Chapter 1242: Departure from the Northernmost Port
“Don’t push — stand in line!”
“Abandon your luggage! The King of Graycastle will feed and clothe you. If you want to live, throw it in the water!”
“Ladies and children first! Move!”
The Northernmost Port in the Kingdom of Everwinter had become a single throat trying to swallow too many things at once. Without the First Army and the lord’s guards maintaining the lanes, the refugees pressing toward the ships would have trampled each other into the planking.
The chief guard pulled his eyes away from the already-departing vessels, packed so thick with bodies that the freeboard barely cleared the water. “Captain,” he said quietly, “we can’t take them all.”
“It’s very brave of them,” Uncle Sang said, still facing forward. He was watching the horizon. Within three or four days the Red Mist had unrolled from the crest of the Impassable Mountain Range and stained the sky above them the color of dried blood. Every face in the crowd wore that color as a mask. “Coming here at this time of year. Very brave.”
Someone nearby muttered, “Captain… save a spot for me.”
Uncle Sang smiled without turning. “If Nail asked me, I’d get off the ship myself to make room for him.”
Over a month ago — fifteen days, perhaps more — the orders had come through: leave the Hermes Plateau, proceed to the city at the far north of Everwinter, conduct the immigration campaign. Nail had visibly exhaled at the assignment. Anything was better than another rotation defending the Holy City; he had grown quieter after Taquila, then communicative again once they’d shipped north. He’d thrown himself into the work the moment the Northernmost Port came into view.
The Graycastle contingent here was not the first — advance teams had already moved through the kingdom, emptying cities in advance of the migration wave. None of it had gone smoothly until the Bloody Moon rose. Rumors spread through every settlement simultaneously: the Moon meant the end of everything. When local residents looked up and saw that swollen red mass and believed the rumors, they stopped asking questions. They simply needed out.
Then things deteriorated further.
Four or five days back: the Red Mist confirmed. The same day: the First Army encountered demons. The outcome of that battle never reached them, but the advance teams had begun retreating south, and Nail’s unit received identical orders — fall back to the next port. The refugee numbers had exploded overnight. Hundreds of thousands arrived daily, pushing toward the dock with nothing left but themselves.
Nail could not abandon them. He had his men build a defensive line and sent a carrier pigeon to the rear, requesting more ships. The retreat plan slipped by days.
Uncle Sang knew the calculus: once Red Mist reports circulated widely, fewer ships would come north. The merchants the king had retained wouldn’t risk their hulls in these waters. They might promise to sail, but they would turn back before landfall. These were almost certainly the last vessels.
Nail had understood this. Which was why he’d had the men prepare explosives — both as a last measure against demon incursion, and to deny the enemy any equipment too cumbersome to carry off.
“Captain — smoke ahead!”
“Again?” Uncle Sang straightened. “Everyone, man your post!”
No witch scouts. No reliable signal network. Every warning arrived the old way — fire and shouting. It was not the first time demons had tested the Northernmost Port; their bodies already lay in stiffening knots outside the town perimeter. According to the training manual these were Mad Demons, scattered and individually unremarkable. Less formidable than the Church’s God’s Punishment Warriors, provided you caught them in the open beyond two hundred meters.
But Uncle Sang was less worried about the demons than about Nail’s next decision. Two ships could not carry these people. What the captain would do with those left behind — abandon them or try to take them south regardless — was the question that sat under every other concern like a cold stone.
Then he spotted the Mad Demon.
It stood outside the barbed wire strung across the street, watching.
The Northernmost Port had no city wall. They’d built their defensive line at the dock, and the scouts — who should have pulled back at the beacon signal and beaten the demons to the perimeter — were nowhere in sight. He frowned. The scouts were gone.
More demons appeared. Then more. The tide of them ran toward the dock in silence.
“Fire!”
Both machine gun squads opened simultaneously. Shells cratered the street. The demons, faster than they looked, scattered into the buildings. When the smoke thinned, two bodies hung in the wire. Then the snipers started on the rooflines.
This was the tactic: obstacles blocking every alley, forcing the demons into direct contact with the machine guns. The Mad Demons could not clear the debris without exposing themselves, and Uncle Sang had counted on them cutting their losses and retreating.
But today they didn’t. Today they worked the cover patiently, grinding through ammunition, pressing without urgency — as if they had been taught to wait.
They had more experience than the ones from a week ago. Someone had instructed them.
Uncle Sang had four Mark I Machine Guns, one hundred soldiers, and enough rounds for a full day of fighting. In that sense, he could afford to be patient. What he could not afford was a second front.
The north end of the dock exploded.
A wall of stone blew through the residential block — not collapsed so much as pushed through it, the stones shearing off a corner of the building as though the thing behind them simply declined to go around. It reared up on its rear limbs from the rubble.
