Chapter 56: Before the Storm
The city felt it before it saw it.
Not in any single dramatic moment, more like a slow accumulation, the kind of tension that builds in the air before a storm and makes everything quieter than it should be.
Vendors packed up earlier. Streets that were usually busy past midnight emptied before the last lanterns went out. Conversations in the bars ran shorter, and when they did happen, they circled back to the same topic eventually.
The beast tide was coming.
BranLeaf had been through this before. Many times. Over the decades it had developed a system for handling it, not a rough plan hammered together under pressure, but something refined through experience, adjusted and improved after every wave until it ran with the kind of precision that only comes from having failed enough times to know exactly what not to do.
At the top sat the council members of the Association branch, the ones who assessed the scale of the incoming tide and directed everything from there.
Deployment of forces, defensive positioning, offensive coordination, resource allocation. Their decisions moved the whole machine.
Below them were the adventurers themselves, the ones who actually executed the plans.
Participation in situations like this was one of the obligations of being a member of the Association, a fact that most understood and accepted, since the alternative, the city falling, made the obligation rather self-evident.
Most signed up without needing to be asked. A few needed persuading. Fewer still tried to find their way out of it entirely, and those people tended to find that the Association had a longer memory than they had counted on.
Today was registration day. By the end of it, initial assignments would be handed down.
The Association hall, already one of the more crowded places in the city on a normal day, had taken on a different quality entirely. The lines weren’t the usual mix of people picking up missions or cashing in on completed ones, they were longer, louder, and charged with the specific energy of people who were simultaneously committing to something dangerous and trying to work out how dangerous, exactly, it was going to be.
Evan registered without much deliberation. He would have been hunting anyway, the tide only changed where and what he hunted. For him, the math was simple.
He even considered registering his clones.
In the end, he decided against it.
Better to keep them as hidden cards. Whatever came next, the tide itself, or whatever was happening in that underground room, keeping his full strength hidden could prove useful against either of those unknowns, or any unexpected developments tied to them. That was worth more than a few extra merit points on a leaderboard.
That said, they wouldn’t be sitting idle. Both clones would be active in their own ways, hunting in remote areas far from the Association’s and other adventurers’ lines of sight.
Shadow, in particular, would also keep watch over the underground space and the handful of figures Evan had decided to monitor.
He turned the bracelet over in his hand.
They had handed them out at registration, simple bands, not decorative, built for a specific purpose. Each one tracked merit points accumulated during the battle. It was one of the things BranLeaf had figured out early on,
if you wanted people to fight well and not just survive, you had to give them a reason to care about the difference.
The merit system did that.
Points translated into tangible rewards, discounts on materials and weapons from Association partners, scaled to accumulation. Rare items and powerful equipment exchangeable for points. Favors from influential figures. Titles, formal recognition, introductions to people whose doors were otherwise closed. The list was long, and the better you performed, the further up it you could reach.
Most of it didn’t interest Evan particularly.
One item did.
An A-Rank weapon.
Weapons in this world had also a ranking system, not entirely different from the one used for awakened individuals.
These weren’t ordinary blades or bows.
They were crafted from the materials of awakened beasts, built around mana cores, infused with properties that made them something closer to an extension of the wielder’s own strength than a simple tool.
The sword Evan currently used was E-Rank. He had paid five platinum for it, and it had served him well enough for most of what he did. But he had started to feel its limits. Against D-Rank beasts at mid and advanced stage it dragged, not catastrophically, but noticeably. The weapon wasn’t keeping up with the targets anymore.
He had been thinking about it for a few days.
With Shadow and his small army,
with Ash, who had turned out to be considerably more lethal than he had expected, thanks to a particular style of combat and swordsmanship that seemed to come naturally to that bloodline,
and with himself, the three of them were already capable of handling advanced-stage D-Rank beasts. He could feel they were getting close to the point where they could start pushing higher.
A better weapon would close that gap faster.
The days had passed quietly after that.
Routines. Grinding. Monitoring. Waiting.
And then, the morning after, the first signs arrived.
Not an explosion. Not a roar in the distance. Just a shift, the kind that people who had lived through a few of these knew how to read. The birds went quiet first. Then the outer scouts sent their signals back.
Then the Association’s alert formations lit up along the city’s perimeter, one after another, steady and deliberate.
The beast tide had begun to move.
The adventurers had already been assigned their positions across the city. Evan’s was at the boundary zone, closest to the forest.
From there, he saw it, a cloud of dust rising on the horizon, followed by a low tremor that moved through the ground in steady pulses, like something large advancing in unison. Then the first shapes broke through the treeline.
Wolves, bears, wild boars, and countless other species of every kind. Creatures that under normal circumstances would have been at each other’s throats. Now moving in the same direction, toward the same point.
Evan watched them come.
And then his senses caught something else.
Not from the awakened around him. Not from the beasts ahead. Something behind him, deeper, coming from below ground, from somewhere beneath the city itself.
’What is that’
It wasn’t hostile. That was the first thing he noticed.
It was energy, pure, concentrated, and strangely familiar in a way he couldn’t immediately place. Not familiar like something he had encountered before, but familiar like something his body recognized without his mind being involved.
It pulled at him.
Not aggressively. More like a current, patient and steady, the kind that doesn’t push but makes you aware, in a quiet and certain way, that it knows exactly where it’s going.
His eyes moved toward the great stump, BranLeaf’s foundation, the ancient wood that the entire city had been built upon. Even from here he could make out the cavities in its roots, some small, some large, some open to sight, others half-concealed by the growth around them.
He understood that those openings led somewhere, that whatever was generating that pull lay deeper still, beneath the roots, beneath the earth itself.
Something his entire being seemed drawn toward.
And judging by the direction the beasts were moving, they were being drawn to it as well.