Chapter 36: My Ability
"Shit."
Lucas’ heartbeat quickened.
The number... it matched quite perfectly with the size of their faction.
Every person who believed in him was recorded by the system...
"And thank you Leader Mark for protecting us..." One of the survivors spoke turning to Mark.
Kai walked over to him. "If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead. I owe you my life."
[Ding!]
Mark turned the moment his own system appeared.
[Reverence Detected]
[The Legend of "The Mountain King" has begun to spread.]
[Current Recognition: 96 Witnesses.]
Confusion was plastered on his face. "The fuck—?"
Eleanor walked over... "You see it too?"
Mark nodded. "This thing is counting believers..."
Lucas narrowed his eyes. "Just what the hell have we gotten ourselves into."
Now the system treated them like higher beings. People that could easily be recognized...
For Lucas, he didn’t like where that thought led.
Because fame could spread and fear spread even faster.
He sighed...
He was going to be in for a whole lot of shit.
***
Three days passed, and they spent every one of them turning a college campus into something that actually looked like a fortress.
Eleanor took charge of the rebuilding with the same energy she’d once poured into a fortress built from nothing, except this time she had actual infrastructure to work with instead of raw wilderness.
The lecture hall became the Faction’s central hall, its rows of seating cleared out to make room for long tables and a war map spread across what used to be a lecturer’s podium.
The dormitories, still standing and mostly intact, were converted into housing. Survivors sorted by, strangers paired carefully and every room accounted for and assigned to.
She shaped stone and earth around the campus perimeter with an ease that spoke of weeks of hard won mastery, raising walls where the original fencing had been too flimsy to trust, reinforcing the old brick buildings with layers of compacted earth that could withstand far more than the architecture ever had been built for.
Water lines ran clean and controlled beneath the quad now, drawn and purified through a system she’d designed herself, freeing the Faction from the constant anxiety of scavenged water sources.
The old gymnasium became a training ground, its floor reinforced, its walls padded against the kind of destructive sparring over a hundred increasingly powerful survivors were bound to generate.
Even the smaller details hadn’t escaped her attention. The old cafeteria, its kitchens still miraculously intact, became a communal dining hall running on a rationing system Eleanor had refined herself.
The library — untouched and preserved, shelves of books nobody had time to read anymore, had been left standing rather than repurposed, some quiet sentimentality Lucas recognized from the girl who used to steal Mark’s favorite hoodie and disappear to study for hours during finals week.
By the third day, the campus didn’t look like a college anymore so much as a fortress wearing a college’s skin — familiar buildings repurposed with efficiency, old comforts folded into new necessities and the entire place humming with the particular energy of people who’d finally stopped merely surviving and started, however cautiously, building something that might last.
Walking the halls sometimes felt, to Lucas, like visiting a childhood home that had been quietly converted into a fortress while he wasn’t looking, comfort and dread occupying the same rooms at once.
***
Lucas lay on his back in room assigned to him, staring at a ceiling that had, impossibly, become familiar in the space of three days, running back through everything Regression had taught him across every death he’d survived.
Two things, mainly.
The first was simple, something he’d pieced together slowly across dozens of deaths:
Regression returned him to a checkpoint a specific point the system itself determined, always just far enough back that he retained enough time to actually change something before the same mistake caught up to him again.
The second was heavier... He didn’t get to choose the checkpoint. He simply woke up wherever the system decided the last "stable" moment had been, and that unpredictability had cost him dearly more than once, dragging him back further than he needed or, worse, not far enough.
Essentially, there was no way to determine where he would return to by himself.
There was also the mental toll. His body came back whole every time but somewhere else, he knew that the trauma was steadily becoming something he couldn’t handle.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also a possibility that he would start fearing death less and less.
’I can’t keep relying on this,’ he thought, staring at the ceiling. ’Every regression buys me knowledge, but it’s not sustainable. I need to actually get stronger without needing to die first to learn how.’
It was a good thought. He didn’t yet know how to act on it, but it felt, at least, like the beginning of an actual plan rather than another desperate improvisation.
A thought ran through his head.
