[CYA] Chapter 112: Wave 1, Final Push

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<Watcher, Apology Tutorial #486 Control and Observation Room>

The Watcher sighed as she watched the building wave of undead roll toward Alex’s base, the front edge already engaged.

Her supervisor had acted well within the rules and even within the spirit of the System’s requirements.

Base building and defense was a valid skillset to emphasize and test, and as such an attack that could only be properly defended against with those parts of the System fit nicely.

It was still a bit underhanded. Such was normally incorporated into the second—or even final—wave in scenarios like this, but there was precedence for it being a part of the first.

She still didn’t like it. She especially didn’t like what that meant for the experience gained during the fight.

After all, the point of this type of wave was to test the base, not the fighters. So, the experience would go toward the improvement of the base. That was important, but she knew that the Initiates would be quite irate.

She was irritated, and other Watchers would be too when they learned.

Regardless, aside from where the experience went, the only real difference resulting from the supervisor’s interference was about a minute’s warning. In that, Alex and his group had done spectacularly, the Base Administrator sounding the alarm incredibly soon after the base registered the wave.

The fact that they had the alarm set up and had built in vermin lures of various kinds showed that the supervisor was not outside the bounds of reasonability in his decision to test them in this way.

The one other base that remained away from the high school, however? That was already gone.

Those initiates had taken up residence in the top of a skyscraper, rightly deciding that they could easily defend against any undead coming up the stairwells, and foolishly deciding to ignore the ‘optional’ quest she’d sent their way to relocate.

They weren’t the only ones to ignore her attempts to guide them to safety, but they were the only ones to have survived to reach the wave.

They’d all died in less than five minutes after the wave began, windows shattered and swarming flocks of undead vermin shredded everything within.

She did feel regret about their fate. Alex and his group had chosen to fear the sky, for a lack of a better way of putting it. The failed base had feared the ground and the tunnels underneath.

There was no way they could have known that the tunnels weren’t a threat during this wave. They might not even be used in this scenario at all.

The System always left a way through, even if it wasn’t always obvious until after the fact. She did know that if any Initiates tried to hide down there, enemies would come for them, but if they simply left them be? It might just work out in their favor.

The Watcher expected her supervisor to attempt sending enemies through those tunnels, so she supposed that she’d soon know if the System would allow it.

Regardless, Alex’s group was handling this wave rather well. She just hoped that they’d take the lessons learned to heart. The next wave would be far harder, and the last? The last would be greater than the first two combined.

Learn while you can, Alex. You’ll need every edge you can get.

<Alex, Real - Endure (Wave), Southern Defenses of the High School>

Alex had been right, the attack was on a difficulty gradient. Any wall that started fighting uncommon variants began to have the UVMs drop on their heads, making the task all the harder.

It was then that they all realized that the flying vermin were supposed to have been harassing them from the beginning, but their lure towers had drawn them away. The ‘rat-pits’ were apparently more than half filled, despite having been dug thirty feet deep with the aid of magic and ‘base building’ shenanigans.

Alex shuddered every time he considered fifteen feet of undead rats, bugs, and other ground-bound critters, all fighting to get down to the bottom where they were being killed by roaring furnaces.

On the positive side, it was trivial for them to keep going, keep dying.

On the negative side, the bodies weren’t really breaking down, so there was genuinely a danger of the pits overflowing, though that overflow would likely be the fried bodies of the fully dead as the undead were drawn deeper to die.

Bleh. He grimaced, slicing a ravager from forehead to groin and ashing it, even as the guts began to spill across the wall. Vermin are gross.

The danger at the walls was growing minute by minute. With flying enemies now coming in to harass the defenders, they had to split their focus, and the non-initiates who were there for communication had to be hidden to either side of the wall, only able to shout the information out to the Initiates.

They were hard to hear over the thunder and continually pouring rain, but it was possible. Each wall had long since triggered the lighting that Kaylee had built into them. Many curses had been uttered when that finally happened as apparently Kaylee had told everyone about the lights, but it had been forgotten in the chaos. The result was that the entire area outside each wall was flooded with light to the point that living enemies would have had a hard time even looking at the defenses. The undead didn’t care.

Thankfully, it was magically granted light—something bought, paid for, and maintained through the base system—so there were no bulbs to be broken, or fixtures to be torn down. The light was there to stay, and as such, the defenders were holding their own… at least they did for most of the wave.

Alex and his three spear wielding ‘guards’ were constantly running from section to section, healing, curing, and shoring up the defenses at need.

