The bed was made of planks, stuffed with grass and wrapped in rabbit hides, and it was the best thing that had happened to me since the announcement.
I woke up to the sound of a hammer. Then a second hammer. Then someone yelling "LEFT, YOUR OTHER LEFT," which meant Brick Layer was awake too.
[Wave 1 begins in: 19:12:40]
The last day and a half had gone by fast. Here's what my gamers did with it.
Cool Spoon built a forge out of river clay and stone, then spent four hours swearing at it until it got hot enough to work the iron the miners were pulling out of the hill. By noon he was turning out spearheads. They were ugly. They were also sharp, and he sold them for 15 GC each, which apparently made him the richest player on the server.
True Elixir figured out that blue slime gel mixed with crushed red berries made a Minor Healing Draught. It tasted like cough syrup, according to everyone, but it healed about a fifth of a golem's health. Gummies nearly cried.
Nana Jo picked Cooking as her profession. Her first stew gave a small buff to stamina, and people started lining up at her pot like it was a raid boss drop. She called every single one of them "sweetie," including Hammerhead, who was seven feet of stone and didn't seem to mind.
Brick Layer picked Masonry and turned the plain wall into a real wall, with a walkway on top and a gatehouse. The gate itself was wood, though. There wasn't enough stone for a stone gate yet. Brick Layer apologized to me about it twice.
Lil Bean climbed every tall tree within a mile and came back to me with sketches, so I could remake the map three times. Everything nearby was still forest, river, and the rocky hill with the mine.
The average player level went from 3 to 5. Not great. Not nothing.
And me? I sat in my workshop and made NPC golems. Ten of them. Empty, simple, stone. I lined them up on the wall like scarecrows. If whatever was coming went for the first thing it saw, I wanted the first thing it saw to be someone nobody would miss.
[Wave 1 begins in: 01:00:00]
The screen didn't just pop up for me this time. It popped up for everyone.
[Wave 1: Gnawlings
Quantity: 300
Objective: Survive.
The Collective would like to remind you that Gnawlings are very hungry, and that most of your little friends are made of wood. Good luck.]
The players saw something a little different. I could see it in the chat logs.
[World Event: Wave 1 — Gnawlings. Defend Day's settlement!]
The Collective's version was so much meaner. I closed it and stood up.
At the gatehouse, the original five had already pulled everyone together. Fifty golems crowded into a clearing that had been a forest two days ago, and every one of them was looking at Eat Dirt, who had climbed on top of a barrel.
"Okay! Appraisal on the event name says Gnawlings are 'small, fast, and fond of lumber.' Which means us," he said, slapping his own wooden chest. "Stone golems, you're on the gate. Wood golems, you're on the wall with spears, and you do NOT go down there unless someone calls for you."
"Mages on the walkway," Valefor added. "Healers behind the mages. If you've got Elixir's draughts, they go in slot one. Don't bury them under 128 rocks."
"I put mine under the rocks," someone said.
"Move them."
Peaches had taken the rogues out into the trees an hour earlier. They came back right as Eat Dirt finished, and Peaches was grinning in a way I didn't like.
"Detect says they're coming from the north. All of them. They're about the size of a dog, they look like a naked beaver had a baby with a blender, and they are chewing through trees on the way here."
There was a pause.
"Sick," said Rustbucket.
I went up to the roof of my house. I couldn't fight, and I couldn't craft anything but maps. What I could do was watch, and rebuild.
[Valefor]
The sound came first. A dry, steady crunching, like a thousand people eating chips at once, getting louder.
Then the tree line moved.
They poured out of the forest in a gray wave, low to the ground, all teeth. Valefor had seen trailers for horror games that were less unsettling. Their front teeth were as long as his hand and orange like old rust, and every one of them was making a straight line for the wooden gate.
"Mana Shot on my mark!" he called. Eleven mages raised staffs. "Mark!"
Eleven little blue bolts went out. Nine hit. Five Gnawlings dropped.
Two hundred and ninety-five to go.
They hit the gate like a flood. The stone golems held it from the inside, Brick Layer and Hammerhead shoulder to shoulder, while the Gnawlings went to work on the outside. Valefor could hear the wood splintering under the walkway.
"They're not attacking the stone guys!" Gummies yelled. "They're eating the gate!"
"Then kill them while they're busy eating!" Old Swordsman roared, and leaned over the wall with a spear.
For a while, it worked. The wooden golems on the wall stabbed down, the mages fired into the pack, and the healers kept everyone topped off. The kill counter in the corner of Valefor's vision ticked up fast. Level up. Level up again. Peaches' rogues dropped from the trees behind the pack and started picking off stragglers, and the whole server's party chat turned into a wall of caps lock.
Then the gate broke.
It didn't fall over. It just stopped being a gate. One second it was there, and the next it was sawdust and Gnawlings, and Gnawlings were inside.
The stone golems got knocked back, and the swarm flowed right past them, because the stone golems weren't food. The wooden golems were.
Valefor watched one leap onto Sleepy Tea's leg, and Sleepy Tea screamed. Not a game scream. A real one. Then she laughed, breathless, smashed it with a rock, and kept going.
"Fall back to the house!" Eat Dirt bellowed. "Wood golems, fall back! Stone golems, make a line!"
