The blast threw me, Lulu, Angel and Solomon away from the gatehouse and across the dirt. Lulu took the brunt of it, her high Defense the only thing that saved her from evaporating under the intense heat. The humans went flying. Even I rolled a couple of times before springing back up to my feet, shocked and panting.

The Ironwood gate had 10,000 HP. Emphasis on 'had'. It was now two burning crescent-shaped wedges hanging off red-hot hinges, which creaked as the remaining weight of the doors pulled them apart like hot taffy. Behind them, Kaban still sat on his legion's back. He had his sword outstretched, a shield strapped to his other arm. The thundersprite whirled behind the Anzu's head, spinning like a dynamo while the gryphon-like beast gaped its mouth, charging up another energy shot.

"GET OUT OF THE WAY!" I broadcast the telepathic imperative to the stunned rebels behind me, yanking a pair of men off their feet and tossing them to the side as I scrambled out of the way myself. Lulu did the sensible thing and flattened against the dirt as the next piercing ray blasted the remains of the doors off their hinges. The light boiled the stone archway and anyone and anything in its path. Acrid-smelling slag slumped to the earth, and the gatehouse groaned as it listed to one side.

"So much for this place being defensible," I thought to Angel.

Angel was helping Solomon get to his feet. "No shit."

"Angel! Noodles! Lulu! Don't you even THINK of staying here!" Merc barked at us from the top of the ladder, still clutching her megaphone. "None of this last stand bullshit. Get your asses to you-know-where! We'll hold the line here!"

Even as she said that, the first wave of Centurions let out a warcry and ran forward: into the minefield Angel and her team of sappers had engineered. The roars turned to screams as the traps detonated, sending limbs and blood flying. Then the autoturrets started up. Mounted up in the gatehouse, the Vickers unloaded on the ranks of Centurions with a steady stream of fire that sent even Kaban scattering to the side and then into the air.

Angel was frozen in place at Merc's order. Every ounce of loyalty was urging her to stay and help her friends. It was Lulu who broke her trance - the Limne let out a forceful little HUP and scooped her up, bouncing over to me. She didn't so much drop Angel as slap her to my back like flypaper and swarm up over my body. "Noodoo! Luu gooo!"

"Don't have to tell me twice." I wanted to stand and fight, but Merc's strategy made total sense. There was no smoke rising to the south of the city, no haze of war on the horizon. My deal with Clive was a bust. It was down to the three of us to breach Fortuna and pull the Centurions in multiple directions if Merc, Doc, Solomon and their people were to have any chance of survival.

For the third time since reaching Pervert Torture Island, I turned tail and ran. Angel cussed me and Lulu the whole way to the quarry wall - English, Sign and Spanish - but she wasn't fighting. She knew as well as I did that we had one shot at making this right.

***

Fortuna was a giant fortress. Fifty-foot walls with Roman concrete cores and brick facades, faced with crenelations and studded with sharp wooden spikes. The walls were smooth, and curved slightly outwards to prevent climbing. The gates were huge, also built with concrete and stone. Archways decorated in surprisingly competent reliefs of Kaban, mostly. The heroic Imperator. If the images were accurate, then underneath his helmet, Kaban looked like a washed-out MMA fighter or boxer. Crooked nose, heavy brow, surprisingly pouty lips. He reminded me of a famous actor from the Millennial Age of Hollywood, some fifty or sixty years ago. Guy named Stallone. But Kaban had a weaker chin.

Getting into Fortuna unannounced was almost impossible, unless you had a flying legion. Or unless you were me. Because yeah, Fortuna had massive walls - about three miles of them - but they didn't have three miles worth of guards. Kaban was shooting his shot at Ironside right now, and Fortuna itself was being manned by a skeleton crew. All parts of the wall were lit, but here and there on the eastern side, there were patches of darkness. Byways I could leverage with Shadow Cloak.

Claws digging into mortar, I half-climbed, half crab-walked up between the buttresses. It took time. It took patience. But it was surprisingly easy, and I still had most of my stamina by the time I pushed myself over the top and dropped to the unmanned patch of walkway.

"Getting down is gonna be the hard part." I dropped my head and ran like a possum, limbs and body low to the ground. More of a scurry, really. "Walking us up here was doable, but no fucking way am I going to have the leverage on those walls to walk us down."

"We need to find a berm," Angel voiced softly. "To get equipment up onto these walls, they need a ramp of some kind. It's probably a rammed earth berm, like a hill built against parts of the wall from the inside. They offer support and thickness from the back, and provide like... several tons of impact protection, so they're probably beside the city gates."

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Where the garrison will be concentrated." But it was what we had, because I'd learned the hard way that my ass wasn't made for any fall higher than about twenty feet. "Speaking of, Clive asked me to sabotage any siege equipment on the walls as a precondition for him invading the city. So we need to find them and kill them."

"Or leave them, and let him deal," Angel's voice took a bitter note. "He's not coming, you know."

