Chapter 51 - Clear the Way

Clusterfuck. I never truly appreciated that word up until now. I’d never been in the middle of a major operation before, so I had no real way of knowing how they were supposed to go. However, the amount of running back and forth, gear being taken off and put on, pissed off Sergeants, and last minute inspections, all happening at the same time, dispelled a lot of illusions for me about how big military groups were run.

People ran to and fro, carrying things, dropping things, shouting to one another. Formations were called together, broken apart, and reformed elsewhere. Beleaguered students with clipboards trailed behind officers, hastily flipping through pages of checklists.

At the center of it all, Jassin, flanked by Garret, his Master at Arms. They floated from group to group solving problems, changing group compositions, and keeping the runners running to get everyone what they needed.

The two didn’t come near my group, however. Jassin never even glanced my way, which came as no surprise. We’d had our talk. I knew the stakes. Now, it was up to me how to proceed. He was going to treat me like my cover was real, meaning disinterest at best, mild hostility at worst.

When we’d shown up to the planning session for the war council, the man slipped into that mild hostility role like he’d practiced it, but we got the go-ahead for our part of the plan in the end. Our participation would cost the regular army nothing and gain them the use of my machines. As far as everyone except Jassin was concerned, there were no downsides to allowing us a spot in the operation. Sissa had hammered that point home repeatedly. I just stood there and did my best approximation of dark and mysterious.

We were underground, somewhere between three floors below street level and ten. The Spire got grander the lower you went, flaring outward until its base went out twice or three times as wide as the above ground portion, more spacious too. This place we were using as a staging area gave me the impression of a converted warehouse or storage room. It was tall and wide with even flooring, big barn doors, and empty shelving hastily shoved to the perimeter of the room to give the military more space to maneuver.

“Glad to have you with us, Rising Sun,” a stocky man carrying a pike against his shoulder said as he hurried by, tossing a hasty salute my way and not waiting for a response. I did my best to make encouraging noises as I waved back at him, but I wasn’t sure if I pulled it off. I wasn’t handling this ‘legend’ thing very well, and I wasn’t getting any better at it, even after all the practice I’d had in the halls as of late. No one warned me that being famous was an awkward thing where people recognized you and respected you without you ever having met.

I pulled my borrowed cloak tighter around my shoulders, not quite ready to cinch the hood yet but wanting to seem like I was preparing myself just like everyone else was, if only to get them to stop looking at me like I was an example to follow.

“He’s not even armed. No armor either. Takes balls, it does,” I heard someone say.

“Maybe more of him’s metal than we see there,” someone replied. “If you take my meaning. Eh? Eh?”

“I take it just fine. Just wasn’t prepared to think about it like that. Saw him crush an undead’s head with that hand. Hate to see what he could do with the other bits.”

Was it too late to fake my own death?

“Did you really have to give away my turrets?” Geddon whined for the third time. “I’m going to miss the thunder.” The big man emphasized that last word with clenched fists and looked wistfully upward as if reminiscing about the boom of the guns.

“The Riverside crew are going to need them,” I replied, relieved to have someone I knew to talk to instead of trying and failing to not be noticed. “They’re a known quantity, and we know they’re effective without me there to feed them. Relax, I’ve got the new ones.”

Geddon’s mouth turned down in a textbook cringe. “That’s what concerns me. Those just don’t have the… impact of the loud ones. There’s still time to switch, you know.”

“Our Brother doesn’t want to catch fire, Brother Ryan,” Trix admitted on Geddon’s behalf.

Trix, like me, didn’t have a whole lot of gear to put on or adjust, so he stood to my side watching all the other dramas play out. He carried his new Kotes’ Carbine (patent pending) covered on a makeshift sling and a belt of extra mags over his shoulder. That didn’t stop him from picking up some of the nervous energy in the room, though. Every once in a while, I saw him stroking the weapon, and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear him whispering to it as well, so intense was his love for his new toy.

Even now, without any outside stimulus, I saw one of those Volpa full body shudders take hold of him.

We’re going to have to talk about that sometime.

I rolled my eyes. “For the love of- No one’s catching fire this time, and I still brought a couple of the ballistic turrets. I just don’t want to use them until we’re all set up. More effective that way,” I assured them. In reality, I wasn’t entirely sure how the scourge-touched shared consciousness worked or how strategic its thought process was, so I didn’t want to reveal that card until we were dug in. Would they recognize my old turrets? If so, would they come running, thinking I was there?