If every death cost him something, then leaning on [Regression] as a crutch for every fight ahead would eventually break something in him that didn’t come back whole no matter how many checkpoints existed. He needed real skill. Real preparation. The kind that didn’t require dying first to earn it.
And there was also the fact that he couldn’t twlk anyone about it either.
’This is more complicated than I thought.’
The door banged open without a knock, which meant only one person it could be.
"Yo princess. You look replaced.," Mark said, dropping uninvited onto the foot of Lucas’s bed. "Or constipated. Hard to tell from the doorway."
"Very funny Mark."
"I try." Mark stretched out before speaking again. "So. Mountain King, huh."
"Seriously? Right now?"
"I’m just saying, it’s got a ring to it. Very ’I absorb blows for a living and somehow that’s impressive to people now.’"
Lucas stared at him for a moment. "You love it don’t you?"
"I absolutely love it," Mark admitted, grinning. "Kai’s already carved it into a piece of wood outside my door. It’s wonderful."
"And the reverence counter?"
Mark’s grin faded slightly. "Ninety six witnesses and climbing. I don’t know how I feel about people treating me like some kind of — I don’t know, Legend. It’s weird, man."
"Says the guy who was complaining about being a virgin."
"Oi. That’s valid! I don’t wanna be nagged by a princess."
Lucas gave a mischievous grin. "Says the virgin."
"Fuck!" Mark gripped his chest dramatically and stumbled forward. "That was a low blow..."
Then he sighed and sat down at the edge of his bed. "Elle’s the same, you know. Worse, actually... Goddess talk’s only gotten louder since the whole Modifier thing. She’s not very comfortable with it"
"None of of are," Lucas said quietly. "Doesn’t mean it’s not happening anyway."
They sat with that for a moment, the easy banter settling into something more contemplative, before Mark clapped his hands together and stood.
"Anyway, strategy meeting. Elle wants everyone in the hall. We’ve got eleven days before the next Edgewalk starts, and she’s determined not to walk in unprepared this time."
"Eleven days," Lucas repeated, standing to follow him as he glanced at the system.
[Time Remaining for the next Edgewalk: 11: 22: 36: 04]
"We’re going to go through all of that again in eleven days..."
Lucas replied. "Yeah but this time we’ll be more prepared..."
***
The hall was full by the time they arrived, survivors gathered around the long tables Eleanor had arranged, the roughly sketched map spread out at the center already marked with notations from the last several days of planning.
Eleanor stood at its head, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back, looking every bit the leader who’d built a fortress out of nothing and fully intended to do it again if the situation demanded.
Their very own Goddess.
"Eleven days," she said, once the hall had quieted. "That’s what we’ve got before the system pulls us into the next Edgewalk. I don’t intend to waste a single one of them."
She launched into logistics — training rotations, resource allocation, scouting parties to map whatever remained accessible of the old world now that they had returned back into it.
Lucas listening with half his attention while the other half turned over Mark’s words from earlier.
"Mountain King. Goddess."
Whatever this world was building toward, he didn’t like it at all.
"We can’t assume the next Edgewalk drops us somewhere as forgiving as the last one," Eleanor continued, tracing a finger along the war map. "I want every fighter trained on at least two formations by the time we move again. I want scouting parties prepared to map out the surrounding area the moment we drop. And I want—"
"You want everyone exhausted before we even leave," Mark cut in, "Elle, we just got back. People need to actually rest before you run them through drills again."
Eleanor paused, reconsidering. However she chose to look at it, Mark was right...
Bertram, standing near the front with Iris and Callum, leaned forward. "What about the beast classes we haven’t catalogued yet? The Hestia caught us blind once already. I don’t love the idea of walking into another Edgewalk with more than we know about."
"Agreed," Eleanor said. "I don’t like the idea of the possibility of new beasts we haven’t encountered."
The hall doors burst open mid-discussion, a survivor stumbling through, breathless and pale.
"Beast—!" he gasped, barely able to force the word out through his own panic. "There are beasts, out past the east dorms!"
Eleanor was moving before he finished, Lucas and Mark falling in immediately behind her, the entire hall descending into panick moments later.
[Ding!]
[Warning: Avalion Class entity detected.]
[Objective: Protect the Fortress.]
[Survival probability: 49%]
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