The world shrank to a circle of steel, a tunnel of focus that blocked out the screaming, the heat, and the coppery stench of blood. Michael's breathing hitched, a shaky inhalation that tasted of dust and gun oil. He let it out slowly, forcing his trembling hands to steady. In the luminous green circle of the M16's sight, a bobbing, furious target resolved: not the crimson-tinged specter of Blackhand, but a Dwarven raider. The Dwarf was a barrel of muscle and rage, his braided beard flying, his tree-trunk legs pumping with improbable speed as he charged headlong across the killing ground. He wielded a warhammer that looked like it could stave in the side of a truck, yet he was keeping pace with the human sprinters, a testament to terrifying strength. Something about the dwarf's sheer, unabashed audacity—the way he bellowed challenges lost in the general roar, the way he seemed to believe himself invincible—pricked at Michael's nerves. That one, he thought, the decision cold and clinical amidst the panic. Take the loud one first. Wasting bullets on the blur that is Blackhand is a fool's errand.
The crosshairs settled on the center of the dwarf's fur-covered chest. One hundred meters. Michael's finger took up the slack on the trigger.
The rifle's report was a sharp, shocking crack, a sound of pure, alien modernity. The Dwarf's reaction was not human. He didn't dive; he contortedin mid-stride, a spinning, lateral roll that seemed to defy the laws of mass and momentum. Two rounds sparked harmlessly off stone or whined into the void. The third connected with a wet thwack, tearing a chunk from the Dwarf's left shoulder. A spray of crimson mist painted the air. The Dwarf bellowed, a roar of outrage that cut through the din, but his charge only faltered for a single, jarring step.
Not enough.A spike of frustrated anger, white-hot and desperate, shot through Michael. He shifted his aim, leading the now-awkward target, and fired again. A short, controlled burst. The wounded shoulder hampered the Dwarf's preternatural agility. This time, he couldn't fully evade. A round punched into his lower abdomen with a sickening sound. Another struck his thick thigh. He went down on one knee, the massive warhammer slipping from his grasp to thud on the hard earth. Yet, impossibly, he began to push himself back up, his face a mask of snarling, pain-fueled hatred.
A cold detachment, the kind that comes when horror becomes routine, settled over Michael. This was no longer a thinking creature; it was a malfunctioning machine that needed disabling. He emptied the remainder of the magazine. The rifle bucked against his shoulder six times. One round went wide. The next four struck home—a brutal stitching of impacts across the Dwarf's torso and leg. The creature's body jerked violently with each hit. The final round entered just above his bushy eyebrow. The furious light in his eyes vanished, replaced by empty, glassy shock. He toppled forward, a sudden, inert mass in the churned dirt.
Twelve rounds. A third of a precious magazine. For one kill. A wave of sickening inefficiency washed over him, mingling with the cordite smoke in his throat. Was this the supreme advantage of his otherworldly technology? It felt grotesque, a profligate waste.
As if chastising his wastefulness, three other, deeper, more authoritative cracksechoed from the fortified husk of the Greyhound bus. The men with the M1 Garands had joined the fray. They were hunters of the wastes, not trained soldiers, and they chose their targets with a predator's chilling patience. Their first volley was a model of terrifying precision. Three shots, three distinct, meaty impacts. But the Aura-wielders were not mere beasts. At the last possible microsecond, they moved. A bullet meant for a heart tore through a bicep in a spray of red mist. One aimed for a head gouged a bloody furrow along a scalp. Another meant to shatter a spine pulverized a shoulder blade. The heavy .30-06 rounds struck with devastating force, but they were not instantly fatal. A grim, close-range duel ensued. Two, sometimes three more carefully aimed shots were needed to finally extinguish the shimmering, superhuman vitality of each target.
And in those exchanged seconds, measured in heartbeats and spent brass, Blackhand closed half the remaining distance. He was a streak of incarnate violence, a crimson comet moving with a liquid, predatory grace that made the air around him seem to warp. Forty meters. He was a blur, leaving his own elites behind, a one-man spearhead aimed at the heart of the wall.
"The leader! All fire on Blackhand!" Michael screamed, his voice raw. He had no frame of reference for what a Third-Rank warrior—or whatever Blackhand truly was—could do. He only knew, with bone-deep certainty, that the man could not be allowed to set foot on the wall.
Frugality was a luxury for the living. Michael flicked the selector to full-auto, raised the rifle, and hosed down the space in front of the charging figure. His marksmanship was, as ever, decidedly average. The bullets stitched a wild, drunken pattern in the dust. Yet, in their very randomness, they wove an inescapable net. Blackhand, a phantom a moment before, was forced to choose. He couldn't dodge them all. He chose to take two. Michael watched, breath trapped in his lungs, as the shimmering crimson aura around the man's torso flared like a blood-red star struck by meteors. The rounds struck—a hammer-blow to the thigh, a grazing slash across the ribs. There was no explosive spray of blood, no cry of pain. The Aura visibly dimmed, flickering under the brutal transfer of kinetic energy, but it held. The bullets, their force spent, fell to the dirt as flattened, mangled discs.
