Finlay bloody hated crossbows.

Oh, they were convenient. Easy to use, simple enough that an idiot could become competent with a fraction of the training one might give to a good longbowman. But they were loud, too. Louder than a bow, which was already a damn sight louder than most tended to guess. All well and good if you were assembling a conscripted force to stand on a hill and put bolts into whatever tried to push them off it, but useless for the types of work he tended to do.

Today, as on so many other days, Finlay was leading his rangers on a night raid. Quiet, precise, rapid. A lightning-strike of an assault meant to gouge the eyes out of their enemy’s force, then lance the heart of its body while it still spasmed in disorientation. It was the sort of operation that required coordination, hard-drilled protocols, men of talent, fierce training and experience all at once.

It was not, by any measure, the sort of thing for which Finlay would have requested five hundred fucking crossbowmen to try and help with their blunt, flaccid-penises for fingers. But it was also one skirmish of many in a war that grew more desperate and doomed by the year.

He’d make do. He had no choice.

Finlay moved over the hilltop as quietly as any creature he’d ever encountered, insects included. There were many magics in the world, many powers. Some people could uproot trees and use them as clubs, others could’ve set the hilltop he was so carefully crawling across ablaze with barely even a few seconds of thought. Finlay wasn’t anything so flashy as that.

Indeed, Finlay’s power was assassinating flashiness itself. And he did it better than any he’d ever met.

He slithered, moving with the unbreakable certainty that he was beyond notice. Any eyes that happened to drop their gaze upon him would see it slide off like water on stone, and unless he decided to enter a coughing fit while breathing down the sentries’ necks, there was little chance of them paying any more heed to whatever sounds he let out.

Fomori, six of them. He recognised the abominations quickly. Not undead, not alive, some wretched halfway point. Each was over seven feet tall, but no broader than a normal man, rapier thin and paper lean. Their skin was grey, yellow or crimson, their eyes black or glowing violet, with mouths filled by jutting razors for teeth and scalps coated in stringy, matted thorns for hair. One had an axe blade for a nose, the tiny scrap of steel catching moonlight whenever she turned. Another’s legs were made from stalactites. The third did not look so unremarkable, with luck it meant the blood flowed more weakly in him.

Of all the things leading the enemy, Fomori were perhaps the worst. Finlay felt his mouth dry as he studied them, the dozen or so Dullahan around them, then the handful of thousand orcs still around them. This was going to be a nasty, brutal and hard fought fight.

Pulling out his bow, tightening his focus, Finlay nocked an arrow. His weren’t made the normal way, there wasn’t a scrap of wood in their structure. Just solid, sharpened steel running a few feet from ass to head and boasting a nasty point on one end. It gave them more mass, a smoother path through the air. Most importantly, it gave them a body that could withstand impacting things as hard as his drawstring tended to launch them. Finlay drew the string back.

It wasn’t strength that let him do so, not entirely. Finlay’s power felt the tensile demands of the string, and lowered them. It hummed around the air adjacent to it, stifling sound before it could even begin, and when he loosed the arrow it flew with no more noise than might a punch have.

Both were misleading features, because it moved as fast as an arrow could do without giving away Finlay’s position with a supersonic whip crack. The length of steel caught one Fomori perfectly, guided mid-flight by Finlay to adjust its course by precious inches and plow right into the vulnerable point between breastplate and helmet. He watched the creature fall in a fissure of blood, already drawing another arrow before it even hit the ground.

By the time he fired his second, the remaining Fomori were scattering. It didn’t matter, Finlay managed to skewer a second through their neck before they could fully remove themselves from danger. The attack came just as the third escaped his field of view.

Finlay had spent years training his Rangers to be living instruments of death, and they proved his success within moments. Coming out of seemingly nowhere, opening up blood vessels and skewering organs as they fell on the orc guards before their hapless enemies even knew a fight had found them. With his night vision as potent as it was, Finlay saw the air turn crimson with spraying arterial blood as five hundred pound bodies thudded harshly to the floor, watched the enemy’s ranks begin to tremble in exertion. He swallowed his anticipation, focusing only on the job.

A Dullahan’s helmet ruptured as Finlay cast another arrow through it, then a towering orc reared up calling out words of galvanisation and encouragement to its men. He got that one through the eye. Every time he released a projectile, another enemy died, and he made sure they counted. Killing officers, killing elites, killing anything that might have the ability to restore order to the chaotic cancer spreading through their forces, or individually challenge and kill any of his Rangers.

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The carnage could not have taken more than half a minute, but by the time it ended he’d already emptied a full quiver of thirty into the other side.

Finlay saw orcs roaring and flailing in confusion, campfires rapidly extinguishing, braziers emptied out into the dirt. He saw officers snarling at their sudden loss of confusion over the ranked men in their forces, and undead lumbering one way and the other in search of something to kill. It seemed, to him, about as chaotic a state as the enemy was likely to enter, and like all military chaos a sharply temporary state. It was his moment.

