Chapter 44: The Only Chance

A dozen or so minutes earlier...

"March!"

Seated on the throne, Koda gave the order to every demon he had.

In an instant, nearly a thousand demons charged at the only entrance in Grimstone’s western wall, and that was just the western side.

At that moment, a good number of merchants and townsfolk were waiting at the west gate to go in or out.

As a town built on both trade and craft, Grimstone was always busy.

And today happened to be a big market day. Every idle soul from the nearby villages had come to trade.

The small traders who wanted to earn a little more usually paid the town guard one copper coin to get in and trade inside.

The ones without much money set up stalls near the gate instead, doing whatever they could to catch passing customers.

They did it because every one of Grimstone’s gates always had big crowds gathered around it, so they never worried about finding buyers.

Far away in the deep, Koda had noticed that too.

And he was ready to use it!

---

When the demons’ roars reached them, most of the people gathered near the gate jumped.

At first, before the demons came into view, they thought it was just some unknown beast howling.

But once the demons started appearing in packs, everything changed.

"Gods, it’s monsters!"

The locals had no idea what these monsters actually were, but the sheer horror of the Imps and Lesser Demons was enough to fill them with utter panic.

That ugliness and madness needed no explanation.

"How are there so many?"

"Gods, run!"

The moment they saw the demons, countless traders and passersby made their choices.

The quick-witted lucky ones slipped straight into the safety of the town before anyone else, or the guards, could react.

Others made the wrong call in the chaos.

They started running the other way, toward the gates on other sides of town.

But most of them, the ordinary majority, threw everything into squeezing toward the single entrance close by.

The problem was that Grimstone’s only west entrance wasn’t very big. With that many people shoving through it in a panic, the only possible result was that the gate would get jammed solid, and nobody would get in.

The town guard, though, were professional soldiers, and they still had enough of a soldier’s instincts.

"Shut the gate, forget them!"

The captain holding Grimstone’s west gate pulled himself together in the chaos and gave his order without hesitation.

He was standing on the wall. He had seen how big this attack was, and he understood everything.

His soldiers were staring at him in shock, panic, and disbelief, but he held his ground.

"Shut it!"

"If we don’t shut it now, we’ll never be able to shut it at all!"

"If this many monsters break through the gate and get into town, we all die!"

"Think of your parents in town! Think of your wives and your children!"

The captain roared.

His roar worked. The other dwarves of the guard came back to their senses and pushed their useless feelings aside.

Working together, with the miserable screams outside the wall ringing in their ears, they finally forced Grimstone’s west gate shut.

"..."

But then something the captain never expected happened.

As he watched, the monsters with their sharp fangs and claws didn’t slaughter the people he had locked outside.

Instead, even though they were clearly starving and savage, they were herding them!

They formed a chaotic but effective ring around everyone the captain had shut out, and drove them off in another direction.

And not all the demons left.

On Koda’s orders, about two hundred stayed behind, circling the west gate and acting as if they were about to attack, keeping any guard from stepping outside.

Elsewhere, countless sobbing, desperate townsfolk who didn’t want to die like this fled wherever the demons drove them.

"What... is going on?"

The captain’s eyes filled with confusion.

As far as he knew, monsters were mindless beasts.

If they ever found themselves in a situation like this, there was no way they would give up the food right in front of their mouths.

So this was very wrong!

"These monsters didn’t attack them, even though they’re starving... wait!"

Suddenly, the captain understood.

He didn’t have much military training, but years of experience finally let him see, too late, what Koda was really planning!

An evil, cold, and terribly efficient plan to take the town!

---

Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong!

Careless, unprepared Grimstone finally began to ring its warning bells.

By now, every gate except the north gate had already been "attacked" by the demons.

But the townsfolk and guards at the north gate had no idea what was going on.

Grimstone wasn’t big, but it wasn’t small either.

A few short minutes wasn’t enough for clear word of the attacks on the other gates to reach the soldiers and people at the north gate.

By the time they understood how bad it was, the bells were already ringing.

And the first thing the soldiers at the north gate saw wasn’t snarling, clawing demons.

They had hearts and souls. The first thing they saw was a flood of townsfolk, driven toward them by demons from every other direction, begging them for help.

They had sworn an oath to protect these people.

That was what the captain of the north gate thought, watching the crowd surge toward him...

They were his family. They were the merchant who sold him apples. They were the old friends he’d shared drinks with. They were...

And there were so many of them...

So many that the captain standing on the north wall lost his only chance!

In the moment he failed to shut the gate in time, because he was afraid of what it would do to his conscience,

a pair of enormous hands caught the slowly closing gate.

Karolith, Matron of the Imps, stood in front of every dwarven soldier there.

The gate.

Had fallen!

And the demon down in the deep finally bared a savage smile!