Built from overturned supply carts, splintered dining tables dragged from the nearby tavern, shattered barrels, and the bodies of the first fallen, the barricade stood less than chest-high. It was a pathetic hurdle against an ocean of nightmares, but for Josh, it was the only thing standing between the town’s survival and absolute eradication.
He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the remnants of the town militia, his shield planted firmly against the barricade. The deafening echo of the void-powder explosion still rang in his ears, a high-pitched tinnitus whine that overlaid the apocalyptic roar of the horde. Dust and alkaline smoke drifted through the plaza in suffocating, blinding sheets, turning the moonlight above into a sickly, bruised purple.
Josh lowered his centre of gravity, bending his knees until his thighs burned, and tucked his chin behind the reinforced steel rim of his shield. He didn't look at the sky; he didn't look at the ruined gates. He looked only at the ground ten feet in front of him, waiting for more of the beasts to co within the reach of his sword.
Beside him, Bhel let out a low, guttural hiss that sounded less human and more like sothing dragged up from the very deep dark he had survived. The dwarf was a coiled spring of lethal intent, his twin serrated fighting axes gripped so tightly in his hands that his knuckles were stark white under the gri.
A horn blasted, a deep, resonant, terrifying note that vibrated directly in their teeth. Erging from the smog was a new wave, tightly packed and moving with terrifying discipline. But it wasn't the numbers that made Josh’s spine tingle; it was what led them.
Striding at the head of the formation was a towering figure, clad in jagged, obsidian-dark plate armour that seed to swallow the ambient firelight. An elite. It carried a massive, serrated greataxe resting casually over one shoulder, and its face was hidden beneath a horned helm. As it stopped, twenty paces from the barricade, it raised a gauntleted hand. The marching column halted instantly.
The elite slowly pointed its axe directly at the centre of the barricade, right at Josh and the Captain.
"Right then," Bhel growled, his grip tightening on his axe as he shifted his weight into a fighting stance. He spat a glob of blood into the dirt. "Let's see if this one bleeds any different."
Josh shared a brief, exhausted look up at Brett on the wall. The unspoken bond forged in the fires of a world they never asked to be part of flared between them. There was no retreating.
With a guttural roar that echoed off the burning buildings, the elite dropped its arm. The new wave surged forward like a tide of iron, and the battle for the barricade began anew.
"Don't step past the barricade, Bhel," Josh grunted, his voice vibrating behind his tal visor. "You let them break on my shield, then you take their heads. Do not get dragged in."
Bhel didn't reply with words, only a jerky, feral nod, his pale eyes wide and fixed on the encroaching smoke.
The kobolds broke through the dust wall as a writhing, screeching tidal wave of rusted iron, yellow fangs, and scaly flesh. The stench hit Josh a second before the physical impact, a foul, gag-inducing wave of wet reptile, old blood, and rusted tal.
CRASH.
The impact was like being hit by a runaway carriage. Three kobolds slamd into Josh’s shield simultaneously, their combined kinetic energy sending a shockwave of agony straight up his left arm and into his shoulder socket. His boots skidded backwards on the cobblestones, carving twin gouges into the dirt before he finally arrested his montum.
"Hold them!" Josh bellowed, his voice a thunderclap of defiance.
He shoved forward, using the imnse strength of his build to heave the three creatures backwards a fraction of an inch. It was all the space Bhel needed. The dwarf was a blur of motion, slipping out from behind the right edge of Josh’s shield like a striking viper. His left axe hooked a kobold’s crude spear out of the way, while his right axe buried itself deeply into the creature's exposed neck. Black blood sprayed over Josh’s visor, hot and tallic, blinding him in one eye.
Josh didn't wipe it away. He couldn't spare the hand. He thrust his heavy shortsword over the top rim of his shield, blindly impaling the second kobold through the chest. He felt the sickening crunch of ribs parting around his blade, twisted the hilt to widen the wound, and kicked the dying monster off his steel.
But there was no ti to breathe. For every creature they dropped, three more scrambled over their twitching corpses to take their place.
“Kill them!” Josh heard the Captain shouting from his left. “This is where they die!”
The battle instantly devolved into a suffocating, claustrophobic at grinder. There was no room for elegant swordplay or tactical manoeuvring. This was a brutal test of sheer, chanical endurance. It was shoving, stabbing, hacking, and screaming in the dark.
Above them, the air suddenly superheated, slling sharply of ozone and burning pitch.
"Get down!" Brett scread, his voice raw and tearing at the vocal cords.
Josh imdiately dipped his knees, pulling his shield over his head like an umbrella. Bhel dropped into a crouch a fraction of a second later.
