Dawn broke not with a gentle blush, but with a bloody smear across the eastern horizon. It was a fitting herald for the violence to come. In the cold, grey light, they appeared. A shambling, wretched tide of humanity pouring out of the foothills. The scout's estimate had been accurate. There were well over a hundred of them, a motley horde united by the lean, hungry look of desperation. They were not an army. They were a pack of wolves, drawn by the scent of our impossible harvest. They carried crude spears, rusty hatchets, and clubs studded with sharp rocks. Their bodies were gaunt, their faces hollowed out by starvation, but their eyes burned with a covetous fire as they beheld our golden fields.
A knot of fear, cold and tight, clenched in my gut. From my vantage point on the main gatehouse, they looked like an overwhelming force, a wave of pure entropy poised to crash against our fragile island of civilization. Beside me, my mother gripped my arm, her knuckles white. Below, our thirty-odd defenders, arrayed along our newly-built ramparts, looked like a handful of pebbles against a tidal wave.
"Steady," I breathed, the word as much for myself as for the men who could hear me. "Hold your positions. Let them come to us. Let them break themselves upon our design."
The raiders, seeing the pathetic size of our defending force, let out a collective, ragged cheer. Their leader, a brutish man with a tangled black beard and a helmet fashioned from the skull of some great beast, pointed a rusty sword towards our fields and then towards our walls. His meaning was clear. The grain first, then the city. Their charge was a chaotic, disorganized affair, a mad dash driven by empty bellies.
This was what my knowledge packet had predicted. This was what I had planned for.
They hit the moat first. They had clearly seen the main canal from a distance, but in their arrogance, they had underestimated its new depth and width. The first wave of charging men didn't even try to slow down, plunging headlong into the deep water. Their triumphant cheers turned into shrieks of surprise and panic. Weighed down by their crude weapons and leather armor, many of them immediately began to flounder and drown. The charge dissolved into chaos as those behind crashed into those struggling in the water.
"Archers!" my voice rang out, sharp and clear. "First volley!"
Our 'archers' were a small group of men and women I had trained, armed with simple bows and the cruel, barbed arrows our blacksmith had fashioned. Their aim was unsteady, their skill minimal, but their target was a churning mass of confusion. A ragged volley of arrows flew through the air. Many missed, but several found their mark, and fresh cries of pain joined the chorus of panic from the moat.
The raiders were stunned. Their initial, confident charge was broken, their momentum lost. The beast-skull-helmeted leader screamed curses at them, urging them forward. A few of the stronger ones managed to swim across, clambering up the muddy bank, only to be met by the second layer of my defense.
This was Borin's domain. He and his ten best men were positioned behind the low earthen ramparts, a grim line of shields and spears. The raiders who made it across the moat were exhausted, waterlogged, and disoriented. They were easy prey. Borin fought with a cold, brutal economy of motion. He was not a duelist; he was a butcher. His shield blocked a wild swing, and his short, heavy sword punched through leather and bone. Beside him, our men, farmers and laborers just days ago, held the line, their fear channeled into a desperate, focused violence. They were defending their homes.
But the sheer number of the enemy was a formidable weapon in itself. More and more raiders, having seen the folly of the direct charge, began to build crude bridges from scavenged wood or simply swam across in a great, ugly swarm. They swamped Borin's small force, forcing them into a slow, fighting retreat back towards the main wall.
Now came the test of the hidden pits. As the horde surged forward, the ground literally swallowed them. Men vanished with sickening screams, their bodies impaled on the sharpened stakes below. The charge faltered again, the raiders hesitating, unsure of the very ground beneath their feet. This was the psychological warfare the system had described. I had turned their greatest asset, the land itself, against them.
But their leader was no fool. He rallied his men, directing them to tread carefully, to probe the ground ahead of them. They began to advance again, slower this time, more deliberate, their faces masks of grim fury. They were paying a heavy price, but they were coming.
They reached the base of our main wall. It was not tall, no more than twelve feet, but it was vertical and lined with defenders.
"Now!" I screamed.
The civilian population, my mother among them, unleashed our final, primitive defense. A hail of stones, bricks, and heavy logs rained down upon the attackers. The women and children, who had been taught to fear violence, now became its agents, their faces streaked with tears and dirt as they fought for their lives.
The raiders, with no ladders to speak of, tried to form human pyramids to scale the wall. It was a desperate, suicidal tactic. We pushed them back, stabbed down at them with spears, and crushed them with stones. The base of our wall became a charnel house, a grim tableau of crushed limbs and shattered bodies.
The battle raged for what felt like a lifetime. The sun climbed higher, beating down on the blood, sweat, and dust. Our defenders were tiring. Our supply of arrows and stones was dwindling. The raiders were battered, their numbers significantly thinned, but their desperation gave them a terrible, unholy strength.
The focal point of the battle became the main gate. They used a heavy log as a makeshift battering ram, and the thick, timber gate began to groan and splinter under the repeated impacts. Borin and his men, having retreated inside, braced it with their bodies and every piece of scrap timber we had.
Thud. CRACK.
A large fissure appeared in the gate. Hands and weapons began to reach through.
The beast-skulled chieftain was there, his eyes wild, roaring at his men, urging them on for one final push. He saw me standing on the gatehouse, the clear leader of the defense. He pointed his rusty sword at me, a silent promise of death.
Thud. CRACK. BOOM!
With a final, shattering impact, the gate burst inwards. The raiders, with a triumphant roar, began to pour into our city.
For a single, heart-stopping moment, I felt the cold certainty of failure. My traps had worked, my defenses had held, but it wasn't enough. Our line was broken.
But as the first wave of invaders flooded through the breach, they were not met by cowering farmers. They were met by Borin and his shield line, a solid wall of grim-faced, blood-soaked defiance. They had fallen back to this final chokepoint, just as I had planned. The narrow gateway prevented the raiders from bringing their numbers to bear. It was man against man, a desperate, hacking, stabbing melee in the dust and shadows of the gate.
I looked at the chaos below, at the exhausted faces of my men, and I knew I had one last card to play. It was a terrible, desperate gamble.
"The oil!" I screamed at my mother. "Now!"
During our preparations, I had set aside several large clay pots filled with the rendered fat from the lizards and grubs our foragers collected. It was our primary cooking oil. Now, it would be our final weapon.
My mother and the other women tipped the large pots over the edge of the gatehouse. The thick, greasy oil rained down, splashing over the chieftain and the packed mass of his men struggling in the gateway. They looked up, confused, momentarily blinded by the foul liquid.
I held up a torch, its flame whipping in the wind. Our eyes met, the chieftain's and mine. I saw the dawning comprehension, the flicker of pure terror in his eyes.
I threw the torch.
It arced through the air, a final, fiery prayer. It landed in the oil-soaked chaos of the gateway. The world erupted in a hellish inferno. The greasy oil ignited with a deafening FWOOSH, engulfing the chieftain and his warriors in a vortex of flame. Their triumphant roars turned into screams of unimaginable agony. The gateway to our city became the very mouth of hell.
The remaining raiders outside stared in utter horror at the wall of fire and the shrieking, burning figures of their comrades. Their morale, already battered and bloodied, shattered completely. This was not a battle; it was a nightmare. They were fighting not men, but demons led by a sorcerer-king.
They broke. They threw down their weapons and they ran, a terrified, scattered rout, disappearing back into the hills from whence they came.
A stunned silence fell over Oakhaven, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the last, fading screams of the dying. We stood on our walls, bleeding, exhausted, and splattered with gore, and watched them flee. We had held. The oasis had survived.