Extra's Survival: Raising SSS-Rank Characters Is My Only Option

The count came in at the seventh hour of the evening.

Encrid read it at his desk in the Watcher’s Office. Merta had brought it herself. She put it in front of him and then went and stood by the window, and she did not say anything.

Two hundred and six soldiers of the Wall.

Three hundred and eighteen people of the Shambles.

Cooks. Porters. Laundresses. Bathhouse keepers. Tavern girls. Children.

Five hundred and twenty-four dead.

In less than a day.

Not because the horde had climbed the Wall. Not because the stone had failed or the trenches had filled or the Roamers had been too many.

Because one man had opened a door.

Encrid read the numbers again.

Then the window appeared.

[ ✦ Emergency Quest Complete ✦ ]

[ The Center Gate has been closed. The inner courtyard has been cleared. ]

[ Narrative Relevance: 2.91% → 3.26% ]

[ Appraisal: E (67%) → D (0%) ]

Encrid did not close the window. He simply let it fade on its own.

The reward he had received for the quest was far beyond what he had expected, but it did not feel good. Knowing that the price for it had been five hundred and twenty-four dead left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Nevertheless, Appraisal had reached D proficiency.

When it had reached E, a year ago, it had begun to show him a person’s Condition. Illness. Injury. Grief. Lies. No window had announced it. A new line had simply appeared at the bottom of the next face he looked at.

He looked up at Merta by the window and opened Appraisal on her.

Name. Age. Realm. Star. Talent. Condition: Exhaustion. Grief.

Nothing new.

Encrid let the window close. Whatever D had given him, it was not something he could see in this room.

✧ ✧ ✧

When Merta had gone, he took out a clean sheet of paper.

He wrote nine names down the left side.

Garrick Dane of the First Watch.

Ysolde Marr of the Second Watch.

Halvic Ostrand of the Third Watch.

Tolm Bree of the Fourth Watch.

Serapha Lund of the Fifth Watch.

Wilm Trask of the Sixth Watch.

Erol Vask of the Seventh Watch.

Neriah Fold of the Eighth Watch.

Bastian Ryn of the Ninth Watch.

He drew a line through Trask’s name.

Then he sat and looked at the other eight.

Trask had been the last man Encrid would have suspected. That was the point. That was exactly why it had worked. He had been cheerful. He had been warm. He had apologized too much. He had voted for Encrid when no one expected it.

He had done every single thing a trustworthy man would do.

For twenty-three years.

So how was Encrid supposed to know who else?

He looked at Erol Vask’s name. The quiet man with the bare map and no pins. The man who had asked four questions and told Encrid nothing. The man who had said, I am still voting against you.

A month ago, if anyone had asked Encrid who on the Council he trusted least, he would have said Vask.

Now that meant nothing.

Maybe Vask was exactly what he looked like. A cold, careful man who did not like strangers.

Or maybe that was what someone wanted Encrid to think.

He looked at Neriah Fold’s name. At Bastian Ryn’s. At Serapha Lund, who had argued with the Vice-Commander about bracing the Main Gate. At Tolm Bree, who had voted for him.

Trask had voted for him too.

He looked at Ysolde’s name.

She had nearly beaten a man to death in front of him. She had wanted to kill Trask. If Encrid had arrived a minute later, Trask would have been dead, and no one would ever have heard a single word from him.

A dead man could not tell anyone who else.

Encrid stared at her name.

Then he made himself stop.

Ysolde had lowered her fist when he asked her to. A traitor who wanted Trask silenced would not have. And she had cut the chains to close the gate. A traitor would not have done that either.

He did not cross her name out.

But he did not write anything beside it.

That frightened him more than anything else he had felt that day.

And somewhere in the middle of it, he remembered something.

It came back to him all at once, the way small things come back at the worst possible moments.

A night, months ago, in this same office. The School had just opened its doors in the seventh-mile yard. A dozen Initiates had opened their Stars in the first month, and Merta had brought him the report, and Encrid had looked at it and laughed.

He had said something to himself. A joke. The kind of thing he used to say in his old life, in an office, when something small went right.

Let the revolution begin.

He had meant the School. Soldiers who had never been taught, learning to cultivate. It had felt like a revolution. A small one. A good one.

He had been proud of that joke.

Now the words sat in his chest like a stone.

The Empire shall burn. For the revolution.

The two sentences did not belong together.

The second was a slogan used by the Revolutionary Army, the faction fighting against the Empire. But their true goal was to overthrow the Emperor, not to destroy the Empire itself. They wanted to take the throne, not bring the entire imperial order to ruin.

But it was the first sentence that was far more dangerous.

There were only a handful of organizations Encrid could name that would dare to go against the Empire so openly, and he already had an idea of who might be behind it.

But he did not know their identities.

He did not know how many of them existed, who led them, or what they wanted beyond fire and destruction. He did not know whether they had anything to do with the Horde or the Elder.

He only knew one thing for certain.

They had been on this Wall for all this time and he had not known.

✧ ✧ ✧

Encrid could not answer the question of who else.

So he did what he always did when he could not answer a question.

He found a way to make the question smaller.

He called Merta back in.

”I need Volk. Fennick. Anyone from the old crew you trust completely.”

Merta did not ask why. She had been a bandit for six years before she had been a clerk. She understood.

”Where?”

”The three gates that are still standing. The Western. The Eastern. The Main.” Encrid folded the sheet of names and put it inside his coat. ”I want someone near every winch room. Every bell. Every bar on every door. They don’t stop anyone. They don’t question anyone. They watch. And if a single bar moves without an order from me or the Vice-Commander, they ring the bell and keep ringing it until someone kills them.”

Merta looked at him for a long moment.

”You’re asking them to die for it.”

”I’m asking them to make sure no one else does.”

She nodded slowly.

”And you?” she asked. ”What will you do?”

Encrid thought about the window that had come with the quest reward. Appraisal, D.

Appraisal showed a person’s Condition.

It showed illness. Injury. Grief.

He had never appraised Wilm Trask while Trask was talking to him. Not once. There had never seemed to be a reason. Trask had been the friendly one.

”I’m going to have a conversation with every commander on this Wall,” Encrid said. ”One at a time. Face to face.”

”And ask them what?”

”Anything,” Encrid said. ”It doesn’t matter what I ask. It matters what they say back.”

✧ ✧ ✧

It was full dark when the horn sounded.

It came from the fourth mile. The Far-Watch horn. Encrid had heard it a hundred times, calling the scouts in at dusk.

This was not the dusk call.

This was a different pattern. Two long notes, then a short one.

Merta turned from the window, her face pale.

”That’s the call for our own,” she said. ”Coming in from the forest.”

Encrid was already on his feet.

He ran.

When he reached the parapet above the fourth mile, half the section was already there, crowded along the edge, looking north. Someone handed him a glass. He did not see who.

He raised it.

At the treeline, in the pale light of the moon, something was moving out of the forest.

Two figures.

One of them was walking. Staggering. Falling to his knees every few steps and getting up again.

The other was not falling.

He was walking very slowly and very steadily, straight toward the Wall.

And he was carrying someone on his back.

✦ ✦ ✦