Novel Full Chapter 732: First Taste
Chapter 732: First Taste
The first things out of the wave were fast.
They came low across the broken ground, four-legged and lean, made of something between flesh and smoke, and the war-lights did not slow them. Light passed into their bodies and died there. They poured out of the black tide in a flood that had no edges, thousands upon thousands, and as they closed, the front ranks saw the detail that would follow them into their dreams. The things had no faces. Just smooth dark skulls, all of them tilted slightly toward the Regalon line, as if listening for it.
"Ranged lines," Natalia called from the height, her voice cutting flat and clear over the rising thunder of their charge. "On my mark. Waste nothing."
She stood at the lip of the spire with the wind pulling her hair across her face, and she let them come. Past the first marker, a line of white stones the family had laid in the daylight. The ground shook now. Past the second marker. Below her she could feel the vanguard wanting to move, the animal urge to do something crawling up every spine on the line, and she made them wait through it, because the killing ground was built on distances and the distances were hers.
On the forward height beside her, Fraisea stood with her eyes half-closed, reading numbers off an interface only she could see. "Wave density is worse than it looks," she said, calm as ever. "The flood is deeper behind the front. Twelve minutes at this rate before the vanguard takes contact fatigue."
"Then we thin it before it arrives," Saffa said from the ground below. "Give me the center approach."
The flood crossed the third marker.
"Loose."
The heights spoke with one voice, and in the same breath, the temperature over the killing ground fell off a cliff.
Absolute Frost Domain unfolded from Saffa’s raised hand, a translucent hemisphere sweeping out across the center approach, and the running flood hit it like men running into deep water. Frost crawled up smoke-flesh legs mid-stride. The charge in the domain went from a torrent to a stagger, and into that stagger the Regalon volleys fell, hundreds of bows and casting arms releasing together, and the front of the flood was gone. Not slowed. Gone.
Saffa thrust her arm forward and Cryo-Sunder Lance condensed out of the freezing air, a spear of layered ice that punched through a dozen packed bodies and burst into branching veins, freezing the runners around it from the inside out. Everfrozen Momentum took hold, and every frozen corpse fed the domain, and the cold deepened, and the flood coming behind slowed further still.
The ones behind still came on. They ran over their frozen kin without breaking stride, and that was the first lesson of the night. The dark did not care about its dead. There was no morale to break, no fear to feed. The flood ate its own losses and kept coming, and then there was no more room for volleys and the runners hit the vanguard line with a sound like a wave striking a cliff.
Hiroshi took the first one on his shield and felt his boots carve furrows in the dirt.
It hit harder than its size promised, all that speed turned into weight, and its momentum carried it up the shield face with claws scrabbling for his eyes. He put his shoulder into the shield, threw the thing back into its own kin, and split its smooth skull before it landed. Two more replaced it, and beside him and beside him and all down the line, the same brutal arithmetic began.
"Hold your spacing!" he roared. "They want you to step forward! Don’t give them the gap!"
Because that was what the things were doing, he realized, even without faces. Every runner that died threw itself dying at a shield, dragging it aside for half a second, and the runners behind aimed themselves at those half-second gaps like water finding cracks. A fighter three men down took a claw across the thigh through exactly such a gap and went to one knee, and the flood surged at the opening.
Hiroshi got there first. He crossed the three paces like a thrown spear, filled the hole with his own body, and for a long ten seconds he was the line, shield ringing, sword arm working, runners piling onto him in twos and threes while the wounded man was dragged back by his collar. Then the rank closed around him, and the wall was whole again.
"Rotate him out," he said over his shoulder, breathing hard. "Next man in. This is a long night, and we spend it in shifts."
On the left flank, Maya fought a different kind of fight, because the left flank’s ground was worse. The broken rocks there cut her rank into segments, and the runners came through the gaps between boulders in narrow howling streams. So she made the streams her weapon, heavy fighters corked into each gap, herself running the spaces between, and wherever a cork started to crack she was there before it finished.
A big fighter named Doran went down at the north gap with a runner’s jaws locked in his shoulder and two more pouring over him. Maya arrived at a dead sprint, took the first one out of the air with a cut that opened it chest to hip, put her heel through the skull of the one on Doran, and stood over him in the gap while he crawled clear, her blade flicking out in short economical arcs.
"Gap north needs a new cork!" she shouted. "And get Doran to Kayla’s people! Rotate, rotate, don’t be heroes, rotate!"
They rotated, and the line stayed a line, and over a grinding bloody hour the flood thinned against Saffa’s deepening cold and the family’s unbroken wall, and slackened, and finally ran dry. Along the whole Regalon stretch, fighters leaned on shields and spears and breathed, looking out at a killing ground so thick with frozen and broken dead that the ground itself had gone black and white together.
"They don’t rout," Marcus said quietly on the command rise. "No fear in them at all. Adjust everything for it. We are not breaking anyone’s spirit tonight. We are emptying an ocean with our arms."
"Then be glad we brought ice," Saffa said, rolling her shoulder. "Fraisea, what is it building next?"
"Nothing on the ground." Fraisea’s eyes were still on her interface, and for the first time that night, her calm picked up an edge. "That is the problem. The mass I am reading is not in front of us."
The dark’s second argument came in silence, from above.
Nobody saw the shrouds arrive. That was their entire nature. They came out of the high black above the war-lights where no one was looking, wide flat creatures like living funeral cloths, each one broad enough to wrap three men, and they fell on the ranged lines from directly overhead with no sound at all.
The first anyone knew of it was a whole archer team on the north height going down mid-volley. One moment five archers, the next a writhing black shape on the rock where they had stood, and the muffled shouting coming out of it was the worst sound of the night so far.
"Above you!" someone screamed. "They’re coming from above!"
The heights, so perfect an hour ago, became chaos in seconds. Shrouds dropped out of the dark by the dozen. Casters blasted upward at shadows and hit nothing. A shroud took a spellcaster off the spire’s edge entirely, wrapping her in the air, and the two of them fell together into the dark below the cliff.
They did not hit the bottom. Halfway down, space opened under the falling pair like a flower made of razors.
Spatial Shear Bloom caught the shroud in its petals and cut it apart along lines that had nothing to do with blades, the creature simply separating as space decided it was no longer whole, and the caster fell free into a net of hardened light that lowered her to the rocks, shaken and alive. On the height above, Clovelle lowered her hand and smiled faintly, and there was nothing calm about the smile at all.
"They steer with their edges," she called up to Natalia, bright and quick even now. "Cut the edges and they fall like laundry."
"Then we cut edges." Natalia had already watched one shroud through its whole descent, and she put a bolt through its center mass at a range that should have been impossible, pinning it open against the rock. "They block their own light coming down! Watch the glow on the rock in front of you, when it dims, roll! Angle teams, points skyward, pair up! Move!"
The heights reorganized around the two of them. Fighters paired, watchers called dives, and Clovelle went to work in earnest. Micro-Singularity Thread stitched itself invisibly across the air above the ranged lines, and diving shrouds hit the wire and folded inward, compressing into dense silent spheres that imploded before they reached anyone. Null-Step Continuum flicked her between the anchor points she had scattered along the heights, so that wherever the dives came thickest, she was already there, snapping her fingers.
Fraisea handled the ones that got through. Abyssal Pressure Choir stacked invisible deep-sea weight onto any shroud that closed on a wrapped fighter, crushing the creatures flat without adding a single scratch to the person underneath, and Kayla’s support squads went in behind the pressure with knives, cutting the seam-lines Kayla had found on the second one, learning the ugly close work of it with slick hands.