A roaring torrent of liquid fire surged over the masses of kobolds in front of them, so close that Josh could feel the hairs of his beard singe and curl. A cone of magical fla slamd into the packed ranks of the kobolds pressing against the barricade.
The shrieks that followed were horrifying. Ranks of the horde were instantly immolated, their crude leather armour lting to their scales as they thrashed and burned. The stench of cooking at and burning hair joined the already foul cocktail of odours filling the plaza.
"Push!" Josh yelled, capitalising on the montary chaos.
He surged up from his crouch, using the boss of his shield to batter a burning, screaming kobold backwards into its kin. He swung his sword in a wide, devastating arc, cleaving through a spear shaft and taking the arm of the creature holding it.
Beside him, Bhel was a demon possessed. He wasn't just killing them; he was dismantling them. An axe took out a kneecap; as the creature fell, the second axe separated its jaw from its skull. He moved with a horrific, beautiful rhythm, stepping into the tiny gaps Josh created, striking, and instantly withdrawing behind the massive steel wall of the tank.
But they were only two, and the barricade stretched for fifty yards.
To Josh’s left, a militiaman scread as a rusted halberd hooked over the barricade, catching him behind the knee and dragging him forward. Three kobolds sward over the wooden debris like rats, burying their daggers into the man's chest before Josh could even turn his head.
"Close the gap!" Josh roared, abandoning his position by half a step to slam his shield into the flank of the beasts that had killed the militiaman, crushing one against a splintered cart wheel. Another guardsman stepped into the space, his face pale as milk, his spear trembling uncontrollably, but he held the line.
The physical toll was mounting with terrifying speed. Josh’s shield arm felt like it was packed with crushed glass. Every impact sent fresh spikes of pain radiating up to his neck. His chest heaved, his lungs burning as they fought to draw oxygen from the smoke-choked, blood-misted air. Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes beneath his helm.
And they had only been fighting for two minutes.
Josh stole a microsecond to glance at Bhel, whose chest was heaving just as violently as Josh’s. A shallow but freely bleeding slash ran across Bhel’s left bicep, and another line of red dripped from a graze on his cheek. His movents, while still incredibly fast, were losing that liquid, effortless perfection. The sheer physical resistance of hacking through bone and muscle was dragging him down into exhaustion.
"Pace yourself, Bhel!" Josh yelled, parrying a thrust and kicking out to shatter a kobold's shin. "Don't overextend!"
Bhel grunted an acknowledgent, pulling back slightly, allowing Josh’s shield to take the brunt of the next surge.
Then, the rhythm of the horde changed.
The constant, chaotic pressure suddenly slackened for a fraction of a second. The high-pitched shrieks and clicking language of the standard kobolds were drowned out by a deep, guttural roar that rattled the loose stones of the barricade. It sounded like two massive boulders grinding against each other.
Josh risked a glance over the heads of the imdiate front line, looking towards the centre of the barricade where the Captain had anchored the defence with the veteran guards.
Through the parting sea of lesser monsters, a nightmare erged.
It was a kobold, but only in the sa way a dire wolf is a dog. It stood over eight feet tall, a monstrous, hunchbacked abomination of hyper-inflated muscle and thick, overlapping black scales that looked as hard as iron plates. Its arms were absurdly long, dragging the ground, and in its massive, clawed hands, it wielded a broken, iron-bound column of stone that must have weighed three hundred pounds. It was a siege-breaker, a mutated elite bred solely for smashing fortifications.
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"Gods above," Josh breathed, a cold knot of dread solidifying in his stomach.
The elite didn't even bother attacking the defenders first; it attacked the barricade itself. With a roar that sprayed black saliva into the air, the behemoth swung the stone column like a massive baseball bat.
The impact was cataclysmic.
The heavy oak tavern tables and overturned carts that made up the centre exploded into thousands of lethal wooden shrapnel shards. The concussive force of the blow lifted three veteran guards entirely off their feet, hurling them backwards through the air like discarded ragdolls. Their armour crumpled under the sheer kinetic force, bones snapping with sounds like dry branches breaking.
The barricade bowed inward, a massive, gaping hole torn right in the heart of the defence.
"Captain!" soone scread in terror.
Josh watched in helpless horror as the Captain, a seasoned warrior in full plate, bravely stepped into the breach, raising his heavy shield to intercept the behemoth's next swing. It was an act of supre courage, and absolute futility.
The stone column descended. The Captain’s shield buckled instantly, the reinforced steel folding in half. The impact drove the man to his knees, his armour groaning, and then the monster simply stepped forward, planting a massive, clawed foot squarely into the Captain's chest and kicking him backwards into the dirt.
The centre was broken. The horde imdiately surged forward like water pouring through a ruptured dam, flooding the gap, swarming over the fallen Captain and the screaming guardsn.
