Chapter 379: Attack
“Move faster!”
“Keep your hands steady—insert the cartridges one at a time!”
“Your teammates at the front depend on your speed. Give the enemy time to close and they’ll kill you!”
“Eyes on the task. Don’t look around!”
“As long as your teammates are still shooting, you keep loading!”
Brian’s voice carried the length of the training yard. Nail worked his way down the line of new recruits, watching hands, correcting posture, measuring pace.
He was not new himself. He had been a veteran of the First Army long enough to remember when it was still the Militia—when the decision to take up a flintlock had felt enormous, something Iron Head had pressed him toward with characteristic bluntness: carrying a weapon to fight for His Highness and Miss Nana was a better future than dragging ore out of a mine. He had believed it. He still believed it.
The Militia had become the First Army. Under Prince Roland and Commander Iron Axe, the army he served in had broken demonic beasts, had broken Duke Ryan, had turned back Timothy’s forces at the city wall and left them empty-handed. After those battles, Nail had been promoted to team leader in the Flintlock Squad.
Then the new recruits had come, in large numbers, and the First Army’s tradition required: some veterans would embed with each new platoon. Live with them, eat with them, train alongside them as instructors. Nail had not wanted the assignment. He had not wanted to leave the front line or his unit. But he had thought of Lord Brian, who had served as instructor to his own cohort in the Militia—and who now commanded the First Battalion wearing a medal from His Highness’s own hands—and he had accepted.
“My lord.” The voice came from somewhere in the middle of the line. “How long do we continue with this? It’s still snowing.”
Nail stopped. “You’re Haimon.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You practice until you can reload with your eyes closed in under half a minute. That’s the standard.” He stepped closer. “And you lead with ‘Report.’ That is a rule of the First Army, not a suggestion.”
“Report!” A small soldier nearby, hands working steadily the whole time, did not look up from the loader. “Do we have eggs for dinner tonight?”
Several men in the line smiled. A few licked their lips. Nail recognized the calculation behind the question: good food was one of the levers that kept these men from the Northern and Southern Territories disciplined and present, even on days when training ran long in the cold. Oatmeal, dried meat, sometimes pickled fish. Eggs came after demonic beast attacks or field exercises—they functioned as the clearest possible signal that performance had value.
“Ask the demonic beasts whether they’re coming today,” Nail said. “What’s your name?”
“Al Bitter, my lord.”
Nail watched his hands for a moment. “It takes you nearly half a day per cartridge. My neighbor—an old woman—is faster than you.” He let that sit. “If you haven’t improved by the end of today’s session, I’ll cancel your oatmeal and meat. Forget the eggs.”
Every head went down. Every pair of hands sped up.
Then the wall bell tolled.
It came fast and hard—the rapid pattern of the demonic beast alarm.
“Stop!” Brian’s voice cut across the yard. “Instructors, lead your men to the wall sector. Ready to engage!”
Nail turned to his platoon. “You’ve heard it. Carry your ammunition. Line up and move to the fourth wall section—same as the exercise. Move!”
Now the new recruits get their eggs, he thought as he brought up the rear.
At their position, the Flintlock Squad was already in place. Nail did a quick check of his men, confirmed the loaders were distributed, and mounted his gun on the wall pier.
The darkness beyond the wall resolved slowly into shapes. He read them the way veterans read a field: rough count, rough size, rough pace. Standard attack. He would have been mildly disappointed—the revolving rifle handled standard attacks—but then he scanned further, and saw something wrong.
A shape at the back of the oncoming mass that did not fit.
Enormous. Moving faster than a Siege Beast had any right to move. Its tusks curved up like scythes, each one thicker than a man’s torso. Its legs struck the ground like column-falls—each footfall raised a cloud of snow and sent a shudder through the ice. The creature’s jawline sat above the top of the four-meter wall.
If it hit the wall at full speed, the wall would fail.
“Look!” Haimon whispered. “Is that—”
“Eyes on your work.” Nail kept his voice flat, though his own throat had tightened. He tracked to the sixth wall section—where the new culverins were mounted, long barrels angled toward the field. The artillerymen see it. They’re already repositioning.
“The witches are so pretty,” Al Bitter murmured.
“The girl with the big sword can kill demonic hybrids,” Haimon said. “Alone. I’d give anything—”
“Shut your mouth.” Nail cut them off. “Miss Nana is a witch too. She is our town’s healer—she is this town’s angel. The power of God, not of demons. If any veteran in the First Army hears you call her a demon, they will beat you, and I will let them. Now load. This is not a practice round.”
He gave the distant hybrids a last glance—a manageable attack, the kind the squad could chew through without incident—and then his eye returned to the giant. The sixth section’s barrel had begun to traverse. Aim forward. Allow for the speed. You only have one—maybe two—shots before it reaches the wall.
He wanted to shout it across the ramparts. He suppressed the impulse. Leaving his post without permission meant a charge, possibly the supervising team. Iron Axe had been explicit on this point: behaviors that broke the defensive line were prohibited absolutely. A commander who left his position under fire was worse than useless.
The front wave of demonic beasts entered effective rifle range. The wall erupted in staggered fire—steady, disciplined, the sound of trained hands.
Nail worked his own position: loaders to hands, hands to guns, cartridges forward.
Then the cannon fired.
The boom rolled across the field and out. A column of snow kicked up well behind the giant creature—the shell had overflown. Nail’s heart sank. The beast was not running toward the sixth section; it was cutting across the field at an angle, and the crew would have to calculate the lead constantly as the range closed.
One more chance at most before it hit the wall.
He watched the barrel traverse again, the crew moving with compressed efficiency at the breach end of the culverin. Smoke still hung at the muzzle. He had not even finished noting the trajectory of the first shot when the second came—less than thirty seconds later.
How?
He stared. Four or five crew members worked at the breech end. Nobody was loading from the muzzle. This cannon reloaded from the rear—like a revolving rifle, it fired in succession, round after round without emptying and swabbing from the barrel end.
The third shot.
Nail did not see the shell enter the beast. What he saw was a mass of black blood erupting from one flank—not a splash but an explosion outward, fur and skin tearing in a cone, chunks of matter in the air. The creature shuddered. Its body compressed, impossibly, a shockwave moving through bulk that should have been unmovable—he watched the ripple travel along the thick fur like a stone dropped in water, the flesh absorbing and transmitting the impact, and then the creature’s eyes bulged forward in their sockets, something viscous and dark ejecting from them.
The sound came after.
Then the giant fell.
All at once—no stumble, no stagger—simply the vast weight of it surrendering to the ground, lying on its side in the snow with its tusks buried, its flank open, smoke rising from the entry wound. The hole, when Nail could see it properly, was absurdly small relative to the creature’s mass. A point just below the neck. It had been enough.
He opened his mouth and the sound came out of him before he had decided to make it.
“Long live His Highness!”
The shout traveled down the wall in both directions. New recruits took it up first, voices cracking; then veterans added their weight; and somewhere along the rampart, someone’s fist hit a pier with a crack that he could feel through the stone.
“Long live His Highness!”
The cheering spread and held and would not stop.
Even this, Nail thought—even something that size—could not survive a weapon His Highness built. And if that is true, there is nothing coming out of the Months of Demons that we cannot meet.