Chapter 1084: In Battle Fumes
A dozen stone pillars fell at once.
The shockwaves overlapped — each impact compounding the one before it — until the air itself felt like a struck drum, pressure slamming in from every direction. Ash and smoke billowed up into the moon and swallowed it. Red Mist drifted through the particulate like something exhaled by the ground. Chipped stone showered across the camp in a hail that forced even the standing men to bow their heads.
One pillar came down directly on Danny’s iron-case perch.
He didn’t feel himself fly. He only felt arriving — hard ground, the particular stunned quality of silence that follows a very loud sound, the taste of blood running back along his tongue. He lay in a heap and performed an inventory: arms moved, legs moved, his rifle was in his right hand, the grip worn familiar. Pain spread from his ribs in a clean lancing arc every time he breathed.
Broken rib. Maybe two.
“Malt,” he said. His voice came out rough.
“Here.” Malt appeared at his side almost before the word finished — crouching close, expression arranged somewhere between distressed and frantic. “You’re hurt. You need to leave.”
“I’m operational.” Danny got one elbow under him, then the other, and pushed to sitting. The pain spiked and he breathed through it. “Trigger finger works. That’s the relevant criterion.”
“That is not the relevant criterion—”
He found his rifle, checked the mechanism by feel in the dark. Still good. He leaned against the dented iron case behind him, used it to prop himself vertical, and looked at what the new barrage had dropped.
One pillar, ten meters away. Still sealed, hissing.
He put the rifle on his shoulder and sighted it. His knee took the weapon’s weight. The math was simple: ten meters, stationary target. He did not miss at ten meters.
“No,” Malt said. Not angry — desperate. The specific quality of desperation that knows it won’t work. “Danny. Leave. Right now. Please.”
“I don’t want to leave the battlefield,” Danny said. His finger was already steady. “And I don’t want to lose you.”
He fired.
The slab cracked open. He was reloading as the fluid poured out and the demon woke — and it woke. It came out of the fluid sac shaking the membrane off its shoulders, and it stood up.
It was not a Mad Demon.
The thing that walked out of that pillar was built on a different scale: armored, each joint plated in dark chitin that caught the moonlight and turned it blue. It was tall enough that when it drew itself fully upright it cast a shadow that stretched the length of an artillery piece. Its eyes found Danny and they were red — not the dull red of animal eyes but something lit from inside, something that evaluated.
His bullet had gone through its forehead. He had seen it hit.
The demon looked at him.
Danny reloaded and fired again.
The round hit the chest plate and blue ripples spread from the impact point like something electrical, like the surface of water when a stone skims across it. Sparks fell. The demon did not fall. It took a step toward him, unhurried, the air of something that had not decided whether Danny was worth drawing a weapon for.
He fired again.
Sparks. Ripple. Another step.
“No—” Malt’s voice had gone very small.
Fourth shot.
This time the fire came from somewhere else — a muzzle flash from Danny’s left, then the sound, and the demon lifted off its feet and drove through the air and crashed into an iron case twenty meters back. The collision sound was catastrophic. Metal buckled. The demon landed and lay in the wreckage and the air smelled of ozone.
Danny stared at the smoke rising from the muzzle of the weapon that had fired.
The man holding it was armored in the same chitin-like material the demon wore. The rifle he carried had a barrel twice the normal diameter; the rounds on his belt were as thick as Danny’s wrist. He turned to look at Danny, and his face was completely calm.
“Run, mortal.” The man was already turning away. “This is beyond you. We’ll handle it from here.”
Special Unit of Strategies and Tactics. The words surfaced from somewhere in Danny’s training. The most mysterious formation in the First Army. Nobody attended their exercises. Nobody knew their roster or their station. The only established fact was that His Majesty had selected each of them personally and that they were — by whatever measure the king used — the most capable troops in Neverwinter.
A grinding sound from the ruins of the iron case.
The Senior Demon hauled itself upright. Its posture had changed — the haughty lassitude was gone, replaced by something focused and cold. It reached over its shoulder and drew a double-edged sword so large it blocked the moon behind it.
“Promoted from Lord of Hell,” the armored man said, to himself as much as to anyone. “That explains the magic saturation.” He started forward. “We’ve been waiting for this.”
Three more warriors fell in behind him. They moved fast for armored men — too fast, the same wrongness that all the God’s Punishment Warriors had, the sense that the weight they carried was somehow irrelevant to the question of velocity. They spread into a loose arc and closed. When their ammunition ran out they didn’t retreat to reload. They fixed bayonets and went in with those.
The Senior Demon was fast. It was — genuinely fast, faster than anything Danny had seen move in his life. But it was four against one, and the four seemed to have decided that dying was an acceptable outcome, which changed the arithmetic considerably. The blue ripples protecting the demon’s armor began to thin. To stutter.
Danny found a sitting position against a second iron case, propped the rifle on his knee, and watched the perimeter.
This is their battlefield. But mine hasn’t ended.
He waited. He breathed through the rib pain and he waited, and when a Mad Demon angled in from the shadows behind the Special Forces warriors — angled in from a blind spot, moving fast, raising its spear arm — Danny put a bullet through the back of its skull before it completed the motion.
One of the armored warriors turned and looked at him across the smoke and the wreckage. Just for a moment. Then turned back.
Danny pulled the bolt. The air tasted of gunpowder, hot steel, something iron. Pain and satisfaction in the same breath, the particular compound that was the only thing in his experience that felt entirely honest.
“Doesn’t it feel good?” he said.
Malt didn’t answer for a moment.
”…Ask me again when you’re not bleeding,” Malt said.
“What in all the hells is the Artillery Battalion doing?”
“Can they not stop those needles?”
“I swear they sent greens to the front.”
Down in the outer trench line, Fishball had been listening to his squadmates complain for long enough that he’d started timing the intervals between complaints to stay awake. He was a member of the anti-aircraft machine gun squad, and there was nothing in his training specifically applicable to a night ground assault by demons, but the predetermined procedure was clear: man the defensive line, hold, maintain crossfire geometry.
They had done all of that. They had caught several demons in crossfire and mortar fire on the approach, and the defensive line was intact. That was the good news.
The new order had come down ten minutes ago from the section commander: Hold position. Do not leave the trenches. Prepare for main enemy force.
There was a group of demons converging from the east and south. Not scattered invaders — the main force.
Fishball remembered the Northbound Slope. The way the demon charge had looked, coming out of the dark at speed, the sheer biological abundance of it, the way the ground seemed to be alive and moving. The First Army had stopped them at two hundred meters out that day, with good fortifications and artillery pre-positioned. Tonight: no fortifications complete, no pre-positioned artillery, no visible anything past the first fifty meters because the dark was absolute.
“They’re moving!” A shout from somewhere down the line. “Fifteen hundred meters, bearing east-southeast! Stand to!”
“Fifteen hundred?” Fishball muttered to himself. “We can’t see fifteen meters.” The witch with the Eye of Magic. Right. He knew how this worked. He hadn’t worked with Sylvie before tonight, but he trusted the call — there was no other basis available.
He checked his magazine. He checked his sight alignment against the darkness. He picked a point in the black in front of him and committed to it. Whatever came out of that darkness, it was going to meet him here.
The first whistle came from somewhere behind him, distant but clear — a long, low tone cutting through the noise of the camp like a voice calling a name.
The train.
Fishball turned his head involuntarily. He had never been so glad to hear a sound in his life.