Chương 79: Surrender or Die

The army came over the horizon a little after the two-hour mark He'd fought waves. A wave was a single horror, a flood of the same monster over and over, terrible in its numbers and simple in its nature. This was not that. This was an army, and armies were made of many part like lego pieces, and Alex stood on the wall and cataloged the parts as they came into view and felt each one land worse than the last. There were monsters in it, Tainted, but not one kind.

Some were huge and green and tusked, smaller echoes of the thing that led them, orc-kin built for breaking things. Some were lean and quick and wrong, corrupted rabbit-people, if that was even the word, things that had been something soft once and were now all speed and teeth. A dozen other shapes moved among them, humanoid and not, every one of them carrying the oily red mark of the Abyss. And walking among the monsters, in ragged formation, carrying weapons, wearing armor, were people. Humans.

Marching with the monsters that should have been tearing them apart, and not being torn apart, held in some terrible truce, and even from the wall Alex could see the wrongness of them. They didn't move like soldiers. They moved like the dead who hadn't been told yet, empty, mechanical, their eyes fixed on nothing. Whatever had been done to them had scooped out the part that resisted and left the body walking. And at the front of all of it, the thing from the scout's story.

Twelve feet of green muscle and tusk, an axe across its back the size of a door, standing still while its army arranged itself behind it. It waited until the ranks had settled. Then it spoke, and its voice rolled across the entire field and hit the wall like a physical wave, far too loud, carrying from a distance no voice should carry, some skill wrapped around the words.

"SURRENDER, OR DIE." The whole camp flinched at the volume of it.

"I will not ask twice. You have one minute to decide. Lay down what you carry and open your gate, and you will live as my master's property" The orc's tusked face showed no expression.

"Refuse, and I will take this wall apart, and I will kill enough of you to make the rest obedient. You have one minute." And then, unhurried, certain, it sat down on the churned ground to wait, the way a man sits who has done this many times and has never once been made to regret it. The minute passed in a camp gone very quiet. Chris used it.

He walked the top of the wall, not fast, letting people see him, and he spoke low enough that only the line could hear, which was somehow worse and better than the orc's booming demand.

"You've all heard what surrender means. You saw the scouts come back. Those three outposts to the south surrendered or tried to run, and they're gone, all of them, every person." His voice was steady.

"So there's no choice here, whatever that thing thinks. We fight, or we die on our knees. I'd rather we fight." He stopped, and looked down the line, at the faces, the fear on them.

"Some of what's coming at us is going to be human. I won't lie to you about that or dress it up. But look at them. Really look. That's not a person making a choice out there. If they get over this wall, your family dies. So you defend your family. You defend the person next to you. You defend the future we've been building, because it's the only one any of us has left. Everything else, we carry after." It wasn't a speech to make anyone feel good.

It was a speech to make people able to do a terrible thing, and Alex, standing shirtless with his new glaive and the return talisman in his pocket, felt it settle the line around him into something grim and ready. Cassandra had been given the mana store, and she stood beside it looking like she'd rather be anywhere else.

Liam should have had it, Liam was the best of them at pouring out that kind of power, but Liam had emptied himself into a desert days ago and hadn't recovered enough to be trusted with a reserve that size, and so it fell to Cassandra, one of the strongest mana user in the camp and the most careful, which counted for something today. She put her hand on the device and Alex saw her steady herself, and he caught her eye across the wall, and she gave him a small nod, and he gave one back.

They'd built the thing together. Now she'd fight with it. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The minute ended. Nobody opened the gate. Kul stood, and grabbed the axe off his back, and roared a single word, and the assault began. It opened with the bombers, and the bombers were the first thing that made Alex's stomach turn, because they weren't people. That was the small mercy in it.

The things that came charging first were Tainted, corrupted monsters, but they'd been changed, fitted with crude mechanical devices strapped to their bodies, and when the archers dropped the first of them the corpse detonated. A hard concussive blast, shrapnel and fire, and Alex understood the strategy in an instant. They weren't attacking. They were walking bombs, sent to die against the wall and take a piece of it with them. The first wave of them, fifty or so, broke against the defense and did little.

The archers dropped them at range and the explosions went off too far from the wall to matter, and Katelin's field kept the injured standing, and for a moment it looked almost manageable. Then the strategy adjusted. The next groups came in tens, and each ten had a mage folded into it, throwing up shields, uncommon-grade barriers that turned aside the arrows that should have dropped the bombers before they reached the wall. Now the explosions came closer.

The wall took its first real hits, the enchanted stone cracking, and the camp's mages answered, and the field in front of the wall became a churning mess of arrows and shields and detonations, and it held, barely, and Alex started to think they might weather it. He should have watched the flanks. The strategy that broke the wall didn't come from the front.

Somewhere on a stretch of wall nobody was watching closely, a group of ten bombers with a mage in the middle of them had crossed the whole field under an invisibility skill, unseen, unhurried, and reached the base of the wall at a blind spot. And there, all at once, the mage dropped the concealment and every one of the ten detonated in the same instant. The wall came apart.

A whole section of it, stone and rune and the people standing on it, gone in a single coordinated blast that Alex felt through his feet from a hundred feet away. He turned toward it and saw the breach, a ragged gap torn in the camp's one defense, dust and smoke pouring up, and he saw, in the same terrible glance, the bodies. People had been on that wall. People had been below it.

The first deaths of the day happened in that one blast, and Alex didn't have time to count them, because the breach was open now and the army had a way in. And far at the back of the army, where it was safe, Alex saw a figure that wasn't fighting. A human, standing behind the whole force, directing it, a hand raised and gesturing, moving pieces. Not Kul. Kul was a hammer, Alex could see that already, a thing you pointed and released.

The mind behind the invisible bombers, behind the shielded groups, behind the patient escalating pressure that had found the one blind spot in the wall, was standing at the back where the danger couldn't reach it, and Alex marked it, the coward at the rear who'd designed all of this, and felt a cold that had nothing to do with the orc. Then Kul stopped waiting. The breach was open, and the orc general did not send his army through it first, the way a careful commander would. He was not careful.

He was proud, and he'd been standing still for too long, and the sight of the broken wall lit something in him. He hefted the door-sized axe and he charged, alone, ahead of his entire army, twelve feet of green muscle pounding across the churned field straight for the gap in the wall, roaring, eager, a warrior who had been made to feel small once and had decided he would never feel small again. Alex saw him coming, and understood that this was his. Nobody else in the camp could meet that. Chris couldn't.

Jeremy couldn't, not head-on. The thing charging the breach was going to go through anyone it reached like paper, and there was exactly one person in this camp built to stand in front of a twelve-foot avatar of muscle and rage and not die, and Alex had spent his whole tutorial becoming that person for exactly this moment. He didn't think twice.

He moved, off the wall, down toward the breach, thermal and gravity already gathering along the edge of the glaive Bartholomew had made him, Solar Empowerment waking under his skin as he crossed into the open, and he put himself in the gap in his own wall, in the one place the whole disaster was funneling toward, and set his feet, and faced the thing coming to kill his home.

Kul saw him, the one figure that hadn't run from the breach, the enormous shirtless human standing alone in the gap, and something like delight crossed the orc's brutal face, because here, finally, was someone who might be worth the swing. They closed the last of the distance between them, and the whole roaring chaos of the battle seemed to narrow down to the two of them and the ground they were about to fight over, and Alex raised his glaive.