“Besides, they spit out metal at or above the speed of sound, they deafen you, and they run hot enough to char skin. How are you okay with having that on your back and not the new stuff?” I asked Geddon.

“It’s the aesthetic. Also the accuracy.” Geddon said, mumbling the last part and throwing a dubious glance over my shoulder as if he could see into my spatial storage.

I wasn’t about to let my new babies be insulted like that. “The new ones hit their targets too.”

“And then some,” Samila quipped quietly under her breath.

I grimaced and wobbled my head side to side, pained to admit they were in, totally immaterial ways, correct. The new turrets were awesome, though. Everyone would come around eventually.

“Okay. One in ten isn’t a great success rate, but they make up for it in volume.”

“Sounds like only a slight improvement over Geddon’s proficiency on the range,” Sissa stated, emerging from the crowd of hustling soldiers to enter our little circle. She, like the rest of the church guards, was already strapped into her freshly polished and repaired plate and chain, carrying her helm under one arm and resting her other hand on the pommel of her sword. I observed the patches on her chain, the scuffs on her gauntlets. I could have done better work than that, but I’d not been asked.

Sissa turned to me to give me a look. “You are going to stay with us this time, I assume?”

I tried to not look guilty and failed. Still, I’d gone over the last battle time and again in my head, and even knowing how much trust I squandered, I’d do it all again if given the chance.

“That’s the plan,” was all I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Is it, though?”

There was a long, meaningful pause.

I left it alone. It was going to take time to build trust again, and it wouldn’t happen any faster if I insisted on having the last word.

“Our guide should be meeting up with us shortly,” Sissa announced, finally turning to address everyone else.

“We have a guide?” Trix asked, tilting his head to the side. “Since when?”

Sissa shrugged. “I’m as surprised as you are. I thought we’d use the smuggler’s key and be on our own again like always, but, apparently, Headmaster Jassin has access to some unsavory sorts, Riverside rats, most likely.”

“It’s not doing much for my civic pride to know that the university knew the smuggler’s tunnels so well and had a plan to use them,” Geddon said.

“And had people familiar enough with them to act as our guide. Probably criminals,” Sissa agreed with a nod.

“That’d be me then,” someone said from behind me.

We all had different reactions in that moment, when Corporal Fidus Bole sauntered out of the crowd to sidle up to us. The man had a new look, bearded, dressed down, and a little gaunt, but his voice and his demeanor belonged to the same man I’d fought down in the Undercity.

His guard issue armor seemed to have been scrapped for a set of form fitting, black leathers and his truncheon swapped out for a pair of short swords. A quick flash of Detect Steel told me there were knives behind the man’s belt and at his wrists just above fingerless gloves with steel reinforced knuckles. His unshaven face still managed to look strikingly roguish, helped along by the smug grin he had plastered across his face.

Sissa hissed… I mean she literally hissed in the man’s face.

Geddon put his hand on his sword and took a challenging step forward, ready to throw down.

Trix scrambled up my cloak to perch on my shoulder so he could be eye level with the man. I heard the click of the Vulpa letting the charging handle of the gun lock into place from within the leather cover.

As for my reaction, I was already halfway between the rest of the group and Bole, looking back and forth between my comrades and the Corporal like there was a tennis match being played in front of me.

Samila, in contrast to us all, got very small, tucked herself into the back, well away from her sister. That was interesting.

Bole smirked, looking from face to face, pausing for a lengthy time on Sissa before he said: “Good to see you all again, especially you, darling. Feel like we’ve been missing each other for a while now.” His tone could grease pistons.

Sissa shook her head slowly, her expression morphing from disbelief to something hotter, volcanic. She looked back at her sister, nostrils flared wide as if she were ready to breathe fire. Could they do that? I hadn’t asked.

“This,” she hissed. “This is your man on the inside, isn’t it? This is our source?”

Samila, for the first time since I’d met her, looked ashamed. She wouldn’t meet her sister’s eyes. In fact, she wouldn’t look up from her own boots.

“You’ve been speaking with him the entire time? You ran cover for him? How long?” Sissa asked.

Samila, again, didn’t answer.

Then Bole did the worst thing he could possibly do at that moment. He spoke.

“Don’t be so hard on her, Siss. We’re all on the same side here. You’ll want your best man ‘round for this one, trust me.”

