The ground came up under Harold's boots all at once — packed stone, and the formation around him lurched through the same half-second of disorientation, a thousand men catching their footing in a town square that hadn't existed for them ten seconds ago.
The square was large, cobbled in uneven grey stone with a well at the center and timber-framed buildings running three sides, the fourth opening onto a wide street that ran straight toward a gate Harold could see in the middle distance. The smell hit before anything else — cookfire ash and animal dung and something sharper underneath, the green-copper bite of torches burning in daylight for some reason.
A man was already moving toward him across the square, robes flapping, both arms raised in the universal posture of a man who had been waiting for something to save him and had just watched it materialize from nothing.
"Thank you!" The man's voice cracked on the second word. "Thank the gods — thank whatever — you're here, we — please, you must help us, the lizardmen are barely half a day out, and we have five hundred militia, and the walls need—"
The knight beside him moved efficiently — a short, flat-handed clap across the back of the mayor's head that cut the words off mid-sentence and sent his hood forward over his face.
"Shut up," the knight said pleasantly, "you overgrown turkey."
He stepped around the mayor, who was resettling his hood, and walked toward Harold with his hand extended.
"Forgive him." The knight's grip was dry and direct, no performance in it. "He's not wrong that we need help — he's just been standing in this square since dawn working himself up to a pitch." He glanced once at the formation behind Harold — at the centuries still dressing their columns without being told, at the ballista wagons rolling into the square's edge, at Hale already moving along the formed line with his hands behind his back and his jaw set. "My name is Aldric. I command the garrison here." He said way a man might say he ran the mill. "Lord Harold, I take it."
"That’s me," Harold said.
"We've got an army of those green bastards about half a day out. They’ll hit the walls right at nightfall. As soon as we lose our vision, they’ll come over."
Harold nodded. Behind him, he heard Hale's boots change direction, and a moment later, Hale was at his left shoulder.
"This is Colonel Hale," Harold said. "He commands my legion."
Aldric looked at Hale the way a craftsman looks at another craftsman's work. Hale returned it with the same neutral assessment and said nothing.
"Let’s go somewhere with a map," Harold said. "I want to know what we have to work with sooner rather than later."
"Bunker under the keep." Aldric was already turning. "Follow me."
Harold glanced back at the cluster of lords standing behind with the knights and raised two fingers, crooked them forward. Fitch, Maren, Caswell, Brennig, and Dalen peeled away from the formation and fell in. Henri followed without being gestured at, which Harold had expected. Renna had already drifted toward the supply wagons and Tribune Tran.
He turned to Hale. "Get the centuries on the walls. I want to know the condition of them."
"Already told them," Hale grunted. “You worry about lording, and I’ll worry about the Army.”
______________________________________________________________________
The bunker was cut into the stone beneath the keep's foundation — low ceiling, timber bracing, two oil lamps on iron hooks, and a table in the center covered with a map someone had been working on for a while. The detail was good: road lines, elevation marks, the outer treeline in careful strokes, and four red-marked positions in the east that Harold didn't need Aldric to explain.
Aldric planted both hands on the table and leaned in.
"First force is about half a day out — they'll reach the walls right as night comes down, which is how they do it every time." He traced a line from the treeline to the eastern wall. "This wave is running about five thousand."
Harold's hands went still on the edge of the table, and his head tilted, his eyes dropping back to the map for a moment before he opened his palm toward Aldric — continue.
He kept his face where it was, but Fitch caught it from the left and Maren from the right, and Caswell let out a breath through his nose that said he'd caught it too.
"They’ll be lightly armed, light armor. They move fast in low light, and they carry some kind of low-grade regeneration — not combat healing, more like they don't bleed out the way you'd expect." Aldric tapped the eastern wall marker. "They'll come with ladders and grapple hooks, and a portion of them can scale the walls without either — their claws get into the mortar joints. The walls slow them, they don't stop them." His finger moved to a second position. "There'll be a shock element in the first wave as well. Could be a berserker strain — big and fast, no sense of self-preservation — or a heavy armored block meant to hold a breach while the lighter ones pour through." He straightened. "What they won't have in this wave is ritualists or siege beasts. Those come later."