Calling out, Finlay gave the order for the rest of their men to advance, then began to draw on his second quiver. He took off an orc’s arm before the first of their conventional soldiers crashed into enemy ranks.

He hated crossbows, he really did. But there were times when it did help a shade to have a few hundred idiots throwing their contributions into the giant, convulsing monster of combat. Finlay saw orcs falling en masse as volleys of bolts tunnelled into grey meat and let blood to spurt out in their wake.

Finlay saw his Rangers congealing, forming the lance formation that would cut to the heart of whatever counter their enemies managed to hastily construct against the main body. He hurried to join them.

It took only seconds to reach the group, but those seconds were enough for the fighting to intensify. Men flew head over heels as orcs launched them one way and another, gambesons splitting open along with their wearers beneath the guillotine-swings of Dullahan. Finlay came into the weakest flank, his bow discarded in favour of two long-knives. He started putting them to work on one of the black-armoured undead without a moment’s pause.

The Dullahan swung back at him, its broadsword out-ranging Finlay’s knives by well over a foot and forcing him to hang back. He dodged, sidestepped, kept at bay and forced to evade rather than parry. In a contest of strength he didn’t think he’d lose, but his physicality wasn’t so great that he could push back a blade that heavy with ones as small as his, not when a Dullahan was on the other end. Eventually, though, his chance came, and Finlay leapt on it like a bloodhound upon a fox.

He drove one length of steel deep into a gap between armguard and cuirass, then twisted. The chainmail blocking his blade was thicker and heavier than could be worn by most humans, but it didn’t last long against the enchanted metal grinding against it, not with the amount of strength Finlay had at his disposal. He tore apart ligaments and joints, then wrenched the knife out and stepped in, placing another one through the Dullahan’s eyeslit and mangling the brains beneath.

Another Dullahan moved in beside him, readying a sword stroke that might have killed Finlay on the spot. Had his men not moved faster. Two of them, Rangers both, one snatching the undead’s arm with both of his own, the other sliding his own knife along the most fragile areas of its plate. Properly made armour didn’t have many true openings, but wielding a weapon with the strength of twenty men caused a lot more functional gaps to appear. And all of Finlay’s boys were well trained in finding them.

One Dullahan dropped, then another, and then all that was left to fight were orcs and undead. The former had strength, the latter a near-inexhaustible endurance, but neither characteristic provided much aid as limbs started to detach beneath slashing blows. The only hitch came when one Ranger was sent flying high, blood arcing away from him as a spinning limb flew from his body in the opposite direction.

It was the Fomori, the last one. Finlay saw his men backing away, the momentum of their crushing assault quickly evaporating as terror seeped in. It entered his mind, too.

Fomori were neither undead nor living, things of Demonic blood and esoteric magic. Just to behold one was to stare at an entity more instinctually terrifying than death itself. Even his Rangers couldn’t overcome such a fear easily, there was simply no training to do so. It took innate, immutable will to manage something like that.

Finlay’s hands tightened about his knives as he closed in for it. Had he been a man lacking in will, he’d have died in the gutters he came from.

The dagger scraped along heavy armour, leaving a deep gouge in the steel as Finlay leapt back. His enemy’s spinning arm came fast as a striking viper, missing him by inches. Finlay made sure to snag the wrist with another knife as it went past, not missing the chance to leave another gash in his enemy.

It was not the sort of wound that typically felled a normal man, let alone a Fomori. The monster was rounding on him again when the first of Finlay’s Rangers fell upon its back, the second and third following soon after.

He saw his chance, shoving while the abomination struggled for balance and sending it to the ground, then all of them fell upon it. Their knives found every vulnerability there was to be found, drawing acidic, black blood in great rivulets and puddles as they skewered the piece of monstrous meat at their feet. By the time they were done, a crater had been eroded beneath the minced enemy.

It was then that Finlay stumbled back, panting for breath, feeling the adrenal frenzy of battle finally slow enough for thought. He surveyed the state of his men.

Many wounds, some dead. The vast majority of casualties had, perhaps expectedly, come from the regular soldiers he’d been granted, their bodies less sturdy and swift than his elites. A few Rangers had died, too, though. That made him truly hurt. Each of those was a man possessing talent found in only one among dozens, then trained for years to hone it. They were not easily replaced.

And the ones lost today were not the only casualties of their rebellion.

Finlay climbed to his feet, forcing himself to think of other matters before his thoughts could turn once more to Collin. His son would not be freed from the Dark Lord by simply agonising over his capture, nor would any of the men now under Finlay’s command be served by finding their leader’s mind elsewhere. He buried every scrap of distraction, weakness and humanity he had to.

His men needed him, his people needed him. Kaltan needed him. As the city’s governor, that had been something he’d made peace with years ago. What Finlay hadn’t known, accepting the job, was that the entire world would one day demand he do it well, to boot.

But that was the least among his concerns, leading a rebellion against the Dark Lord. And yet more larger ones would soon be added to the pile. They always were.