Sissa’s blade was out and against Bole’s neck before anyone could react…. Anyone except Bole. I’d forgotten how fast he was. Bole didn’t react the way you might expect with a sword coming to end your life. He didn’t pull his own blade. Instead, he lifted his chin and stepped into it, dragging his jugular across the edge all the way from the point toward the hilt.

The blade ran down his unshaven skin. The hair parted. At the last moment, Sissa’s wrist bent and changed the sword’s angle. Then they were eye to eye, a sword between the two. Bole just stared at his attacker, unafraid, that stupid grin still on his face. Triumphant. Sissa bared her teeth.

The Corporal had scored a point, however. He’d just gambled and won. Bole banked on the fact that Sissa was better than himself, and he was demonstrating that he could do all sorts of nasty things with that knowledge.

The two of them stood like that for a full second before Sissa pulled away and sheathed her sword in one motion. Her armor hid it, but I thought I saw the hint of a shudder pass through her body.

“Keep up, don’t get in our way, and we’ll get along fine, ‘best man,’” she declared tersely.

Bole bowed slightly. “Your wish is my command, my lady blue,” he replied.

Sissa turned on her heel and stormed off into the bustling crowd. Samila put out a timid hand, but her sister recoiled, yanking her arm away and not stopping until she was gone from sight.

“So,” Bole began as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “How’s everyone been? Hello, Monk. So, you’re a hero now, eh? You cut a better figure without hair if you ask for my opinion.”

I ignored the barb, sparing a look for the rest of my friends before taking a cautious step toward the man, leaning into polite conversation range.

“Bole. You’re alive,” I observed.

“Never waste a day or pay in full,” he replied. It sounded like an idiom, something culturally significant. I let it slide past.

“Last time we spoke I asked you to get everyone out,” I said, remembering the civilians we’d sent with him to escape the Undercity.

“Not to worry. I did just that. If a man sets himself on fire then gives you a quest, you get it done, especially if you were gonna do it anyway. The trip through the tunnels was smooth, but the dead were up our asses soon enough. Came out in Riverside just ahead of the ‘em, and we had to live for a couple weeks on a boat in the middle of the channel.”

“Everyone?” I asked.

“Yeah. Is that so hard to believe?”

“Absolutely. One hundred percent,” I answered honestly.

Bole leaned back and clutched at his chest indignantly. “How dare you. You don’t even know me, Monk.”

“You did try to kill me for a minor slight.”

He snorted. “Yeah, that was great. But I consider the two of us square now. Had some friends in that lot you helped out of their tight spot earlier. Good job. We just gonna stand around talking or are we going to finally get to it?”

—--------------------------------------------

The six of us stood next to the familiar solid quellstone wall that I’d come to associate with exits from the smugglers’ tunnels. This one was at the top of some stairs, and all of us crowded together as close to the wall as we could get without touching it. Geddon stood at the front with Trix tucked directly behind. Sissa and Samila stood on opposite sides of the stairs pressed up against the stairwell’s walls, trailed by Bole and myself. the two of us bringing up the rear.

“If we’re in the right place, we’ll come out in a basement,” Bole whispered softly. “Stairs are on the left. Locked door leads to a loading ramp that should be looking directly at the South Gate. The idea was to crate things up and slip into traffic after the inspection point. Gate’s a bit of a run, though.”

Sissa turned to us all, her face stone, all business. “We come out hard in the basement, then gather at the stairs. Force the door then we move.”

Figuring I was far enough from the Spire now, I reached into my shirt and scooped out the quellstone, making them disappear into my spatial storage again. I instantly felt warmer and more healthy, more here. As I’d been taught, I let my mind drift into that place that was out of focus, the one Jassin said I touched with my magic in that moment between being suppressed and being fully open. I didn’t see anything with my eyes, but I did feel something happening there now that the quellstone wasn’t trying to kill me, an expansion, like I was the epicenter of a slow motion explosion… but a good one. Then the feeling was gone. I sighed in frustration.

I put up the hood on my cloak and slipped on my cloth mask in preparation for the fight to come.

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Sissa spot checked all of us, nodded, then pulled the key necklace out of her armor to wave it at the wall. The bricks click-clacked aside, and we were moving.

We stormed into a basement just like Bole had said. Crates and casks were everywhere. Lots of them were broken open, others intact with a solid layer of dust on the top. Particulates floated lazily in the air, illuminated by sunlight streaming in through the doorway up above.

At Sissa’s signal, we gathered at the stairs and charged up them as well, Geddon shouldering the door at the top aside and nearly taking it off its hinges.

