The mercenary line held. The barricade took the brunt of their attacks, the sharpened logs catching the first attackers and forcing them to climb or go around. Those who climbed were met by blades from above. Those who went around found narrow gaps that funneled them into killing lanes where two or three mercenaries could hold off a dozen.
The ruins helped. A collapsed arch to our left created a natural chokepoint that four men held with nothing but spears and bad attitudes. A half-wall to our right forced the attackers to split around it, and the mercenaries on either side cut them down as they came through single file.
Dull was in his element. The big man didn’t shout, didn’t roar or do anything dramatic. He simply stood at a gap in the barricade and swung his axe with a metronome’s consistency. Each swing opened a man. Each recovery was smooth. He fought the way a carpenter sawed wood, with the dull efficiency of someone doing a job they’d done a thousand times.
The wiry woman was beside him, her spear darting in and out of the gaps like a serpent’s tongue, finding throats and armpits with a precision that made her earlier ment about "first wave" feel less like information and more like a professional reviewing the appetizer before the main course.
I stayed close to the barricade but didn’t push forward. I had the longsword in my hand and had sent Frostfang into my soul. I used it twice in the first few minutes when an attacker slipped through a gap and came at our section.
The first one I caught with chains before he could close the distance. They wrapped around his ankles and pulled him down, and the man next to me finished it with a downward strike.
The second one was faster. He came over the barricade itself with a hook that nearly caught my shoulder. I stepped inside his reach and drove the sword into his side. It wasn’t clean. He grabbed my arm and tried to drag me forward, and for a moment we were tangled together, his blood warm on my hand, his breath in my face, his eyes wide and animal.
Dull’s boot caught the man in the chest and sent him tumbling back over the barricade.
"Don’t let them grab you," Dull said, not even looking at me. "Grapplers pull you over the wall. Then you’re on the wrong side."
I nodded, wiping my hand on my trousers.
Sulin had not moved from her position behind the main line. She stood with her arms folded, watching the battle with those red eyes of hers like a woman appraising fruit at a market. When an attacker somehow got past three mercenaries and came barreling toward our section’s interior, she unfolded her arms, took a single step, and struck him in the throat with her open palm.
The man’s feet left the ground. He hit the stone wall behind him with a sound that made several people flinch, and he did not get up.
Sulin folded her arms again.
’I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.’
Jose, for his part, had found a position on top of a broken pillar where he could see the battle spread out below. He sat there, legs dangling, occasionally kicking rubble down on attackers who came too close to the base.
The first wave broke after twenty minutes. That was what it felt like, though I had no way to measure. The attackers that remained alive turned and ran back across the broken ground, stumbling over the same terrain that had tripped them on the way in. A few of them fell into the same pits that had claimed their rades.
Nobody cheered or even dared to celebrate.
The mercenaries just... reset. Men checked their weapons. Women re-bound wounds they’d taken. Someone passed water down the line. The nervous kid was still alive, his short sword stained red, his eyes wider than they’d been before.
"That was it?" I asked, looking at the bodies strewn across the broken ground.
Dull gave me a look.
"That was the greeting."
The wiry woman cleaned her spear on a dead man’s cloak. "Now they know where we’re strong and where we’re not. The next one won’t be so stupid."
She was right.
The second wave came ten minutes later, and it was different.
They came with shields this time. Wooden shields reinforced with strips of metal, held in tight formations of ten or fifteen. They moved through the broken ground more carefully, using the terrain the way we’d used it. Half-walls became cover. Craters became staging points. They advanced in bursts, formation to formation, closing the distance in controlled pushes rather than a single reckless charge.
"Shields up! They’re organized this time!" The shout came from down the line.
The battle became slower and harder. The barricade that had been a wall against the first wave was now a contested position. Shield formations stacked against the logs and pushed. Men behind the shields reached over with hooked weapons and tried to pull the sharpened stakes apart. Others threw grappling ropes.
The chokepoints that had worked so well were being tested. Attackers with shields plugged the gaps and created cover for others to move around the flanks.
Having no choice, I was in the fighting now. Three men came through a gap that had been ripped open in the barricade, their shields interlocking, and I had to choose between the white chains and sword.
I chose chains.
The links snaked out and wrapped around the edge of the nearest shield, and I pulled. The man behind it stumbled forward, his guard broken, and the soldier beside me put a blade through the gap. The second shield-bearer turned toward me and I released the chains, drawing them back, then lashed them out again at his legs. He went down, and someone else finished him.
The third man saw what was happening and dropped his shield entirely, pulling a short axe from his belt. He came at me with a speed that surprised me, and I barely got the sword up in time. The impact jarred my arm to the shoulder.
Sulin appeared beside me. She caught the man’s axe arm at the wrist, twisted, and the axe clattered to the ground. Then she struck him twice in the ribs with a precision that folded him like wet paper.
"You are too slow," she said, her voice flat.
"Thanks."
"It was not a pliment."
"I know."
The second wave lasted longer. By the time it broke, there were bodies stacked three deep at some points along the barricade. The mercenary line had held, but barely. I could see gaps where sections had been pushed back. I could see men sitting against walls with injuries they were pretending weren’t serious.
’And that was just two waves. Mundane ones. No summons. No Spirit abilities. Just men with weapons.’
The realization settled into me with an ugly weight.
’I wonder just how many hours we have used already.’
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