Chapter 994

Overdrive burned through their bodies.

Vitality Well pushed their strength to the limits for another step.

Then another. Then another.

The imperial front buckled. Not collapsed. Not yet. But buckled. That was when Gaius moved in the distance.

He stood near the left flank, boots planted in mud, eyes narrowed in concentration. His geomancy spread through the field like a buried current. The ground behind the imperial push shifted.

At first, only a few noticed. Then the retreat path rose. Earth walls erupted from the battlefield in jagged lines, cutting off the easiest routes backward. Not tall enough to be impossible to climb. Not thick enough to hold forever.

But enough.

Enough to make retreat stop being simple. Enough to turn a nervous step backward into confusion. Enough to make every man in the imperial front realize that the way out had just become smaller.

Panic touched them then. The kind no officer could fully shout down. And Maurien made it worse. From farther behind Lionfang’s lines, the old wind mage raised one hand and summoned a tornado.

It began as a twisting column of rain and dust behind the enemy backline, narrow at first, then widening with a hungry roar. Wind screamed across the field. Loose banners snapped free. Arrows went wild. Men stumbled. Horses reared. Supply carts overturned as the tornado tore through the rear formations, not necessarily killing in mass, but doing something more useful.

It made them panic. The backline, which had spent most of the fight believing it was safely behind the dying, suddenly remembered that battle did not always respect formation depth. Men shouted. A unit of archers broke position and scattered before their captain could stop them.

The front line saw that. Tali saw them see it.

“Now!” she screamed.

Brann drove forward with everything he had left. Jori roared something obscene and threw himself into the nearest gap. The recruits followed. Not beautifully. But together.

The Empire’s forward line finally started to break. One man turned. Then another. Then five.

Then the whole section began folding inward against the walls Gaius had raised behind them, trapped between exhausted Lionsguard fighters who had found one last reserve of violence and a backline now screaming under Maurien’s storm.

Arslan watched, sword still raised. His expression did not soften.

Not yet. But his eyes sharpened with grim satisfaction. The enemy had come to destroy Lionfang. Instead, the first bite of their army was learning a very old lesson.

A line did not break when men got tired. It broke when they believed the other side still had more left than they did. And right now, in the mud and rain and blood outside Lionfang, Tali, Brann, Jori, and the battered recruits made the Empire believe exactly that.

Ten minutes later, the battlefield finally went quiet. Not truly quiet.

There was still the rain, the crackle of scattered fires, the moaning of wounded men too stubborn or too unlucky to die quickly, and the ragged breathing of hundreds of fighters trying to convince their bodies not to collapse.

But the battle itself had stopped. The attacking force in that section was dead.

Bodies covered the field in broken layers, imperial soldiers, mercenaries, adventurers, and underworld scum all mixed together in the mud like the world had decided they were worth the same in the end. Some lay with their eyes wide open, staring at the black sky. Others were twisted in ugly shapes, cut down while trying to flee, smashed while trapped against the rising walls of earth, or shredded when panic took their lines apart.

Lionfang had endured. They had suffered losses. Too many. But they had endured. Outnumbered five to one, they had still won. That truth took a few seconds to settle into the exhausted minds of the defenders.

Then it hit all at once. A few Lionsguard members let out hoarse shouts of victory. Some northerners banged weapons against shields and howled to the sky. Others simply dropped. That was the more common reaction.

Men and women who had spent the last stretch of battle burning Overdrive and Vitality Well beyond comfort finally gave in and fell to their knees or straight into the mud. Some dropped their weapons first. Some didn’t. A few hit the ground so hard it looked like they had been struck. Their arms shook. Their chests heaved. Their faces had gone pale under the blood and grime.

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One recruit laughed weakly for three seconds before he started crying instead. Another simply rolled onto his back and stared at the sky like he couldn’t quite believe it was still there.

Tali planted her spear in the ground to keep herself upright and nearly followed them down anyway. Brann sank to one knee, shield half-buried in mud beside him, while Jori leaned on his axe and spat out a mouthful of blood and rain.

“We won,” one of the newcomers whispered.

No one answered immediately. Because saying it out loud would make it real. And reality, today, had not been entirely trustworthy. Arslan stood near the front, breathing hard but still upright, sword in hand, eyes sweeping across the field.

He saw the state of his people.

The shaking legs. The drained faces. The wounded trying to rise and failing. The healers moving like ghosts between the living and the dying, deciding who could be saved fastest and who would have to wait.