The bunker was quiet except for the lamps.
"How many waves?" Harold said.
"I won't know until my scouts report back in. This wave is the probe — they want to know what we have before they commit the main force." Aldric looked at the map with a bleak expression.
Harold's thumb drummed into the table edge a couple of times, then stopped. "What do you have?"
"Five hundred militia," Aldric said it without apology. "They're not what your men are — I can see that just looking at them. But their families are inside these walls, and that does something for a soldier that training doesn't." He moved to the left of the map. "Armed with spears, swords, and tower shields — the shields fit the crenellation slots, built for it. They get cover while they work."
Aldric glanced at them all and kept going. "In the armory, there are another two hundred crossbows with a few thousand bolts, spare spears, and mangonels — my men are building them on the walls now. Four, maybe five by nightfall."
Hale grunted, “We’ll need them.”
"Civilians," Harold said.
"Close to ten thousand." Aldric looked at the map. "Most aren't mana-capable in any useful sense for a fight. But there are crafters worth knowing about — two smiths with production perks, two alchemists, an imbuer, and a dwarven enclave." He paused. "The enclave is evacuating as we speak."
Harold looked up from the map.
"I tried to convince them to fight, but you know how dwarves are," Aldric said, pre-empting the question. "They only care about three things." He held Harold's gaze.
He sighed in response, “They care about drinking, crafting, and fighting, and the order is in debate.”
Caswell leaned forward from the end of the table with his forearms on the edge. "Five thousand in the first wave, and between all of us we're talking about what, fifteen hundred effective fighters on the walls?"
"That’s what I said," Aldric said.
“Math ain't mathing there.”
Caswell held his look for a moment and sat back. At the far end of the table, Maren had been running her finger along the eastern approach without looking up for the past two minutes.
"The walls," she said. "Height and walk width."
Aldric located her. "Twenty feet wide at the base parapet. The walk is ten feet all the way around." He tapped the four corners of the map and the gatehouses. "Each corner bastion and the gatehouse are reinforced — built heavier than the curtain wall, wide enough to seat siege equipment." He moved his finger to the northern face. "The approach is from the north."
"So the bastions on the northern corners are your main battery positions," Maren said.
"And the gatehouse," Aldric said. "The gate's the obvious target."
She nodded and went back to the map.
Harold pulled the trial objective text into his peripheral vision — he'd read it in the square while the mayor was still finding his hood — and let it sit there against what Aldric had laid out.
Hold the walls through all the waves.
No more than 10% civilian casualties.
Secondary objective: destroy the nest.
He pressed two fingers against his temple and looked around the table.
"Caswell." The man straightened. "Find the dwarven enclave before they finish packing. Tell them the Count of Harold's Landing wants a word — introduce yourself as a knight of the realm first. They can't refuse a system-titled count, so use it."
Caswell pushed back from the table. "Aye, I can do that."
"Fitch — the imbuer, the smiths, and the alchemists. Gather them somewhere and hold them there. I need to speak with all of them."
Fitch nodded once, already moving toward the door in his head.
"Lady Maren." She looked up from the map. "Find Renna. I need elevated platforms constructed on the walls above the current parapet level — towers, reinforced, tall enough that our siege equipment can look down on anything approaching. The lizardmen will eventually bring their own artillery, and I want our crews above it when they do." He paused. "Make sure the construction is sound. Don't let anyone rush it into something that falls over when a ballista fires."
"Understood," Maren said, and her finger left the map.
Harold turned to Brennig. The man had been quiet the entire briefing, watching the room more than the table. "I need you to survey this town. Every building, every cellar, every place a man could fit through if he wasn't proud about it." He kept his voice level. "Lizardmen don't commit to an assault unless they're confident in it. That means they've been here before, or someone has. Take a knight detail with you and go through everything. I want to know about any tunnels, any hidden access, anything that doesn't match the building above it. The way the system is cliché about these things, it’s probably the sewers."
