Chapter 32

Chapter 32: Chapter 32

The first gunshot echoed across the roaring river like thunder.

High above the muddy chokepoint, hidden in the scrub brush of the plateaus, our snipers opened fire. From my vantage point on the battlements of Trivi, I watched the execution unfold exactly as I had planned.

A towering barbarian chieftain, wearing the bleached skull of a dire wolf, was marching at the head of the vanguard. He suddenly jerked backward, a fist-sized exit wound erupting from his chest in a spray of crimson. He hit the mud before the sound of the second shot even reached us.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

The Republic of Sfirt muskets rained invisible death down into the bottleneck. I watched a Shaman, raising his black resin-staff to begin a chant, lose the top half of his head in a mist of red. Another leader, adorned in heavy bear pelts, was thrown violently into the river by the impact with a lead ball.

In any traditional war, an army that loses its command structure in the first thirty seconds breaks the panic sets in and formations crumble.

The Mud and Blood Coalition did not break.

They didn’t even pause. When a chieftain fell, the warriors behind him simply stepped on his corpse, driving his body deep into the churning mud, and kept screaming. The horde was not driven by military hierarchy; it was driven by fanatical momentum. Thirty thousand bodies surged into the narrow corridor between the cliff and the river, a wave of flesh, fur, and rusted steel pushing relentlessly toward the stone bridge.

The six muskets fired continuously, dropping dozens of high-value targets, but they were trying to empty an ocean with a teacup. The horde absorbed the casualties without breaking stride.

"They aren’t stopping!" Alysia yelled over the deafening war cries, drawing her dual scimitars as the vanguard reached the bridge.

"Archers!" Miklas roared, his voice cutting through the chaos. "Fire at will! Make them bleed for every inch of stone!"

The sky darkened as the Dormant Bud infantry unleashed their arrows. Hundreds of steel-tipped shafts rained down on the bridge. The front lines of the Coalition were shredded. Barbarians fell by the hundreds, their bodies forming a grotesque, writhing carpet of meat on the cobblestones.

But the sheer numbers of thirty thousand people pushing from behind forced the vanguard forward. The living used the dead as shields, crawling over the mountains of corpses to reach our walls.

"Brace for impact!" Kaelen bellowed from the lower courtyard, standing behind the newly forged iron portcullis.

The horde hit the walls of Trivi like a tsunami.

The impact actually shook the stone beneath my boots. Crude grappling hooks made of jagged bone and iron clattered over the crenellations. Ladders constructed from lashed timber were slammed against the stone. At the main gate, hundreds of barbarians rushed forward with heavy axes and scavenged Imperial warhammers, hacking insanely at the iron gridwork.

The battlements instantly became engulfed by the fight.

A barbarian hurled himself over the wall right in front of me, his face painted with dried mud, holding a rusted hatchet. He screamed, his eyes completely white with fanatical rage.

My instincts took over, instead of stepping back, I ducked beneath his wild swing, igniting the Ember in my chest. The familiar, scalding heat flooded my muscles. I drove my Veriti knife upward, sliding the enchanted blade perfectly between his ribs and piercing his heart. I kicked his dying body off my blade, sending him tumbling back down into the muddy abyss below.

Before I could even take a breath, two more crested the wall.

The barbarians were strong, fueled by whatever savage adrenaline pumped through their veins, but they were fighting a Dormant Bud. I was faster, stronger, and possessed the nerves not to get scared by a burly man screaming at the top of their lungs.

I killed ten. Then twenty. Then fifty.

But they were simply too many of them for every head I chopped, another two appeared, and for every attack I parried, another four aimed at me.

My fourteen-year-old body, already fighting an agonising internal war, began to fail under the sheer, unyielding volume of the enemy. After three hours of continuous, relentless combat, my arms felt like they were made of lead. The Veriti knife, usually light and balanced, dragged heavily in my grip.

A barbarian with a jagged spear lunged over the wall. I parried, but my reaction was a fraction of a second too slow. The jagged edge of the spearhead caught my left bicep, slicing through the boiled leather and tearing the flesh.

I hissed in pain, driving my knife into his throat, but the damage was done. Another warrior swung a heavy wooden club, glancing off my shoulder and sending a shockwave of numb pain down my spine.

I looked down the battlements. The 5th Cohort was bleeding out.

Alysia was a whirlwind of gore, her scimitars hacking through limbs, but she was favouring her injured shoulder, surrounded by a dozen enemies. Yuni was fighting with terrifying precision, his spear darting out to blind and cripple, but he was slowly being pushed backward toward the stairs. Our soldiers were killing five barbarians for every one we lost, but they had thirty thousand.

"The gate is buckling!" a terrified legionnaire shouted from the courtyard below.

