Roots and undergrowth poked through what had previously been level roads and smooth sidewalks. I’d walked these streets before and what had once been a casual half-hour stroll, now took hours of tireless effort. Collapsed buildings, pushed aside by hills and growing trees, now spilled their contents from broken walls and shattered glass. Designer clothes and bags laid in piles like unwanted refuse.

A thick growth of vegetation covered everything in green while threating to bury what few landmarks I remembered. Trees and cliffs towered over the horizon, where once the tallest object had been a church steeple.

The Charleston that I knew was lost. I was among the few of her citizens to remain.

As we crested each hill the bridge would come into sight, only to disappear as we climbed down the other side. Catayla had appeared, in her usual silent fashion, just as we reached the top of one such overlook. The bridge was close, and only a final descent down a winding trail remained.

I felt my breathing increase and my hands clench as I looked at the far side of the long suspension bridge. Thousands of beasts were charging through barricades as they merged into an ocean of flesh. Individual forms were lost among the hoard. The roar of thousands of voices crying out together was interrupted only by the echoing barks of gunfire.

Despite the difficulty in picking out individuals, some among the horde were large enough to stand out. Among the wash of bodies could be seen massive humanoid with odd proportions — bulbous heads, overlong limbs, and twisted bodies. They were nude or wore simple furs. Behind them, they dragged trees and telephone poles as if they were clubs.

Also, among the horde were beasts of fantastic size that would dwarf their common cousins. Other, stranger creatures were harder to describe and had no common animal with which to compare. One such beast seemed to be a massive ball of eyes and tentacles set among rubbery, wrinkled skin.

The sky above the battlefield was nearly as full as the ground below. Forms too far away and packed to densely to be clearly seen blackened the sky, like storm clouds full of twisting shadows and the occasional glimpse of fang and talon.

“Tiller,” I said. “Can you make out anything useful? What about those birds up there?”

I was relying on Tiller’s Reaction and Perception heavy build. It made sense that Perception would increase his vision, but I’d never really asked him about it in detail. He had once tried to show off his stats by shooting the wings off a mutated fly the size of a mouse— I must admit that what was left after his attempt had been wingless.

“Dinosaurs,” Said Tiller. “Pterodactyls with gold and red feathered wings and scaled bodies. It’s really quite amazing…”

“I get it, Tiller,” I said. “We can both nerd out together when our lives aren’t in danger and we don’t have a horde of demons to fend off. Now. Focus. What are the birds… I mean dinosaurs. Tell me what they’re doing.”

“Nothing,” he said shaking his head. “I mean they are circling, obviously, but they are not fighting. Some are breaking away from the group and fleeing, but they aren’t attacking. They may be scavengers.”

“I don’t like it,” said Rachel. “Whatever has them spooked is something we should stay away from. There must be hundreds of those things, thousands! Yet here we are moseying on in like it’s a day at the park.”

“More like moseying into the Alamo,” said Tiller.

“You wanted to be here,” I said. “It’s too late to back out now. Besides, those are our people on that bridge. We need to get down there and find a way to punch our way through or at the very least cover their retreat.”

“Look,” said the tall amazon with the ridiculously oversized club. “None of us want to be here, but it needs doing. Besides, I’ve got friends on that bridge. There is no way we are leaving them alone to die.”

“Bridgette’s right,” said Worthy. “Those are my friends out there and I’m not letting them go out without taking out as many of those monster bastards as I can. Plus …”

Worthy smiled as he looked towards the blonde Amazon, “Bridgette and I had a little wager and I’m not letting her back out now.”

Bridgette glared at Worthy but said nothing. The rest of us exchanged glances but made no move to do anything despite our tough words. The numbers were overwhelming, possibly in the hundreds of thousands. The bridge funneled them into more manageable numbers, but the covered its length like ants swarming a rotting log.

It was Worthy, of all people, that started moving first. He spit before signaling his companions to follow with a simple grunt. The rest of us were not too far behind.

Crossing the bridge required going up a ramp and climbing over several makeshift barriers of stacked cars and debris, but we covered the ground quickly. The sound of gunfire and the roar of voices, both human and otherwise, slowly began to drown out my ability to pick out individual sounds. My other senses were obscured as well, smoke and the smell of burning hair nearly overwhelmed me for a moment. It was disorienting and isolating in a way that made my heart begin to race and my hands shake.

It wasn’t long before I was met with a close-up view of the battle. The defenders had fallen back to a secondary barrier about halfway down the bridge. This focused the stampeding monsters into a narrow area creating a ‘kill zone’ where the defenders were able to concentrate their ranged fire. Despite the advantage this gave to the defenders, most of the guards had abandoned their rifles. The guns still firing had blue lines tracing the trajectory of their shots, much like Tiller’s guns did when he was using mana rounds instead of physical bullets.

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Worthy and his two companions immediately ran to the top of the barricade and began shooting. Catayla quickly disappeared again as she shimmied up one of the bridge’s suspension wires. It didn’t take her long to find a perch on a cross beam and begin to rain death upon the horde of monsters. The rest of us were slower, but not by much.

