. And he'd learned this much, that nothing in this system was free.

"Trace first," he said, under his breath.

[Estimated trace: Kindling. Skin runs hot under strong emotion. Cloth may scorch.]

[Estimated gain: Ember Hide (Common). Reduces fire damage by a fifth.]

A fifth. It wasn't much. It wasn't nothing, either.

Kindling. He thought of Rhea's flat voice. Of the Hunger, and the Flinch, and the one-second hole Obedience put in him. A little heat, when he was afraid or angry. He could live with that. He'd lived with worse.

"Yes," he said.

Warmth poured into him like honey. It ran down his arms and settled in his chest, gentle, steady, an ember glowing under the ribs.

When he opened his eyes a shadow had fallen across him.

Bram Holt stood over him, tall and silent, with the shield still on his arm. The firelight flickered on his scarred face. He wasn't smiling. He didn't look angry. He looked like a man who had just finished adding something up.

"Porter," he said.

"Sir."

"Come and walk with me."

"I'm not-"

"I said walk." Bram jerked his chin toward the dark. His voice dropped so low that only Ethan could hear it. "Don't lie to me, boy. I watched you hit that hound. Porters don't hit like that."