From the top of the third wall, the pale Sky-Fallen boy and his doll-like companion watched the forest transform into a graveyard.
The first Lacert soldiers crept through the dense undergrowth in a cautious spread formation. Their scaled bodies moved low between the trees, weapons drawn, eyes scanning the terrain ahead. They were disciplined and professional. They checked their footing and communicated through hand signals, advancing with methodical precision.
However, their skill wouldn't save them, as one by one the Lacerts disappeared beneath the canopy until the leading soldiers entered the first stretch of trapped woodland.
Grub's expression never changed but his mind knew what was coming.
When the leading Lacert took a step forward, The poor bastard's foot snagged a tripwire hidden beneath a carpet of fallen leaves. For a fraction of a second the wire held taut before the mechanism triggered. The ground beneath the soldier and two of his companions gave way as a concealed pit yawned open like a hungry mouth. Their screams cut through the forest canopy, sharp and startled, before a sickening wet crunch silenced them all at once. At the bottom of the pit, sharpened wooden stakes jutted upward from the earth, each one now bearing the weight of an impaled body.
The remaining soldiers in the advance group froze. Then, after a tense heartbeat, they shifted their formation wider and pressed forward.
The next trap was a deadfall. A weighted log suspended between two trees crashed down on a Lacert who stepped through the trigger zone, flattening him into the dirt with a sound like a sack of grain hitting stone. His companions shouted warnings to each other, their voices rising in pitch as the reality of their situation began to sink in.
Then a net trap swept three more off their feet, tangling them in woven vine rope treated with the spore-bearing fungi Orobas had recommended. The struggling Lacerts inhaled the released spores and began convulsing, their movements growing sluggish and disoriented as the fungal compound attacked their nervous systems.
The surviving Lacerts froze.
"What was—?!"
"Traps!"
"Watch your footing!"
But before they could reorganize—
TWANG!
A bent sapling released, causing a log to swing through the trees like a battering ram.
The lumber smashed into two soldiers with enough force to launch them into another tree, their bones breaking with audible cracks.
Another scream soon erupted farther down. A concealed snare tightened around a purple Lacert's ankle.
The unfortunate Lacert shot into the air upside down before another hidden mechanism released and dozens of sharpened stakes swung outward from a nearby trunk.
The hanging soldier was skewered before he could even cry for help.
One by one, trap after trap activated across the outer ring of the first wall's perimeter. Tripwires released swinging branches studded with sharpened stakes. Concealed snares yanked soldiers off the ground by their ankles. Pressure plates collapsed false floors into spike-lined channels. The botanical compound Grub had spent hours mixing filled certain pits with a noxious gas that burned the eyes and lungs of anything that fell in.
The jungle itself seemed alive, devouring soldiers without revealing where the attacks were coming from.
Of the roughly three dozen Lacerts in the first wave, nearly half were dead or incapacitated before a single defender raised a weapon.
Grub watched from the third wall with an expression that hovered between analytical satisfaction and a much less clinical look. Each scream that faded into silence confirmed another trap had functioned as designed. Each crash and snap validated the hours of engineering he had poured into the network.
His enchanted notebook sat open on his knee, and every few seconds he jotted a quick observation. Which traps triggered cleanly and which ones the Lacerts managed to avoid. He wrote where the gaps in coverage had revealed itself and information he could use to improve the system later, assuming there was a later.
El sat beside him, her hidden gaze fixed on the carnage below with characteristic stillness. If the violence disturbed her, her posture didn't show it.
Far below, Morrigan stood before the first defensive wall with her arms folded. She hadn't moved an inch. Her small unit of Guardians and volunteer soldiers stood at their posts, weapons ready, expressions ranging from grim determination to barely contained terror. But none of them had engaged. There was nothing to engage yet. The forest was doing their fighting for them.
Several Lacerts attempted to retreat. Others tried to sprint through the danger zone. Neither option worked. Running only triggered more mechanisms. Turning around forced them back through traps they hadn't noticed before.
Slowly but surely, bodies accumulated among the roots as broken spears and shattered shields littered the undergrowth.
Yet the invasion did not stop. More Lacerts continued pouring through the forest.
Surviving Lacerts from the first wave began emerging from the deeper portions of the trap zone. They pushed through the last line of deadfalls and snares with heightened awareness, testing each step before committing their weight, scanning every branch and vine for signs of concealment. Their earlier discipline had been replaced by jumpiness. Every snapping twig made them flinch. Even something as simple as a rustle of leaves sent hands tightening around weapons.
They were becoming cautious enough that the remaining traps would catch fewer and fewer of them.
The survivors started to point out the hidden tricks.
"Pit there!"
"Don't step on that branch!"
"Watch the trees!"
Slowly and painfully, the front line adapted.
They began navigating around already triggered traps and fewer Lacerts died cause of it.
