Mind-shattering rage forced itself into me, filling my mind like someone had jammed a fire hose into my mouth. I threw myself out of my chair, heaving the small granite table to the side so that it shattered against the wall. I was halfway out of my quarters in six steps at a fast walk, having already put on my helmet and gauntlets, walking towards the weapon rack next to the door to pick up the goblin whip, the only real weapon in the fortress that I could even lift.

I could feel my connection to everything in my sphere of influence growing more solid. The anger being forced into me by Cherish was feeding me. I knew what the intruders were wearing. I knew exactly what they were doing, I could see them in my mind like I was watching them on a security camera.

Cherish pointing the way to Jack, who gave commands to Crawler, and Shatterbird using the little sand she still had with her to scout in advance of Crawler. Every now and then, they would simply walk through the stone like it was air, holding Siberian's hand as they followed Shatterbird and Cherish's directions. Crawler would follow behind while Siberian's power of matter destruction created a tunnel, then move back to point when they broke into a new passage through the fortress. Burnscar was helping them avoid magma traps, and Crawler was simply setting off all the non-magma traps with glee.

While I was watching the S9 calmly moving almost directly towards me, I picked up the whip and grabbed the door knob.

Mannequin stopped at an uncarved section of wall, and quickly carved an image of a young girl running from seven humans and a scorpion. The leader of the humans was laughing. After finishing, he quickly rejoined the group coming almost directly towards me.

Novice work at best, came the comments of several of the dwarves connected to my mind. There was general agreement. Reasonably decent for a human though, did you see the movement he used with his etching tool on the bevel at the end of the scorpion tail? I might actually have to try that. Came another comment.

The connection to my dwarves was more solid than it had ever been. I was sharing thoughts with them, not just simple information and commands. We were all charging towards the S9. Even the children, deep below were grabbing picks, beginning to mine upwards to join the fight. I tried to force them to stop, but they ignored me. It would take days for them to mine up the shaft to the area of the fight though. None of them were mature. None of them were seasoned miners.

Instead of me drawing the fury and anger from my dwarves, my dwarves were now drawing fury and anger from me, but it wasn't enough. Cherish was overloading me, and I was overloading my dwarves. Despite the banter in my head, despite the cold rage radiating from every one of us, we all knew we were doing exactly what we were expected to do. And we didn't care.

Cherish started speaking. "I've got her, Jack, she's on her way now. We probably want to find or make a large open area - they are coming but they seem to be coordinating to arrive in a big wave. Well, most of them. Some of them seem to be moving very slowly, far underground."

After I opened my door, I pulled the kite shield off my back and settled it on my arm. I at least knew how to wear the armor, and I could feel my dwarves struggling within my mind to help me understand a little better how to move and fight in armor, but the smallest adult dwarf weighed about six hundred pounds, averaging closer to eight hundred. They had very little to teach me that would help.

I ran down the hallway, joining half a dozen dwarves as Arda and Tikon coordinated our headlong rush in the shared mind, converging on the communal dining room. After the first twenty or thirty of us died, almost everyone would be in a berserker state, fighting anything that moved, so we would want to surround them, to create the largest number of berserk dwarves close to the enemies as possible.

There's Urist! I thought to myself, as I saw him running towards me, axe slung over his back.

As he approached, he didn't slow down, running straight at me. Even in an enraged state, I did not want to run into almost a thousand pounds of sprinting dwarf. I slowed, expecting him to do the same. "Urist, what's wrong?"

He swerved to the side to avoid me, and a gigantic fist reached out, grabbing me around the waist as he ran past. "I'm sorry, Overseer." Before I understood what was happening, I was ripped off my feet and my shield and whip fell to the ground. There was no opportunity to struggle as I was trapped against his chest with his handless arm as he ran. In shock, I felt my helmet being ripped off by the hand of Urist's good arm, and then I watched as a gigantic index finger thwapped me in the forehead. Then there was a bright tunnel, and darkness.

**

I woke up coughing from a bucket of ice cold water thrown in my face. I did not recognize the place I was in, but a quick check of the fortress map in my head indicated that I was in the graveyard. Urist was standing over me with a somber expression on his face.

I could only feel twenty-one sane dwarves in the fortress. Urist and the children. The children were nearly insane with grief over the deaths of their families, but their amazing happiness levels had kept any of them from berserking.

One hundred eighty dwarven corpses were scattered in the communal dining room, stacked like cordwood where they had charged the S9, who had been ready and waiting for them.

"Urist, I should have been there!" I kicked him in the knee as hard as I could, my sabatons clanging against his greaves.

He shrugged. "But you weren't." He looked down as I kicked him in the knee again with another loud clang. "Would it make you feel better if I said ouch?"

My head hurt so much. Still, I forced myself to look. I needed the rage. If I didn't have the rage, either the headache or the hopelessness would make me collapse.

I watched as Cherish and Shatterbird crawled out of the large wooden bin sitting next to Siberian. Burnscar and Bonesaw were both brushing dust off themselves. Siberian had protected all her fragile team members in the wooden bin that had apparently been looted from a nearby depot. Crawler and she then killed dwarves until they berserked and turned on each other. As my enemies calmly talked amongst themselves, my rage started building again. Jack and Burnscar laughed as Crawler told a stupid joke about short people.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Siberian picked up a bloody bit, looked at it from a couple angles, and then took a small bite of it.

