"Cover me!" I bellowed, though my voice was just one more scrape in the cacophony.
I sprinted behind their line, feeling the heat of an aetherling's fire-lance on my back. I passed the last functioning sun cannon, a marvel of gnomish and kobold engineering that drank solar light and spat it out as searing beams.
It was manned by a single kobold artillerist, her small, scaled body a whirl of desperate energy as she cranked the elevation wheel, tracking an oncoming roc. The cannon's great focusing lens was crazed with fractures, a spiderweb of light-leaks that signaled its imminent demise. Each shot might be its last.
I skidded to a halt, blocked. The cannon was humming, a sound like a choir of hornets, as it built its charge. The air grew thick with ozone. To run in front of it now would be to atomize myself. To wait was to invite the roc, which was now diving, talons open, directly at the cannon.
"Fire it, scale-sister, fire it," I hissed, my knuckles cracking on the case.
The kobold did not flinch. She kept tracking, her tail lashing, waiting for the perfect alignment. The roc shrieked, a sound that felt like it was tearing my eardrums. At the last possible second, as the shadow of the beast fell over us, she slammed the activation rune.
The beam speared upward, pure white, silent, and absolute. It punched through the creature's breastbone and emerged blazing from its back. The roc plummeted, a dead weight, but the beam's feedback was too much for the damaged lens.
It shattered in a blinding bloom of molten crystal.
The recoil didn't just push the cannon; it detonated its housing. The blast hurled the kobold backward. Her tail whipped the stone as she landed. I was already moving, my own armor peppered with hot crystal shards. I paused only long enough to see that she would not rise again. The cannon, her final monument, drooped like a wilted flower, petals of smoke drifting into the angry sky.
Another life debt.
"Fifty yards," I grunted, and plunged back into the chaos.
The eastern landing was visible now, a hellscape of barricades and desperate magic. "Hold the line!" an orcish captain bellowed, his voice ragged yet still forged of iron. He was magnificent and terrible, his armor dented, one tusk snapped, but his eyes burned with a commander's fury. He saw me coming, his eyes flicking from my face to the case.
"Draughts!" I roared, shoving past the last twenty feet through a knot of wounded.
"Balu's axe, you made it, soldier!" He snatched the case from my grasp, his huge green fingers surprisingly gentle as he flipped the latches. He didn't pause to thank me, he just acted. He grabbed a vial, jammed it into the hand of a goblin sergeant beside him, and took one for himself.
"Kriv didn't," I said, gasping for air.
The orc captain paused, the vial halfway to his lips. His eyes met mine. "He died a hero," he growled, and downed the draught in a single gulp. "A fate I can only envy."
I watched his shoulders straighten, the crushing fatigue of seventy hours peeling back for one last, glorious hour of clarity. "On me!" he roared to his squad, his voice now booming with the draught's false thunder. "TO THE BARRICADE!"
My mission was over. The draughts were delivered. But I was here, and the captain was moving. I drew my sword, its edge chipped and dull, and staggered to his side. Together, we slammed our weight against a barricade of collapsed merlons as the first wave of ants crested the stairs.
The combined weight of the insects slammed into it, a tide that could flex granite. My arms trembled as I braced the shield wall. I could feel the pulse of mandibles hammering the other side, each strike a nail driven into my eardrums, the air thick with the copper-and-vinegar stink of their acid.
"It's not holding!" a goblin shrieked, as the barricade slid back a foot, crushing his leg.
"Back! Get back!" the orc captain shouted. He jammed a powder keg the size of a beer stein between two loose stones and flicked a rune-match. Sparks kissed the fuse.
We hurled ourselves backward, dragging the wounded goblin with us. The barricade vanished in a roar of pulverized rock and chitin shards. The stairs were clear, for a breath. Then the bugs behind clambered over the corpse-heap of their kin, undeterred.
"Choir!" the captain bellowed, looking past me as we ran. "Bind them! Now!"
Farther along the eastern landing, I saw them: the Spellweaver Choir. Thirty kobolds, linked by silver circlets, began their grand binding. Ropes of pale blue sigils arced skyward from their hands, weaving a lattice of pure magic meant to imprison the entire battlefield in stasis.
It was both beautiful and utterly futile. Before the final line of the sigil-cage could seal, a fresh flock of rocs dove, not with lightning, but with suicidal purpose. They crashed through the lattice, talons shattering the glowing sigil-nodes, scattering kobold bodies like torn parchment. The lattice collapsed in a rain of broken runes that flickered out before touching stone.
There were moments, in that stretched rubber-band of time, when I forgot sound existed. One descended then: a hush after the detonation, after the choir's failure.
In that calm, I heard the ants' mandibles clicking, a soft, billion-fold castanet rhythm. Had I not known what was behind the noise, it might almost have lulled me to Vantara's embrace.
The orc captain heard it, too. He tilted his head, his good eye wide. "What...?"
The ground beneath my boots bucked.
It wasn't an impact. It was a breach.
A centipede, no, the centipede, the one we had whispered about for thirty hours, burrowed through the wall's facing and surfaced upon the second terrace. It was seventy feet long, its plates glowing with mage-fire, its antennae lashing the air. Its arrival tore open a chasm in our line. I lurched sideways, watching three orcs and the goblin I had just saved tumble screaming into the fresh void.
The centipede reared, its forest of legs churning the stone to gravel. It spat a gout of acid that hissed across the terrace like sleet on a frozen pond. Parapet edges sagged where the acid bit too deep; one section sheared away, cartwheeling into the ant-ocean below.
My vision narrowed to a tunnel. If that monster carved unchecked, it would cleave the terrace in half, cutting off the captain's platoon and isolating the third tier's stairwell. It was already turning, its countless milky eyes fixing on our cluster of soldiers.
The orc captain was frozen, his sword halfway raised, stunned by the sheer scale of the new threat. But I saw it—a crate, twenty feet away, stenciled with the blue rune for Frost.
I didn't wait for an order. "The bombs!" I screamed, sprinting, if my ragged stumble merited the word, toward the last reserve of alchemical frost bombs.
Two goblins were already there, but a spray of acid from the beast's passing had caught them. They were slumped over the crate, their armor dissolving. I shoved their bodies aside, my gauntlets sinking into the suddenly soft metal, and ripped the lid from the box. Inside, blue-glass spheres hummed with cold.
"Help me!" I yelled to anyone.
A goblin sergeant, the one the captain had given the draught to, slammed into me. "The slings!" he pointed, already fitting a bomb into a wire-mesh sling. I did the same.
We whirled the bombs overhead, the glass cold even through our gloves. The centipede saw us, reared again, and opened its mandibles.
"Now!"
We released. The bombs arced, two small blue stars against the smoky sky. They struck the creature's thorax. Frost blossomed upon impact, a sudden, beautiful field of hoarfrost that crept up the centipede's plated legs.
Segments locked, cracking with a sound like glaciers calving. The beast writhed, shattering half the frozen armor in a desperate frenzy, but it could not free the front quarter of its body. It twisted, convulsed, and toppled sideways.
It crushed thirty feet of battlement as it fell, yet blocked the gap it had made.
For a heartbeat, I wanted to cheer, but my throat would not obey. I leaned on my knees, sucking air that tasted of acid and sudden winter. The sergeant next to me collapsed, heaving for breath. The orc captain staggered over and clapped a hand on my pauldron so hard it nearly drove me to the stone.
"Good... good," he breathed. "You see? We hold..."
But his voice trailed off as he looked past me, toward the plain.