Grub had expected as much. The outer layer had never been intended to stop the army. Only trim it off. He watched another group carefully weave around an exposed pit.
"They're learning," Luthiel whispered.
Grub nodded once.
"They should be."
Then Pazuzu's Forte reached them.
Grub couldn't see the horned Guardian from his position. Pazuzu was concealed somewhere within the middle layer of the first defensive perimeter, exactly where the battle plan had placed him. But Grub could see the exact moment his ability took effect.
It was like watching a switch flip inside every soldier simultaneously.
The Lacerts who had been creeping forward with agonizing caution suddenly relaxed, their houlders dropping lazily while their grips loosened on their weapons. The hyper-vigilant scanning of the terrain slowed to casual observation. One soldier who had been testing the ground with his spear tip before each step simply started walking normally, as though he had forgotten why he had been so careful in the first place.
That unfortunate lizard walked straight into a concealed snare. The wire caught his ankle and hauled him upward into the canopy. His confused shout was cut short when the counterweight swung a spiked branch into his midsection.
The soldier behind him watched it happen. He bore witness to his comrade being torn apart by a trap that should have been obvious. And then walked into the next one.
Pazuzu's Calm Aura stripped the survival instinct from every Lacert within its range. The traps that should have become ineffective after the first few activations continued to claim victims with mechanical regularity. Soldiers who had just witnessed their companions die to hidden mechanisms stepped into identical mechanisms without a flicker of hesitation.
From the third wall, it looked absurd. Like watching people walk into walls they could clearly see.
Grub's prediction had been exactly right. One soldier falling into a pit trap should teach everyone behind him to watch for pit traps. But Pazuzu's ability severed that logic at the root. Lesson learned, lesson forgotten, lesson lethal.
That horned bastard is worth his weight in gold right now.
The grudging admission sat uncomfortably in Grub's chest, but he couldn't deny the results. The trap network was performing beyond his most optimistic projections, and Pazuzu's Forte was the multiplier that made the difference between effective and devastating. The Guardian's ability was terrifying. Grub reluctantly acknowledged that no strategy he'd designed could have achieved this level of effectiveness alone.
More Lacerts continued pushing through the outer ring. Their numbers were thinning, bodies scattered across the forest floor between broken traps and collapsed pits. The survivors who managed to push past Pazuzu's range of influence regained their caution, but by then they had already cleared the densest portion of the trap zone. The remaining obstacles were thinner, more spread out, designed to slow rather than kill.
Morrigan's group still hadn't engaged. The old kappa stood at her post like a statue, her staff planted beside her, the water in her basin perfectly still. She was waiting for the Lacerts to clear the forest and enter the open ground between the tree line and the first wall.
The killing ground.
Grub checked his notes and looked up at the forest again. The first wave had been chewed up badly. Between the traps and Pazuzu's enhancement, he estimated that far more than half of the initial three dozen soldiers were either dead or too injured to continue.
But it wasn't over.
A second wave was emerging from the deeper forest. This group was larger, considerably so. Where the first wave had been a probing force of a few dozen, this formation stretched wider through the trees and moved with a heavier, more deliberate cadence. They had heard the screams from the advance party and knew what was ahead.
Grub counted heads as best he could from the third wall. The numbers were difficult to pin down through the dense foliage, but his estimate put this wave at well over a hundred soldiers. Perhaps more behind them that he couldn't yet see.
His stomach tightened. That was a significant force. Even with the traps, and Pazuzu, even with Morrigan at the first wall, numbers like that would test every layer of their defense.
Then his eyes caught something that made his breath hitch.
Moving through the second wave, partially obscured by the soldiers around it but unmistakable once spotted, was a Lacert unlike the others. Its scales were a deep, vivid crimson that stood out against the muted greens and browns of the forest like fresh blood on snow. Where the other soldiers advanced in formation, this one moved with a loose, predatory swagger.
Grub squinted harder, trying to make out details through the distance and the foliage. The red Lacert was armed differently from the others, carrying something curved at its hip. Its movements were fluid almost as if it were dancing.
No, Grub knew that particular red Lacert. He had seen him with Colonel Gavial and at the festival.
Grub's fingers tightened around his notebook.
"El," he said quietly.
Luthiel turned her hidden gaze toward him.
"Do you see the red one? In the second wave."
A moment of silence passed before El responded.
"Yes. I see it."
Her flat voice carried something Grub couldn't quite identify. Not fear, El didn't seem capable of fear. But something adjacent to it, a careful recognition that whatever was walking through those trees was different from the cannon fodder dying in the traps around it.
Grub looked back at the crimson figure moving through the forest and felt the faint Nihil in his chest pulse in response. His hand drifted to the morning star strapped across his back.
The first wave had been the appetizer.
The real battle was about to begin.