The first hound came out of the ground before the screaming had even started.
It was the size of a calf, black-grey, with no fur, only plates of something like wet slate along its back. Its head was too long and its mouth split sideways. It landed on the grass in the centre circle, shook itself like a dog after a bath, and raised its nose to the crowd.
Then the second one came out. And the third.
For two full seconds, nobody on the benches moved. People held up their phones. Somebody laughed, thinking it was a stunt for sports day. Then the first hound ran at the nearest thing that moved, which was the boy holding the long-jump measuring tape, and the whole ground broke into noise.
Alex was already moving the other way.
John had him by the wrist, pulling him towards the benches.
John- " Alex! Bro, run! What is that?! Run! "
Alex- " Go to Sara! Take the girls out the main gate! "
John- " And you?! "
Alex- " Right behind you! "
It was a lie, and John was too scared to notice. He slipped out of John's arms, pushed through the crowd running for the gates, and ducked behind the scoreboard. Two seconds there. He took out the black mask he had bought at South City and put it on. Disguise: a dark hooded coat over his body, his height a little taller, his face a blank behind the mask. Then he activated the runes.
Twelve points around the field lit up at once, visible only to him, and a thin red wall rose from the grass to the height of a two-storey building. The hounds reaching the edge of the field hit it and bounced back, yelping. People on the benches, outside the wall, kept running. Nobody inside would get out. Nothing inside would get to them.
Only the field, him, and the crack.
He could have just switched to Tier 10. Ten hours at Tier 10 and every single thing in that hole would be dust. But a Tier 10 aura here, in the middle of the city, with two thousand people outside a thin wall? Half of them would faint. The weakest might not wake up. And the old man had a sensor at the kiln. He was surely watching here too. Every machine in the city would light up like Diwali.
So, Tier 5. Stage 2.
[Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 2/5]
Alex picked up a javelin from the equipment rack and walked onto the field.
The first hound saw him and charged. He let it come, stepped to the side, and put the javelin through the gap behind its jaw, where the slate plates didn't meet. It ran three more steps on pure stupidity and fell.
[Rift Hound (Lv 24) killed · EXP +210]
The other two came together, from two sides. That was smarter. He threw the javelin through one and caught the other by the throat with his bare hand as it jumped. Its claws raked his coat and the disguise flickered for half a second. He squeezed. Something cracked.
[Rift Hound (Lv 26) killed · EXP +240]
He dropped the body and turned, and that was when he saw the sports teacher.
The man was still inside the wall. He had been near the long-jump pit when the first hound came out, and now he was lying flat behind his lime machine with his tracksuit covered in white powder, holding his whistle in both hands like a weapon. A fourth hound had found him. It was walking around the machine in slow circles, sniffing, the way a cat walks around a cupboard where a mouse is hiding.
Alex picked up a shot put from the grass. Seven kilos of iron.
The hound lowered its head to the gap under the machine. The teacher shut his eyes and blew the whistle, a long, shaky, ridiculous note, the bravest thing Alex had seen all morning.
The shot put hit the hound behind the ear and it folded sideways into the sand.
Alex crouched beside the machine. The teacher opened one eye and saw a tall figure in a black coat and a blank black mask looking down at him, and he made a small sound like a pressure cooker letting go.
Alex- " Stay down. Don't move till it's quiet. "
The teacher nodded very fast, and then fainted, which solved the problem.
More were coming out. Five. Six. The crack had grown to the length of a car, and its edges were glowing hotter. Alex started moving between them the way he had practised with his summon in the empty room. Short steps. Never stopping. Every attack aimed at a weak point, nothing wasted. Javelin. Shot put, thrown at Tier 5 speed into a skull. A relay baton, actually, which John had dropped, jammed sideways into a hound's open mouth so it couldn't close.
He was breathing hard now. His shoulder was burning. Tier 5 was "stable", but stable didn't mean free.
Then, through a gap between two hounds, he looked at the benches.
Sara was on the ground. Not hurt, he saw at once, just pushed down. She was trying to get up and her face was furious. Marina was holding her. John was standing on the bench shouting something, pointing towards the east gate.
Riya was gone.
No. Not gone. Alex's eyes found her in the crowd, at the edge of the ground, near the east gate. Mohan had one arm around her shoulders, like a kind uncle helping a sick girl. Her hands were still over her ears, and she was stumbling, half carried, towards the gate where the white van was waiting with its back door open.
Alex smiled behind the mask.
Last night he had stood at that east gate and put a small rune on the van's parking spot. A very old trap from Zaroth that adventurers used on wagons. Anything with an engine that stood on that spot for more than ten minutes would find its engine quietly, completely dead.
Through the thin red wall, he watched Mohan push Riya into the back of the van. Ansel was in the driver's seat. Ansel turned the key.
Nothing.
He turned it again. Nothing. Alex could see his face through the windshield, even from here, and it was the face of a man who had planned everything except this.
In the back, Riya was not making it easy for them either. Half-blind with the noise in her head, she had still found Mohan's hand on her arm and bitten it, hard. Alex saw the short man jerk back and shake his hand in the air, his mouth open in a shout he couldn't hear from here. Then Mohan grabbed the sliding door and slammed it shut, and through the dirty side glass Alex could only see shapes. A white shirt. A ponytail. Two hands still pressed over two ears.
Good girl, he thought. Keep fighting. Ten more seconds of being difficult.
Ansel was out of the driver's seat now, lifting the bonnet, looking at an engine that had nothing wrong with it. Mohan was shouting at him through the window. Neither of them was looking at the field.
Alex- " Sit there for one minute, Brother. I'm coming. "
He turned back to the field to finish the last hounds.
And stopped.
The crack had gone quiet. The hounds had stopped coming. The ones still alive had backed away from the opening with their tails, or whatever they had, low between their legs. They were whining, all of them, like dogs during a thunderstorm.
The cold coming out of the crack doubled. Then doubled again. Frost formed on the grass in a ring around the edges.
A hand came out of the hole.
It was not a claw. It was a hand, a little like a man's, but grey and as big as a car door, with five fingers that ended in black nails. It gripped the edge of the field and the soil groaned under its weight. Then a second hand. Then the top of a head with two horns curved like a ram's, and under them, two eyes as red as the crack itself.
Alex's mouth had gone dry. Not from fear. From something older, the body remembering what his mind had forgotten. Every hair on his arms was standing up. Somewhere deep inside his chest, the part of him that was still the Demon God turned its head and looked.
A window opened in front of Alex's mask without him asking for it.
[Warning: Rift Ogre-Chief (Lv 88) · Tier 3]
Under it, a second line he didn't like at all.
[Barrier integrity: 61% · falling]
The red wall around the field was flickering now in two places, near the pavilion and near the gate, where the runes were weakest. Every hound that had hit it had taken a little bite. The cold pouring out of the crack was taking more. He could feel it pulling at his mana like a tide pulling sand from under his feet. Three minutes, maybe four, and the wall would come down, and whatever was inside it would walk out into two thousand people.
Lv 88. Tier 3. On paper, nothing. A Tier 5 body could beat it.
But a Tier 5 body that had just killed eleven hounds, with a burning shoulder and a barrier eating its mana, in front of a van it needed to reach in one minute?
The ogre pulled itself halfway out of the earth and looked at him. Then it opened its mouth and spoke, in the language of Zaroth, which no one on Earth was supposed to know.
Ogre- " Found you… little god. "