I stepped onto the hood of a car before jumping off it and landing on the top of a three-car high barricade. Jesus, it felt good. Even with all the danger around me, I reveled in my new strength. Might had only increased by 3 points, but my body weight had stayed the same. This, combined with the multiplicative effects of physical training, made me feel like a superhero.

I began raining down Arcane Missiles. The self-correcting orbs allowed me to minimize my time aiming, and it was one of my most mana efficient spells. I would activate Analyze sparingly to pick out the strongest, or at least the highest level, monsters. I focused my spells on bringing them down so the others could take down the cannon fodder that were threatening to overtake us through sheer numbers.

Tiller was close behind me when he began firing his revolver. He quickly began to match my targets, switching his aim only to take down anything that came close to our barricade. His speed and ability to quickly change targets with almost no time lost aiming made Tiller a whirlwind of death. He quickly caught up to and surpassed me in number of kills.

Tiller could probably keep up his barrage for an extended period, but I knew I could not. My mana was quickly being depleted and its recharge time seemed was too slow to be effective in battle. Simply gaining enough mana for a single cast of Arcane Missile took more than a minute. We were vastly outnumbered and any monsters I took out were quickly replaced, often with stronger, uglier beasts.

I looked out over the battlefield trying to pick out the best targets. I needed to find a general, something that was commanding the rest or at least something that they all feared more than charging into the meat grinder the bridge defenders and I were creating.

These weaker monsters were spooked already, perhaps if we could take out the strongest among them we could weaken their resolve – maybe even cause them to break and withdraw. It was clear they were not working together in an organized way. They were more stampede than an army.

I finally calmed down enough to slow my racing thoughts and concentrate, taking a deep breath I tried to take in the whole battlefield and understand what was happening. What was coming at us, and what resources did our side have? Despite our lack of numbers, the group of bridge guards had some impressive abilities.

Someone had conjured a golem made of concrete and rebar that was smashing its way through tiny humanoids that had blue skin and furry shoulders. The golem would strike out with giant sledgehammer-like fists and send the tiny creatures flying. They would swarm the concrete and steel juggernaut, but it would quickly shake them off or flatten them against its own body with a massive concrete palm.

The construct would occasional reach into its own chest and pull forth a boulder that really should have significantly lessened its mass, and yet somehow didn’t. Rather than toss the boulders the creature would then roll them, literally bowling through the horde of fiends. As the stones came to a stop under the weight of crushed bodies they would provide additional cover and create another obstacle for the approaching horde of beasts and monsters.

A man in a long coat and fedora was shooting red beams from his palms that would set anything they touched on fire. Between spells, he waved his arms and contorted his fingers in complicated and exaggerated motions that I was sure were unnecessary. Despite his theatrics and bad fashion sense, his attacks were quite effective. He would sweep his beam across the attackers, setting as many as half a dozen aflame every few seconds.

A large man with a fire axe had jumped down in front of the barricade and was hacking apart anything that managed to make it that far. I watched as a wolf the size of a jeep charged down the middle of the bridge and tried to leap over the barricade. The man with the axe twisted his body sending his blade into an uppercut-like slash that sent the dire wolf flying back. It tumbled head over feet as its entrails spilled out upon the ground.

There were less than a dozen guards, and yet they were holding back thousands. It was awe inspiring to watch them and to imagine what they must have gone through to last this long. The pile of bodies had become so thick at some points that they were tumbling over the railing into the water below.

I yelled commands to my Dark Companion, still in its kingfisher form, to fly through the battlefield and find anything that resembled a leader. Despite the noise and distraction, it was able to understand me — perhaps due to our mental bond. The creature immediately turned into a haze of gray feathers as it darted through the air.

Rather than fly overhead the Fisher chose to cut through monsters like a bullet, leaving bird sized holes in anything in its path. It didn’t tarry or search but seemed to be heading in a straight line towards the far end of the bridge.

I ignored the bird and began to look around. One of my companions was missing.

“Rachel,” I called out.

I yelled again, but my voice was lost in the cacophony of battle. I immediately regretted sending out my dark companion without first making sure I had accounted for all my teammates. It was a mistake I vowed to learn from.

“Tiller,” I yelled grabbing his shoulder to get his attention.

He fired into the horde twice, but then lowered his aim and bent his ear towards me. His increased perception allowing him to hear my voice through the deafening roar of battle.

“Find Rachel,” I said.

He looked back at the battlefield beneath us, but then nodded once and jumped down in the direction we had come from. I trusted him to find her faster than I could, and I didn’t want him following me for what I had planned.

I was running out of mana, but the eldritch energy was thick around me, I could feel it rolling off the bodies of the slain monsters and coagulating into thick clouds around the human combatants. The knuckles on my left hand turned white as my fingers wrapped around my staff, it slowly extended to its full length as I pulled it from the loop on my belt.

I carefully began to draw the dark, eldritch energy into one end of the staff. A long, curved blade slowly grew from the tip, giving my staff the appearance of a scythe surrounded by black mist and crackling bolts of red energy.

The chain that had been coiled around my right arm began to unwind as I slowly fed the dark energy into it. Thick, black thorns grew from the chain links as tiny specks of red energy formed at the ends of the razor-sharp barbs.

I struck out with the scythe as the chain spun like a living bramble turned into a vortex of metal and blood. Blood ran down my hand as bodies pressed in around me.