Chapter 14: Thornback Gully

Chapter 14: Chapter 14: Thornback Gully

The construction lot on the east side had been abandoned for three weeks, ever since the gate opened. A chain-link fence sagged around the perimeter. Someone had zip-tied a laminated Association notice to the gate: D-RANK. UNASSIGNED. ENTER AT OWN RISK. The rain had blurred the ink until "OWN RISK" ran down the plastic like tears.

Marcus read it twice.

"Unassigned," he said. "Meaning nobody wants it."

"Meaning nobody’s been paid to want it," Elias said. "D-rank gates in bad neighborhoods sit for weeks. Guilds take the ones near money."

"And when nobody takes them?"

"They break."

Marcus looked at him for a long second. Then he looked at the gate itself, a vertical tear in the air above a pile of rebar, rippling a dull red like a wound that wasn’t healing. He checked his rifle. Then he checked it again.

"First time through one of these," he said. "Anything I should know?"

"It feels like being swallowed," Elias said. "You get used to it."

Aveline stepped up beside them, shield on her arm. "You don’t get used to it," she said. "You just stop complaining."

They went through together.

Thornback Gully hadn’t changed. The same ravine of red rock beneath a bruised purple sky, the same thornbushes clawing up the walls, the same smell of woodsmoke and wet dog. But the fire pit where the warband had camped was cold, and the ledge where the shaman had stood was empty.

The goblins had moved up the ravine.

"Marcus," Elias said. "Link."

It was the first time he’d asked for it inside a gate. Marcus touched two fingers to his temple, almost a salute, and the world changed.

The ravine drew itself in thin white lines. Every boulder, ledge, and bend of the dry riverbed lit up with distance markers. Ahead, where the walls pinched together between two huge slabs of fallen rock, the Link stamped a label: CHOKE POINT — 4 m. Beyond it, on the ridgelines to either side, markers bloomed.

Red diamonds, dozens of them. Spear goblins massed behind the choke. Archers spread along both ridges, each with a faint red cone fanning out in front of it to show its line of fire. And at the back, a cluster of fast-moving markers with a different symbol, a paw print, with small arrows stretching ahead to show where each would be in two seconds.

"Wolf riders," Marcus said. "Six. Fourteen archers, thirty-plus spears. And there." He nodded past the choke, to where a wall of lashed bones and rusted rebar stretched across the gully like a dam. "Fortified camp. That’s where your boss is sitting."

"The chieftain," Elias said. "We never got to him."

"You’re about to."

They went over the plan in thirty seconds. It wasn’t complicated. Aveline would hold the choke, all four meters of it, and nothing would get through. Marcus would take the high rock on the left and kill archers. Elias would stand behind Aveline’s left shoulder and do the one thing he was good at.

"Call it," Marcus said. "But call it right. A number and a direction, not a feeling."

Aveline walked into the choke point and planted her shield.

It took the goblins eleven seconds to notice her. Then the ravine erupted. Spear goblins poured down the slope shrieking, and the first arrows came hissing off the ridges.

"Right ridge, three archers, forty meters," Elias said. "Left, two, sixty."

Crack. Crack. Crack. The right ridge went quiet. Marcus shifted his weight on the rock and swung his barrel left without hurrying. Crack. Crack.

The spear wave hit Aveline and broke. She didn’t give a single step. Her shield took the first spear point, her sword took the goblin behind it, and she shoved the third back into the fourth so hard they both went down. The choke was four meters wide, and she filled every centimeter of it.

"Left ridge," Elias said. "New archer, fifty-five meters, behind the dead tree."

Crack.

"Better," Marcus said.

The wolf riders came on the fourth wave.

The Link saw them before Elias did: six paw-print markers breaking away from the camp and curving wide along the riverbed, their arrows stretching longer as they picked up speed. They weren’t coming at the choke. They were going around it, along a goat track on the right wall that Elias hadn’t even noticed.

"Riders, right wall, flanking," he said. "Ten seconds."

"Aveline’s busy," Marcus said, already turning. "Call me the lead."

"Big one in front. Red saddle."

The wolves came over the lip of the goat track in a rush of fur and teeth, each the size of a pony, each carrying a goblin with a hooked lance. Marcus shot the lead wolf through the front legs, and it tumbled, and the two behind piled into it. The other three cleared the tangle and kept coming, straight at Elias.

He didn’t freeze this time.

Quick Step threw him sideways as the first lance came down where his head had been. He came up inside the second wolf’s reach, under its jaw, and drove his dagger into the rider’s thigh. The goblin shrieked and fell. Without turning around, Aveline swept her shield backward and caught the third wolf across the muzzle hard enough to spin it off its feet.

Marcus finished the riders in three shots.

[Level up: 5 → 6.]

Elias stood in the riverbed, breathing hard, his dagger slick, and realized he was grinning.

"Don’t," Marcus said from his rock. "You’ll get cocky."

The goblins broke. Elias watched it happen in the Link. The red markers on the slope stopped advancing, hesitated, and began streaming back up the ravine toward the bone wall. Archers abandoned the ridges. One spear goblin threw down its spear and simply ran.

"They’re running," Elias said. "We can push—"

"Hold," Marcus said.

"But—"

"Hold. Rule two." He hadn’t taken his eye from the scope. "Something made them run back toward that wall instead of away from it."

Then Elias heard it.

A deep, slow boom, so low he felt it in his ribs before his ears caught it. Then another. Then a third, faster, building into a rhythm. It came from the ridge above the bone wall, from somewhere the Link couldn’t quite reach.

War drums.

In Elias’s vision, every retreating red marker stopped. One by one, their outlines thickened and began to pulse, and a small notice flickered beside each of them: [BUFF: WAR CHANT]. The fleeing goblins turned around. Even from here, he could see that their eyes had begun to glow.

The drums grew louder.

Aveline set her feet in the choke point and raised her shield.

"Well," she said. "Now it’s a fight."