Shielding his mouth to stifle a cough, Gam cursed the whole situation once more.

Of course the city was on fire, whilst he and his men were inside it. The damned arrogant fool Sar just couldn't help himself, could he. The one order he'd been given, the one order he needed to follow, was to secure the city surroundings so the free mage couldn't escape. But no, that wasn't enough for the man, was it. He had to go and start throwing his flames about.

But it wasn't like Gam could march back out of the city and chasten the man, not in front of the whole battalion. The Battle-master arguing with the Lord Seeker would be devastating for morale, and he couldn’t afford a blow like that in the midst of the assault.

Afterwards, however, they would be having words.

“Get those dampers set!” Gam shouted, gesturing to the soldiers accompanying him.

“Yes, Battle-Master!” Came a chorus of shouts from the men, as they worked on pounding a stake through the paving slabs and into the earth beneath. A second group stood poised with a cart of disk-topped black poles, the mana dampers that would be crucial in combatting this free mage.

The devices had already proved their worth, destroying a trio of skeletal minions that had ambushed them as they’d entered the city. They were a key element in any mage hunt, allowing his mana-less men to stand toe-to-toe with the powers of a spellcaster. They were so effective, in fact, that they prevented Sar from joining them on the hunt, lest his abilities be rendered useless. Or so Gam had been taught in the academy.

This was his battalion’s first posting, after all.

He’d been stationed close to the Rudean border, and as such there hadn’t been any need for his deployment in the last twenty years of his time as Battle-Master. Rudase was thoroughly subjugated, cowed to the point of complete silence. The backwater of the empire, they’d always called it. But that had never bothered Gam. A quiet posting was still a posting.

And then Sar had shown up at his door, with orders to march on a free mage that had wiped out an enclave. Actually, make that two enclaves, as they’d discovered when passing through Avonford.

“Damper set!” Came a shout that pulled Gam from his thoughts.

The distinctive tingling chill of the damper activating ran down his spine. Gam wasn’t a mage, so he didn’t feel the artefact’s full effects. From all accounts, however, to a mage it would feel nauseating to have their mana constantly torn away and dumped into the ground. Standard operating procedure was to fence in the free mage with such dampers, pushing them back and back until they had nowhere to run. Then, with their magic weakened and surrounded by soldiers geared up specifically to hunt mages, they’d finally bring this rebel to an end.

“Pack it up, let’s move to the next site!” Gam shouted, waving for the soldiers to move on once again.

From a side-alley emerged one of the scouting groups, the soldiers responsible for moving ahead through the city and identifying pockets of resistance. The main body of the men, those that Gam was commanding, could then proceed through the streets on their own important task, safe in the knowledge that the enemy threat was being kept at bay. Simple enough that even these men who had never seen real battle could carry it out. A final, smaller force was stationed outside the walls with the Lord Seeker, responsible for setting up a fortified position that the main force could retreat into if necessary.

“Flames are burning out of control in the southern street.” One of the scouts reported, snapping a salute. “Permission to cancel the scouting of that sector, it’s becoming difficult to withstand the heat.”

“Granted.” Gam grunted. “If it’s tough for you, it’ll be impossible for these backwater folk. Take the north-north-western street instead.”

The scout snapped another salute and strode off, gesturing for his men to follow. Gam cursed under his breath again. How was he supposed to operate this hunt by the book with that damned pyromancer screwing everything up? It really was intolerable that-

A figure burst out of the smoke.

A flame-wreathed skeleton, smoke billowing off it like a cloak, sprinted out of the alley the scouts had just emerged from and slammed into the soldiers packing up the damper cart. It shouted no warcries, made no sound except the clacking of its bones against the floor, just silently thrusting a blade deep into a man’s side.

The screech of metal against metal mixed with a shrill scream of agony as the pair tumbled to the ground. Instantly, chaos erupted through the ranks, men shouting and stumbling over themselves to get away from the attacking creature. The skeleton itself was in a frenzy of violence, thrusting the blade into the soldier again and again.

Gam froze for a moment. Was the damper faulty? How was this minion still moving within its influence? How come it wasn't being drained like…

No, he couldn't let questions freeze him, not now. He was the Battle-Master, it was time to start acting like it.

“Form up! Form up, damn you!” Gam roared. “Draw arms and about face, destroy that skeleton!”

Thankfully, the men listened, a fumbling of blades being readied, shields being raised, and they were a fighting force once more instead of a disorganized rabble.

And not a moment too soon.

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An army of skeletons burst from all sides, charging in to clash against the shield-wall. The sheer force of the impact sent a ripple back through the lines, even knocking Gam back a step as a soldier stumbled back into him.

“Hold and strike!” Gam roared again. “They’re weakened by the damper, destroy them!”

Nearly a hundred blades lashed out, crashing against metal and bone alike. The magebane-augmented weapons wreaked havoc on the line of undead, dashing the creatures apart to scatter over the ground. Some men fell beneath the onslaught, but they seemed to have come out ahead of the first engagement.

“Second row, take aim!” Gam shouted. “On my mark. Drop and fire!”

