Talia rushed up the steps to the battlements two at a time, caught in her disbelief. Her mindsense stretched across the fortress and into the tunnel beyond, threatening to overwhelm her with the countless flickering minds of the Aberrant. The abominations stumbled over themselves, pressing up against the walls like a pile of vile puppies seeking out their mother’s teat. From what she could tell, the only reason the defenders hadn’t been overwhelmed yet was because of the creatures’ single-minded, suicidal focus. They sluiced across the foot of the walls blindly, piling over themselves in an effort to force their way past the heavily armoured defenders that held the narrow gap in the gates.

The seemingly bestial tactic struck Talia as odd, considering how intelligent the creatures had proven themselves to be in the past, but she put the thought out of her mind as she rounded up to the top of the wall and laid sight on the horde for the first time. When she did, she realized that the Aberrant’s intelligence—or lack thereof—probably wouldn’t be an issue. They didn’t need to fight smart when their number blanketed the tunnel like a sharp, oily carpet.

Light and heat bloomed. Talia raised an arm to block a rush of hot air past her face as the assembled defenders fired off a salvo of fireballs from their wands in synchrony. The mass of flame incinerated a swathe of the monstrosities, leaving limping and screeching survivors to be trampled by the ones behind them. The regimented way they went back to firing their bows and crossbows reminded Talia to stick her clicker back in her mouth, the little black oval vibrating in her hand as she pulled it out of its pouch.

She found Torval, Calisto and Darkclaw standing outside the gatehouse, overlooking the defence with their cowls down. Torval’s huge black bow twanged as fast he could nock arrows to its string, while the battlemaster and the chronicler looked on grimly as monstrosity after monstrosity fell, only to be replaced. Next to them, a metre or so down the battlement, the triplets poured over the chassis of the ash lance, seeming at odds over how to make the thing function.

It's not that complicated…is it? Just turn it on, point, and fire. Ugh, I should’ve at least shown someone else how to use it.

But her recent fixation with self-recrimination would help no one. Shaking her head, Talia stalked past the officers—patting Darkclaw on the shoulder as she passed—and shooed the sheepish gnomes away from her artefact. They were so short she wasn’t even sure what their plan had been once they’d gotten the thing working. Stand on each other’s shoulders maybe?

Either way, it looked like she’d been fast enough that her absence behind the weapon hadn’t shifted the course of the battle, and now, with it on their side, she was well-placed to give the defenders of the breach some room to breathe.

Talia fought off the urge to grin as the chassis of the lance vibrated to life under her palms, a low thrum of air being pulled through its barrel, waiting, begging for the stone dust to hit the firing chamber. She fiddled with the settings, broadening the jet somewhat and increasing its power to compensate for the range she’d be shooting at, while remaining mindful that blinding her fellows could be catastrophic.

Her palate twinged with clicker calls—status reports, orders, and the like—but she ignored them all. If Darkclaw had a specific target in mind, she was confident he would let her know. For now, the goal was simple: kill as many as she possibly could.

And so that’s what she did.

The jet of molten rock spewed forth from the mouth of the ash lance like the fury of a choleric god, coating the ranks of the Aberrant with incandescent rock, vaporizing their corrupted flesh and cracking the metal amalgam of their bones. The swarm’s unholy screeching mixed with the high-pitched whine of distressed metal to create an infernal threnody that battered at Talia’s ears.

When the metal of the barrel itself began to glow, Talia cut depressed the trigger, letting the artefact cool and looking over the damage she’d caused. The ash lance had drawn a scorched line across the floor of the tunnel, leaving in its wake a mass of steaming and smouldering corpses that began disintegrating into a puddle of oily tar. Seeing the damage, Talia pictured what she’d be able to do if she was level with the horde, able to sweep across it with impunity. The carnage she’d be able to inflict… But that was neither here nor there. The attack created a gap in the horde, and for a moment, Talia thought the defenders might cheer at the small victory.

Then the battlemaster capitalized on the groupings she’d created; the Aberrant had scurried away from the line of the lance, clustering even tighter on either side and priming themselves for a dozen or two well-placed fireballs.

Fwoom—WOOSH

Talia covered her eyes with a hand as the conflagration raked across the clusters that had pressed themselves against the base of the wall, mimicking her prior jet of superheated dust with a more explosive twist.

For an eternity of a half dozen seconds, the tunnel was filled with the screech of dying aberrations and the woosh of fireballs.

By the stone this is crazy. They’re going to write stories about this if we ever get home—when we get home.

Seeing that the barrel of the ash lance had cooled, Talia lined up for another pass, only to stop as she felt a clawed hand tap her on the arm. Darkclaw gestured for her to wait as he gave out the order for another volley of massed fireballs.

