High above the mud and the blood, Brett clung to the rough stone of the battlents. His breathing was ragged, his chest heaving with dry sobs of pure physiological exhaustion. Every ti he tried to reach inward, to scrape the very bottom of his core for even a spark of mana, a blinding spike of pain drove itself directly behind his eyes, threatening to send him toppling over the edge and into the plaza below.
He was completely tapped. To push his core any further wouldn’t just risk mana sickness; it would risk permanently shattering his magical foundation. But as he leaned over the crenellations, looking down at the slaughter thirty feet below, self-preservation felt like a bitter, useless instinct.
Down in the at grinder, illuminated by the stroboscopic flashes of spellfire from the surviving mages on the gatehouse, Josh and Bhel were fighting for their lives.
The arrival of the reinforcents had thickened the line, transforming the flimsy ground-level barricade into a bristling wall of steel and wood. But the siege-breaker elite in the centre cared nothing for phalanxes. Having pulverised the veteran guards and the Captain, the eight-foot-tall abomination of overlapping black scales and hyper-inflated muscle turned its attention to the left flank.
It turned its attention to Josh.
"Brace!" Josh bellowed, his voice echoing from the depths of his dented helm.
He stepped half a pace forward, breaking the perfect alignnt of the shield wall. He couldn't let that beast strike the militian behind him; their standard-issue shields would fold like wet parchnt under the weight of that stone column. As a tank, it was his job to hold, whether his burning muscles could take it or not.
Beside him, Bhel spat a curse in Dwarven, adjusting his grip on his twin axes. The dwarf was limping from the gash across his thigh, his dark skin coated in a horrifying mixture of grey dust, sweat, and black kobold blood.
"If that thing hits your shield directly, it’ll drive your arm straight through your own ribs," Bhel grunted, his pale eyes tracking the behemoth’s lumbering approach. "You deflect. I cut."
"Understood," Josh rasped, planting his boots firmly into the slick cobblestones.
The siege-breaker didn't charge. It didn't need to. It waded through the sea of lesser kobolds, crushing its own kin underfoot without a second thought. When it reached the cleared space before the left flank, it raised the three-hundred-pound, iron-bound stone column high above its horned head. Black saliva dripped from its jagged maw, sizzling faintly as it hit the dirt.
Up on the wall, Brett watched the weapon rise. Panic, cold and paralysing, gripped his heart. I have to do sothing. He scrambled along the walkway, his boots slipping in the blood of the fallen. He couldn't cast, but he wasn't completely useless. Ten feet to his right, slumped against the stone parapet, lay a dead guardsman, but beside him was a heavy siege-arbalest—a massive crossbow mounted on a fra, designed for piercing plate armour—fully cranked and loaded with a steel-tipped bolt the size of a short spear.
Brett threw himself onto the weapon. It was terrifyingly heavy, the iron stock cold against his trembling hands. He wasn't a ranger. He didn't have the strength or the training to fire it from the shoulder. But at this angle, firing almost directly downward into the plaza, gravity would do the heavy lifting. He shoved the arbalest through the gap in the stone teeth of the wall, wedging it firmly, and desperately tried to line up the sights on the hulking monster below.
Down at the barricade, the stone column descended.
It ca down with the speed and kinetic force of a falling teor. Josh didn't try to stop it dead; he rembered the fate of the others who had tried. Instead, he angled his battered steel shield at a sharp forty-five-degree incline, stepping into the blow rather than retreating, praying that the shield's enchantnt would work against such a blow.
CRACK.
The noise was deafening. The stone column slamd against the angled steel, but instead of crushing Josh flat, the weapon glanced off the slick, sloped surface, burying itself deeply into the cobblestones just inches from Josh's right boot.
The force of the deflection still tore through Josh’s body. His left shoulder partially dislocated with a sickening pop, and he was driven hard to one knee, the breath driven entirely from his lungs.
But the elite was overextended. Its weapon was embedded in the earth.
"Now!" Josh roared, fighting through the blinding pain.
Bhel didn't hesitate. The dwarf used Josh’s lowered left shoulder as a springboard, stepping onto the tank's thick armour and launching himself into the air. Bhel flew towards the elite’s exposed chest, his twin axes raised high.
The siege-breaker, surprisingly fast for its size, let go of the stone column and backhanded the airborne dwarf. The blow caught Bhel mid-flight, swatting him out of the air like a botherso insect. Bhel crashed hard against the splintered remains of a supply cart, his breath leaving him in a sharp hiss.
