Chương 122: 112. Mártyras

I kept the post above the pass for nineteen years and filed what came through it: the merchant trains, the plague summers, the two boys who killed a lion on the scree and were sung about for a generation. I never once stopped a thing from happening. A watcher who acts is a watcher no longer, and the report he cannot then file is the only one the order ever needed.

— Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 4th Century BCE, Arcadia Arthur read the container yard exactly like a combat encounter: load paths first, then the inevitable failure points. The shipping containers were stacked four high on either side, their rusted, corrugated steel flanks narrowing the ground into dark choke points barely wide enough for two men abreast. Nobody had taken the high ground on top of the iron boxes: terrible tactical planning by the Council.

The amber light was bleeding out of the sky; in another ten minutes, it would be gone entirely, and the wolves possessed far better low-light vision than anything human. At the far end of the lane, a handful of Council soldiers had formed a ragged crescent. Their spears jabbed out in short, panicked bursts, trying to hold the shifting shadows at bay. A massive wolf threw its weight directly into the iron tips.

Two spears bit deep into its shoulder, but the beast's momentum carried it straight through the line anyway, throwing a soldier flat onto his back. Arthur didn't think. He was already sprinting toward the man about to die under a downpour of claws. He slammed into the beast from the flank, leading with the heavy, rolled rim of Breakwater. The blue-tinted iron caught the animal squarely across the shoulder, violently turning it off its trajectory.

The creature's claws screeched against the concrete, raking empty air where the man's throat had been a second prior. Before the wolf could recover its footing, Arthur drove his boot hard into its exposed ribs, following the motion through with the brutal, downward arc of his maul. The impact left a flat, satisfying crack in the air.

"Finish it!" Arthur barked at the frozen Council fighters, pivoting on his heel to scan the narrow corridor for the next failure point. He could not replicate the static defence he had used on the hill against these creatures. On open ground, with nothing blocking his line of sight, he could anchor his heels, absorb the raw kinetic impacts and let the stored force finish the work. Here, the narrow lanes were choked with bodies.

Council soldiers were struggling to patch a broken formation while two women dragged a bleeding man on a grey tarpaulin toward the safety of the far gate. He couldn't act as a stationary wall. He had to be a wall that moved. There were five of the beasts in the immediate corridor, their heavy, muscled shoulders rising all the way to his hips even on all fours. Arthur knew their attack patterns; they could rear up on their hind legs to strike downward with multiple rapid sweeps of their claws.

"Watch the reach if they stand up!" he shouted to everyone and no one at once.

"Donna, the ones on the left," he called.

"Steve, no area of effect, friendlies everywhere. Sarah, stay on me." Steve had already seen it. The ice slick that could lock down a hundred metres of open ground was useless with soldiers and civilians all around him. He levelled the rod and sent a fire lance into the shoulder of the wolf that had broken the spear line. The creature shrieked, rearing back as its flesh scorched, which gave a downed soldier just enough time to scramble clear of its shadow.

Donna went left along the nearest channel, and where the space opened between two stacks she burned Threshold Drive and became a flicker of herself. The first wolf on the left had a Council spearman pinned flat against the corrugated steel. As the beast reared up to crush him, Donna flashed through the gap, her axe tracing a brutal arc across its hamstring. The beast dropped instantly, its balance ruined as it fell to three legs.

The spearman scrambled away into the dust, allowing three fresh fighters to rush forward and lock their weapons over the struggling creature. A second beast plummeted from the upper tier of the container stack, targeting a guard kneeling a few feet to Donna's left. The guard was just a boy, clutching a mangled, bloody thigh with both hands, his weapon lost somewhere in the dirt. Donna burned the Drive a second longer than she liked to do as she lunged forward and hauled the boy backward by his collar.

The move saved his life, but it pulled her own body directly into the trajectory the wolf had locked onto. The heavy claws ripped through her sleeve, tearing four clean lines down the flesh of her left forearm. The impact spun her on her heels. She used the momentum, turned and drove Ravener deep into the creature's throat. The blade bit into thick bone and muscle but failed to sever it on the first pass.

Without pausing, she wrenched the axe free and delivered a second brutal hack that dropped the wolf onto the concrete. Blood had begun to run down her wrist. Donna glanced at the tear, adjusted her grip on the haft of her weapon and dived back into the shadows to find the next target. Across the lane, Steve's fire lance caught the hamstrung wolf in its flank. A split second later, a concussive blast followed the thermal burst, throwing the beast sideways into a container wall with a loud clang.