"We have to help them!" Brett scread from behind Josh, his voice cracking with panic.
Josh's muscles scread to abandon his post, to charge into the centre and throw his own shield between the elite monster and the dying n. Every protective instinct he possessed demanded he move.
But as he took half a step to his right, a fresh wave of lesser kobolds crashed into his own section of the barricade. Three spears thrust towards Bhel, who was forced to desperately backpedal, parrying wildly.
"I can't!" Josh roared, the admission tasting like bile in his throat. He threw his weight back onto his left foot, bringing his shield up to deflect a flurry of blows aid at Bhel's exposed side. "If we move, this flank collapses! We have to hold here!"
It was an agonising, impossible choice. He was a tank. He was supposed to save people. But to abandon his five yards of the line to save the centre ant letting the flood engulf the wounded behind him.
He locked his jaw, tears of frustration mixing with the sweat and blood on his face, and returned to the butchery in front of him.
The situation was deteriorating exponentially. With the centre buckling, the pressure on the flanks intensified as the horde sought to widen the breach. They were no longer just fighting what was in front of them; kobolds were beginning to spill sideways from the centre, flanking Josh and Bhel's position.
The at grinder beca a vice.
A spear tip slipped past Josh's guard, glancing off his breastplate but slicing deeply into the unprotected flesh of his upper arm. He grunted, chopping his sword down to sever the spear shaft, but the damage was done. His left arm, already trembling with exhaustion, was beginning to fail. The shield, which had felt like a part of his own body thirty minutes ago, now felt like it weighed a ton.
To his right, Bhel let out a sharp hiss of pain. A rusted, jagged shortsword had bypassed his guard, opening a nasty, jagged gash across his thigh. Bhel stumbled, his knee hitting the cobblestones for a terrifying second.
Two kobolds imdiately leaped towards the downed fighter, their daggers raised for the killing blow.
"No!" Josh bellowed.
He couldn't swing his sword fast enough to save Bhel. Instead, he lunged to his right, driving the boss of his shield directly into the face of the first leaping kobold, crushing its skull against the air, and then stabbed the second kobold through the throat mid-air. He felt the cartilage tear as his blade cut through it, and threw the choking beast into the surging crowd.
Bhel scrambled back to his feet, leaning heavily on one leg, his face pale beneath his helt, his chest heaving like a bellows. He didn't say thank you; there was no breath for it. He just raised his axes again, his hands shaking violently.
"Josh! I have nothing left!" Brett scread from above them on the wall. "My mana is empty! I'm completely tapped!"
Josh risked a look up. Brett was on his knees, his hands pressed against the wall, vomiting violently from mana exhaustion. The magical glow that usually surrounded the mage was entirely extinguished.
Josh turned back to the sea of yellow eyes and jagged teeth pressing against his dented shield. He looked at the endless horde spilling through the ruined gates. He looked at the massive siege-breaker in the distance, still systematically crushing the last resistance in the centre.
For the second ti since he had arrived in this world, absolute, icy despair washed over him.
The wall was going to break. It wasn't a possibility; it was a mathematical certainty. His muscles were tearing, his stamina was non-existent, and they were utterly surrounded. He was going to die here, in the mud and the blood, thousands of miles from the life he had known.
If I’m going to die, Josh thought, a strange, terrifying calm settling over his panicked mind, I’m going to make the ground expensive.
"Bhel," Josh gasped, his voice raspy and barely audible over the din. "Get behind . When my shield drops... run."
Bhel looked at him, his pale eyes burning with a mixture of agony and fierce, unyielding pride. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the cobblestones, gripped his axes tighter, and stepped up right beside Josh, shoulder-to-shoulder. He wasn't going anywhere. He’d run from the dark once. He’d left his friends behind when they’d told him to save himself once. He wouldn’t do it again, no matter what. He had decided this was the place he stood his ground.
Josh offered a grim, bloody smile beneath his visor. "Alright then. Together."
He gripped his shield tightly, lowering his head, preparing for the final, overwhelming surge that would bury them both. The kobolds shrieked, sensing the defenders' imminent collapse. The front line surged forward, a tidal wave of rusted steel ready to crash down.
And then, an imnse weight slamd into Josh’s back.
For a wild, terrifying microsecond, he thought they had been flanked. He thought a monster had bypassed the line and hit him from behind. He braced himself for the killing blow.
But the blow didn't co. Instead, a broad, heavily armoured shoulder wedged itself firmly against his back, bracing his spine. A gauntleted hand slamd onto his right pauldron, gripping the tal with imnse, anchoring strength.
"Hold the line, big guy! We've got you!" a voice roared, thick with a gruff, local accent.
