Vikram did not come to college on Monday.
Everyone noticed. The bench in the third row where he usually sat with his legs stretched into the aisle was empty, and his two friends sat on either side of the empty space like bodyguards with nobody to guard. Someone had drawn a small nose with a plaster on it on the blackboard before the first lecture. The professor rubbed it off without asking who did it, and he was smiling when he turned around.
John came at eleven, against the doctor's orders, wearing dark glasses indoors like a film hero. The girls in the canteen made him sit down and brought him samosas. He told the story of the beating four times before lunch. By the fourth time there were six men, and one had a knife, and John had held them off with a bread packet.
Alex let him tell it. It was John's story to tell.
He sat at the back of the canteen with his tea and did sums in his head.
Wednesday, after college. That was what the man in the black T-shirt had said. Malhotra wanted to talk to him "nicely" first. In Alex's experience, a man who sends four goons to break a boy's ribs and then wants to talk nicely only wants one thing from the talk, and it is a signature.
So Malhotra would show him the file. The forged loan. Eight lakh at ten percent a month, against the house. He would tell Alex he could pay or leave. He probably had a lawyer ready, and maybe a policeman who owed him money, and maybe a court date that had already been fixed while Alex was writing exams.
None of it scared Alex. The house was not the problem. He could buy ten houses with one gold bangle from his inventory if he wanted.
The problem was the widow with the mangalsutra. The vegetable seller with ninety thousand paid on a twenty thousand loan. The red word taken care of under a name from last winter.
If Alex only protected himself, Malhotra would go back to all of them on Thursday.
So he needed more than a win on Wednesday. He needed the whole thing to fall at once, cleanly, in daylight, with Malhotra's own books as the knife. And for that he needed time to arrange things, and some strength in reserve in case "nicely" turned into guns.
Time he could manage. Strength he could get tonight.
He took out his phone and texted Riya.
Alex- " Can you hear anything near the brick kiln tonight? "
The reply came during the next lecture.
Riya- " It's louder since Saturday. Like the crack in the race ground woke it up. Why? "
Alex- " I'm going hunting. "
Riya- " You're mad. "
A minute later:
Riya- " What time? I'll stay awake. "
At 11:40 PM, Alex stood at the edge of the old kiln field outside the city, with the chimney black against a sky that was the colour of dirty milk.
Nothing had changed since the last time, except everything. The sour smell was stronger. The grass around the crack had died in a circle about ten metres wide. The ground under his shoes was warm, like a road in May. The crack itself was hidden behind the collapsed wall of the kiln, and from it came the low hum he could feel in his teeth.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Riya- " Three small ones near the wall. One bigger thing deeper. It's moving slowly. "
That was new. Two weeks ago she could only hear the bells. After the race ground, after she had stood near an open crack and survived it, her range had grown. Now she could hear the things that came out, at least the ones close to the surface, and she could tell him from her bed eleven kilometres away.
Alex- " Thank you. Tell me if the big one moves fast. "
Riya- " What do I say if it does? "
Alex- " Say run. "
He put the phone on vibrate and walked in.
The first three were Rift Rats. They came out from behind the kiln wall together, low and fast, each one the size of a dog, grey-skinned with no fur and too many teeth. Their eyes reflected his phone light like coins.
Alex didn't use a spell. He used the iron rod he had picked up from the edge of the field and the Tier 5 body that the Vessel had given him. The first rat jumped, and he stepped aside and swung. The rod went through its skull with a wet crunch. The second went low for his ankle and he kicked it into the kiln wall so hard the bricks cracked. The third hesitated, which was its mistake. He was already there.
[Rift Rat ×3 defeated · Sync +2%]
Small numbers. He hadn't expected big ones. Rats were the mosquitoes of this place. Killing a thousand mosquitoes won't make anyone strong. But he had noticed something in the last week. Every kill from the cracks counted more than the panel showed at first, as if the Vessel was hungry for this particular food and kept a little extra each time. It was the same with the hounds. It would be the same with these.
But they kept coming.
For the next hour they came in twos and fours, pushed out of the crack by something behind them, and he killed them steadily, the way a farmer cuts a field. He kept count. Fifteen. Twenty-two. Thirty-one. The iron rod bent and he took another one. His T-shirt was soaked, and his hands were black with something that was not quite blood. Every few minutes the panel flashed, and the numbers crept up, and the Vessel inside him settled and grew like a muscle being worked.
[Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 3/5 · Next stage: 88%]
At 1:05 AM, his phone buzzed three times in a row.
Riya- " The big one is moving. "
Riya- " Fast. "
Riya- " RUN. "
Alex didn't run. He jumped.
The ground where he had been standing exploded upward in a shower of earth and broken brick, and something long and pale came out of it like a fish coming out of water. It hung in the air for a second, and he saw it clearly in the light of the moon.
A Stalker. He had read the stolen notebook enough times to know the word. Six metres long, thin as a whip, with a body like a skinned lizard and a head that was only a mouth. No eyes. It hunted by heat.
[Rift Stalker · Lv 38 · Hunts by body heat]
It came down where his heat had been a second ago, a mouth full of needle teeth biting empty air.
Alex landed on the kiln chimney's broken edge, ten metres up, and thought fast.
By heat. So he was a torch to it. Every movement he made, every breath, it could feel. It was faster than him on the ground. It was also probably faster than him in the air, if it could jump like that.
So he would stop being hot.
He cast a cold spell on himself. Not an attack. Just a thin layer of frost on his skin, the kind of thing a Zaroth mage used in desert campaigns to stop his soldiers from collapsing in the heat. His breath came out white. His fingers went stiff and blue.
Below him, the Stalker turned its head slowly. Left. Right. Confused.
Then Alex dropped a fire spell, very small, on the ground thirty metres away near the kiln wall. A little burning patch of grass, hotter than any human.
The Stalker went for it like an arrow.
And Alex came down behind it, cold and silent, with both hands on the bent iron rod and all of Stage 3 in his shoulders, and drove the rod straight through the back of its skull into the earth.
It screamed with no voice. It thrashed for twenty seconds. Then it was still.
[Rift Stalker defeated · Sync +24%] [Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 4/5 · Next stage: 12%]
The feeling came up from his stomach like heat after a strong drink. His legs stopped hurting. His eyes adjusted to the dark so well that he could read the brand name on a brick ten metres away. He breathed in and out, slowly, and felt his body find its new size.
Stage four.
He took the core out of the Stalker's head. It was the size of a cricket ball and a dull violet colour, much bigger than the rat cores, and warm to touch. He put it in his inventory with the rest. Thirty-one small grey rat cores like river pebbles, the twelve he already had, and now one violet egg on top. He had no idea yet what they were worth on Earth. In Zaroth, a core this size would have bought a horse and the cart behind it.
His phone buzzed.
Riya- " Are you alive? "
Alex- " Yes. It's dead. "
Riya- " I heard it stop. I thought it was you that stopped. "
Alex looked at the message for a moment. Then he wrote back.
Alex- " Not me. Sleep now. "
Riya- " Something else is coming. "
He was already turning towards the crack when the sound reached him. Not from the ground. From the sky.
A helicopter.
Then, from the main road behind the field, engines. Lots of engines. Headlights swinging off the highway onto the mud track. Army trucks. Two, three, five of them, and a white searchlight sweeping the field from the air, closer every second.
And from inside the crack, at the same time, a sound like a huge door opening very slowly.
Something under the ground pushed upward, and the whole kiln field rose a few centimetres and settled again, like a chest breathing.
Riya- " Alex. That one isn't small. "
The searchlight swept across the kiln and stopped on him.