The Council spearmen closed in instantly, hammering their iron tips down into the thrashing shape. Steve was lining up the next shot when white shards went past his shoulder. They were jagged and fast, and looked like icicles. The missiles flew from a knot of Council fighters to his right, striking a charging wolf squarely in the chest and staggering it. For a second Steve forgot the fight entirely and stared at the two soldiers standing with their hands still out, frost smoking off their knuckles.

"They're casting," he said, delighted.

"Donna. They're casting."

"I see it," Donna said from somewhere in the steel, not delighted at all. Sarah was crouched near the boy Donna had pulled back. She pressed her palms down onto the boy's thigh. Field Triage ran in the corner of her perception, the grid cataloguing every Nadi-Matrix within five metres. Femoral artery intact. The flesh was ragged and the bleeding was heavy, but it lacked the bright, rhythmic pulsing of an arterial spray.

"Keep pressure right there," she commanded the boy in Greek as the bleeding slowed, forcing his trembling fingers down onto the wet, torn cloth. She scrambled back up to her feet, staying low behind Arthur's shadow as she scanned the corridor for the next casualty. Past the two local casters, deep in the thickest knot of spearmen holding the far lane, a Council soldier was swinging a massive two-handed sword that was not standard Council kit.

He was using it in sweeping arcs that kept a wolf at bay where a spear would have been batted aside. Arthur saw the blade flash once in the failing light and filed that too. The alpha had still not committed to the line. It stood at one of the dark lanes of the container yard, reared up on its hind legs, its head rising a full foot higher than the rest of the pack. It had watched three of its wolves die without moving a muscle.

The beast was reading the field from the rear, patient and silent, waiting for the human defence to fracture before making a clean strike. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Arthur chose to force the encounter. The beast was the highest threat level on the concrete, and he needed its focus fixed on him rather than the faltering guards. He tightened his grip on the maul and brought it down on the shield with a loud clang as he moved toward the alpha.

The alpha dropped to all fours and came. It was faster than the others by a margin that mattered. It covered the distance between the stacks in three massive, low bounds and slammed into Breakwater with the raw kinetic violence of a creature mutated to shatter gates. Arthur's boots scraped backward on the concrete, and then he saw the alpha rearing up. Arthur pulled in ambient Ether without meaning to, and the closed Nadi-Matrix responded in a heartbeat.

The Ether moved through his body as he activated Counterforce Plant. The alpha triggered its assault, a blinding four-strike combo hammering the face of the shield in less than a second. The Tempered iron took the blows and held, as did his Ether-suffused muscles. He swung the maul down in a tight, heavy arc, releasing the accumulated energy of all four absorbed impacts directly into the beast's left shoulder. Bone splintered under the iron face.

Arthur followed the momentum with a shield bash to pin the alpha against the corrugated container wall. The alpha rolled with the blow, came back up and opened him along his bicep. White heat flared through his arm as blood flooded down his skin. To his right flank, the Council man with the two-handed sword brought it down on a wolf's spine, a farmer's stroke with a soldier's weapon. Arthur ignored the burn in his arm, keeping his full weight pinned against the shield to trap the alpha against the steel boxes.

Donna burst from the narrow maze of the adjacent lane at a dead sprint, Threshold Drive humming. Ravener found the most obvious gap, burying its heavy edge into the ruined shoulder joint Arthur had just shattered. The alpha unleashed a ragged howl of pain, thrashing its weight to throw Arthur off and clear a path toward the exit. As the beast tried to rear up a second time to break the hold, Donna wrenched Ravener free with a brutal twist, unbalancing it mid-movement, and Arthur seized the open window.

He brought the maul down in a vertical drop, and the crunch of a fracturing skull ended the struggle instantly. The largest predator in the yard collapsed into a heap of grey muscle and bloodied fur at their feet. Sarah was already moving, darting past them toward the screaming casualties scattered in the dirt. Behind her, those who had run from the yard came back in trembling groups to see what it was they had run from.

ETHER ABSORBED: +2, 420 (5 KILLS) INTEGRATION: 3, 849 / 3, 712 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 21 INTEGRATION: 137 / 3, 968 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 SARAH INTEGRATION: 4, 079 / 3, 456 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 20 INTEGRATION: 623 / 3, 712 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 After a few minutes Sarah circled back to them. She was running Ether through Donna's arm before she could argue.

"Flexor compartment, superficial," Sarah murmured, her tone clipped.

"The tendons are intact." She kept the current flowing steadily until the blood slowed and then stopped.

"Your ribs are bruised as well, but nothing is broken." Donna tested the fingers of her left hand, flexing them against the handle of her axe.

