Churchill pointed at the nearest Rampback. "That one's ours." He was moving off the parapet before the sentence finished, the longer blade swapping to his right hand as he hit the stairs. "Come on, my lord."
"Uhh, guys, he's going," Elroy said, watching Churchill's back disappear down the stairhead.
"This is awesome," Jenkins confirmed.
Harold followed, and the guard pulled in around him — Carter, Ren, and Corwin at his flanks, the banner pole in Ren's off hand. Elroy and Jenkins were two steps behind, Jenkins grinning so wide it looked painful.
They moved along the wall walk fast, Churchill cutting toward the section the Rampback was going to hit. The whole formation tightened around Harold as they cleared out the legionaries holding position there. The optio looked vaguely relieved. The Rampback was sixty yards out, head down, that flat bone-plate skull churning through the air.
Harold watched it come and felt something in his chest that was not quite dread and not quite excitement and was probably some combination of the two that he hadn't had a name for in his first life either.
Churchill pulled up at the parapet and looked at the Rampback for about a second.
"We keep your flanks clear," he said. "Front is yours, my lord." The title came out with a quarter-turn on it. He looked at Harold sideways and held it just long enough.
Harold pulled the mana in without answering — a steady low current, enough to sharpen reflexes and put real weight behind each strike. It settled across his shoulders and down into his legs.
"Banner," Churchill said.
Ren had it socketed before Churchill finished the word, the colors cracking out above the wall section, and the sound from the legionaries below came back fast.
The ground shook.
The Rampback hit the wall like a slow avalanche, front legs dropping into the ditch, the bone-plated skull driving up and into the parapet face with a concussion Harold felt through both feet. Stone dust rained from the crenellations, the whole top of the wall lurching back a foot. Three legionaries grabbed for the merlons and one didn't make it, sliding over the inner edge and catching himself on the lip, dangling.
Then the head started moving.
Left to right, the bone-plate skull dragged across the parapet face in a grinding arc, crenellations snapping off where they caught. Two legionaries went sideways and were caught by their century mates. A third dropped straight down and hit the walkway hard.
The first lizardman cleared the Rampback's head.
Harold met it with a straight thrust to the armpit — gap in the scale there, where the arm met the body — and the mana-empowered arm behind the blade drove it in clean. He pulled it out and turned.
Two more over. Carter took one left, the guard closed on the other.
He was faster than he'd been in his first life and infinitely more fit. A blade came at his face and he stepped inside it instead of blocking, his elbow finding the lizard's jaw and his knife hand driving into the neck. The first life version of him would have blocked it and eaten the second strike. Good to know, he supposed.
The Rampback's head came back around and the whole section shook. Harold grabbed a merlon, rode it out, and saw a lizard coming off the skull at a run. He lit the blade — mana coating the edge, shimmer running to the tip — and took it across the forearm and upper chest in one stroke, slicing through scale and the arm behind it.
Churchill stepped up. "Don't use that."
Harold killed the coating with a grimace. The next lizard came over and he looked for gaps instead — shoulder joint, inner thigh, the angle where the neck piece didn't meet the helmet edge. He feinted right, drove the blade in at the neck joint on the recovery. It cost him a cut across the back of his pauldron, the edge shrieking off the scales.
It was slower. Harder. He understood why Churchill insisted and he didn't have to like it.
"Better," Churchill said, and went into a melee on the left.
Three lizards came over the Rampback's head together, staggered by two seconds, and Harold caught the first on his blade as it landed, the impact driving him back a step, and the second slammed into him before he'd reset, its shoulder catching him across the chest and spinning him sideways. He got his back against a merlon and the third one was right there, blade coming down, and Harold shoved off the stone and got under it and drove his elbow into the lizard's throat, felt the crunch of something important, and as it folded he ripped its own short blade from its hand and drove it through the second lizard's neck joint in the same motion. His own blade came back up for the first one, and they traded two strokes — Harold giving ground, the lizard pressing — until Harold found the angle at the hip and put the borrowed blade there instead, two-handed, all the way through.