The turning point came after an hour and a half—when they had only thirty minutes remaining—dementedly at almost exactly the time that Alex was starting to feel that they’d be able to hold through to the end.

The undead became smart, or rather, some sort of commander variant seemed to take the field. Alex only briefly caught a glimpse, his Analyze not firing off fast enough in the brief flash of lightning.

At the time, Alex had been called to the western wall—arriving in time to heal someone who had been bitten—and he was about to depart for the next place he was needed when every undead around had frozen, locking up for a moment.

Even the fliers were affected, a few slamming into buildings or the ground due to their moment of inactivity.

Regardless, a breath later, they were all moving again, and this time with horrifying unity.

That was when the lightning had flashed, and Alex caught the smallest glimpse of the odd enemy in the distance.

As to how the undead acted? The few remaining commons immediately crouched and clambered together making inhuman pyramids for the uncommons and rares to scale to more easily assault the wall.

Those uncommon and rare variants divided into diverse groups, ravagers and death squires forming up to defend flesh golems from longer range attacks while those golems stopped trying to take hits and instead struck from cover.

The result was an almost immediate routing of the defenders around Alex.

In less than a minute, he was alone in defending the wall-top, his spear wielding guards crouched low beside him.

That made him the sole focus of the golems’ twisted, reaching attacks.

That was perfect.

Alex quickly slew six flesh golems by dumping HP into them when their twisted, extended flesh tried to come for him as well, but that cost him dearly, taking nearly 500 points each to ensure their destruction and jump to their defenders to harm them as well.

The best sort of kill is overkill.

As a result—after all his healing and recovery—he was down to roughly six thousand of his eleven thousand HP.

He had a moment of panic before he realized that he’d recover that in a bit more than a minute.

In the midst of the chaos—his allies all knocked from the wall save Jacob, Ben, and Leanne who had crouched low at his side, relying on him to deal with the flesh golems—Alex let out an uncontrollable laugh.

His MP would still be a bit of an issue, but he’d make do. In the worst case scenario, he’d acquired another mana potion, and that would see him through. Besides, he’d been able to use his HP for the transfusions most of the time, so his MP was mainly being drained by his strategic uses of Shaped Force Burst.

The undead seemed utterly confused by the sudden defeat and destruction of the flesh golems. His laughter likely had no effect on them.

Well… in both cases, it was likely the commander who was confused and unaffected, but with how it looked, Alex had a hard time conceiving of it any other way.

Regardless, in that second, momentary freeze, Alex slapped his hand down on an undead before him, one that was about to hop over the barrier protecting the defenders on the wall.

He touched that undead who was still atop the inhuman pyramid. Following the same instructions that he’d used to cut a wedge out of the undead harassing Stephen’s Initiates days earlier, Alex dumped HP into a Life Transfusion attack.

He saw the verdant lines lance out like tree branches, each segment growing outward, jumping from undead to undead through any form of contact in a frozen moment.

Then, the entirety of the horde out to twenty feet from the foot of the wall vanished in a puff of dust.

Alex’s eyes widened as he suddenly felt violently ill.

He staggered, seeing that he’d accidently put a bit too much HP into the working.

“Over-tall step!” He staggered, Jacob standing up quickly beside him to offer support.

The other man’s eyes widened. “By all that is holy… What was that?”

Alex gave a wry chuckle. “Six thousand HP, conveyed with fifteen hundred MP.”

“Are you… alright?”

He grunted. “Better by the second. I’m down to less than three hundred HP.”

Jacob frowned, their conversation coming quickly as the undead before the walls seemed to still be momentarily frozen in indecision. “I thought you recovered more than fifty a second?”

“I do… I accidentally used down to just twenty-five points.” Alex gave a sheepish look. “It seems like my body didn’t like that.”

Jacob’s eyes widened. “Back to the high school. Now.”

Alex shook his head, feeling better by the second with his HP quickly ticking up. “The other defenders here. I need to help them.”

Jacob grimaced. “Don’t kill yourself, Alex. Heal them, then we go.” He looked out at the undead who were finally advancing once again, spread out this time and seemingly taking a slower, more strategic approach. “We’ll hold the wall as long as we can. Get it done.”

Ben and Leanne both nodded in agreement, spreading out, taking careful looks over and sending the occasional spell.

Alex reluctantly nodded, but as the plan was already in motion, his reluctance hardly mattered. That decided, he hopped off the wall on the base-side, landing beside the first of the downed Initiates.

The woman was writhing, black tendrils growing across her flesh.

Steeling himself, Alex went to work.

He was woefully low on both HP and MP, and with how slow his MP refilled—even with the 10x multiplier from his mana circulation technique—he wanted to allow that to refill for use with his other spells.

