Chapter 338: Infected [4]

The outer gate was gone.

Yellow-eyed tribes poured through the broken timbers in a continuous flood, climbing over their own dead, biting anything that still moved with ordinary fear.

"HOLD THEM OFF!"

Elven line fighters met them in the arch and the first yard with spears and short blades, working in tight pairs, calling targets by the color of the eyes alone.

Civilians were already running deeper into the districts: parents dragging children, merchants abandoning carts, wardens shouting routes toward the second ring and the high shelters.

The sound of the city changing shape under panic rolled out ahead of the fighting.

Thora moved through the breach like she had been born in it.

The compact axe rose and fell in clean arcs.

She didn’t chase.

She held a stretch of broken stone wide enough for three elves to stand behind her, and anything yellow-eyed that entered that stretch died.

A painted man lunged with broken nails.

She took his arm at the elbow and his head on the return.

Another tried to climb past her on a fallen beam.

She kicked the beam out and finished him on the ground without looking down for long.

"Left side is thickening!" an elven sergeant yelled.

"I see it," Thora answered, already shifting.

"Keep your people behind my shoulder and stop trying to be brave in front of me."

Further along the inner face of the ruined gate, Misha had pulled three city mages into a working knot. Her voice cut through the noise with the same precision she used on ledgers.

"On my count. Barrier along the arch line, low and wide, not a dome. We do not have the reserves for a dome. One—two—now."

Mana sheeted across the broken threshold in a hard translucent band.

The next surge of corrupted bodies hit it and staggered.

Some burned where the working touched open wounds.

The press stacked against the barrier instead of pouring freely into the yard, buying the ground fighters seconds that mattered.

"Hold it," Misha said.

"If it starts to crack, you tell me before it fails, not after. Firlia—get the rear lanes clear and keep the Queen’s runners moving. No one blocks the stairs with baggage."

Firlia’s answering shout was already half-lost in the noise as she ran.

Above the nearest inner court, Sira had put herself in a tree that overlooked the breach.

Orange hair tied back hard, new bow up, she picked targets with spiteful accuracy: eyes, open mouths, the occasional climber trying to crest a side wall.

Shaft after shaft dropped bodies that had been about to flank the elven knots.

She put one heavy arrow into the elephant’s shoulder.

The shaft stuck and hung.

The animal didn’t slow.

"Of course," Sira muttered, already nocking again.

"Of course the giant nightmare has skin like a fortress. Fine. I will just kill everything around it until someone with an axe does something useful."

On the left wall walk, Kessa had stopped pretending this was only defense.

She dropped into a cluster of corrupted tribesmen with both gauntlets live, grabbed the first by the skull, and smashed him into the second hard enough that both went down in a broken heap.

A third reached for her.

She caught his arm, twisted, and used him as a flail against the ones behind.

Tiger-striped and grinning, she moved through the press like the violence had been waiting for her specifically.

"Hehe... this is fun."

She drove a gauntleted fist through a yellow-eyed woman’s chest and flung the body off the walk.

"Come on then. Climb faster. I am getting bored of the slow ones."

A horn answered her from deeper in the city: high, structured, the formal call for full knight deployment.

Sirens followed, rolling from tower to tower, waking every district that had not already heard the gate break.

Elven knights in heavier plate began arriving in ranked groups, shields locked, pushing into the yard to relieve the first exhausted line fighters.

Kane stood in the middle of the breach with a headless corpse still sliding off Mjoldr’s edge.

He had cut a path.

It was not enough.

For every yellow-eyed body that fell, two more shoved through the wreckage.

And behind them all, the elephant kept working the broken gate like a living ram: tusks hooking timber, bulk shoving the gap wider, bloody plates turning arrows into decoration.

Each time it surged, another section of the arch crumbled and another dozen corrupted poured inward.

Thora’s voice reached him over the slaughter.

"Kane! That animal is doing more damage than the entire first wave! If it keeps opening the wall, we lose the second ring before the knights finish forming!"

"I know."

Kane planted a boot on the dead tribesman, tore Mjoldr free, and looked at the elephant properly.

Arrows and ordinary mana flares were a waste.

A frontal cut would bounce.

He needed weight, angle, and a place the corruption had not bothered to armor.

"Griselda!" he shouted upward.

"When I move, you put everything you have into its eyes! Not the body—the eyes! Blind it for three seconds!"

Griselda’s wings snapped wide on the high perch.

"On your mark!"

Kane ran straight at the elephant.

The animal saw him and screamed, high and wrong, swinging a tusk in a horizontal arc meant to take a man in half.

Kane slid under the sweep close enough to feel the wind of it, came up along the beast’s left foreleg, and did not swing for the hide.

He swung for the back of the knee joint where the plating folded.

Mjoldr’s spike drove in with full commitment and the system’s unrestricted strength behind it.

The joint gave with a structural crack.

The elephant staggered hard, screaming again, weight collapsing toward the injured side.

"Now!"

Griselda’s cast hit both eyes in a searing double flare.

The animal reared in pure reactive agony, half-blind, knee failing, head lifting high enough to expose the softer underside of the throat where the plates did not fully close.

Kane was already climbing.

He used the lodged spike as a step, hauled himself up the shoulder with his good hand and the axe haft, and brought Mjoldr around in a two-handed descending cut aimed at the throat gap.

The edge went in deep.

Black-tinged arterial spray erupted across the broken gate stones.

The elephant’s scream turned into a bubbling roar.

Kane ripped the axe free and cut again in the same line, deeper, until the head listed and the whole impossible bulk started to go down.

"Clear the fall line!" he yelled.