The blast arrived carrying weight.
Cobblestones shudder beneath the barricade. Shields vibrate against leather straps. A thin rain of dust slips from the broken wall behind the line and settles across shoulders and helms like ash from a distant hearth.
For a breath, no one moves.
Then the sound comes... sharp, not close. It rolls through the streets like something enormous turning in its sleep, a distant beast shifting its bulk. Smoke climbs beyond the rooftops, a smear against the grey sky, a bruise spreading outward.
A shockwave follows. The first to feel it are the ones with the least to lose: a boy at the front who staggers as if struck, a cart's wheel that hops and then collapses, a loose tile that skitters like a coin. The wave pushes at shields and Armor, makes helmets sing on their straps, and leaves a ringing silence in its wake.
Baron Edric tightens his grip on the shield and does not turn his head.
"Hold," he says.
The word is small and flat, but it lands. Men who have been awake for nights hear it as if it were a bell. The line holds.
Confusion spreads fast.
Faces lift, eyes searching the sky and the ruined roofs. "Mage?" someone whispers, voice thin with hope and fear. Another voice answers, harsher: "This feels less like magic and more of destruction."
The thought of a mage is a blade that cuts both ways...miracle or doom...and the men do not know which to fear more.
Edric watches the smoke and the way it curls, the way it smells when it reaches them, the oily reek of torches.
There is a bitter, metallic edge to it that stings the back of the throat. He has read forbidden reports in the quiet hours, heard rumours of a new craft that eats air and spits ruin.
The word for it is banned in every market and every hall, a technology outlawed across the continent for its hunger and its instability. Few have seen it. Fewer still know its sound.
He does not speak the name.
"Captain!" a voice calls from his right.
Edric glances without turning. A young lieutenant stands half a step back from the line, helmet cracked, eyes wide. "Something exploded to the south. Big. Didn't sound right."
Edric nods once. "Too blunt for a mage," he says. "Too crude for a spell."
The lieutenant swallows. "Then what is it?"
Edric's jaw tightens. He looks at the smoke again, at the way the roofs beyond the square are pitted and blackened, at the way a cart farther down the lane lies split as if a giant had taken a hand and closed it. He thinks of the banned craft, of pamphlets burned in the capital. He thinks of the apprentices who might be learning to measure powder by the weight of a coin.
He does not answer the lieutenant's question aloud. Instead, he calls, louder now, to the rear ranks.
"Close! Shields up! Hold your ground!"
The line compresses. Men step into gaps without being told. A fallen soldier is dragged back by his collar and replaced before the puppets can reach the space he left. Someone screams.
The shockwave has left the air raw.
Puppets...the enemy's stitched things...press forward, stumbling over broken bodies, boots slipping on frozen blood. One catches fire where a torch crew had been working; it walks on until its legs fail and it collapses like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Their joints are stiff, their faces blank. They do not flinch at the shockwave. They do not think.
Edric steps forward. His sabre comes up once, clean and level. The blade slices a throat and does not slow. He drives the shield into the next body, shoving it back into the press. The shield rings; his arm takes the shock. He breathes out through his nose. The ground settles beneath him.
This is not desperation, he realizes. This is rehearsal. Someone is learning how much force it takes to break a street, how close they can get before the blast kills its own carriers, how many bodies can be spent for one clean result. They are using people the way an apprentice uses scrap metal...to see what survives the strike.
"Archers!" Edric calls. "Loose on my mark!"
He steps forward, raises his shield, and lets the puppets close the distance.
"Now."
Arrows hiss overhead. Necks break. Bodies drop. The line breathes again.
A young soldier near the centre trembles. His shield wobbles. Blood runs down his cheek where something clipped him. Edric steps into his space and takes the next blow meant for him. The sabre cuts once. Pain flares. He breathes through it, and finds the boy's eyes. They are very young and very steady.
"Breathe," Edric says quietly, without looking at him. "Feet steady. Shield up."
The soldier swallows and obeys.
The men around them speak in fragments now...questions, curses, small jokes to keep the dark at bay. "If it's a mage," one mutters, "call for the warders." "If it's not," another replies, "we burn the ones who made it." The talk is more ritual than plan, a way to make the unknown less sharp.
Edric feels the city's heartbeat in the cobbles: a distant boom, a closer tremor, the soft, steady thud of his own pulse. For a second a memory slides under his ribs...a small hand, callused and warm, gripping his finger in a market stall...and he almost lets the image stay. He folds it away like a map.
"Sergeant," he says, voice low enough that only the man at his elbow hears, "if they learn the cost, we must make the price higher."
The sergeant's laugh is a dry rasp. "Aye, my lord. We'll charge them for every lesson."
Smoke crawls thicker, clinging to faces and the edges of vision. Light goes flat. The world narrows to the scrape of leather, the ring of steel, the hiss of arrows.
A man in the third rank...thin, with a braid tucked under his helm...whispers a prayer between strikes. It is not for victory. It is for the next breath, for the next step.
A man two shields down hums a tune his mother used to sing; the melody is wrong, but it keeps his hands from shaking.
When the next blast comes, the shockwave slams into them like a hand. It lifts a man off his feet and throws him against the barricade.
Edric feels the impact through his boots, through his bones. He tastes metal and snow and the bitter tang of powder. He thinks of the small hand again and lets the image harden into a promise.
"All shall be well," he says once more, and this time the words are not a prayer but a command to the living. The line answers with a single, steady movement. Shields lock.
When the next blast comes, it finds not a broken street but a living wall.