Talia nodded, taking the opportunity to refill her ammunition from the conveniently placed kegs at her feet. When she was done, Darkclaw beckoned to her, describing what he wanted through a series of hand signs and clicker calls. Once she’d grasped what he was getting at, she grinned darkly, nodding her understanding.

Lining up her target, she waited. And waited. Until the swarm had normalized and the patchy areas had been filled with the seemingly endless chaff the Aberrant always had to spare. Then, at his command, she activated the jet, dragging it across the mass in a parabolic arc. The abominations scurried out of the way of Talia’s ray of death, trampling over each other in an effort to avoid it, packing themselves in between the jet and the beam.

Simultaneously, Darkclaw sent the call for another volley, incinerating even more of the mindless foes.

And then the cycle repeated, continuing until the lance got low on mana and the volleys of fireballs grew ever sparser as wands depleted. Osra, her magic less useful at this range than her role as a mana battery, ran the round of the battlement, picking up depleted wands and charging them as fast as she could, becoming more and more haggard every time she passed by. Surreptitiously, Talia began funnelling mana from her Core into the ash lance whenever she had the opportunity, fully aware that their current success rested on its power.

We’re winning! It’s taking everything we have, but we’re fucking doing it.

The swarm had gotten progressively thinner, and though the knock-on effect was that Darkclaw’s tactic was less effective, that was just due to how few of the Aberrant were left. To both the visible eye and Talia’s mindsense—its ranged reduced by the lance’s demand on her mana—less and less of the monstrosities were making their way down the tunnel to assault the breach.

The effect bordered on being surreal. What had at first seemed insurmountable odds had spun in their favour through force of magic and proper tactics. The trio of delvers in heavy plate down in the breach swapped out every once in a while, but so far, none had been downed or even wounded.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Good cheer spread through the ranks, palpable enough that even though she wasn’t looking for it, Talia felt the upswell in morale through her sense.

It’s almost…too easy.

And of course, it was.

The shift happened after another pass of the lance-fireball combination. Talia felt the blur-flicker in her mindsense of something larger skate its way past—no—over the ranks of the remaining chaff, skittering across the ceiling like a spider in a race toward the wall. When she looked up, she could barely spot it, even with her dark vision, but its trajectory was obvious.

‘Incoming’ she clicked to Darkclaw, pointing to the dark shape as it beelined toward her.

The battlemaster frowned, shooting her a curious look before noticing what she’d pointed to and calling out to nearby delvers. Torval turned to look as well, nocking an arrow and sighting, along with a few of the archers nearby.

Time slowed to a crawl. Too many things happening at once for Talia to process.

Below, the Aberrant chaff conglomerated, making a concerted push for the breach that was only barely repulsed—

The pair of archers missed, their arrows going wide as the shape on the ceiling high above swerved—

Reaaatriichhhhrwub

Talia’s blood froze as she recognized the magmamander’s warbling call—

Torval managed to land a hit on the shape on the ceiling, making it stumble but failing to stop it—

The ground shook—

A plate-mailed beastkin was ripped from the defensive line and pulled kicking and screaming into the horde by a bipedal Aberrant that looked eerily like a human, his body ripped to shreds by the swarm before his comrades could get to him—

The blurry shape on the ceiling raced closer, looking for all the world like a tunnel drake—

It doesn’t just look like one, it is one.

Talia thought back to the drake whose corpse they’d left by the wayside on their way over.

We should’ve burned it—

That thought was Talia’s last before the corrupted beast dropped from the ceiling onto the wall, falling straight down onto the dwarven woman who’d missed it just a few moments earlier. A flash of pain and fear was all Talia felt from her before a resounding snap echoed across the battlements and she lay still.

The Aberrant drake’s neck clicked and cracked disgustingly as it tore into the dwarf’s lightly armoured corpse, exposed tendons pulling sinuously taught, rubbing against silver spines coated in black tar. The scales on one side of its ribcage had been peeled back, revealing internal organs partially turned to silver and black sludge, beating and pulsing erratically. Ribs and bones shattered by wagon wheels had been sharpened to wicked points and twisted chaotically.

Its movements were slow and predatory, belying the grace that its sleek black form had once possessed. Milky eyes swirled madly in their orbits, twisting unnaturally to focus on the command group.

That answers why there’re so godsdamned many of them—the corpse fields on the way in must’ve been a feast for them.

Talia quacked as she wondered what else the Aberrant had perverted, unsheathing her sword and stepping forward with her shield raised, a spell already forming in her mind.

To the delver’s credit, the moment of shock and realization was short-lived. Torval and the remaining nearby archer began peppering it with arrows, while Darkclaw continued to give orders while limbering up his battle-axe. Calisto pulled out her spiked mace, finally able to participate in the fight.

Then, it moved, sluicing across the battlements toward them—no, not them, toward the ash lance. Whatever was guiding the swarm had clearly had enough of its meddling, either unaware or uncaring of the fact that it was running low on mana.

