There was a wet, gristly crunch as the spearhead punched through leather, mail, and bone. He stiffened, a choked gurgle escaping his throat. Black, viscous blood fountained from the wound, spattering my face and chest. For a moment, his eyes, wide with shock, met mine. Then the light went out of them. He slumped forward, his massive body wedged tight in the alleyway, dead.
I stood there, gasping for breath, my whole body trembling with adrenaline and nausea. My spear was stuck, buried deep in his spine. I left it. I stumbled back into the main street, my hands shaking uncontrollably. I had done it. I had killed one of them.
The baker was helping his wife to her feet. He looked at me, his eyes filled with a terrified awe. “You… you saved us.”
I just shook my head, unable to speak. I wasn't a hero. I was just a terrified person who hadn't wanted to die, and who hadn't been able to watch children be slaughtered. I wiped the Orc’s hot, sticky blood from my face with the back of my gauntlet.
The fighting still raged around me, a chaotic symphony of death. The city was falling, street by bloody street. We hadn't fought them off; we’d justannoyed them. Our resistance was the frantic buzzing of hornets whose nest had been kicked over. Painful for a moment, but ultimately futile.
A fresh wave of screams from the direction of the market square shook me from my stupor. There was no plan. There was no strategy. There was only the next ten seconds. Survive, and if you can, help the person next to you survive. It was the only creed left to us.
I scooped up a dropped short sword from the mud, the weapon feeling light and flimsy after my spear, and threw myself back into the fray.
The battle had devolved into a series of bloody, swirling pockets of resistance. We, the abandoned grunts, had become a thorn in the side of the Orcish war machine. We didn’t have the strength to meet them head-on, so we used the city itself as a weapon. We fought from doorways and rooftops. We funneled them into narrow streets where their numbers meant nothing. We bled them for every single inch of ground. We were dying, yes, but we were making them pay for our deaths.
The rage I’d felt earlier had burned down to a hard, cold ember in my gut. This wasn’t for the Magistrate anymore. This wasn't for a king or a country that sawme as fodder. This was for the scared boy to my left, trying to hold his guts in with one hand while he swung a hatchet with the other. It was for the old woman huddled behind a barricade of market stalls, her face a mask of silent prayer. It was for Joric.
I saw him go down near the fountain in the center of the square. He’d fought beside another guardsman, their backs to the stone basin, a small mound of Orcish dead at their feet. But there were too many. A massive brute with a two-handed cleaver simply smashed through their shields, through bone and sinew. It was over in a heartbeat. The man who had been the closest thing I’d had to a friend was just another body in the mud.
A guttural roar snapped me back to the present. An Orc lunged, and I met him, not with strength, but with speed. I slipped under his clumsy swing, the wind of his axe rustling my hair, and thrust the short sword into the soft spot under his arm. He bellowed and staggered back. I didn't wait to see him fall.
There were maybe two dozen of us left. Two dozen guardsmen against hundreds of Orcs. The futility of it all was a crushing weight, but I couldn’t stop. To stop was to die.
And then, the chaos around me began to… change.
The Orcs I was fighting, two of them closing me in a pincer, suddenly hesitated. They took a step back, their brutal faces showing something I hadn’t seen yet: deference. The frenzied tide of the battle seemed to part, creating a path from the shattered gate to the center of the square where I stood.
Through that path walked a mountain.
He was the figure from the ridge, a walking siege tower of black iron and fury. He had to be a full two feet taller than me, his shoulders so broad he could have blocked a doorway. He carried a monstrous axe in one hand, a weapon so large it looked like it had been forged for a giant, and it was dripping with blood. His face was grim, scarred, with a pair of thick, curved tusks jutting up from a jaw that looked like it could crack stone. His eyes… they were intelligent, sharp, and they were fixed entirely on me.
General Korvak.
The air went thin. The sounds of battle faded to a distant hum. It was just him and me in a bubble of deadly silence. My heart wasn’t just hammering anymore; it was trying to break out of my chest. Thiswasn't some grunt warrior. This was the General himself. The end of all things.
He took a slow, deliberate step toward me. The ground seemed to tremble.
I did the only thing I could. I screamed a raw, wordless war cry and charged him.
He didn’t even flinch. I jabbed with my sword, aiming for his unarmored throat. He moved with a speed that was terrifying in a creature his size. He didn’t block the blade; he simply caught my wrist in his massive, gauntleted hand. His fingers wrapped completely around my forearm. I felt the bones grind together under the pressure, and a gasp of pure agony escaped my lips.
With a flick of his wrist, he twisted the sword from my numb fingers. It clattered uselessly to the cobblestones. I was disarmed. Helpless.
But I wasn't dead yet.
With my free hand, I clawed at the mud and gore on the ground and flung it at his face. He grunted in annoyance, momentarily blinded. It was the opening I needed. I drove my knee up into his groin as hard as I could.
It was like kicking a stone wall. He barely flinched, but the insult registered. His grip on my arm tightened, lifting me partially off the ground. He was toying with me.
Rage and terror gave me strength. I stomped down hard on his instep with my hobnailed boot and, at the same time, pulled the small dagger I kept tucked in my belt. I stabbed upward, aiming for the gap where his gorget met his breastplate.
The dagger point screeched against his armor, failing to find purchase. It was a pathetic, desperate attack.
And it was the last I would get.
His patience was clearly gone. He let out a low growl that vibrated through my entire body. He released my arm and swung his free hand. It wasn’t a punch. It was a swat. A contemptuous, backhanded blow you’d use on a bothersome insect.
I tried to duck, but I wasn't fast enough. The impact wasn't on my face, but on the side of my head. His gauntlet connected with my helmet with the force of a battering ram. The world exploded into a concussive bang of light and sound. The helmet strapsnapped, and the steel pot went flying, skittering across the stones.
