Chapter 1008

Arslan blocked another thrust with mana-hardened steel.

The spear’s pale light pulsed. His reinforcement flickered. The impact punched through his guard and drove the crossbar of his sword into his own chest.

Orleandul’s knee followed, slamming into the same spot. Arslan staggered. The spear butt struck his jaw. The world flashed.

For a moment, he saw not the battlefield but an old road. Broken wheels. Rain. His mother’s hand, still. A little sister’s ribbon in the mud. Not memory. Imagination. He had not been there. That was the cruelty.

He had spent years imagining the accident. Filling empty spaces with details because the mind preferred invented horror to blankness. Now every imagined image burned with a new question.

The spear came for his heart. Arslan moved late.

The blade punched through his outer armor and scraped along his ribs instead of piercing his chest. He trapped the shaft under his arm and swung upward. This time, he caught Orleandul.

Barely.

The sword’s edge cut across the commander’s cheek, opening a red line from jaw to ear.

Orleandul’s eyes widened. Arslan stepped in with a snarl and slammed his forehead into the man’s already-bloodied nose. Barrier or not, Orleandul stumbled. Arslan followed. One slash. Two. Three.

Orleandul blocked the first with the spear shaft. The second slid along the pale barrier over his shoulder. The third forced him to retreat two full steps.

Arslan roared and drove forward. For three breaths, he overwhelmed the spear. Raw pressure. Sword strikes raining down like falling iron. Shoulder feints. Kicks. Short cuts. Not elegant. Not pretty. The kind of violence that had made his name before titles and guilds had weighed him down.

Orleandul gave ground. His boots slipped in mud.

Arslan’s sword smashed against the spear again and again, each strike heavier than the last. Pale light flickered along the shaft. The commander’s calm twisted into concentration.

Arslan raised his blade for a killing cut. Orleandul smiled. Too late, Arslan saw the trap. The spear shaft bent. Not physically.

Mana bent around it, forming a curved line of pale force that wrapped behind Arslan’s sword like a hook.

Orleandul twisted. Arslan’s blade was dragged off course. His balance opened. The spear butt slammed into his wounded side. Pain ripped through him. His legs weakened.

Orleandul reversed grip and drove the spearhead toward Arslan’s stomach. Arslan caught it with his left hand. The blade pierced through his palm. He stopped it anyway. Blood ran down the shaft. Orleandul’s eyes sharpened. Arslan’s fingers closed around the spearhead, flesh splitting deeper.

“You talk too much,” Arslan said.

Then he pulled. Not backward. Down. Orleandul resisted by instinct. That was enough. Arslan stepped onto the spear shaft with one boot, pinning it into the mud for half a heartbeat, and swung his sword toward Orleandul’s neck.

The commander abandoned the weapon. He let go and threw himself backward. The sword missed his throat but cut through the edge of his collar guard, sending pale armor shards flying.

Arslan kicked the spear away. His pierced hand screamed. He ignored it.

Orleandul landed several paces away, now without his weapon. For a lesser fighter, that would have been victory. Orleandul drew two short blades from his waist. Their edges lit with the same pale mana.

Because apparently the day had decided fairness was something that happened to other people.

Arslan flexed his ruined hand once. Blood dripped from the hole through his palm. His left side bled freely. His head rang. His ribs were cracked. His breathing had become a negotiation.

Across the battlefield, the situation worsened. The golems had nearly closed both flanks.

Darnell’s retreat line was compressed near the broken barrier segments. Gaius and some others were trying to rip open another path, but several had collapsed. Maurien’s wind blasts kept enemy archers disrupted, but even he could not be everywhere.

Kharnek and Armandis were still fighting. Each clash between them sounded like a smith hitting the world’s largest anvil.

Arslan noticed the encirclement was almost perfect. Not complete. Almost. That thin difference was the only reason anyone was still alive.

The imperial reserves had spread with disciplined cruelty, pushing from the front while the runic golems closed from both sides. Behind the Lionsguard and northerners, the fragmented barrier walls still blocked the clean route back to Lionfang’s gate. Gaius and the geomancers had torn open gaps, but not enough. Not fast enough.

The battlefield had become a funnel. A wet, bloody funnel filled with exhausted fighters, wounded recruits, screaming men, and machines that did not tire.

Mana bullets ripped through the rain from both flanks.

A shield line to Arslan’s left buckled as three rounds punched through the same tower shield and blew the arm behind it apart. The fighter holding it went down with a raw scream. Two others grabbed him by the straps and dragged him backward before the golems could finish the job.

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A shell exploded near a knot of northerners. Mud and fire burst upward. One warrior came out of the blast with half his face bleeding and one eye shut. He staggered, roared, and kept moving until Sigrid seized the back of his armor and shoved him toward the retreat.

Farther ahead, Darnell’s shield groups were trying to rotate the wounded through the breach. They were doing it well. Too well, considering half of them looked ready to collapse. But the enemy fire kept tightening. Every few breaths, another body dropped. Every few breaths, another healer burned the last scraps of mana trying to keep someone’s organs from becoming exterior decoration.

Escaping without being massacred was impossible. That was the ugly conclusion.

Arslan saw it in the spacing of the golems. In the firing angles. In the way Orleandul’s reserves were no longer trying to kill quickly, but to compress. To push. To make the retreating force bunch together near the breaches until the catapults or golems could erase them in clusters.

Blood ran down his side from Orleandul’s spear wound. His ruined hand throbbed with every heartbeat. His ribs burned. His head rang. His mana felt scraped raw from too many bursts, too much reinforcement, too much anger forced into useful shape.