It took me only a second to get used to the morning daylight. Bright blue sky. Huge flaming moon. Deep shadows all around.

Blurry shapes resolved into closely packed wooden buildings to my right, a stone wall to my left, muddy cobblestones making up the road. Straight ahead, through the mouth of the alley I could see the big wooden gates that I’d entered a long time ago, shut now, and the giant arch above with parapets that overlooked the glade beyond.

It was maybe a block and a half away.

Between us and the gates, predictably, were scourge-touched. Packs of black and pale bodies padded on bare feet from one building to the next, ducking into doorways and back out again. Black Ones clambered up gutters, leapt to window sills, hissed and howled at things they saw.

Beyond them, a makeshift barricade of overturned wagons, scrap lumber, and sharpened stakes was jammed between two buildings, effectively blocking our way to the gates. Smoke billowed up from behind it.

We were in the right place.

I got the nod from Sissa and went to work.

This turret was a tall one, about a foot taller than myself once it was set up, with thin, multi jointed legs that ended in hooks. On top, I affixed a circularly packed bundle of long barrels, twelve in all, to a boxy containment housing with a circular hatch on the bottom side for me to reload the thing. I didn’t need to Shape-weld the pieces together, since it wasn't going to have any recoil to speak of, so the whole setup process took maybe thirty seconds with me summoning a piece from my storage and fitting said piece into place the manual way. I felt every one of those seconds, though. Eyes were everywhere.

“You’re using one of the blinky ones?” Geddon whispered. The guy’s voice wasn’t made for whispering, but he gave it a Geddon try. That is to say: forcefully and with zero subtlety. It sounded more like he had a cold than anything. “I thought we were setting things on fire,” he continued.

I shook my head, pulling on the fastener to secure the barrels snuggly into the box housing. “Fire is for later. Everyone remember what I said.”

“We remember,” Sissa assured me. “Now focus and get it done.”

Finally, I slipped the specialized, Automated glow rod into the ammo housing, making sure it made contact with the smart card before closing the hatch and securing the clasp. Instantly, the hooks on the turret’s feet contracted with a quiet *crack* as the hooks dug into the cobblestones.

Good luck flipping this one, you little bastards.

“Done. Ready.” I called quietly.

Sissa got beside me and began the countdown. “Three, two, one. Go.”

I triggered the activation sequence with my mind, a simple trigger that unleashed all of the Volatility mana in the core in a series of sequential ‘mild’ explosions, not nearly hot or forceful enough to destroy the turret, of course. Most of that excess energy was dispersed harmlessly through generous ventilation holes in the back of the housing with a quiet *FWOOSH*

The new turret went on absolute rampage. The Trigger rod shot energy through all of the turret’s systems, activating its rotator joints and its targeting programs. The turret, fully powered now, tracked and fired non-stop. Purple beams of concentrated light blasted out from its twelve barrels simultaneously, laying into the scourge-touched and raking silent death across the scattered monsters (and a lot of the alleyway) with ruthless vigor. Searing white sparks flew out of vents on the back of the housing, bright enough to blind.

The enemy, wherever it was touched by the light, simply fell apart.

The violence had no associated sound, not that could be heard above the background noise of the dead city anyway, except for a faint sort of *thrrrrrrrup* as… something… scored hundreds of hits in under a handful of seconds. I wasn’t sure what it was that did the hitting (I was still working on that). I just knew that it was there based on experimentation and the System.

The mockvine bulbs and fibers, it turned out, weren’t very good for burning things or activating Triggers in my machines, no better than the basic stuff I could make anyway. What they were very good at was conducting mana, light, and all sorts of stuff the plant had used when it was alive. “Signals” the System had called them.

Though the heat and kinetic force of Volatility were the things that did the heavy lifting to lay the hurt when I used it normally, the mana and light, it turned out, were also considered part of the attack by the standards of the System. Not much of the attack, but it qualified.

So, after some experimentation, I determined that if I put a Volatility charged rod next to a heat-shielded mockvine bulb that acted as a repeater, I could conduct said light and mana down the fibers and put on a pretty fantastic light show with the resulting signals.

The cool thing was that the mockvine bulbs repeated the “signal” they were getting perfectly and multiple times to multiple fibers, meaning the wild mana and the purple light were getting repeated and sent down a dozen different paths every time the bulbs received them, and every single one of these copied flashes of fun retained their… ‘Attacky-ness’ in the System, qualifying them for the bonus damage from Knife in the Dark.