He stood breathing over three bodies for a half-second. Three on one. In his first life that would have killed him.
A spear lay across the nearest one, pulled from a legionary Harold didn't want to look at directly. He grabbed it without stopping, turned, and put it straight through a lizard coming off the Rampback's spine at full sprint, the impact taking it in the chest and driving it backward into the two lizards ascending behind it, all three of them going sideways off the tail in a tangle. He drew his sword and kept moving.
To Harold's right, a section of wall was taking heavy press — six lizards over the parapet at once, shields up, driving hard into the legionaries there, and the century was being pressed back, men giving ground step by step. A legionary went down with a blade through his thigh and two of his mates dragged him back by the collar while the line closed around the gap. The lizards pushed through it and a centurion drove into them with his shield at full sprint, the crash carrying down the walkway, two lizards stumbling sideways off the edge. The line reformed around him.
Another ladder cracked against the wall face, then a second one twenty feet past it. Lizards coming over both before the axe crews got there, and one of the axe men took a blade across the forearm trying to clear the ladder and went down hard, clutching it, a medic runner pulling him back before Harold lost sight of them in the press.
Three more lizards came at Harold in a press, shields up, driving forward together to push him off the walk entirely. He put his shoulder into the nearest shield, shoved, created an inch of angle, and his blade went into the gap between the first and second shield with enough force to find the wrist behind it. The grip on that shield failed. He stepped into the opening and the second lizard's blade came at his head from the left and his own came up and deflected it, the third's blade came in low and he deflected that too, his wrist burning with the speed of it, three exchanges in the time it took to breathe once, and then his blade reversed direction and opened the third lizard's neck on the way back and the second took his elbow across the jaw, dropped its shield, and his sword went through its armpit on the follow-through. The system blade caught deeper than it should have — not mana, just quality, the edge taking scale apart where the Landing's steel would have skidded. He felt it every time it landed and he was going to have words with Caldwell about the equipment budget when he got home.
Fifty yards east, Hale was on the wall.
Harold caught it between combatants — Hale moving along the walk at a controlled jog, sword out, angling into a press where a section had buckled and three lizards were through the line. He didn't shout anything. He hit the nearest one from the side with a short brutal stroke into the neck joint, stepped over it, drove his blade into the second one's armpit before it finished turning, and the third got a shield rim across the jaw from a legionary who'd been waiting for someone to clear the angle. Hale was back to issuing orders before the body finished falling, not a wasted motion in any of it.
Harold turned back to his own fight. He needed to be half that efficient and he wasn't yet.
He heard Hale's call over the noise — two clipped syllables, a pattern name — and it ran down the wall legionary to legionary. Harold braced. The mana came out of the cohort in a single coordinated pulse, a flash of edge on every blade at once, and every legionary on the wall cut through the line in front of them in one synchronized stroke, bone and scale giving way, the front rank collapsing inward. The wall reformed before the lizards behind it could fill the gap.
A ladder cracked against the wall thirty feet left. Carter peeled a knight to handle it, and Harold stepped right and back into the line, a lizard off the Rampback's skull coming at him with a glaive. He went under it, the blade missing his ear by a finger's width, drove his shoulder into the lizard's midsection, rode it back into the merlon, and found the neck gap with his knife.
Down the walk, the noise from thirty feet left pulled his eye for a half-second — Elroy and Jenkins, moving through the fighting in a way that was unlike anyone else on the wall. Jenkins stepped inside a blade thrust, his off-hand pushing aside the lizard's guard, and Elroy's stroke came through the gap Jenkins had opened before the lizard could reset. Jenkins cleared right as Elroy stepped through, their lines crossing and recrossing without ever interfering. Harold had seen them train. He had not seen them like this. He was going to have to do something for those two when this was over.