Old Swordsman didn't fall back. He jumped off the wall right into the breach, landed on two Gnawlings, and started swinging. He held the gap for maybe twenty seconds while the others ran past him.
Then there were too many.
Valefor saw his health bar in the party frame go from yellow to red to gray.
[Old Swordsman has been destroyed. Respawn requires Day to rebuild the body.]
[Day]
I was already running.
I don't remember climbing down from the roof. I just remember the workshop door, and the pile of spare wood I'd begged the players to stack in there yesterday, and my hand already glowing purple before I reached it.
The Golem Workshop reward from Comfort Comes Second had come through that morning. In here, a body that would have taken me fifteen minutes to make took about ninety seconds. I'd thought that was a nice convenience.
It was not a convenience. Ninety seconds was ninety seconds of a person waiting in some loading screen, after whatever had just happened to them.
I didn't know what dying felt like for them. I didn't know if the system dampened it at the end, or if it just let them feel all of it. I didn't know, and I'd never be able to ask, because asking would mean telling.
The body finished. I put him in.
Old Swordsman opened his eyes on the workshop floor, sat up, and looked at me.
"Hurt right up until it didn't," he said. Then he grinned. "Worth it. Did they hold?"
I couldn't answer that right away, so I just pointed at the door.
He grabbed a spare spear off the rack and ran back out.
By the end, I'd rebuilt seven of them. Old Swordsman twice. Lil Bean, who'd been on the far side of the clearing and got cut off. Two players from the second batch whose names I had to look up. Rustbucket, who'd been made of stone and somehow still managed to get eaten, which nobody has figured out. And Sleepy Tea, right at the end, who came back to life and immediately asked if she could have her leg in a different color.
Every single one of them came out of that workshop laughing.
The last Gnawling was a big one. Fat, slow, gray-white, and twice the size of the others. Players started calling it the Gnawling Mom halfway through the fight, and the name stuck. It went down to a combined Mana Shot from all eleven mages, a spear from Cool Spoon that he'd kept for himself because it was his best one, and Nana Jo hitting it repeatedly with a ladle.
The clearing went quiet. Then fifty golems started cheering.
[Wave 1 Cleared.
Player casualties: 7 (all recovered). Gnawlings defeated: 300/300.
Rewards distributed: XP, GC, Gnawling Incisor (material), Gnawling Hide (material).]
[Average player level: 6.2]
And then, just for me:
[The Collective has reviewed your performance. Adequate.
Wave 2 begins in: 6 days, 00:00:00.]
Adequate. Three hundred teeth-beavers ate my front gate and seven people, and the gods of this planet thought it was adequate.
I went and sat back down on my stump, which nobody had moved, and finally took a sip from my mug. It was empty. I'd forgotten to fill it.
Out in the clearing, Nana Jo was already setting up her pot. Brick Layer was standing in the pile of sawdust where the gate used to be, measuring it with his arms and muttering "stone, stone, it has to be stone." Cool Spoon was on his knees, pulling Gnawling teeth out of the dirt and appraising every one.
Seven people got eaten tonight. Tomorrow, they'd be on the forums talking about how cool it was.
I was never going to tell them. I'd made that decision before the first one ever woke up. But sitting there with an empty mug, I decided something else too.
Nobody in this town was going to get eaten by something I could have seen coming.
[Alternate Earth: The Collective's Challenge Official Forums]
Thread: WAVE 1 IS OVER AND I DIED (Old Swordsman)
{I want to be clear: I died on purpose. I was holding the gate. It was very heroic. Then I died again an hour later, which was less heroic. Some things you all need to know:
When your body breaks, you go to a gray screen that says "Awaiting Reconstruction." No timer. You just wait until Day rebuilds you. He did mine in about a minute and a half, both times.Day RAN to the workshop. He doesn't run. He hasn't moved off that stump in two days. I'm telling you, this NPC has some kind of emotion engine.It hurts. Then it stops. That's all I'll say.}
{Sleepy Tea} "Can confirm all three. Also you CAN'T pick your color when you respawn. I asked."
{Brick Layer} "Gnawlings don't target stone golems. They only went after stone ones when they were blocking something wooden. Stone meta is real. Stone everything. I need stone."
{Nana Jo} "My stew gives +10% stamina for 30 minutes. Bring your own bowl, sweeties, I'm out."
{Cool Spoon} "Gnawling Incisor is a crafting material. Appraisal says 'harder than iron, if you can find a way to work it.' I'm finding a way. Reserve your weapons now."
{ConspiracyCat} "Not to be that guy again, but a guy in my Discord says his pod logged a heart rate of 160 during the wave. What VR pod logs your heart rate?"
{Eat Dirt} "Mine does that too. It's for safety, so you don't stroke out from how hype the game is. Read the manual."
{GuildMaster_Rhen} "Iron Covenant's officer just got his beta key. We're coming in the next batch. See you all inside."
{Valefor} "We're at average level 6.2. Someone on the Discord found a note in the system's question marks that says something unlocks at level 8. Nobody knows what yet. Wave 2 is in six days. Let's find out."
The thread hit 4,000 replies by morning. One reality over, a man with an empty mug was remaking a map by candlelight.