They had won. But they were in no state to enjoy it. Arslan raised his sword. The motion alone pulled attention toward him.

“We move now!” he shouted.

His voice cut through the exhaustion and the lingering haze of victory.

“Use what’s left! Back to town!”

A few groans answered him. That meant they were listening.

“We are not dying in the mud after winning!” Arslan roared. “Get up!”

That worked better.

Training and fear dragged bodies back into motion. Tali barked at her squad to rise. Brann hauled one recruit to his feet by the back of the collar. Jori kicked another lightly in the shin and told him to stop trying to become part of the field.

The northerners laughed at that. Then some of them nearly fell while laughing. Even so, the line began to move.

Arslan was already about to bark the next order when he heard it. A distant sound.

Low.

Mechanical.

Wrong.

His head turned sharply toward the horizon. Engines. More than one. A lot more.

The sound rolled through the rain like iron beasts approaching at full speed, growing louder with every second until even the half-dead defenders noticed it. The brief, fragile momentum of victory vanished.

Arslan’s eyes narrowed.

In the distance, through the curtain of rain and the smoke of the battlefield, he saw them. A large group of runic golems. Too many.

Their armored bodies gleamed wetly in the storm as they advanced in formation, heavy mechanical steps eating across the ground far faster than such bulky things had any right to move. Their eyes glowed through the dark. Runes pulsed along their frames. Several had arm-mounted cannons already shifting into firing position.

Arslan didn’t hesitate.

“Immediate retreat!” he roared.

The force behind his voice changed. This wasn’t an order to regroup. It was an order to survive.

“Back to Lionfang! Now!”

Tali’s head snapped toward the incoming runic force, and the last traces of triumph died on her face. Brann cursed. Jori didn’t even bother with words. He just grabbed the nearest recruit and shoved him toward the walls.

The Lionsguard front began to withdraw in earnest, wounded and exhausted fighters stumbling over corpses and churned mud, trying to drag themselves back before the machines reached firing range.

That was when the northerners moved. Kharnek saw the danger and didn’t wait for anyone to explain it.

The giant chieftain raised his weapon and roared something in the old northern tongue, a furious battle-call that rolled over the field like thunder. The northerners on the walls answered instantly.

Then they jumped down. Not all of them. Enough to matter. The wall section opened, and a group of northern warriors led by Kharnek surged out like a flood of muscle, iron, and murder. Their job was obvious even before anyone shouted it.

Cover the retreat.

Buy time. Make the enemy pay for every step.

Kharnek himself hit the ground hard enough to splash mud in all directions, then bellowed for his people to form up. Huge axes, clubs, and shields came down into ready positions as they spread out between the retreating Lionsguard members and the incoming runic golems.

For one second, it almost looked like it might work. Then the runic golems arrived too fast. Far too fast. Their engines screamed. Their arm cannons rotated. And then the bombardment began.

The first volley hit before half the withdrawing front line had crossed even a third of the distance back.

Mana shells and rune-propelled shots tore through the rain in bright, vicious streaks and smashed into the mud field with explosive force. Earth erupted. Bodies were thrown. One exhausted recruit vanished into a blast of shattered soil and blood before the scream in his throat had fully formed.

The second volley came tighter. Smarter. They were targeting clusters. Targeting the wounded. Targeting the slowest. Arslan’s eyes widened.

“Scatter!” he roared. “Move!”

Too late for some.

A blast landed among a group of Lionsguard fighters trying to carry one of their injured. The explosion sent all four flying, limbs twisting in the air before they crashed down broken and still.

Another shell struck near Brann’s section and blasted two recruits off their feet hard enough to make their bodies bounce when they landed.

Tali shoved one soldier down before a follow-up shot passed over them and blew apart the corpse pile behind. Jori dragged a stunned healer by the arm while screaming for him to run. And the runic golems kept firing.

They weren’t here to break a line. The line had already won. They were here to finish it off before it could crawl back behind walls. Kharnek saw that too.

The chieftain roared again and charged straight at the machines, his warriors surging with him as the northerners spread wider to block sight lines and draw fire.

A shell exploded near them. One northerner spun and fell with half his side torn open.

The others didn’t stop. That was the kind of people they were. Arslan’s grip tightened so hard around his sword that his hand hurt. The field that had just become a victory was turning into a killing ground all over again. And the worst part was that his people had almost nothing left.