Churchill's axe took a lizard's arm off at the shoulder and his blade followed into the neck before the lizard realized the arm was gone, two motions so tight they read as one. Another came over the parapet and he stepped into it, drove his elbow into its face, and punched the axe into its chest on the backswing. He looked bored doing it, which Harold found genuinely annoying.
A lizard landed directly in front of Harold and he turned back.
Then he caught Henri.
Twenty feet down the walk, working the edge of the press with a rapier — the blade thin enough to look wrong in a melee, the kind of weapon that got laughed out of rooms like this. Except Henri wasn't using it like a melee weapon. He was using it like a key, slipping it between scale joints with a precision that required knowing exactly where to put it, and every lizard he touched folded without understanding what had happened. No wasted movement, no brute force. Harold watched him slide the tip through the gap between a lizard's neck plate and its helmet edge, withdraw, turn to the next one.
Hale had said occasionally useful. Harold was starting to think that was underselling it.
A lizard came off the Rampback's tail and he turned back.
The wall shook again and another roar came from down the walk. Harold had a half-second between combatants and turned.
Down the wall a hundred meters east, a Rampback had a ballista bolt buried two feet into its skull, the shaft vibrating. The tower cranked and released and the second bolt hit the same beast at the shoulder, punching through where the mana pen coating had broken the resistance. The Rampback lurched sideways, its feet went wrong, and the whole mass slid off the wall in a slow collapse, lizards dropping off its back into the ditch.
Then Finn's potions started landing.
Harold caught him on the walk, a small figure in a baggy coat with too many pockets, lobbing potions up onto the Rampback's back where the lizards were climbing. Each one burst on contact, throwing bodies sideways, lizards tumbling off the spine. One hit somewhere on the skull and the Rampback screamed, deep enough that Harold felt it in his back teeth, and the skull came off the parapet and the tail started thrashing through the lizards massed behind it.
The stream of bodies over the wall cut to nothing.
Harold straightened and looked at the wall. His guard was holding, banner still up, Carter finishing a lizard on the left with two clean strokes. There were bodies on the walk in both directions, and not all of them were lizards — three legionaries down that he could see, one of them not moving, two being pulled toward the stairhead by the medic runners while the line closed behind them. The wall was holding. It was costing.
Churchill was to the right in a brief and entirely unhurried exchange with a lizard who had apparently made a poor choice.
The explosions from the treeline had been steady since the assault began — ballista crews walking their shots into the dark between the trees, detonating in bursts of orange that lit the canopy from inside. Harold had been filing them as background noise. Then a different sound came out of the forest, not the deep rolling crack of an explosive bolt but something sharper and wrong, a scream of something in immense pain.
He caught it between exchanges — a shape in the treeline moving through the dark toward the field at a pace that ate the distance fast. Ten feet tall, scaled across the shoulders and chest, and it came out of the tree line at a run that crushed two lizardmen underfoot without slowing. A portion of its hip had been blown off by a ballista bolt and it didn't care.
It ignored the ditch stakes entirely, dropped into the trench on impact, and launched itself at the parapet face.
Harold lost sight of it as his own section demanded his attention, but he heard the impact — a concussive thud against stone that was different from the Rampback hits — and he heard Caswell's voice a half-second later, clear and carrying over the noise.
"Oh, that's fugly. Fitch, left side!"
The troll had its hands over the parapet lip, hauling itself up, and Caswell and Fitch hit it with their details from both sides before it crested. Harold caught it in half-second glimpses between his own melee — blades going into the troll's arms and shoulders, the troll taking them and not caring, mana-clad edges barely cutting, the wounds closing behind them before the blood had finished running, the knights pulling back fast when they saw what was happening.
"It's healing," one of Fitch's knights shouted.
"I can bloody see that," Caswell said.
Harold killed a lizard, turned, killed another, and caught the next glimpse — Caswell and Fitch both off the line, backs against the inner parapet, Caswell already uncorking the blue vial Harold had sent down with the runner an hour ago. Fitch had his out too, applying the coating with the focus of a man trying to remember the instructions under pressure.