Brennig's chin came down once. He didn't ask questions, but he had a wolf’s smile on his face before he left.
"Lord Dalen." Dalen straightened at the end of the table. "The crossbows in the armory — I want them out and in the hands of the militia. Spears and tower shields are fine for holding a breach, but crossbows on the wall walk will do more work against a fast-moving force in low light. Get them issued." He thought for a moment. "Work with Renna and Lady Maren as well. I want fallback positions built inside the walls and elevated platforms for our archers and crossbowmen — something they can retreat to if the wall walk gets contested and keep firing from."
Dalen pulled out a small notebook, which Harold hadn't noticed until now, and wrote something. "I'll get it done."
There was a general scrape of boots and a low current of acknowledgment around the table, and then they were filing out, the lords dispersing into a town that had half a day to become defensible. Harold watched them go and trusted, as he always had to, that the instructions would survive contact with the reality waiting outside the door.
He looked at Hale.
Harold stepped closer and dropped his voice. "Something is wrong. This scenario isn't running the way Henri described it."
Hale's expression didn't change, but his jaw moved once. "Course it isn't. Nothing's ever easy with you." He crossed his arms. "What's different?"
"Last time, Henri's initial assault was two thousand. He repelled it without much trouble — said so himself, at length, on every forum he could find." Harold looked at the map. "This wave is five thousand, the composition isn't matching what he posted, and—" He checked that Aldric was out of earshot. "I just read the secondary objective. There's a nest out there we're supposed to destroy, and that’s not what Henri’s was either."
Hale was quiet for a moment. "So either these change based on the force we bring or…."
Harold rubbed his temple. "Something has changed. I fear someone is fucking with us."
"Right," Hale said it the way he said — unimpressed. "Well. First wave we can handle. The boys are good for that, five thousand or not, and we've got the walls and the ballista. We go wave by wave from there." He looked at Harold. "You've made good moves already. Let's figure out what else we can do." He glanced toward the stairs. "Start with the walls? Go look at what we're actually working with."
Harold thought about it for a half-second and nodded. "Yeah. Let's do that." He looked at the map one more time. "I wish we had Josh here."
Hale was already on the stairs. "I'm sure he's burning something down back home. Let's go."
Henri was already in the stairwell when they came up, which meant he'd been waiting close enough to hear the end of the conversation.
The guard picked them up at the keep's door — Carter at the point, Ren and Corwin wide, Churchill falling in behind. Parker was already out in front of the small column, moving with the authority that declared the space around Harold belonged to him, making it clear to everyone they passed. Two of his knights materialized on the flanks without being told, and the townspeople and militia moving through the street adjusted around the formation the way water finds a new path.
They walked north toward the wall. The town was louder than the square had been — hammering from somewhere above the roofline, the creak and drag of timber being moved, someone calling measurements in a voice that had been doing it long enough to go hoarse. The smell shifted as they moved, and something smelled heavenly.
Henri walked at Harold's left, a half-step behind, and his eyes moved across the buildings with curiosity.
"What are you thinking?" Harold said.
Henri was quiet for a moment. "That I hope you've prepared enough." He looked at the wall growing ahead of them, at the militia figures moving along the parapet. "This scenario — the way that the commander described it — this is not something I would have handled well." He said it without self-pity. "I did not have the advantages you have in this timeline."
Harold laughed, short and genuine. "So you've accepted I'm from the future."
Henri's eyes moved sideways to him, incredulously considering beneath confirmation. "Naturally." He looked back at the wall. "There is no other explanation for how soundly you beat me."
Hale, two steps behind them, didn't look up from the street ahead. "You know, Henri." His voice carried no warmth. "Even when you're trying to be modest, you're still an asshat."
Henri said nothing, but Harold could see the small smirk.