I glanced down. Kaelen and the heavy infantry were holding the line behind the iron portcullis, but the metal was groaning under the impact of a thousand axes. The hinges were warping. The barbarians were literally hacking their way through the raw iron by sheer force of numbers, burying their own dead to create ramps of flesh over the barricades.

"Fall back!" Miklas roared, realising the walls were lost. "Abandon the battlements! Fall back to the upper keep!"

It was a death sentence, and we all knew it. Retreating to the upper tier only delayed the inevitable. Once they took the lower courtyard, they would swarm the keep like ants on a carcass.

I retreated down the stone stairs, my breathing ragged, my chest heaving violently. Blood dripped from my arm and my shoulder. Every step sent a jolt of agonizing pain through my growing, suffocating bones.

The remnants of the 5th Cohort gathered in the lower courtyard, forming a desperate, final shield wall behind the failing iron gates. There were less than three hundred of us left standing. We were battered, exhausted, and covered in gore.

BANG. CRUNCH.

The iron portcullis screamed as a massive section of the gridwork caved inward. Bloody, mud-caked hands reached through the gaps, tearing at the metal.

Miklas stepped to the absolute front of the formation. The Captain looked exhausted, but his amber eyes burned with the violet light of his Ancient Rune. He raised his broadsword, preparing to unleash the lightning, preparing to burn his vessel out completely to buy us a few more minutes of life.

I tightened my grip on my knife, ready to die alongside him.

But the lightning never came.

Instead, a sound tore through the heavy, rain-soaked air. It wasn’t the rhythmic pounding of the barbarian war drums that accopained until now the assault, but it was a single, immensely deep, resonant note that vibrated through the sky itself.

OOOOOOOOOOOM.

The Great Horn of the Empire.

The barbarians tearing at the gate suddenly froze. The war cries outside the walls faltered, replaced by a ripple of confusion that quickly morphed into pure panic.

I looked up toward the plateaus across the river.

Pouring over the hills, flanking the massive, trapped column of the barbarian horde, was a sea of crimson and steel.

Thousands of heavy cavalrymen of the 7th Legion crested the ridge, their lances lowered, their massive warhorses thundering against the earth. Behind them, nine Imperial Knight-Mages unleashed a synchronised barrage of fire, kinetic force, and shattering ice down into the trapped Coalition warriors.

"The Anvil," Miklas whispered, his broadsword slowly lowering, a breathless sigh of absolute relief escaping his lips. "We were the anvil."

Commander Erula hadn’t just sent us here to hold the fortress. She knew we couldn’t stop thirty thousand men. She had ordered us to hold Trivi to force the barbarians into the chokepoint. She needed them entirely committed to the bridge, packed so tightly they couldn’t manoeuvre. We were the bait. We were the anvil.

And the main army of the 7th Legion was the hammer.

Outside the battered walls, a massacre took place: the barbarians, exhausted from storming our walls and trapped between the cliffs, the river, and the charging Imperial cavalry, were decimated. Without their leadership—thanks to our snipers—they had no coordination to form a defensive line. The heavy cavalry tore through their unarmored flanks like a scythe through wet wheat.

The remaining barbarians at our gates abandoned the siege, turning to fight the new threat, only to be trampled by the panic of their own routed army.

The sounds of slaughter raged for another hour.

Slowly, the screams faded, replaced by the heavy, rhythmic marching of Imperial boots on the stone bridge.

The survivors of the 5th Cohort stood in the ruined courtyard, lowering our weapons. I leaned heavily against a stone pillar, clutching my bleeding arm, the Ember finally fading into a dull, exhausted in my chest.

Through the massive, jagged hole in the ruined iron portcullis, a figure appeared.

Commander Erula Fion Buros walked onto the bridge , she walked slowly towards us, not caring about the dead bodies littered on the floor as her crimson cloak dragged over the mangled, bloody corpses of the barbarians without a single ounce of hesitation. Her immaculate steel armour didn’t have a single drop of blood on it.

She stepped through the ruined gates and into the courtyard, her blazing red eyes sweeping over the battered, bleeding survivors of the 5th Cohort. She looked at Miklas, giving him a single, imperceptible nod of approval.

But my eyes weren’t on the Commander, walking exactly one step behind Erula, dressed in the immaculate, dark tailored tunic of a personal ward, was Myra.

Her face was still set in the cold, emotionless mask she had adopted the night Elara died. She looked over the courtyard, looking at the destruction with an unsettling detachment.

Then, her eyes found me.

She saw the blood dripping down my arm. She saw the exhaustion etched into my scarred face. For a fraction of a second, the mask slipped. The coldness vanished, and the young, terrified girl from the auction block returned. Myra let out a long, shuddering sigh of relief, her shoulders dropping slightly.

I gave her a slow, tired nod.

We had survived this battle, but looking at Erula, I could feel that this was the start of a war that would take more than the thousand lives already lost here.