Every hit lit up their victim, and I became aware of them like I did when using my Detect abilities, except not. The feeling was fundamentally different.

I brought the combat log up to confirm what I was seeing.

You hit Scourge-touched undead for 3 damage. (0 base, +3 Knife in the Dark bonus)

Scourge-touched undead is marked.

Scourge-touched undead is cursed.

Scourge-touched undead takes 3 damage. (0 base, +3 Knife in the Dark bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 3 damage. (0 base, +3 Knife in the Dark bonus)

Scourge-touched undead is marked.

Scourge-touched undead is cursed

You hit Scourge-touched undead for 3 damage. (0 base, +3 Knife in the Dark bonus)

Scourge-touched undead is marked.

Scourge-touched undead is cursed

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Scourge-touched undead takes 1 damage. (0 base, +1 Marked bonus)

Yeah. Hundreds of attacks per volley.

They did very little damage on their own, but the bonus ate away at flesh and sawed through bone given there were enough.

And there were an absolute shit-ton of them.

The two upgrades I’d selected for Knife in the Dark were already proving their worth.

Mark: A successful Knife in the Dark attack marks an opponent. Marked opponents take more damage from additional attacks and are visible to you.

Curse of Obfuscation: Opponents struck by Knife in the Dark are now Cursed. Cursed opponents are now less likely to detect you and your actions.

The alley was awash in purple laser lights. The aim was terrible, since I didn’t know a thing about lenses, making this iteration of ‘laser turret’ a bad choice if you wanted to defend a strong point, but it did wonderfully for clearing an area of all living things. When it came to unprotected flesh, this thing was a buzz saw.

Scourge-touched fell apart, reduced to piles of minced, vaguely organic puddles. Wood splintered and fell to dust. The cobblestones and any exposed stone supports fared just fine, however. Whatever Knife in the Dark was using, it seemed to only work on organic materials. Where the light touched inorganic stuff, strange, multi colored, oil-smudge marks covered the affected area. Instead of heat, like you’d expect from a laser, this was entirely ‘bonus’ damage, which was a strange, unqualified thing that defied explanation no matter what queries I made of the System.

‘Weird damage," I was calling it, for now.

The turret stopped firing, the barrel sagging down to point at the ground as the housing box hissed. The metal box clanked and popped under the stress of all the heat. Whether it was glowing or not, I couldn’t tell in this light.

I disengaged the release to let the previous charged rod fall to the cobbles with a *clang,* and wIth one, smooth motion, I summoned another charged rod and jammed it into place, ready to fire again.

When I looked up, everyone was staring at me, mouths in various degrees of open, the collective sentiment a mix of horrified fascination, awe, and healthy disgust. I shrugged sheepishly, then summoned my sword in preparation for the next part of the plan. Did they have war crimes tribunals here? If so, I’d need to be long gone before they could put one together.

After just a couple seconds more of hesitation, Sissa ordered the charge, Geddon slipping in front with Trix riding on his shoulders. The rest of us fanned out behind them, the Sisters and then myself and Bole in as much of a wedge formation as the alleyway would allow.

After ten or fifteen clanking steps, a trickle of curious scourge-touched began to poke their heads into the alleyway. A bunch of their own had just died here, and if their collective consciousness worked like I thought it did, they’d know there was something here that needed killing. They streamed in and scattered, inspecting it all, crawling over the remains and looking for the cause.

A singular Black One turned our way, affixed its stare on us and howled.

Trix let out a squeak and fumbled for his rifle, pulling off the cover. It was a short, carbine type weapon I’d made for him, about the size of a large pistol for a human but with a butt stock and a longer barrel that put it squarely into long-gun territory, at least for a Volpa. It didn't have the power of one of my turrets, only shooting tiny conical spikes of iron as ammo, but it had almost no recoil and very little report.

*THAP* *THAP*

Trix, it turned out, was a natural marksman… a marksvolpa… shootyfox. Two scourge-touched including the one that started the alarm went down in less than a second, and Trix didn’t stop there. He let the lead fly. Every shot hit, most of them an instant kill with tiny, nearly invisible holes blossoming from targets’ heads and chests.

I hadn’t tested the gun enough to guess by sound if it wasn’t on full auto, but it might as well have been. Trix deftly tracked targets and filled them with daylight before they could even think to get in our way. All the while, he trembled that way he did, but it didn’t seem to affect his aim.