Josh’s eyes went wide. He didn't turn his head, he couldn't, but the sheer, unyielding pressure against his back was undeniable. He pushed forward against his shield, and instead of sliding backwards in the mud, he found himself anchored, immovable.
To his right, beside Bhel, two more figures slamd into the barricade. One was a towering tigerkin adventurer wielding a massive two-handed maul; the other was a militiaman, his face streaked with soot and tears, desperately thrusting a spear over the rubble.
"Push!" the voice behind Josh roared again.
Josh let out a primal scream, a sound born of agony, exhaustion, and sudden, miraculous hope. He shoved his shield forward with the combined strength of the man bracing him, sending the front rank of kobolds tumbling backwards over each other in a tangle of limbs and scales.
He risked a half-second glance over his shoulder.
The street behind them was no longer empty. A flood of bodies was pouring down from the stairs of the intact sections of the original wall. They were adventurers who had found their feet after the explosion, militian who had rallied from their panic, and town guards sprinting from the far, unattacked gates. They were charging into the plaza, a chaotic, screaming wave of reinforcents.
The cowards had returned. The reserves had arrived.
More bodies slamd into the line to Josh's left and right. The incredibly thin, pathetic defence suddenly swelled, thickening from a single line of dying n into a solid, impenetrable phalanx three ranks deep. Swords extended over Josh’s shoulders; spears thrust past his hips.
The crushing pressure on his shield eased just a fraction. It was still heavy, still agonising, but it was no longer a solo effort. He was part of a wall again.
Bhel leaned against a newly arrived dwarven shield-bearer, taking a precious three seconds to bind a tourniquet tightly around his bleeding thigh, his teeth bared in a snarl of pain before he hoisted his axes and stepped back into the fray.
"Hold them!" the tigerkin roared, his maul crushing a kobold’s skull with a sickening crack. "On these shields lads! Push!”
But even with the reinforced line, the sheer numbers of the horde were terrifying. The siege-breaker in the centre was still raging, and the tide of monsters pouring through the destroyed main gates showed no signs of stopping. They were holding, but it was a stalemate of attrition, and the kobolds had numbers to burn.
Then, the sky lit up.
From the high, unbroken ramparts of the gatehouse flanking the breached doors, a brilliant, blinding cot of pure blue arcane energy shrieked down into the night. It arced over the plaza, illuminating the sea of monsters in a stark, unforgiving strobe light, before slamming directly into the dense pack of kobolds waiting to funnel through the gates.
The explosion was deafening, a shockwave of kinetic magic that vaporised dozens of monsters instantly and threw bodies thirty feet into the air.
Before the dust could even begin to settle, another rhythmic sound filled the air.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.
It sounded like a swarm of angry hornets. From the battlents on both sides of the breached gates, the surviving archers of the town guard, joined by every ranged adventurer who could draw a bowstring, unleashed hell.
A literal rain of steel-tipped death poured down upon the horde.
Because the kobolds were bottlenecked at the ruined gates, forcing thousands of them into a tight, densely packed funnel, the archers couldn't miss. Every arrow fired found a target. The back ranks of the horde, previously safe and pushing the front line forward, suddenly found themselves caught in a devastating crossfire.
Arrows punched through leather and scale, pinning monsters to the earth, creating massive, chaotic pile-ups at the entrance. More mages on the walls, having regained their breath, began hurling bolts of magic down into the chokepoint, turning the entrance to the town into a literal killing floor.
The effect on the secondary barricade was imdiate.
The endless, crushing forward pressure of the horde faltered. With the rear ranks being slaughtered from above, the supply of fresh bodies slamming into Josh’s shield temporarily dried up.
"Now! Push them back!" the militian scread, sensing the shift in montum.
Josh gritted his teeth, his arms shaking uncontrollably, and heaved. For the first ti in what felt like hours, the shield wall moved forward a pace. They stepped over the bodies of the fallen, driving the surviving front-line kobolds back towards the killing field of the plaza.
Josh was bleeding from a dozen minor cuts. His left arm was entirely numb, his chest burned with every ragged breath, and he was quite certain he had a concussion from the sheer noise and impact. Beside him, Bhel was limping heavily, his skin slick with gore, his eyes wide and manic.
The flood had been stemd. The breach had been stabilised.
But as Josh looked out over the plaza, illuminated by the flashes of spellfire and burning debris, he saw the siege-breaker elite still roaring in the centre, tossing n aside like toys, and the endless sea of yellow eyes still glittering in the smoke beyond the gates.
The pressure was insane. The at grinder was still turning.
Josh tightened his grip on his dented, blood-slicked shield, adjusted his stance, and prepared to step back into hell. They weren't dead yet, and as long as he had breath in his lungs, this line was not going to break.
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