Chapter 56: Sharp Edges

*Rashid, Maximilian, and the others*

Forty women and men entered the battlefield moving out together, splitting into five formations built the same way Jakob's had been — at the front of each was one of Michaels old team members, a handful of fighters falling in around them and weapons drawn. It was the team of Rashid, Maximilian, Sophie Dupont, Lukas Brunner, and Jonas Holzer. Rashid took the front of the whole group, spear in hand, and slung over one shoulder, a small bag that looked almost out of place next to the weapon. Inside it was a mismatched collection of things that each fit neatly in a single palm consisting of mostly stones, a few short lengths of scrap iron and some splinters of wood with rough edges where they'd been snapped rather than cut. It looked less like an arsenal than something a child might have collected on a walk, which was exactly why nobody but Rashid himself expected much from it.

Somewhere ahead, a distant boom rolled across the rooftops, followed a moment later by a second, sharper crack of sound rippling out from the same direction.

*God, what an idiot,* Rashid thought, jaw tightening. *That new strength of his must have gone straight to his head. If Michael were here, he never would have let that happen.*

It was Jakobs first attack that drew the attention of everyone and every beast. There wasn't time to think about it any further than that.

„Get ready! Something's coming our way!“ he called back to his formation, already scanning the dark for movement.

Then, to the visible confusion of the people around him, he put his spear down and reached into the bag instead, closing his hand around a plain, fist-sized stone. „Let's see if this actually works the way I planned it,“ he muttered, mostly to himself. A monster was closing from mid-range, loping toward them with the same mindless hunger as every other monster today. „Spears up!“ he ordered his formation, and waited a bit longer.

He turned Sharpness on the stone instead of his spear tip for the first time. Nothing changed that he could see — no glow, no visible edge forming along the rock's surface — but he felt his mana take hold of it anyway, drawing a fine, lethal point out of stone . *And here we go.*

He threw it.

The monster didn't take it into account. It was just a rock, as far as its instincts were concerned, nothing worth dodging. It took the hit square in the torso, and the stone bit into flesh far deeper than its size should have allowed, lodging itself somewhere just under the surface. The monster staggered, overwhelmed by a sudden, sharp pain it had not expected, and its legs went out from under it entirely — it hit the ground rolling, full momentum carrying it right up to the front of Rashid's formation.

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„Now!“ he shouted, and three spears drove down through it before it even finished skidding to a stop. This was the battle strategy he came up with. He would hit the monsters with ranged attacks while his team members would finish them of with their spears. The result was a clean and safe kill. Something that those without a talent and fighting power desperately needed right now.

„Perfect. Keep moving.“ Rashid was already sighting the next one.

While Rashid worked at range, Maximilian did the opposite. He'd traded his spear for a pair of heavy iron rods, each one closer to a length of scaffolding than a proper weapon, and he swung them with a force that had nothing subtle about it. Five of his free stat points had gone straight into Strength for exactly this — a higher base value meant the percentage bonus from his Strength Boost talent increased his raw power much more. He caught the next monster mid-stride and drove the rod straight through it, the sheer mass and momentum behind the blow enough to kill it before it even registered the hit. „HAAAA!“ he roared, wrenching the rod free with a grinding sound, and charged the member of his formation straight into the next cluster without breaking stride. His troops fought all together and engaged in a battle of 4 vs 1.

Sophie Dupont's formation didn't hold a line at all. Unlike everyone else, she kept hers moving, circling the wider group rather than anchoring to one spot, refusing to simply wait for monsters to arrive. Her talent *Environmental Radar* built a constantly updating map of the surrounding area in her mind, sound bouncing back with enough detail to mark exactly where the next threat was coming from before it arrived. She used that to intercept — cutting monsters off before they ever reached the others, catching them from angles they hadn't accounted for. None of the rest of her formation carried an active talent of their own, so they fought with plain spears once the intercept landed. It wasn't a formation built for a high kill count. But every monster they cut off out here was one less monster reaching anyone else, and that alone was worth more than the numbers on its own would suggest.

Lukas Brunner used a similiar but heavier approach as Rashid. Where Rashid threw stones sharp enough to bite, Lukas threw entire iron rods — the kind Maximilian was currently using as melee weapons — turned into projectiles through his talent *Weight Manipulation*. He'd close his hand around one, strip away a fraction of its weight just long enough to hurl it clean across the gap between them and a monster, then let the effect lapse right as it struck, the rod snapping back to its full mass right before the impact. One monster after another went down under the sudden, crushing weight of something that should never have moved that fast, and whatever was left standing, the troops of his formation finished off with spears. Lukas‘ attacks caused more damage than Rashid’s but overall Rashid's troop was more effective because he could complete much more attacks than Lukas due to the amount and small size if the objects he was throwing.

Jonas Holzer needed none of that. He went in close, the same way Maximilian did, but where Maximilian relied on raw force, Jonas's talent *Sunder* tore straight through whatever resistance a monster's hide and muscle were supposed to offer. Toughness that would have blunted another spear meant nothing against him — his strikes tore through his opponents defenses and landed like the armor wasn't there at all. He nullified their defenses and either finished them off by himself or his team members put them to death.

Five formations, five entirely different answers to the same problem, all converging on the same stretch of street — a thrown stone here, a swung rod there, a spear finding an opening no one else could have seen coming. For now, at least, all of them were still standing.