Chapter 224: What Comes Across the Plain (2)
They came at half past two in the morning.
CRACK.
Reina's ice sheet reported them before anyone saw them, a long splintering line running west to east across the outer ground.
"Weight," she said. "A lot of it. Coming fast."
THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.
Natalie was already shooting. She had ranged that plain for four days and written every number down, and she started dropping targets at eleven hundred meters, in the dark, before a single beast entered the arc lamps.
Nine of them were dead before the crews below even understood the attack had started.
Then the front rank hit the light.
Wildlands beasts. Real ones. Rangy, gray-hided things built like starved dogs with too many joints, and behind them something heavier with a low flat skull that came in a straight line and did not swerve.
