A bullet zipped past and hit Revin’s gallimai, knocking it down. Pain tore through the gallimai’s body and Revin’s mind. It died beneath him, and he hit the ground hard. He curled up and covered his head. Agony tenfold ricocheted in his head. He screamed, his throat scratching at the effort.

Revin blinked. Mind broken. A spear had pierced his gut. He looked down. No wound. Was it a saurian that had felt the spear? He looked up. Smoke hung in the air. Men screamed. Explosions sounded. Saurians bellowed. Pain flowered in his ribs...

Metal monsters walked through the circles of floored men and beasts, unhindered by the fell sorcery of the cannonballs, slashing and stomping the struggling forms beneath them. Swarms of gears and blades overran saurians, leaving them moaning and gushing rivers of blood.

Blackfire .

He trembled. He fell to his knees. He rubbed his eyes until he saw flashes of painful light to drive the images out. Ismander’s lifeless face as he dragged her into a shallow grave. His tears mixing and freezing with blood. He shook his head violently, pain throbbing.

Death and death again.

He looked up. Way out. Must run. Corpses. A retreating army of men and saurians. Revin was struck by a single clear thought.

Follow that army or die.

He stumbled over broken and dying men, the sight of which made him sick. It was all chaos. Soldiers ran in different directions. Some screamed in agony. Others screamed in rage. Metal monsters interspersed among the ranks.

Revin tripped again, his hands landing in a mixture of blood and dirt. He looked up from the torn earth. A metal monster stomped forward; its spear held in both hands. It thrust the spear right through an ateyan soldier, solid metal breastplate and all. The man grunted, dropping his weapon, the tendons on his neck tightening.

Without a glance the metal monster flicked the man off the end, dropping him in a spray of blood, and moved on to other targets.

Revin looked around, frantically. Which way was forward? Which way was safe? Men screamed, and a dozen metal monsters burst through a line of Ateyan soldiers. They bore guns, sighted down on him.

“You should have taken your last chance.” Narazoth’s voice said in his head.

Revin was frozen again. He screamed at himself in his mind to move. Not a single muscle responded. Those weapons would tear him to bloody strips. And he was going to feel every single rip.

Something huge smashed into the automatons and Revin stumbled backward in reflex. It thrashed its three horns with a furious bellow, crushing the metal monsters. One metal monster struck with a sword, breaking a horn and piercing its headshield.

Metal monsters with spears were on it in a moment, one went through its gut, another through the eye, the shoulder, the leg. It thrashed and honked, only tearing its wounds wider. A spray of blood shot from its neck, coating Revin in crimson ink.

Omrai jumped off its back, leaping forward and thrusting his spear into a metal warrior’s shoulder. The gears snapped and broke, and he pulled it back out rapidly. He jumped to his feet and turned to Revin.

“I told you to run!” he shouted, grabbing Revin by the collar and shoving him away from the fight. Without another glance, Omrai turned back to the metal monsters, breaking two more.

Revin nodded. He knew where to go now. He looked at his hands.

They were brown and red.

He ran.

✦✦✦

Shifra and Qadi stood on a hill with a few other camp followers, watching the battle, hearing the din of shouting voices and the rumbling of saurians and gunfire.

The battle was not going well. Her father’s forces had been scattered by the weapons of the enemy. And in a few seconds, she had seen more blood and gore than she had her entire life. Men torn apart. Saurians moaning on the ground. Her body felt cold, the world spinning. She couldn’t believe what her eyes were seeing.

Maybe her father was right. How could anyone worry about a few whippings when this marched toward them? Seeing a battle made her feel so… small. She had thought her father was ignorant to the pain of her people. But, if many battles were like this, then he saw far more pain than she ever had.

Her hand itched to strike.

“Most battles aren’t this bad,” an accented voice said to her right, voice sharp. It was Kaiato. She felt a tingle in her hands and a rush of ice down her back. His brow was furrowed, and he held his arms in fists at his side, one slightly-trembling hand gripping his rifle. He didn’t look at her, only at the field of war.

“How so?”

“They’re getting slaughtered out there,” Kaiato said. “They have to retreat faster. ”

Shifra looked back to the army, groups of men were falling back in scattered clumps, some left their weapons behind, and others fought as their fellows fell back.

The metal warriors pursued.

One group headed their way, towards the camp. The soldiers struggled to stay ahead of a dozen metal warriors.

She looked to the others. Was she just supposed to stand here? She touched the sword at her side, regretting leaving her spear behind. But why would she bring it? She’d been ordered to stay.

Kaiato shook his head.

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“Aren’t there any reserves?” Qadi said, “anyone to help them?”

Shifra looked around. The others that watched the battle looked at the ground. Cooks. Blacksmiths. Saurian masters. Not warriors.

Kaiato dropped to one knee, loading a strange bullet into his rifle. He growled, “they fight like cowards.”

Shifra frowned at him. “They’re doing the best they can.”

Kaiato shook his head as he finished loading. “Not the Ateyans. The metal men. They use fell sorceries, and then stomp on their opponents?” Kaiato aimed down the sights. “This is wrong.”

With an ear-splitting crack, he fired.

