Commander Haral had fought in eleven Night Auctions.
He knew the rhythm of them. The first hours were always the cheapest, bodies thrown at the rcenary line to test fortifications and bleed the defenders. Then the summoners ca in waves, each tier calculated to drain the defensive barriers until they cracked. By the fourth hour, the line would buckle sowhere. It always buckled sowhere. And once it did, the Night Fall Order would pour through the gap and the real killing would begin.
Eleven auctions. Sa rhythm every ti.
Tonight was no different. His forward units had pushed hard through the first three hours, eating through the rcenary rabble on the eastern approach. Reports ca back steady and predictable. The casualties were acceptable, defensive summons were thinning. The barrier class on the Night Guard side was flagging. Five of their shield bearers had already collapsed.
Haral stood on a broken ledge overlooking the ruins, three of his summoners flanking him, and watched the rcenary line sag.
"Send the second summoner line," he told his lieutenant. "Target the west barricade. They’ve lost their tortoise."
The lieutenant turned to relay the order.
That was when the screaming started.
Not the screaming of battle. Haral had heard enough of that to filter it out like wind. This was different. This was the sound of n who had seen sothing that broke whatever kept them moving forward.
It ca from the southern flank. His southern flank.
"Report," he said.
No report ca. Only more screaming... and then silence, which was worse.
He turned to his lieutenant. "What’s happening on the south?"
The man was already looking, squinting through the dust and torchlight that choked the ruins. His expression shifted from irritation to confusion.
"I... don’t know, sir."
Haral moved to the edge of the ledge and looked south.
At first, he couldn’t parse what he was seeing. There was a gap in his formation. Not a tactical gap, it wasn’t a breach caused by enemy pressure too. It was an absence of n where fifty soldiers should have been standing. The ground was littered with bodies, so still moving, most not, and among them, walking with the unhurried patience of soone crossing a quiet courtyard, was a woman.
She was small and petite, wearing what looked like a nun’s habit, the dark fabric torn at the edges and streaked with sothing wet. Her hair was hidden beneath a veil. In her right hand, a silver chain swung in a lazy arc, catching the firelight as it moved.
Behind her, the southern flank simply did not exist anymore.
"Who is that?"
Nobody answered him.
The woman reached his front line. Three soldiers moved to intercept her. Haral watched the first one lunge with a spear, a clean thrust aid at her center mass.
The chain snapped upward. It caught the spear shaft and ripped it out of the soldier’s hands with a force that spun him off his feet. Before he hit the ground, the chain reversed direction, whipped around, and struck the second soldier across the chest. The sound it made was not a crack. It was a detonation. The man’s breastplate caved inward and he left the ground entirely, his body carving a trench through the rubble behind him.
The third soldier tried to run.
The chain caught his ankle. She yanked, and his body swept the ground before she whipped him overhead and slamd him into the earth with enough force to crater it. Dust erupted in a ring.
She didn’t pause. She didn’t even look at what she’d done. She kept walking.
"Send Vorat’s squad," Haral said. His voice was still calm. Eleven Night Auctions. He’d seen strong fighters before. "Full engagent. Surround and suppress."
Vorat’s squad was twelve n. Career soldiers, all of them. Swordsn, two shield-bearers, a pikeman with arms like tree trunks. They moved in formation, flanking wide, closing on the woman from three angles.
She stopped walking.
Haral leaned forward.
The chain coiled around her forearm twice, and then she moved.
It wasn’t speed. Speed was sothing you could track, sothing the eye could follow even when it lost details. This was displacent. She existed in one place and then she existed in another, and what was left behind in the space between was broken n.
The chain uncoiled and lashed through the first three soldiers before Haral registered that she’d shifted her weight. It wrapped around the shield-bearer’s arm, and she pulled. The man weighed two hundred pounds in his armor. He flew toward her like a child’s doll, and her fist t his face at the midpoint. The crack echoed off the ruins. His helt split. He dropped and didn’t move.
The chain was already elsewhere. It whipped in a circle around her body, a radius of silver that turned everything within three ters into a killing field. Two n caught the chain across their throats. One caught it across his knees and folded. The pikeman thrust from outside her range and the chain wrapped his pike, jerked him forward, and her knee ca up into his ribs. He bent around the impact and she released him with a backhand that sent him spinning into the rubble.
Twelve seconds. The entire squad was on the ground.
She pulled the chain free from a groaning soldier’s arm, flicked the blood off it with a snap of her wrist, and kept walking.
Haral’s calm cracked for the first ti in six years.
"Summoners," he said. "Bring her down."
Three summoning circles blazed to life on the ridge. The first summoner brought forth a shadow wolf the size of a horse, all black muscle and teeth like knives. The second produced a serpent of condensed stone that coiled through the air, its body grinding against itself. The third summoned sothing Haral had seen tear through barricades, a beetle-like creature with a shell harder than forged steel, its mandibles clicking with mindless hunger.
Three summons. One C-rank. Two D-rank. More than enough to overwhelm any lone fighter in the Night Auction’s history.
The beast wolf reached her first. It lunged, jaws wide, aiming for her throat.
She caught it by the lower jaw with her bare hand. The wolf’s montum drove her back half a step. Then she stopped, and the wolf stopped with her, its legs scrabbling at the ground, its jaws straining against a grip that shouldn’t have existed on a hand that small.
She squeezed.
The jaw shattered.
The wolf dissolved into black mist with a sound like tearing cloth, and the summoner who’d produced it staggered, blood pouring from his nose.
The stone serpent ca next, coiling around her from behind, constricting. Its stone body tightened. The ground cracked beneath her feet from the pressure. For a mont, she disappeared inside the crushing coils, and Haral felt a breath of relief.
The serpent exploded.
Fragnts of stone sprayed outward like shrapnel, peppering the nearby ruins, and the woman stood in the center of the wreckage with the chain wound tight around her fist. She’d punched through the serpent’s body. Punched through solid stone, from the inside.
Her crimson eyes turned toward the beetle.
It charged. She didn’t dodge. She stepped into it, drove her palm flat against the underside of its shell, and lifted. The creature weighed several hundred pounds. She flipped it onto its back like an overturned pot and brought her heel down on its exposed belly. Once. The shell cracked. Twice. It caved. Three tis, and the thing stopped moving.
She pulled her foot free, dusted sothing off her habit, and walked forward.
All three summoners were on their knees. One was unconscious. The other two were staring at the empty space where their spirits had been with the hollow expressions of n who’d just lost sothing they believed was permanent.
Haral’s lieutenant turned to him with a face drained of color.
"Sir, what do we—"
"Send the B-ranks."
There was a pause.
"Sir?"
"I said send them."
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