Chapter 268: The First Street (1)

Chapter 268: Chapter 268: The First Street (1)

Chapter 268: The First Street (1)

Marek’s Third Company moved with terrifying precision. The southern wall had been breached, and they marched through without breaking stride. As they advanced, their boots trampled over the broken bodies of Bastion Nine’s garrison. Their deaths could have been prevented, but arrogance of their Commander had sealed their fate.

Captain Valerius, a scarred veteran, expected the eastern quarter to be exactly like the rest of the occupied city.

They advanced in a tight, impeccable phalanx. Shields were locked and the spears angled uniformly. Their polished armor gleamed dully in the choked light.

These streets were not designed for the traditional war. They were built for the cargo transits. The alleys were incredibly narrow. They were hemmed in on all sides by towering brick warehouses. The air here was heavy and smelled of brackish canal water and wet coal dust.

Valerius led his one hundred and twenty men down the primary thoroughfare called Iron Way, which was like a cramped artery. The sunlight was entirely blocked by the heavy overhanging walkways that crisscrossed between the grim factory rooftops above, making the shadows extremely dark and deep.

"Keep the line tight," Valerius barked, his seasoned voice echoing harshly off the brickwork. "They will break at the first sight of naked steel. Standard pacification. Leave no stragglers behind."

But there was no one left to break. The street was eerily empty. There were no weeping refugees clutching their belongings, no desperate militiamen offering a futile defense.

There was only a suffocating silence, broken solely by the rhythmic CLACK of their own perfect advance. The heavy infantry pressed deeper into the bottleneck. They were perfectly disciplined. And they were exactly where Draven wanted them.

The slaughter commenced with a sound no louder than the sharp snapping of a dry twig.

Lucien had strung the highly tensile tripwires with extreme precision. He had anchored them deep into the masonry at the exact ankle height. They were hard to see as they were in the dimmest stretches of the underpass.

Valerius’s front rank hit the first wire in the gloom. They tumbled forward instantly, their heavy tower shields dragging them face-first into the cobblestones in a sudden, deafening cacophony of shrieking metal and cursing men.

Before the sergeants could even draw breath to scream for a halt, the street itself seemed to rip open.

Thirty feet above, Reina’s rigged canal ridges from the rusted gantries gave away violently. Thousands of gallons of fetid, which was painstakingly dammed up over the last forty-eight hours, crashed down into the narrow alley.

The deluge slammed into the tightly packed formation like a battering ram. It swept their feet out from under them, blinded them with corrosive silt, and broke their formation apart. Heavily armored men slipped and drowned in eighteen inches of rushing water, dragged down by the very steel meant to protect them.

Panic, cold and sudden, rippled through the company.

"Shield wall! Reform the wall!" Valerius roared, desperately wiping toxic sludge from his eyes.

But the trap had been designed to funnel them exactly where they stood. As the surviving soldiers scrambled out of the freezing flood, they pushed toward the slightly raised doorways of the warehouses on either side, desperate to find solid ground. That was when the true nightmare revealed itself.

The doorways were not empty.

Varn’s dockworkers stepped out from the deep shadows. They wore no armor, only stained canvas coats, and they carried no swords. Instead, they swung heavy iron pry bars, cargo hooks, and massive, long-handled shipyard hammers. The trapped soldiers, their mobility entirely negated by the cramped space and the crushing press of their own routing comrades, could not bring their long spears to bear.

A pry bar swung in a brutal, heavy arc, instantly crushing a legionnaire’s helm. A rusted cargo hook caught another soldier under the rim of his breastplate, dragging him screaming into the total darkness of a warehouse. It was mechanical, butcher’s work. The traps had stripped away their discipline. The tight quarters had nullified their numbers. The dockworkers, men who had broken their backs moving iron and stone for pennies their entire lives, dismantled the elite soldiers with horrifying, blue-collar efficiency. A disciplined company of a hundred and twenty men was rapidly being ground into desperate, screaming meat.

At the far end of the alley, where the funnel tightened into a final, inescapable choke point before the refugee camps, stood Aegon.

He did not have a squad to command this time. There were no grand flanking maneuvers to call, no complex strategy to execute. Draven had given him one single order. Be the wall.

As the most desperate of the surviving soldiers shoved their way forward, trying blindly to break out of the kill zone, they slammed directly into him.

Aegon planted the butt of the Blood Fire Spear against the cobblestones and set his boots. The impact rattled his teeth and sent a shockwave up his arms, but he did not yield a single inch.

A frantic legionnaire thrust a short sword straight at his throat. Aegon swept it aside with the haft and drove the shaft into the man’s face. Bone crunched under the iron. The soldier folded like paper.

Aegon breathed heavily, his heart hammering a frantic, violent rhythm against his ribs. This was not Bastion Six. He was not fighting mindless, shrieking monsters pouring out of the wastes. These were men. He could see the stark terror in their eyes, hear the panicked, wet gasps of their breath, and smell the bitter sweat and blood on them. It felt incredibly heavy. The guilt of it gnawed at the edges of his mind, a sickening realization of what it meant to take a human life while looking right into a pair of terrified human eyes.

But behind him were thousands of shivering refugees huddled in the factory basements. If he broke, they died. So Aegon locked his jaw and pushed the horror down. He became a machine of meat and iron. He stepped forward, the spear moving in short, brutally efficient arcs, crimson heat bleeding off the shaft with every strike. He was the anvil upon which Marek’s company finally broke.

All along the Iron Way, the brutal fight continued. The dockworkers were winning, but they were not invincible. Armored men trapped in corners fought like cornered wolves, and the laborers bled for every yard they gained.

Elian was twenty-two, a loader from the lower wharves. That morning, he had carefully saved half his ration of stale bread for his little sister, keeping it safe in his breast pocket. He had a crooked smile and hands hardened by years of work. Now, exhausted, he swung his heavy iron wrench at a fallen soldier, each blow slower than the last.

He never even saw the blade.