"I know. Even if he does, he'll be too late." I headed south, toward the big eastern gate - the Arcus Regalis, which I wasn’t even sure was real Latin.

Angel rode low, head down against the back of my neck while I loped down the cool stone with a whisper of sound. Lulu had her glued to my back, the Limne unusually still and silent. Ahead of us, a covered watchtower loomed - and within it, two men. I could hear them talking, making use of the easy post. One leaned against the hip-high crenellation, a pike resting in the crook of his arm, a tall shield on his back. The other was scanning the ground outside, looking for any unusual traffic beyond the wall. There were no catapults on the walls, like Clive had feared. But there were turrets. Turrets like ours, the machinegun kind, and a few junk turrets. A few ballistae.

"We're about to have company." I slowed down warily, hanging back in the shadow cast by the tower. It didn't provide much concealment by itself, but Shadow Cloak did the lion's share. "Two guys at least. They're inside that tower."

Angel lifted her head up and looked over the wall into the city. She tapped me, and pointed down. About twenty feet below, an orange tiled roof sloped down toward the street. "Once we're done, we can get down using that roof there. Also, how many EXP do you have before you hit Level 25?"

I snorted softly through my grille of nostrils. "I’m two hundred and change away from Level 24. We could get the EXP to hit max level from one or two good Legion fights, maybe. But unless these guys are elites, I won't get any EXP from killing them. But if we disable those catapults-"

"Noodles... fuck the siege equipment. Lie to Clive, tell him we did it," Angel voiced, keeping her voice soft. She sounded... bitter. "Every minute we wait is another minute Kaban is overrunning Ironside. We can't waste the chance the Maroons gave us. They're paying for our opportunity with their blood."

With a sigh and one last look at the men - they still hadn't noticed us yet - I spun and ran back toward the roof Angel had pointed out. "Right. Well, this will be a crunchy landing, so-"

"Hold onto my panties, I know."

As I vaulted over the crenulation, Lulu suckered onto the bricks to slow our descent. Even so, it was a hard landing. Terracotta tiles slipped and skidded under my claws as I hit the slope and slid down all the way to the gutter. The noise was obscenely loud, like a gunshot going off in the quiet, darkened city. But no one came out. Steady lamplight burned behind closed shutters in the buildings around. Barred shutters, I noticed. The non-combatants of the guild were hunkering down, probably under orders. All the remaining soldiers were deployed to strategic entry points within Fortuna.

"This place… it’s too quiet." I bounded the last fifteen feet or so to the road. Compared to the rest of Malae, this place looked neat, orderly, civilized. Cobblestone roads, neat rowhouse villas, fruit trees planted inside of little metal rings. There were drains and clean water fountains. But it was cold, impersonal. Like a city designed by a cult. The real Rome hadn't been built out of white marble - all the nude white marble statues displayed in museums had once been covered in bright paint, with the stone serving only as a base for the Roman love of color. But the Centurions obviously didn't know that. Everything here was pale, pure. Oppressive in a way even the filthy Pigs camps weren't. As we ran past barricaded shops and darkened taverns, I couldn't help but notice the poles out front. They were like short bronze lamp posts, but they all had big heavy rings welded onto them in four directions. Some were low down, for pets or lesser legions. Some were at human neck height, for slaves. “Gives me the creeps."

"Same, so let’s not stay here longer than we have to. Rachini's temple is on the hill at the center of the city," Angel signed. "We're nearly there."

We were climbing uphill, hitting Shadow Cloak every time the effect ended. I stuck to the shadows of hedges and fences, waiting in concealment as patrols of Centurions and their legions rode by. Tension gnawed at my gut as we left cover and loped across the street. All roads led to the temple mount, radiating from it like the rays of a great sun. But the temple itself was at odds with the rest of the city. A towering black stone cube flanked by thin towers, it was in the same savage style as Vanara's half-sunken temple and Karkinos' lair, alien architecture of a bygone era. The temple complex jutted rudely from the top of the hill, the black heart brooding at the center of Kaban's clean white-and-gold city. And it was crawling with elites. The processional ramp leading to the columns at the entry had a wall of elite soldiers and their legions standing two abreast. They walked the perimeter and idled on the streets behind hastily erected barricades that blocked traffic from every direction. But there were gaps. The temple mount was surrounded by terraced gardens.

"I could fight these guys, but we’ll burn ourselves out before Rachini if we do. So we either go in fully leveled and exhausted, or slightly underleveled and fresh. Either way, we need a distraction. A big one." My eyes narrowed as I scoped out the concentration of security from our vantage point: the mouth of an alley that looked over the grand plaza at the base of the hill. "We can set up an explosion and make a run for it. If we kill a just few of these guys, Lulu and I will both level to 24. And if we level..."

"... Then we can beat Rachini. We can win this if we’re only one level under max," Angel finished. "I hate to admit I was wrong, but let's backtrack a little. Clive might not be riding for the southern gate, but I have enough explosive gel left over to make them think he is."