She looked to the fleeing men to see a metal warrior go down, its head bursting in a shower of sparks. A soldier lay on the ground, crawling backward from the broken form.

He was cut down a few moments later by a different metal warrior.

“No!” Shifra shouted. Another man got near the bottom of their hill, and he too was cut down, an automaton spear through the chest. He looked young. She heard a loud gasp and turned. Qadi was stepping backward, hand to her mouth. That one had been much too close. The camp-goers nearby moved away from the army as well.

“ Kek shi len !” Kaiato shouted in rage. A curse? He hurried to reload.

Shifra looked back down the hill. The men were just making it to the hill, but they wouldn’t make it. They’d die before they reached the top.

Shifra looked to Qadi, comprehension dawning. “Get out of here!” Shifra yelled. “You’re not a fighter.”

Qadi nodded, but Shifra turned away before she could see her move. Her hand touched her blade. Gripping tightly, she drew it forth with a quiet slide. She looked down the hill.

“Miss Speartip,” Kaiato said. “What are you doing?”

Shifra ran down the hill.

✦✦✦

Omrai hurled himself into the fray, his spear tip scraping through the chest armor of a metal warrior and striking into its soft blue core. It crumpled. It had taken breaking a few of them to discover the key weak point. A weak point surrounded by a thick breastplate.

He growled in rage as another metal warrior swung a massive hammer at his head. He ducked but felt a sudden wave of dizziness and a heavy weight as it passed over him. The same as the cannonballs.

He grabbed a sword from a fallen soldier and crammed it into the gears of the thing’s neck, its head twisted and sputtered. It dropped its weapon and tumbled to the ground.

He surveyed the battlefield. Men and saurians lay dying. Bone, flesh, and metal churning in a macabre stew. Commander Shikaia went down under a wave of spears, each scraping through his armor with hideous screeches. His men fled behind him.

Omrai watched as veterans who had fought at his side, driven back invasion after invasion, died in droves. There were just too many. And he couldn’t get his saurians to move with any cohesion or enough speed to do damage. He thanked Father God for the inspiration to order a retreat sooner rather than later.

The uncareful who fled stumbled into the circles near the cannonballs, and others were accidentally pushed by their fellows in the struggle to escape. Omrai looked to the faceless warriors and struck again. He twisted between them, incapacitating or destroying them. But just being around their weapons made him feel heavier. He wouldn’t last much longer.

His men wouldn’t either if they didn’t get out. That retreating trickle needed to be a flood.

An enemy musketball hit Omrai’s right pauldron. He felt a sudden heaviness on his right side. He let out exhausted breaths. His head spun and constricted.

He shook his head, trying to release the tension. On opening his eyes, the battle lay before him. Time seemed to slow. A metal warrior's blade swung upward, cutting a soldier from waist to jaw. The man flipped backward in the air as a stream of blood shot upward, showering the men behind him. Omrai flinched as a spike of terror rose from the man.

An ankylo swung its clubbed tail, smashing a metal warrior with a shower of gears and sparks, but another just thrust low with its spear, gouging a deep wound along its flank. Spurts of ruby smeared over the metal warrior’s chest.

A man fell to the ground, screaming and holding a bloody stump, bone protruding from the wound. The boy was young, not older than nineteen. He stepped forward to help, but a large form stabbed the boy from behind, its sword coming out the front of his chest. He gargled; eyes wide. Light dimming. Life… drifting.

Bones snapped. Skin tore. Flesh sheared. Eyes darkened. Breathing ceased.

These sensations weren’t unfamiliar. He had felt thousands of deaths before. But… this time… they meant nothing . There was nothing he could do about it. This was it. The war was over. He would die with his men, and Ateya would fall.

Someone grabbed his shoulder. It was a member of his honor guard. Harin. He was almost as old as Omrai himself.

“Sir, you need to leave.”

“But my men,” Omrai said.

“Will die for nothing if you remain!” Harin snapped.

Omrai whipped his head in Harin’s direction.

“Learn from this,” Harin said. “We don’t follow you to live. We follow you to win. Let us buy you a future victory.”

Without another word, Harin turned to the enemy, and charged. He was joined by others, who shouted in defiance as they drove their weapons into the enemy.

With great resistance, Omrai turned away. He spotted a panicked gallimai in a small space cleared of men. He ran to it and climbed up, despite the feeling of a solid counterweight on his back.

He felt… a thrum. A vibration within his core. Almost a deep bass note. It was a sense of… purpose. He looked east, to the direction of the feeling. It was not his own. As he scanned the enemy swarm, he saw someone standing on a hill. A man vested in a black cloak and hood.

“Jebuthar,” Omrai whispered as he would a curse.

The man stood alone on the tallest part of the hill. Behind and around him metal warriors rushed like water over rock, avoiding him by several feet. Behind him, still looming massively in the distance, were the three ships, their faucets spewing clockwork death. Omrai’s gaze returned to Jebuthar, and Omrai thought the man looked right at him.

Omrai turned to the men and saurians he couldn’t save. He felt their pain as they struggled, their own weight flattening them to the earth. Many were left alone, but others still were slaughtered by metal warriors as they struggled to stand.

The metal warriors were unaffected as they marched through the circles of death around the cannonballs. Crushing men under their metal feet.