The elite raised its massive, clawed foot, preparing to stomp the downed dwarf into paste.
Josh couldn't reach him in ti. He struggled to rise, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, his heavy sword too far away to interrupt the strike.
Thwump.
The sound of the heavy arbalest firing from the battlents above cut through the din of the battle.
Brett didn't close his eyes. He watched the heavy steel bolt streak downward through the purple, smoke-choked air. He had aid for the head, but his hands were shaking too badly.
The bolt slamd into the siege-breaker’s right shoulder joint, the sheer kinetic force of the heavy ammunition punching straight through the iron-hard scales and burying itself deep into the at.
The elite roared, a sound of absolute, unadulterated agony. The stomp was entirely thrown off target, its foot crashing into the dirt a foot away from Bhel’s head. The beast staggered backward, reaching a massive hand up to claw blindly at the wooden shaft protruding from its shoulder.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not ant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It was a window of barely a second. But a second was all the front line needed.
The towering tigerkin adventurer who had braced Josh earlier stepped over the rubble of the barricade. With a bellowing war cry, he swung his massive two-handed maul in a brutal, horizontal arc. The hamr connected squarely with the side of the elite’s knee.
Bone shattered with the sound of a falling tree. The siege-breaker collapsed onto its ruined leg, its head dropping perfectly into striking range.
Josh’s left arm was dead, but his right arm still had strength. He lunged forward and drove his blade up under the creature's jaw, right where the scales gave way to soft, fleshy throat, burying it to the hilt.
At the exact sa mont, Bhel scrambled up from the wreckage of the cart. With a feral scream, the dwarf swung his right axe in a devastating downward chop, burying the serrated blade deep into the back of the monster’s neck, severing the spinal cord.
The beast's yellow eyes rolled back in its head. It twitched once, a massive spasm that nearly threw Josh off his feet, and then collapsed sideways into the mud, dead.
Silence did not fall over the plaza, but a profound, palpable shift rippled through the air.
The lesser kobolds, seeing their invincible champion butchered before their eyes, faltered. The frenzied, suicidal pressure against the barricades suddenly evaporated. The shrieks of bloodlust turned into high-pitched trills of panic.
"They're breaking!" soone yelled from the wall.
"Push!" Josh roared, his voice cracking. He pulled his sword free from the elite's neck. He grabbed his dead arm with his right hand and, with a sickening crunch and a stifled scream of pure agony, wrenched his shoulder back into its socket. "Push them back!"
The shield wall surged forward. Without the elite to anchor their centre, and with the archers above still raining unyielding death into the chokepoint, the horde’s morale snapped. So of the vanguard turned and fled, trampling their own kin in a desperate bid to reach the ruined gates and escape the killing floor.
They had held the line. The breaking point had co, and it was the horde that had shattered first.
Or so they thought.
The respite lasted barely sixty seconds. The air in the plaza was no longer oxygen; it was a noxious soup of aerosolised blood, burning pitch, and the foul, reptilian musk of a thousand unwashed bodies.
The fleeing vanguard slamd into the endless masses still trying to push through the ruined gates, creating a horrific crush of bodies. And from that crush, fresh horrors erged.
Josh swung his blade in a wide, desperate arc over his heavily dented shield, feeling the jarring shudder travel up his forearms as steel bit through rusted chainmail and the dense, scaled collarbone beneath. The kobold didn’t even scream. It just gurgled, dark blood bubbling past rows of needle-like teeth as its montum carried it forward, nearly dragging Josh down with its dead weight. He kicked the corpse away, his boot slipping on the slick, gore-painted flagstones of the plaza, and imdiately brought his shield up just in ti to catch a downward chop from a jagged cleaver.
The impact rattled his teeth. The ringing in his ears had started an hour ago and hadn't stopped, a high-pitched drone that underlaid the cacophony of war—the clashing of steel, the roar of flas, the endless, chittering shrieks of the horde.
"Hold the line!" Bhel’s voice bood over the din, a raw, ragged sound that bordered on a feral roar.
To Josh’s left, the dwarf was a whirlwind of devastation. Bhel’s great-axe rose and fell with rhythmic, terrifying power. Every swing cleaved through the encroaching tide, sending broken bodies tumbling back over the remains of the barricade. But for every three Bhel threw back, five more sward over the rubble, their clawed hands grabbing at the defenders, their yellow eyes wide with a fanatic, drug-addled frenzy.