The men of the shield-wall dropped to one knee briefly, and the men behind unleashed a volley of bolts over the shoulders of their allies into the ranks of undead. The results were… underwhelming. A skeleton was mostly empty space, with none of those juice fleshy parts for the bolts to damage. Instead, the only real effect occurred when a bolt managed a direct hit on a bone, shattering it to pieces. Still, there were more than enough of the creatures for the volley to find some marks. The press of the undead lessened a moment, as many of their numbers collapsed.

“Push forward!” Gam shouted.

The soldiers struck ahead, emboldened by their advantage. More and more skeletons tumbled away under the attacks, each strike of the soldiers turning the undead threat into a bile of bones that rolled quickly out of sight.

Then, suddenly, the undead retreated.

Between one step and the next, the attacking force turned and fled. Only a shouted order from Gam stopped his men from giving chase. Chasing the undead into unfamiliar ground, in a burning city, was a perfect way to get slaughtered. Still, he couldn’t help feel a surge of elation. In a straight-up fight, the undead had broken and fled. They could do this. They could win.

Gam took a moment to evaluate the aftermath. Roughly a dozen of his men had fallen, with half of those lying dead. Scattered bones littered the street around his force, the remains of skeletons that had succumbed to the magebane onslaught.

"Transfer the dead to the closest burning building." He ordered. "We're hunting a necromancer here, each corpse is a weapon for him to use. Get the injured onto the cart and let's move on."

As the men disposed of the dead, Gam indulged himself in his thoughts. How was this necromancer still casting inside the influence of the damper? That was… unheard of. He did seem to be unreasonably powerful, able to command far more minions than he'd expected.

But, still, his forces had broken before the might of the Seekers.

"Move out!" Gam shouted, and the cart trundled into motion.

Only to find the street ahead blockaded by a pile of burning debris.

Gam cursed once again. That was the classic setup for an ambush, he just knew it. Textbook perfect, even.

“Raise arms!” He shouted. “Two rows, prepare for engagement!”

The men scrambled to comply, and not a moment too soon. Figures burst out of the side-alleys, charging forward to crash into the lines of soldiers with bone-shaking force. The front line buckled, but held. Barely. Man after man fell under the flashing blades and tearing fingers of the skeletons, but there were more than enough numbers remaining to replace them.

“You know the drill, cut them down!”

Then a movement on one of the neighbouring roofs caught Gam’s attention. Looking up, he could see skeletons clambering up the sloped surface, a cloud of smoke following behind them. A moment later, the source of the smoke was revealed.

They were carrying dozens of burning logs.

“From above! Brace!” Gam roared as the undead threw themselves down onto them, carrying the flaming payloads down into their midst.

Wood and bone crashed against hastily raised shields, the burning logs exploding out into a searing cloud of embers from the impact. Screams of pain filled the air as men were burned by the makeshift falling weaponry. More screams sounded as the fallen skeletons reformed themselves and attacked anyone within reach, only felled by scores of sword strokes.

Gam’s pulse pounded in his head as he frantically scanned the unfolding melee, trying to spot some way they could escape this predicament. If they stayed here, they would die. His men couldn’t hold off the falling undead and their flaming weapons. They had to break out.

“Gather in, wedge formation!” He roared, springing up onto the cart to get a better vantage point. “We break out, on my mark! Ma-”

“What in Idia’s name is that?!” Screamed a voice. Gam snapped his head around to the source of the cry. Then he saw it too.

A monstrosity had just climbed atop the barricade.

I was enormous, maybe twice the size of the cart on which he stood. It looked like a twisted spider, made from strange green metal, black chitinous plates, and polished bone. It had a bulbous torso, suspended from six limbs that looked to be formed from strangely human bones. The torso itself looked broken and mangled, patched back together with fixings of green metal and wrapped in what seemed to be human ribs. At the core of the torso, three skulls had been positioned, radiating out in a triangle, and where their jaws would have been instead jutted a tube of the same green metal, its rim inscribed with countless glowing amethyst runes.

As Gam started at it, slack jawed in horror, it ponderously skittered forward in a spider-like manner, and levelled the tube at its core towards his men. Then, with a deep buzz that seemed to vibrate him down to his very core, a cyan radiance built within it.

There was no way that was good.

“We need to move!” Gam roared. “Leave the cart, we break through now!”

“Battle-Master, what about the wounded!?” A voice shouted to his side.

“They’re dead already. Unless you want to join them, you’ll shut your mouth and fight like your life depends on it. Now turn, and-”

The world was thrown into stark relief as a cyan beam, thick and blazing with terrifying power, blasted out from behind them. It scythed through the right side of his men, turning those it touched into nothing more than a faint mist of gore. The slabs that paved the street exploded into razor shards of rock in the trail the beam cut, shards that tore through the men that didn’t immediately die from the attack.

Chaos took his forces.

“Break through! Fight, like your lives depend on it!” Gam roared over the screaming. “Retreat out of the city!”

The soldiers surged forward, smashing into the lines of undead and pushing them back. Men in their dozens fell at the front, killed by the undead or bowled over by their desperate allies, only to be trampled to death beneath hundreds of stampeding feet. The death toll was catastrophic.

But they did break through.

Gam ran with the rest of his men, as fast as his legs would carry him. They had to get away from that… thing, before it attacked again. There was nothing they could do against power like that, not even Sar stood a chance. There was only one thing they’d brought that had the might to combat it.

They had to activate the Ironjaws.