"Does it taste like chicken?" Jack asked, with a chuckle.

The naked zebra woman simply nodded.

Cherish and Shatterbird, muttering to each other, slowly turned in my direction, and Cherish spoke. "She's in that direction, Jack, with one construct."

I watched as Jack turned in my direction. "I know you can hear me, young lady. This has been a lot more interesting than I expected it to be, but we really do have places to go. The longer we chase you, the less happy we will be when we find you."

My blood went cold with fear, and my hand gripped the USB pendant around my neck. "Urist. They can still track me."

Urist looked down at me, then held his hand down to me. "I suspected that, and you're probably going to start raging again soon, unless they decide they just want to hunt you for fun."

"Why do this then, Urist? Why didn't you let me die with them?"

"Because I wanted to do something stupid." Urist shrugged.

My mind went a little blank. "What?"

"When you're completely outmatched by an enemy that you cannot possibly defeat in a direct fight, you don't fight directly."

"We tried that, Urist, it didn't work!" I yelled up at him.

Urist flexed his fingers. "Take my hand and stand, please. I'd like to have my axe in my hand when I die, not reaching down to help a weakling."

My vision went red. I grabbed his hand with my right hand, and pulled myself to my feet as hard as I could. I used the pulling motion of my right hand to help me add power to the looping haymaker punch of my left. I saw Urist's head move slightly, so he took the blow on his eyebrow instead of his nose.

"Fuck you, Urist." I screamed as my gauntleted fist smashed into his eyebrow ridge.

"Dwarves don't do that, you know. Spores." He flicked his hand across his brow and looked at it, there was a little blood on his hand. "I've been hit harder by a four-year-old, but that was a pretty good blow for someone of your size and experience."

"So you are planning on fighting and dying here. Why didn't you just join us before?"

"I already told you. I wanted to try something stupid." He kicked a gravestone, breaking it.

I stared, shocked. A dwarf desecrating a grave? I had brought the remains of all the dwarves in the old fortress graveyard across, and all the headstones and coffins as well. There were over four hundred graves here.

Urist wandered from place to place quickly, ignoring ten or twenty stones in a row before kicking another. I saw no rhyme or reason to it until I looked at the names and causes of death on the broken headstones closest to me. They were all Urist's victims, all but one listed as death by loss of blood during assault by unknown vampire.

"Urist." I whispered. "Are you really trying to do what I think you're trying to do?"

He kicked another head stone, which shattered into four pieces. "Since I just saw you reading three stones, and then look at me sharply, I'd say probably so. Like I said, a stupid idea." He twirled his axe in the air, then caught it and smiled at me.

"How is dying this way going to be any better than dying to the S9, Urist? The children don't have the skills to make new markers, and they can't mine out before the ghosts will find them."

Urist glanced in my direction as he kicked over another stone. "Overseer, I am certain that when you die, all of us who remain will cease to exist. We came into being from nothing." He paused. "That's just not possible. Not even necromancy works that way. There's always a source, a precursor, something before."

I couldn't argue with that logic, even if I wasn't sure if he was right. At best it would be a he-said, she-said argument. "Why end it this way? We could have just gone into the melee. Or the final solution lever. I had a lever in my room that could have killed us a lot easier, and given the children a chance, if you're wrong."

"Who said anything about ending it? You're not understanding, Overseer. After they figured out where you were, there was absolutely no way possible that we dwarves were going to defeat those enemies, whether by trap, trick or melee. They have complementary strengths, better-than-piss-poor leadership, and enough caution and experience that they were just going to wander back and forth through the fortress slaughtering us until they found you, and then we would all poof."

"So you say." I glared at him.

"Indeed. So I say." He smiled at me. "You don't really understand your role in this yet, do you?"

"My role in what? Dying? That's pretty straightforward, I'd say."

"No." He grinned at me fiercely as he walked back towards where he had broken the first headstone, the newest-looking stone. Ulok Obsidianplow's stone. The first dwarf to die in this world, mortally wounded by Crawler, then drained by Urist.

I watched, nervously, as a transparent white form started to coalesce in front of me, above Ulok's broken tombstone. I could see other white forms beginning to form above other desecrated graves. They had all died to violence, they had all died to Urist, and he had personally just desecrated all their graves. They were going to be in a state of complete rage when they finished forming.

Urist moved to stand beside me, near Ulok's forming ghost. "Overseer, when there's no way in hell you can win any other way, the smartest thing to do is try something stupid."

I punched at his face again, and he casually blocked me with his arm stump, the clang of our armor colliding rang loudly. "That just sounds insane, Urist."

"You got a freebie, Overseer, but only one. You have to earn the next one." He smiled toothily. "I want to live. All the rest of the adult dwarves are dead except two berserk dwarves that I will consume if I survive, so I do not have to prey on the children. The children can't carve memorials, and you aren't a stone crafter either. I, on the other hand, am a master engraver and a master stone crafter. You convince the ghosts to kill our enemies without killing me or you, and we all live."

I stared at him in shock. He wants me to convince murderous ghosts to help us?

Urist winked at me. "Remember, it's for the children."