“Spider Demon?” someone asked.
“Load the anti-demon grenade!”
Uncle Sang’s stomach fell. The manual described Spider Demons. He had studied the drawings carefully. But this was not quite what the drawing depicted. This one moved with a coordination the manual’s creature lacked — limbs that swung in a lateral arc as it walked, rotating the torso continuously, denying any stable shot at the abdomen. And the armor: not the random rubble-crust of the manual’s Spider Demon, but shaped stone fitted together in deliberate polygons. Neat. Engineered. If those plates locked edge to edge, they would approximate a perfect trapezoid.
Two grenades arced toward it. One bounced off the plating and detonated uselessly in the dirt. The second caught a front leg and the Spider Demon leaned into the explosion like a man walking into headwind, barely breaking stride.
“Shoot the body, you idiot!”
Another soldier grabbed shells and crept from the trench. Uncle Sang let him go, watching the demon’s cadence — the way it automatically tightened into a lower profile the instant the launcher raised, curling the armored plating to intercept. The next three shots glanced off.
Mad Demons poured through the gap the Spider Demon had torn in the building line.
“Enough.” Uncle Sang raised his voice. “Retreat to the second defensive line. Abandon this area. Prepare to ignite the explosives.”
“But —”
“If they flank us, we’re pinned.” He did not soften it. “Move.”
Horns crossed the battlement. Nail’s unit fell back toward the dock in trained sequence. The sight of the creature sent a shockwave through the refugees and the crowd surged, and the soldiers on the flanks pressed the lanes hard to hold the lines.
Behind the retreating column, the detonating cord was already run to the motor.
“Captain — we’re ready.”
Uncle Sang watched the Spider Demon lurch through the maze of barricades, limbs smashing debris aside. He waited for his moment. Geometry. The buried charges were not random — they’d been laid under the likeliest approach routes during the preparation week, and the Spider Demon had walked almost exactly where he’d hoped it would.
“Just a moment — now.”
The lever went down.
The ground heaved. The detonation was not a sound so much as a physical event — something that reorganized the air. The Spider Demon left the earth. Its plated limbs, those same thick stones that had been its defense, became its anchor, and the joints could not survive the torque. It came down in a heap of shattered armor and broken limbs. Immobile. Done.
Someone in the battlement whistled.
Then the eastern side of the dock blew open.
A second Spider Demon stepped through the new gap.
Uncle Sang was already satisfied with the decision he’d made. Had he hesitated — had the machine gun squads still been forward when the first Spider Demon emerged — there would have been no clean retreat. Now, at least, they had a position, four working guns, and a defined perimeter.
Two Spider Demons, though. If one more arrived, the dock itself would not hold. And behind him several thousand refugees pressed toward the water, and panic in that crowd would be a second catastrophe running parallel to the first.
He was calculating how much of either problem he could solve when he heard it.
The sound came from the water.
Deep and mechanical and familiar as a heartbeat: the report of a 152-caliber Longsong Cannon. There should have been no artillery at the Northernmost Port. Uncle Sang turned.
An iron ship was nudging into the dock, its cannon level with the waterline, already pointing at the enemy beyond the defensive line. The markings on the hull resolved as she turned.
“That’s — that’s the Roland!” a soldier shouted.
“Didn’t she leave?”
“Who cares — we have fire support!”
“Long live the king!”
Shells swept over the soldiers’ heads and burst in the streets beyond the barricade — ten meters, eight meters from the trench, close enough to shower the sandbags with soil. In another battle they would have cursed the Artillery Battalion for the proximity. Now every man in the line simply loved the sound of it.
Uncle Sang watched and understood: Nail had not abandoned them. He had anticipated this moment, shipped the refugees out on the first vessels, and held the Roland back as a reserve — waiting for the moment it would matter most.
Beneath the suppressing fire, soldiers were guiding refugees onto the ironclad’s gangway in controlled files. Most of the crowd was moving.
“Everyone.” Uncle Sang raised his voice to carry the full line. “To the dock. One by one. No one falls behind. Explosion unit — when the last man clears, ignite everything remaining.”
The order passed from soldier to soldier. The trench emptied. The Mark I Machine Guns stayed behind — too heavy, and the king’s standing orders were clear: men first, weapons second, because men build weapons, and weapons do not rebuild men.
They reached the dock as the demons breached the second defensive line against the last of the gunfire. A beat later, the remaining charges went off — one massive percussion that stilled everything for a moment, that sent a column of smoke and debris climbing into the Red Mist sky.
The Roland whistled once, sharp and final.
She pulled away from the ravaged Northernmost Port at full speed, her wake cutting clean through the harbor’s dark water.