Soon, though, the word was out and the alley was wall to wall with more enemies than Trix could handle. Those, Geddon rolled over like a boulder. The massive Leori came through like a freight train, bowling handfuls of the scourge-touched aside at a time, his sword chopping down and wounding or killing all it touched. Samila and Sissa were just behind him at his flanks. Their swords flashed. The scourge, already stunned and wounded, never had a chance to get to their feet.

My sword was already in my hand, and it did what it did. Honestly, there wasn’t much I needed to do in the back of the formation aside from finish off those I could and stay close to the dragonkin sisters. My new sword model wasn’t anything fancy, but it had an edge on both sides and stabbed just fine. I made sure to preserve my edge while I could, though.

Willing Edge [2 MP/sec]

Scourge-touched crowded in, pounding out of doorways and jumping down from windows to land in the alley with us. I took one in the throat and followed up with a reverse slash across another’s eyes, but that was all I saw of those two.

We kept moving. To stop meant to be bogged down and overwhelmed. I couldn’t help but observe how much less painful this was with a team. Maybe there was something to this whole teamwork thing.

Bole was next to me, slashing and stabbing on his own, every strike to something vital. It was actually impressive to see how he moved, fast and accurate, with a confidence in his body and proficiency I lacked. There was a rhythm to it too. Nothing survived more than two moves.

I hugged the wall slightly to look beyond Geddon. We had maybe a half of a block to go. The alley was filling up fast, though. Too fast.

Gradually, our momentum stalled as the road flooded with living opponents, but true to his nature, Geddon never stopped pushing and plowing through, trusting us to have his back while he devoted everything to muscling his way to the goal.

Attacks were coming more frequently from the rear now, and Bole and I were forced to backpedal to defend ourselves. That’s why I didn’t notice we’d arrived at our destination until it reached out and touched me. I nearly impaled myself on a sharpened stake that the rest of the party had dodged. Luckily it caught me in the metal part of my shoulder, the tip of the spike snapping off and catching in my cloak.

Unfriendly faces and bared teeth pressed in around us, and we quickly went from being surrounded to being smothered. The armored folks got out on the edge of our half-circle and kept the baying creatures back while the rest of us worked on a way to get over the barricade.

There was a shout from behind the barricade, muffled but intelligible. It was one of those wordless calls, all vowels and harshly pronounced stops. Sissa answered something back like “BOLTA.” Again, no translation from the System. Probably a code.

Whatever they’d said, it must have worked. A length of coiled rope hit me in the back of the head, and arrows started to whistle in the air above us.

“Duty and mercy!” Sissa shouted, putting her will behind the call to help us get through this next part. That golden feeling suffused her words like they did in the Undercity, and the battle came into razor sharp focus. I felt my pulse quicken and hair stand on end.

At Sissa’s direction, a panting and sweating Geddon fell back and tied the rope harness around himself, tugging on the end to get pulled up. Trix hopped onto the big guy at the last second and used the spent Leori as a firing position, squeezing off rounds as he rose out of my view.

I didn’t watch them go all the way up. I stepped into Geddon’s place between the dragonkin sisters to help hold the line. I heard something wet gurgle behind my back and turned to find Bole there, skewering a Returned with both of his swords, wrenching the blades out hard to spill the rest of the undead’s guts onto the ground. He caught my eye and flashed that grin of his.

I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for this right now. I was busy batting at reaching arms and dancing in and out with my sword while the shield users took the brunt of the real punishment.

The sound of the rope smacking on wood sounded behind me.

“Next!” Geddon bellowed from above. Trix’s rifle barked again and again and scourge-touched closest to our flanks began to die.

Bole went next. Then, Samila. She shook her head at first, not wanting to leave Sissa but I shouldered my way over to get into her spot. Then she had no choice.

Our circle had shrunk to just a few feet of breathing room. Full sword swings were impossible, but the monsters didn’t seem to have the same suicidal urges as the last time I’d fought them. They responded to my attacks as I thought a pack of rabid animals might, shrinking away from the dangerous point of my sword but never giving too much ground, always attacking where I wasn’t paying attention.

An interesting data point for later.

“Time!” Geddon shouted. “Get out now!”

That was the signal. Geddon had spotted something. The alleyway was about to become very, very popular. Sissa and I couldn’t see over the press, but we had to trust Geddon to see when things were going to be too much for us.