Talia moved on instinct, Calisto’s shout behind her a blur of words that didn’t register. The arcanist stepped forward to the side, powering up her mother’s arming sword and allowing the drake to shear itself on her blade—or so she thought.

The vorpal edge glided through the Aberrant’s chest—until it didn’t, pinging off of the metal in its ribs and getting stuck, throwing Talia to the ground and disrupting her focus before she could cast the spell that would send it careening off the wall.

The drake stumbled, suddenly losing its balance as the ligaments in one of its legs tore and snapped. Calisto stepped up to smash it in the skull with her mace, Darkclaw right behind her with an overhand swing that carved into the shoulder opposite where Talia’s sword remained stuck fast.

Skreeiaaat

The drake recoiled, its balance shaking as it scrabbled away from the battlemaster’s follow-up swing. Pulling herself upright, Talia crouched low, inadvertently mimicking the drake itself as it lowered its belly to the ground, its back legs tensing like a spring.

Torval broke the stalemate, sending an arrow streaking over Calisto’s shoulder to land right in its eye. Talia watched as he reached for another projectile, dropping his bow when he found his arrow bag empty and unsheathing his serrated shortswords.

The command complement of the expedition surrounded the Aberrant, Talia expanding her shield to cover the entire wall as she pulled the Infiniwand from its strap on her leg.

“I’ll push it forward,” Talia called, her voice muddled by her clicker “you slash it to bits!”

But the drake had other plans, twisting its neck unnaturally toward the ash lance on its tripod, with only Torval in its way.

It pounced, landing on the delvemaster and tearing into his shoulder with jagged teeth before propelling itself at the artefact, dragging the lance with itself over the wall. Talia’s thoughts stuttered to a halt as she watched the artefact fall over the edge, torn from its tripod and tumbling down end over end.

Oh please please please don’t explode.

Numbly, she registered Calisto’s shriek of grief as the chronicler rushed to Torval’s side, but Talia ignored them, sprinting to the edge of the battlement where the lance was falling much like an idiotic gnome had just hours ago. Its chassis bent under the unholy strength of the Aberrant drake. She could almost imagine rune channels twisting just so.

The safety function should prevent it, but I had to go ahead and modify the thing so who knows how effective—

The lance tumbled from the drake’s grip, falling under the lip of the battlement toward the gate and out of view as the Aberrant scrabbled for purchase against the wall, its sole remaining eye milky and rage-filled.

Fuck, if there are gods, please let it just land and do nothing.

Someone was shaking her shoulder, their cries sounding like mumbles in her ears.

Talia ran the scenario in her head, taking into account how much mana was in the device and the possible points of failure.

It was almost empty, so if we’re lucky—

As soon as Talia thought it, she realized how stupid she sounded, coming out of her daze and springing to action, crouching down next to Calisto helping her pick up Torval, his arm and shoulder ripped to an unrecognizable mass of shredded flesh. Before they could so much as lift him up however, the wall shook.

The world went white for a moment and time seemed to stutter. An electric crackle filled the air, chasing after the eerily quiet explosion.

The discordant shrieking of the horde cut out as if some god had waved their hand and decided that sound was no longer a part of reality. Cries of anguish from the defenders at the gate were torn from their throats before evaporating just as quickly. Talia felt it in her mindsense as the mass of numberless Aberrant teeming at the gate simply...ceased to be, along with four of the six defenders below, the last two somehow surviving through a stroke of luck. What state they were in was a different question all together.

As she scoured her mindsense for evidence of more of the monstrosities—finding none nearby—Talia thought for but a moment that the Aberrant, in their haste to get rid of the lance, had simultaneously doomed themselves.

Then she felt them, flickering minds, a little more than a dozen all told, but stronger, more real, running towards the fortress with a final, unfathomable consciousness bringing up the rear. That magmamander had finally shown itself, and if she wasn't mistaken, to kill it, they would have to fight through a corrupted cadre of the expedition's own fallen.

Crackle-crack-BOoM

The arcanist felt the impact of the ancient gates to Karzurkul crashing to the ground in her chest like the beat of a drum.

Darkclaw's clicker call for another volley was quickly—too quickly—followed by a call for retreat.

Warble—Reaaratcchhhh

The Aberrant magmamander pressed forward with its vanguard of corrupted sapients while Talia helped Torval and Calisto limp down the battlements, the chronicler frantically stuffing the delvemaster's wound with strips of her robe, fumbling with a tourniquet.

In many ways, they'd succeeded in their goals. The swarm of Aberrant was cut down to size, leaving only the tougher, more capable abominations for them to face. As she looked around with both her eyes and her sense, however, Talia wondered if maybe they'd have been better off blowing up the bridge in the first place and damn the consequences.

What's done is done. Now we just make sure to lure that big bastart onto the bridge and get to the other side with whoever's left before it blows.