The Garands spoke again, their deeper barks angry and final. Their heavier rounds had more tangible effect. Michael saw Blackhand's seamless stride break as a .30-06 round slammed into his side. The Aura there fractured like stressed stained glass, and a real, dark splash of blood bloomed on his leather jerkin. Another round clipped his arm, spinning him slightly. But they were wounds, not stops. The man's forward momentum, though checked, was undestroyed.
And then Blackhand's right hand moved. It was less a draw and more an appearance, a motion too fast for the eye to properly follow. One moment it was empty, the next it clenched the checkered grip of a Colt M1911 pistol. It rose, the dark eye of the barrel unerringly finding Michael on the parapet. A chill, colder than the deepest void of space, locked Michael's joints. This was it.
A different sound erupted—a deep, concussive BOOMthat physically shook the air in Michael's chest. From a hidden firing port lower on the wall, a gout of flame and smoke vomited forth. The settlement's last secret, the man with the sawed-off shotgun, had fired. The spread of shot caught Blackhand in mid-air, a giant's fist made of lead that smashed him from his trajectory and hurled him onto his back in the dirt. Yet even as he was thrown, the pistol in his hand flashed. Four times. The reports were a single, stuttering roll of thunder. Michael saw the shotgunner's position disintegrate in a shower of splintered wood. The fourth shot was definitive; the top of the defender's head vanished.
Blackhand hit the ground, skidded, and came up in a low crouch. Dozens of lead pellets were studded in his chest and arms like malign jewelry, stopped by a combination of impossibly dense muscle and his guttering Aura. He shook his head once, a bull dismissing flies, and flung the empty pistol aside with a snarl. From his back, he drew a spiked flail, its head dangling from a cruel chain. He looked up, his eyes finding Michael's, and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a smile that held no humor, only a promise of exquisite pain. Then he charged again. The wounds, the point-blank shotgun blast, seemed only to have sanded the edge from a monster, not broken it.
'Third Rank, a good rifle shot can drop them,'John's voice echoed in his memory. 'Fourth Rank… their bodies are tempered. Common bullets might not even break the skin. They catch them in the meat and keep coming.'
"A Fourth-Rank warrior," Michael whispered, the words tasting of ash and despair. A walking tank. His fingers, suddenly clumsy, found the magazine release. The empty clattered to the planks. He fumbled at his belt for a fresh one, the simple drill now a nightmare of sluggish ineptitude. Blackhand was covering the last twenty meters, a relentless, crimson-jacketed fate. Once he was on the wall, in the press of bodies, the rifles would be useless. The delicate defense would be shredded.
"Zach!" The scream was torn from his throat, pure desperation. "Stop him! You stop him, and I swear by all the spicy strips in creation, you can have them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until the sun burns out!"
The effect on the Ogre was chemical, profound. The promise of unlimited la tiaopenetrated the battle-rage fogging his simple mind. His small, deep-set eyes, previously fixed on the brawl before him, swiveled. They found Blackhand, and in them ignited a new, singular fire: the pure, avaricious light of culinary destiny. "SPICY STICKS!" he roared, the sound a physical force. "ZACH'S STICKS!"
He moved. Not with strategy, but with the tectonic certainty of a landslide. The massive manhole cover strapped to his left arm came up. A raider was between him and his goal; there was a brief, wet sound, and the man was simply gone, hurled from the wall. Zach reached the parapet just as Blackhand vaulted over it.
Blackhand landed, graceful and lethal, the spiked ball of his flail already a blur. Zach didn't parry. He set his feet, braced the crude shield, and took the blow. The impact was not a sound, but a catastrophe—a deafening, shuddering GONG that vibrated through the stones and up the spines of every fighter nearby. The chain wrapped around the shield, the spikes shrieking in protest. For one eternal second, two impossible forces were locked: the refined, ferocious power of a Fourth-Rank Aura against the primordial, mindless might of an Ogre hypnotized by promises of chili and oil.
Zach grunted, his boots scraping on the bloody planks, but he held. Then, with a bellow that seemed to suck the air from the battlefield, he swung. The railway axle club, a grotesque masterpiece of gore, whistled in a blow that held the finality of a falling cliff. Blackhand, shocked by the raw, resisting power, had to bring his flail's haft across in a desperate block. The collision was a concussive blast of force. Blackhand was physically driven back a full step, his boots screeching on the wood. The calculation in his eyes was replaced, for a fleeting instant, by sheer, stunned disbelief.
He hadn't been stopped. But he had been caught. And on this crumbling wall, that was a miracle. A miracle bought for the price of spicy processed snacks. As the Ogre and the raider lord became the eye of a new, more terrifying storm, blow echoing against blow, Michael finally slammed the fresh magazine home, racked the charging handle, and turned away. The battle had not turned. It had simply birthed a new, more desperate stalemate at its heart. The real wave was still coming. The wall was still dying. And now, he had to face the rest of the flood.