"They just keep coming!" Brett shouted from the wall thirty feet above, his voice cracking. The mage was leaning over the crenellations, a blur of desperate motion. Unable to cast, he had resorted to hurling rubble down into the fray. He darted along the stone teeth of the wall, dropping anything he could get his hands on onto the creatures pressing in on his friends below. "I'm running out of things to throw, and I'm pretty sure I'm running out of air!"
Other mages around him had resorted to throwing items as well, their mana burning out as quickly as his own.
The pressure was suffocating. It felt as though the entire world had been compressed down to this twenty-foot stretch of the plaza. There was no sky, only the choking black smoke from the fires. There was no ground, only the shifting, slippery carpet of the dead and dying. Every muscle in Josh’s body scread in protest. The lactic acid burned in his thighs and shoulders, turning his limbs into lead. His lungs drew in the ash-laden air in ragged, shallow gasps.
They had been fighting without pause since the gates blew apart. The adrenaline that had carried them through the first wave was long gone, replaced by a grim, chanical desperation. It was a at grinder, and they were the gears, slowly being worn down by the sheer volu of gristle passing through them.
Suddenly, the pitch of the battle changed. The chaotic, disorganised swarming shifted. The chittering cries organised into a guttural, rhythmic chant.
"Heavy hitters!" Brett yelled from above, pointing desperately towards the gates.
Through the smoke, a trio of massive, heavily armoured kobolds breached the barricade line. These weren't the scrawny, starved fodder that had made up the vanguard. These beasts were thick with muscle, their scales a dark, mottled crimson, adorned with plates of scavenged iron and carrying massive, two-handed weapons. They moved with a predatory coordination that sent a spike of ice through Josh’s exhausted veins.
Bhel didn't hesitate. With a bellow that tore at his throat, he charged the trio, his axe sweeping low to catch the lead warrior in the knees.
The crimson kobold leaped the strike with surprising agility, bringing a massive, spiked maul down in a crushing overhead blow. Bhel twisted, catching the haft of the maul with the handle of his axe, but the sheer force of the impact drove him to one knee. The cobblestones beneath him cracked.
"Bhel!" Josh scread, lunging forward.
He was too slow. The second armoured kobold flanked the kneeling dwarf, a rusted, serrated halberd thrusting forward with lethal precision.
Bhel tried to pivot, trying to bring his pauldron around to take the hit, but the exhaustion had robbed him of his usual speed. The jagged blade of the halberd punched through the gap in his armour, right beneath his ribs, tearing through chainmail, boiled leather, and flesh with a sickening crunch.
Bhel’s roar died in his throat, replaced by a wet, strangled gasp. The kobold wrenched the halberd sideways, tearing the wound wider, and kicked out. The heavy, scaled foot planted squarely on Bhel’s chest, launching the massive warrior backward.
Bhel flew over the wreckage of the barricade, crashing down onto the blood-slicked stones of the plaza with a bone-shattering thud. His axe clattered away, spinning into the darkness. He didn't get up. A dark, terrifying pool of crimson imdiately began to spread rapidly across the grey stone beneath him.
"No!" Josh roared, a surge of adrenaline tearing through the fog of his exhaustion.
He threw himself in front of the gap, his shield slamming into the snout of the halberd-wielder, breaking bone and sending it staggering back.
"I can't reach him!" Brett shrieked from the battlents, pure terror in his voice. He abandoned his position, sprinting wildly towards the nearest stone stairwell leading down to the plaza, desperate to get to his friend.
Josh backed up until he was standing over Bhel’s fallen body, never lowering his shield, taking a rain of battering blows that numbed his arm from the shoulder down. He planted his boots on either side of his friend, his sword lashing out to keep the monsters from descending on them.
He glanced down for a fraction of a second. It was bad. Terrible. The wound was a gaping ruin, frothing with bright red arterial blood. Bhel’s hands were clamped over it, his knuckles white, but the blood simply pulsed out between his thick fingers. The dwarf's eyes were wide, unfocused, staring up at the smoke-choked sky, his chest heaving in erratic, shallow jerks.
He’s dying, Josh realised, a cold terror gripping his heart. He’s bleeding out right here, and I can't stop it.
A heavy warhamr slamd into Josh’s shield, pushing him back a step. His arm felt broken. The dented steel of his shield was groaning under the strain. In front of him, the three crimson kobolds lood, raising their weapons for the killing blow.
Josh gritted his teeth, raising his sword. If this was the end, he was going to take at least one of these bastards with him.
Reviews
All reviews (0)