“Get on the rope,” Sissa ordered.

“Now! Trouble coming!” Geddon roared.

Not waiting for permission, I grabbed Sissa by the waist and yanked her back to the rope. Then, I grabbed the end with my prosthetic and triggered Iron Grip. There was a momentary resistance to what I was doing I could feel through her body, but it lasted all of a half second. Then she was swinging with her sword and bashing with her shield to keep the creatures at bay while I did my best to hold on.

Our feet left the road.

The scourge-touched swarmed underneath us, leaping up to slash at us. One of them latched onto my leg and tore into the calf.

“Sissa!” I called.

“I know!” She said. “Up! Up!” She called to the rope pullers.

“Sissa!” I shouted, hoping she remembered what I’d said before we started. “Look now! Look at the turret!”

I triggered the next volley. Being on this side of the carnage was a different experience. The strobing lights danced over the entire alleyway, a fire hose of purple beams, indiscriminate, seemingly infinite in number. Intellectually, I knew that every beam I saw had another four or five behind it, too fast to perceive from this distance with the naked eye. The general direction of the light tracked back and forth, bathing everything in that purple.

There was a moment, a collective breath from all of us, Sissa and myself, the horde. Everything stopped for a heartbeat. Then a tipping point was reached.

The horde at our feet liquified in slow motion, starting at the back and surging to the front, like the scourge-touched’s bodies just gave up on staying together all at once and decided smaller chunks were the way to go now.

I didn’t dare look away from the turret to observe the process, though. Neither did Sissa. One lapse in attention would be an opportunity for Knife in the Dark to Mark us. Then we’d be in a world of hurt.

Sissa and I stared at the turret, neither of us daring to blink, though I was pretty sure we were allowed to blink. We just had to be paying direct attention to the turret to not be affected. Sissa would probably have been fine with the armor she wore, but we weren’t going to take any chances either, not with our precious eyes and faces exposed to the world.

Then the alley went dark. I blinked tears out of my eyes, scanning the area to see if anything was left alive.

I saw movement, but nothing that went beyond a pathetic crawl. Nothing that could run or jump. Good.

We crested the top of the barricade and Geddon got us up the rest of the way, letting us drop on the uneven wooden surface what looked like doors and scavenged wooden chests.

Sissa squirmed, spinning around to look my way, her eyes wide. She reached up to wipe black blood off of my forehead with her sword hand.

“Ryan. You can let go now,” she said.

Oh yeah.

I let go of her waist, nearly sending her tumbling down, before turning away bashfully, suddenly very interested in what was going on in the yard beyond the barricade upon which we stood.

Church guards hustled everywhere, fully armored, swords in hand and battered shields at their sides. Our barricade wasn’t the only one clogging up the streets that lead into the gatehouse area. They’d piled up an impressive amount of garbage to create their fortifications, and they were manning the ‘battlements’ as best they could.

The enormous gates themselves were shut and barred, making up the back wall of the camp, and the black city walls on either side of the gate were manned by crossbowmen and spears alike.

What surprised me, however, were the goblins. They were everywhere. They ran over the yard, carrying things, throwing things on the giant bonfire in the middle of the half circle the fortifications made. Others carried spears and ran alongside Miur and bow legged guardsmen whose species I didn’t know the name for. Others shot arrows from crude bows up and over the wooden barricades as a guardsman directed their line of fire. Still more sat next to the pyre sharpening lengths of wood with tiny knives and burning the ends to temper the points.

Suddenly, my view was blocked.

…by a gaggle of children. Goblin children. Lots of them. Where’d they come from?

High, squeaky voices seemed to come out of the crowd, not from any individual child but from the group itself.

“They have lots of stuff.”

“We can take it? A black one eats my dad’s spear yesterday.”

“But they have swords. Does your dad use a sword?”

“No.”

“Tie a sword to a pole and you have a spear,” another voice suggested.

“True. True. Maybe one of the little ones. We can take them.”

An older child, taller, well muscled, and mohawked like a warrior, shoved his way to the front of the gaggle, pushing the smaller ones aside and mean mugging the crowd with impressive aptitude. He turned to each in turn and stared them all down, forcing them to shrink away.

“No,” he growled, probably in an intimidating way to other goblins, but to me it just came off as cute. “They keep their stuff.”

“Awwwww.” Came the collective moan from the rest of them.

The big kid wasn’t having it, though. “Come on. We take them to the big one.”

“Yay! The big one!”