I remained on the roof, looking out the death and destruction, wondering how we could survive this... but as the initial shock wore off I began to look at things with more equanimity.
Perhaps what initially appeared to be an apocalyptic disaster was not the end of the village. After all, nobody down in the safe rooms had seemed to have given up hope - or even been all that frightened, once the initial panic of the mad rush to the fortress had subsided.
A fair number of my fellow villagers had a worried air about them, perhaps thinking about their spouses and family members as they stared at the door anxiously, like Mom had been doing when I last checked on her, but I didn't think they were concerned for their own safety. There might even be some kind of plan in place, or a solution that I didn't know about yet!
My musing was interrupted when a group of armored villagers joined me on the roof. I finally got to see the centrally placed metal contraption in operation as they passed through it carefully, a complicated process that involved passing individually through three interlocking zones. The whole thing was enclosed in a thick metal cage about the size of a house, and the whole thing made no sense until I witnessed it in operation.
The hatch began opening, smoothly inching upwards so gradually that I deduced there was probably a mechanism operating it.
The first armored villager, a green-haired man armed with a sword and a crossbow, climbed out of the hatch and looked around warily as he stepped onto the roof. He began taking wooden logs that were handed to him from below and pushing them through the cage onto the roof outside, making four log piles that clued me into what was going on - the villagers were going to feed the bonfires! That explained how they were still burning so brightly after nearly a day had passed.
Next, he moved to the gate to the middle zone and spent a moment tinkering with something I couldn't see. Soon the hatch behind him began to close, while the gate swung up out of his way and into the air near the top of the cage. He passed into the second area and began spinning a large wheel which brought the gate down, yet the hatch stayed closed.
Once the gate had closed, the green-haired man moved to the portcullis that bordered the third and final zone inside the cage, which was also by far the largest. There were a series of levers that he manipulated, some up and some down, which caused the thick bars of the portcullis to smoothly lift into the air, sticking out of the cage through a narrow gap. He walked into the newly opened zone - which was separated from the wide open roof by a second portcullis - and then just stood there as if waiting for something.
Shortly thereafter, the hatch started opening again to let another villager onto the roof, and the process began to repeat itself. The only difference was that the first portcullis moved down by itself as the hatch started raising, making me wonder if there was a mechanical interlock that required one to be closed for the other to open.
The green-haired villager was now sealed in the third section of the cage by himself, but it wasn't long before a handful of people passed through the gauntlet and joined him. Eventually, the hatch closed for the final time, and without warning the portcullises began to smoothly swap positions, with one ascending at precisely the same pace the other descended. If the villagers had initiated the change - which seemed likely since none of them were surprised - I had missed it.
They began adding wood to the bonfires, and I watched them for a while as I dealt with my disappointment at the fact that my missing father wasn't in this group. I had felt a mounting sense of expectation as each emerged from the heavy metal hatch in the roof, even though I knew it was a foolishly far-fetched hope.
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I thought I heard (or, more accurately, perceived) a distant crash from behind me as the villagers approached the bonfire closest to me, two of them still holding stacks of wood, and when they flinched in surprise I knew that they had heard it too. The green-haired man barked out a sharp command, and two of them started sprinting back toward the cage in the center of the roof. The remaining villagers set down their burdens, drew their crossbows, and began moving in the direction the sound had come from.
I moved with them, accidentally poking through the kneecap of one of them (a woman with pretty brown hair, framed nicely by the coiling goat horns growing out of the side of her head) in my effort to adjust the shape of my soul-rope (she didn't notice).
Soon I was able to make out a large group of people moving towards us, surrounded on all sides by the shadow wolves. There must have been nearly a hundred people in total, and I was astonished that they were still alive out there. The group was composed of dozens of adults, a few score children (none looked younger than eight or nine), and fourteen soldiers wearing a style of painted red armor I had never seen before.
They were unmistakably struggling against the horde, but somehow the small group of just over a dozen soldiers was managing to hold the monsters at bay.
I watched a tall lanky woman leap through the air faster than should have been possible, spinning madly with a huge sword in each hand as she chopped off the heads off of three wolves in quick succession. Two more soldiers were fighting in tandem, their movements in sync as they danced from monster to monster, striking them down quicker than I could clearly see. The rest were similarly impressive, displaying speed and coordination that put the beasts to shame, like heroic figures out of a kung-fu movie. I could hardly believe what I was witnessing!
Yet at the same time, I could tell they were struggling to protect such a large group: Even if the shadow wolves were weaker than them individually, their superior numbers made it impossible to stop them all. Even as I watched, one of the adults in the group screamed in pain and stumbled, blood gushing from his leg as a monster tore into him from behind. A warhammer crushed the monstrous wolve's head in shortly after, but the damage had been done. The wolf had managed to lunge past the towering soldier wielding the warhammer while he was distracted, but I could hardly blame the soldier as he was being attacked from all sides, and his position was about to be overrun - he didn't appear injured, but he was noticeably slower than the rest of the soldiers, and the pressure from the attacking wolves was continuously mounting against him.
One of the soldiers covering another area (which looked clear of threats) abruptly ran straight at a two-story house next to him... and ran straight UP the freaking wall as if gravity just didn't concern him. Then, to make it even worse, he vaulted straight over the group of fleeing villagers and started to drop onto the shadow wolves packed around the overwhelmed warhammer-wielding soldier. The falling soldier landed blade first, slicing right through the head of a beast and then straight into the stones below. And then it got really weird...
The guards on the wall around me gasped in awe as a circle of fire rapidly spread out from the site of impact, rising explosively from the stone itself in concentric rings, killing and burning all the wolves around him. The fire also washed over the other solder, but he looked to have braced himself as if expecting it, holding his warhammer out in a tight two-handed grip between himself and his firely savior. The soldiers both moved back into their original positions once the group was again (more or less) secure, but their progress up the street had slowed to a crawl.
Next, I saw a woman appear on a rooftop above the group, long pink hair billowing wildly around her. She spun a short bronze spear in the air and then pointed it down towards the street, arcs of bright lighting springing from it into one group of wolves after another in rapid succession. She was singlehandedly killing or maiming the monsters quickly enough that the pressure on the other soldiers diminished greatly, allowing the whole group to push onward toward the gigantic stone fortress in the center of the village (which I was on top of).
The guards around me on the wall let out a rousing cheer, but I was starting to wonder if I was dreaming. Superpowers!? What the heck kind of world was this!?