“Fact,” he spoke, glad of the break in the fighting and willing to stretch it out. “You weaklings have been testing yourself against the refugees of a lost cause, as if they’re a tenth what their ancestors were. But, weak as they are, their ancestors’ potential is still there, waiting to bloom. Why do you think you’ve been sent to wipe out a single small city? The lord master is afraid of what they might become if he left them be.”
“Lies!” she snarled.
Kaern laughed, no sarcasm in his tone at all. “And the devil of it all is that he’s right to fear them.”
She screamed incoherently and charged him, the temporary truce ended.
Kaern stepped to the side as she passed, twisting under the slash of her blade, and flicked his own sword out in a deceptively casual motion. She continued on past him, stumbling to a stop as blood erupted from her side where he had stabbed in deeply, and fell to her knees.
He looked over the rest, and spoke calmly. “Eight.”
*****
Elan struggled as she threw herself into the swarm again, trying to distract and slow them enough that they would not be able to join the attack on the refugees’ line.
So far it seemed that she was succeeding, gathering a rather large degree of attention, none of it particularly positive. Her sidearm whined and discharged time and time again, but despite their fear, nothing would deter the demons from swarming her. She was fighting flashes of that night in the desert, trying not to relive her nightmares, as much as the demons themselves, but there was nothing to do now but fight or die.
Perhaps both, in the end.
An annoying buzz attracted her attention, causing her to look around amid the fight. “What is that?”
“That is your sidearm warning you that it will shortly be forced into regeneration mode,” Merlin advised her. “I suggest you return it to blade form. Just think blade, or sword.”
Frustrated, Elan flicked her hand down as she did as she was told and the weapon changed, the black blade assembling itself as she strode once more into the fray.
“What the hell is regeneration mode?” she growled as she swung the blade, foregoing any of the style she had learned from her father or Simone. In the mass of targets she had, hacking was the only real style she could manage.
“Generating negatively charged hydrogen pellets requires energy,” Merlin explained calmly, not mentioning that he was securing her face and head covering again now that the psychological intimidation opportunity had passed. “Your sidearm can only fire so many before it must recharge from the thorium core. Why do you suppose a blade mode was included at all? There are few things more useless than an uncharged blaster, but a blade is always of value.”
Elan growled in frustration as she fought. “You do know that I didn’t understand at least half the words you just spouted, right?”
“Then why do you keep asking?” Merlin grumbled back, irritated.
“Honestly?” she asked with a grin as she jabbed a fist into the misshapen face of a demon ahead of her. “Annoying you is beginning to entertain me.”
Merlin was silent for a few moments, before replying, “Well, so long as you find it entertaining. Just a warning, if you intend to live, you may want to withdraw now. The clock is counting down.”
“Counting down to what?” Elan asked, now annoyed again.
“You would not believe me if I told you,” Merlin responded, before correcting himself, “or, perhaps I should say, you would not understand me if I told you.”
Elan growled, hacking off a demon’s arm as she wrenched her way free of the last of them and began to run up the bank to the hills on the north side of the river.
Smug bastard, she thought, casting an eye to the east, where Kaern was fighting. “I need to warn Kaern.”
“He is a demon. Leave him,” Merlin ordered.
“I owe him,” she said, shaking her head. “So that is not going to happen.”
Merlin swore silently, but said nothing to deter the girl as she turned and ran inland rather than to the sea as he had told her.
*****
With most of the refugees pushing back along the riverbed heading for the sea, Simone and her guardsmen rushed ahead to meet any resistance to the withdrawal. She barely knew why she was in such a rush, but something about Elan’s attitude had convinced her.
Alright, the strange weapon and armor the girl wore certainly added to her credibility, and as much as Simone didn’t want to admit it, even she hadn’t been unmoved by the scene of the girl striding down the bank of the river while calling down the power of the Gods themselves against the demons.
It was the first time she’d started to truly credit Kaern’s belief that the girl’s arrival had been prophetic.
Perhaps she had been sent to them, and if that were the case…well, best to pay attention, then, right?
It wasn’t like she had many other options anyway.
They were through the heaviest resistance and now trying to get ahead of the refugee column again in case they were needed, but when the column ground to a halt, people slamming into those in front of them as they started scrambling to back up, Simone knew that they’d just run into another problem.
She almost ground to a halt herself when she saw it, the line of demons blocking off their path entirely. She knew that there was no way they’d be able to fight through that, not with the weakened forces they had.
Behind them lay death, and now death waited ahead.
Simone gritted her teeth as the men and women around her looked to her for guidance, any guidance would do.
“We’ve no choice,” she said. “The only way out is through them. If it takes our lives, we have to get as many as we can through.”
They set their expressions, nodding in agreement as they continued on ahead to close out the front of the column. Simone set herself at the vanguard of their formation, sword held aloft.
They were walking to their death, but bravery came easy, she found, when all other options were stripped away. She would not surrender and running was not an option, so they would die or she would.
The two lines, demon and human, closed on one another and were only moments from meeting when a whistling sound filled the air and shadows flitted across the sun. Simone and the others from both sides looked up, shocked as waves of arrows rained down from the sky and fell upon the demons.
They were not demon killers, for they had no iron tip, but the arrows tore through flesh and sinew, embedding into bone with solid impacts. The demon line was torn to shreds by the strike from the sky, and everyone twisted and looked for the source.
Atop the hill to the north, a blade held high glinted in the sunlight before it dropped and a second wave of arrows was lofted as the demon line broke into chaos.
Simone recognized the blond boy holding the sword and grinned with relief. Before the arrows could strike down, she struck her own sword against her armlet to gather attention from those around her.
“We strike on the heels of those arrows!” Simone yelled, bringing her blade up. “Charge!”
With a roar, the guardsmen, and many of the refugees, surged forward at her command.
*****
“Hit them on the flanks!” Caleb ordered. “Help them punch through!”
His “army” consisted of weakened prisoners of the demons, elderly, and the extremely young. It didn’t seem to matter in that moment, not as they were charging down the bank. An experienced man would have cringed at the lack of discipline, but no one would have questioned their enthusiasm as Caleb led them against the monsters that had haunted their nightmares their entire lives.
Caleb and the front line hit the demons from their flank like a wave crashing onto the shore, though this wave had steel and iron, and the shore was being hammered from the other side just as hard.