"Good enough."

"You next," Sarah said, pointing a bloodied chin at Arthur.

"I will do a more thorough job when we are back at the house, but there is no reason to lose blood here if we don't have to." Arthur didn't argue. He lowered Breakwater and stood still, letting Sarah's Ether flood him and close the jagged tear in his bicep.

"Three dead," she said in a low whisper.

"Three dead in less than two minutes. I could only stabilise two."

"You did what you could, and those two are alive because of you," Arthur said.

"This would have been a lot worse if we were still rowing back. A lot worse." While Arthur kept his eyes on the lingering crowd, Donna moved methodically through the yard, going from carcass to carcass and harvesting the cores. Five creatures yielded three cores in total. Two of the stones were roughly the size of a fist. The third was larger and heavier, and held a much deeper, darker hue. The alpha's core.

The Council captain approached them with a slow, deliberate stride, the posture of a man calculating exactly how much he owed and to whom. He was perhaps forty-five, lean-faced, dark-bearded, with the bearing of someone who had spent years giving orders. His spear was blooded to the crossguard.

"You did not have to come in," he said. His English was slow and certain.

"We would have held the lane."

"You would have held it," Arthur said, his eyes tracking the tarpaulin being dragged toward the gate.

"But you would be burying six men tonight instead of three." Arthur walked over to Donna, took one of the fist-sized stones from her hand and stepped back toward the officer. He held out his open palm, the stone catching the faint light of the container yard.

"Here," Arthur said.

"Take it. You lost people today. Maybe this will help your men clear the next breach a bit faster." The captain looked at the core and then at Arthur's face before taking it.

"Andreadis," he said, with a single inclination of his head.

"Arthur."

"Those two soldiers," Steve said, stepping up from behind to watch the retreating line.

"Your two men who threw the ice shards. How long have they been doing that?"

"For about three weeks." Andreadis shrugged, his tone shifting back to the guarded neutrality of a local commander.

"It comes to some and not to others. We do not know why. The ones it comes to, we keep together. They learn from each other."

"I'm glad to see people are gaining strength," Arthur said once the captain had gone back to tend to his perimeter.

"I have a distinct feeling we will need every bit of it when the fence finally goes down."

"It means we now have to stay alert for ranged threats," Donna said, missing his point entirely. She turned her back on the soldiers.

"We need to leave. We have been seen fighting by a dozen Council men, and it is well past dark. Every minute we stand here is just another line on a report somewhere." Arthur looked across the yard at the wreckage: the dead wolves, the dead soldiers, the overturned stalls and the civilians who had crept back to the edges of the market to stare. They had walked into this fight because it was the right thing to do, and the right thing would put them on every tongue in Kastella.

Steve tucked his rod under one arm and looked at Donna's wrapped forearm.

"How bad?"

"It can wait for the house." Donna rolled her good shoulder.

"I have had worse from climbing walls in the wrong shoes."

"I genuinely doubt that," Sarah said.

"Let's go home."

"Your mother is going to have opinions," Arthur said.

"My mother is going to have a great many opinions," Sarah corrected, a small smile touching her lips despite the exhaustion in her face, "and every single one of them is going to land squarely on you." They went down through the lower streets toward the water with dozens of eyes upon them. • • The report reached General Dimitrios Mavros at the harbour command post just after midnight. It was carried in by a lieutenant, relaying the intelligence from a runner straight out of the container yard.

"Four of them," the lieutenant said.

"Foreigners. They came out of nowhere and went through the pack like a hurricane. Five wolves, sir, and one of them was an alpha, a big one, taller than a man. Kastella squad had lost three before they arrived. The strangers lost none. They broke the pack in under two minutes." Mavros did not look up from the map, where coloured pins marked the anomalies his conscripts had not yet been able to clear. There were a great many pins.

"The alpha," he said.

"Who took it?"

"The big one with the shield, sir, and a woman with an axe. Very fast. And, sir." The lieutenant hesitated.

"Andreadis also reports he was given a core, sir. By the large man with the shield. A werewolf core, handed to him freely." For a moment the only sound was the sea against the harbour wall.

"They gave it to him," Mavros said.

"As a gift. For the men he lost, they said." Mavros smoothed the top page with the heel of his hand and sat in thought for a long moment.

"These are the same ones who went to Sounion and commissioned equipment from Stavros."

"Yes, sir, same."

"Find out what you can about them. Where they sleep. Who they talk to. Where they go," Mavros said.

"Do not send anyone. Do not engage. Only observe." The lieutenant saluted and left.