As such, he had to both use HP for healing and the transfer of the HP into his target.

He wished that Brianne was still with him, but she’d been ordered to other parts of the base nearly an hour earlier.

They were the two main healers their group had, and as such, they had to be split up in order to keep everyone else on their feet.

On the positive side, they hadn’t lost anyone since James—and Alex had confirmed that it had, indeed, been James on the roof—but on the negative side, both he and Brianne were stretched thin.

He was cursing himself for the use of HP to drive back the undead, but honestly? It had been needed to gain them some breathing room.

He considered using the MP regeneration potion in his Inventory, but they were so close… It felt like a waste to use it now.

Less than five minutes later, he and the defenders were ordered to retreat.

Alex immediately downed the potion, knowing things were going to get bad if they had to execute a fighting retreat.

Whatever had changed with the undead near their wall had happened with the other locations shortly thereafter, only the non-initiates working quickly to communicate had gotten the word out in time to prevent utter disaster.

And we only had them because we had this base to protect them. He was rather amazed at all that Kaylee had been able to do with and because of the base.

Regardless, all positions were falling back, the walls becoming untenable under the organized assault.

Thankfully, they only had a bit more than twenty minutes left.

They could do this.

They could survive the wave.

Alex grimaced even as he ran toward the lights of other groups of retreating Initiates and accompanying non-Initiates.

They would survive this wave, but what would the next one look like?

This was only day fifteen. If things kept scaling, would they have any hope at all?

He pulsed his detect spells to monitor the undead pouring over the defenses, the creatures seemingly pausing to take time to utterly dismantle those defenses before following.

That was a mixed blessing. It meant that people would likely get to safety, but they’d have a lot of work to do to reestablish those defenses—hopefully with improvements—before the next wave… whenever that might be.

He banished those thoughts as his detect spells found infected among the retreating Initiate groups nearby, being restrained and carried by their fellows.

He sprinted away from his group of initiates and non-initiates, barely calling out his plan, his shoes giving him continued traction in the deluge.

His spear guards followed, cursing under their breath, leaving the three other Initiates and the two non-Initiates to head toward the closest entrance to the school.

Given all the infected his spell had detected, he didn’t slow, slapping a hand on each as he passed, even having to use multi-strike in a few cases to affect those too close together for him to have been able to otherwise heal both.

There were eight groups all heading for the three entrances into the school, and four of those groups were near him, most farther from the entrance than his group had been.

Brianne would be close to the other side, likely another two or three groups there, but that meant that at least one or two groups wouldn’t be near a healer that could work against the plague.

Alex growled, calling out over his shoulder. “Get inside! I need to get to the others.”

He left, maintaining his dead-sprint toward the other entrances, trusting that those here could now get to safety.

The three spear users followed, barely keeping up on the slick footing.

His group had been among the last to leave the wall, which meant that their direct pursuers would be the slowest to follow.

That meant that other groups might already be being harried.

Sure enough, he came on the last groups in a fighting retreat toward their ingress and safety.

Two among their number were staggering, nearly fully overcome with the plague of undeath, but fighting onward even so.

By this point, everyone had endured infection at least once, so the ‘first infection’ paralysis was no longer an issue.

Still, he slapped a multi-strike of healings on the two, then blew past the others, slamming into the pair of death squires who had been harrying them. “Get inside! I’ll cover the retreat.”

The initiates and the non-initiates with them didn’t hesitate, turning and sprinting away.

In hindsight, Alex wasn’t sure if he appreciated the trust or begrudged how easily he was abandoned. Regardless, he fought.

Blade and spells lashed out crashing against the slowly building horde of opponents, even as he continually back-pedaled.

When he was on the edge of being overwhelmed, spears and others’ spells joined his, allowing the four of them to continue their retreat at a controlled pace.

It was enough.

He made it to safety two minutes later, lunging backward even as the doors were slammed closed behind him and his guards.

He collapsed to the ground, panting, feeling utterly spent.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he groaned.

It buzzed again, and he fumbled pulling it free, Ben having to help him due to Alex’s fingers refusing to work as he wanted.

He was so spent.

But that didn’t matter. Brianne was holding off the plague in six, and she needed him now.

With an unconscious whimper, he stumbled to his feet, Jacob and Ben slipping under his arms as he staggered toward where the text said he was needed.

Leanne took his phone and responded that they were on their way.

His work wasn’t quite done.

Behind him, undead pounded on the magically reinforced door, Kaylee’s preparations showing their worth yet again.

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