But he was still standing. Therefore, work remained.

Orleandul was recovering behind him, wounded but alive. Armandis and Kharnek were still trading blows that made nearby soldiers reconsider their life choices. The runic golems kept advancing. The imperial troops pressed hard enough that even the Lionsguard’s disciplined retreat was beginning to bend. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

Arslan took one step forward. Then another.

Darnell saw him and swore. “Guildmaster!”

Arslan ignored him. Naturally. He planted his boots in the mud, raised his sword, and drew in a deep breath.

It hurt. Everything hurt.

Good. Pain meant he was still attached to the world.

His mana stirred, not outward this time, not into fire, not into brute force. It reached for a bond. Old. Familiar. Carved not into flesh, but into pact and practice. Arslan opened his mouth.

“Come!”

The word tore across the battlefield. A light of summoning bloomed in front of him. Bright. White-gold. Sharp against the rain and mud. For a heartbeat, it looked absurdly gentle. Then the light split. A direwolf appeared before Arslan.

Massive paws struck the mud with enough force to splash blood-dark water over Arslan’s boots. The beast stood nearly as tall as a warhorse at the shoulder, with thick gray-black fur, scarred muzzle, and eyes like cold silver coins. Its breath steamed in the rain. Its lips peeled back, revealing teeth long enough to make most swords feel insecure.

It shook its mane once. Then growled at the Empire. A good wolf. Around the battlefield, more lights answered. One after another. Then dozens. Then hundreds.

Summoning circles flared beneath the feet of Lionsguard fighters and northerners alike. White-gold light flashed through rain and smoke, appearing between shield lines, beside wounded squads, behind retreating warriors, near breaches in the magical barriers.

Direwolves emerged across the battlefield.

Five hundred of them. Adult direwolves.

Not ordinary mounts, if anything about a creature capable of biting through a man’s torso could be called ordinary. These were unusually tall, broad-chested beasts, thick with muscle beneath rain-slick fur. Some had northern bloodline markings, dark stripes, pale muzzles, bone charms braided into their harnesses. Others bore Lionsguard tack, reinforced saddles, side straps, and hardened leather packs.

Their presence alone changed the battlefield.

Not enough to win. Not immediately. But enough to make everything hesitate.

Imperial soldiers stopped advancing for half a breath as five hundred predators appeared among the retreating force. Horses in the backline panicked. Several mages lost focus. One mercenary stared at the direwolf nearest him, then looked at his own sword, as if realizing the weapon had been a decorative suggestion this whole time.

The runic golems did not hesitate. Machines were rude like that. Their weapons adjusted. Optics flashed. Target priorities shifted. Orleandul, wiping blood from his mouth as he regained his footing, narrowed his eyes.

At first, Arslan thought the man was simply surprised. Then Orleandul’s gaze sharpened. Not at the wolves themselves. At their backs. The commander noticed it.

The packs. Every direwolf had them.

Heavy leather backpacks strapped along their sides, secured beneath layered harnesses. Some were soaked from rain. Others had mud splattered across the flaps. None were decorative.

Orleandul’s expression changed. Not fear. Not yet. Recognition arriving too late. Arslan smiled through blood. It probably looked awful. Across the battlefield, Lionsguard members and northerners reached for the direwolves’ packs.

Hands vanished into leather compartments.

Corks popped. Glass clinked. Mana potions came out by the handful. Not one or two. Dozens. Hundreds.

Small emergency reserves. Distributed across summonable mounts. Hidden from siege fire. Protected from storehouse destruction. Designed specifically for the moment when exhausted fighters needed one more ugly miracle.

Ludger’s paranoia.

A recruit with one eye swollen half shut grabbed a potion from a direwolf’s pack and stared at it like it was a holy relic.

The direwolf snarled at him.

The recruit flinched. “Thank you?”

The wolf snorted in his face.

“Right. Drinking.”

He drank. So did the others.

Lionsguard veterans ripped corks out with their teeth and downed blue liquid in desperate gulps. Northerners drank like men insulted by the concept of dosage, some grabbing two potions at once until nearby healers shouted at them not to explode their own mana channels.

“Half bottle first, you oversized goat!” one Lionsguard healer snapped.

Mana began to return. Mana potions were not rest. They were not sleep. They were not a kind hand on the shoulder and a warm bed waiting somewhere civilized.

They were borrowed power poured directly into the body.

Fighters gasped as raw mana flooded drained channels. Some doubled over. Others clenched their teeth hard enough to crack. Veins lit faintly under skin. Muscles trembled. Eyes sharpened.

The Lionsguard had been exhausted. Now they were exhausted and dangerous again. A very important distinction.

Orleandul saw it. His eyes widened. Just a little. Enough. He raised one hand, turning toward his line.

“Attack!” he shouted. “Now! Break them before—”

Too late. Those who had drunk pointed their hands at the enemy. Not all of them. Not perfectly. Not with Ludger’s monstrous precision. But enough.

Hundreds of palms faced outward. Earth-aspected mana sank into the battlefield. The rain had already done half the work.

The ground was soaked. Mud churned from thousands of boots, hooves, explosions, and blood. The soil beneath the imperial advance had been loosened by earlier detonated runes, broken by battle, saturated by hours of rain and water spells.

It only needed a suggestion. The Lionsguard gave it one. The ground beneath the imperial front turned soft.

Then softer. Then liquid. Quicksand opened across the battlefield in wide, ugly patches.

A spreading disaster.