"Edge, not tip," Fitch said, half to himself.
"Ha! Oh, he's getting the tip!" Caswell said, already done and capping the vial. He looked up at the troll, which had an arm over the parapet now and a knight hanging off it trying to slow it down. "Alright." He grabbed the axe from his belt, the shorter one with a broad heavy head. "You're gonna want to move."
He ran at the troll at full sprint and left the ground two steps before the wall, got his boot on the parapet lip, and launched himself straight at the troll's chest. The mana-penned axe went in below the collarbone with the full weight of Caswell behind it and buried to the hilt, and this time the wound didn't close, and Caswell dropped, hit the parapet, and rolled hard into the wall base.
The troll staggered.
It was still moving, one hand clawing at the axe buried in its chest, but its weight had shifted and its footing on the parapet was wrong, and a knight behind it — one of Fitch's detail, a big man with a maul — swung for the back of the troll's knee with both hands, the impact audible even over the assault noise, and the joint failed. The troll went down sideways onto the parapet walk with a crash that shook the section, and the knights and both lords came in from every angle, mana-penned blades finding the gaps in the scale that the coating opened up, and the troll stopped moving forty seconds later.
Caswell was sitting against the wall base with someone's hand on his shoulder, breathing. He waved it off.
"I'm fine. That was excellent." He looked at the axe still buried in the troll's chest. "That's my axe."
Harold turned back to his own wall. The lizards were still coming.
The Rampback was hurt but its tail was still a ramp whether it was thrashing or not, the formations behind it were deep, and Harold looked out at the field — at the thousands still waiting — and looked at the wall and felt something cold settle in under the noise.
He'd held walls before. In his first life he'd done a stint as a battle alchemist and spent the whole time retreating from monster after monster. He was not doing that again. He was not losing these people. Not this time. He was done with that particular lesson.
He looked at the legionary who wasn't moving. Looked at the one whose thigh had been opened to the bone. Looked east and caught Hale — Hale, who did not get hit — taking a blade across the side of his helmet hard enough to snap his head sideways, and for a full second Hale just stood there, and Harold's stomach dropped, and then Hale shook it off and came up swinging.
Something let go in Harold's chest.
He had spent months in this life being careful about that particular door. He knew what lived behind it. He had built things in his first life using what lived behind it, and he knew what the building had cost, and he had told himself this time would be different, this time he would find another way, this time the madness would stay where it belonged. He had believed that. He mostly still believed it.
But his people were dying on this wall, and the door was open.
He stopped fighting it.
The part of his mind that he had been keeping quiet since the regression woke up fully and started doing what it had always done, which was work. The lizards coming over the parapet were no longer enemies in any emotional sense. They were material. His eyes moved across the nearest body as he took inventory — the scales dense with mana, each one worth rendering down in a reduction solution, three days of work for a mana-dense reagent base. The eyes, still bright even in death, the crystalline structure behind the iris that made them irreplaceable for darkvision compounds. The claws, hardened beyond what most metals could match, what any imbuer worth the title would pay serious gold for. His blade opened a neck and his mind noted the gland beneath the jaw and the specific compound it produced under stress, the one Balfiel had never been able to replicate synthetically, the one Harold had spent years learning to extract without degrading it. The excitement of it rose up through his chest before he could stop it. "So much material," he said, to no one.
The part of him that was a lord watched the wall. The part of him that was an alchemist watched the bodies.
He opened the aura from that place.
Not the command-room version. Not the careful pressure he used to hold a room's attention without frightening anyone. He opened it from the part of himself that had worked in rooms that smelled like copper for years and had learned to find that smell comfortable, and he let it carry exactly what he was feeling right now — which was that every creature on the other side of this wall was already dead, already catalogued, already reduced to its component uses, and the only remaining question was the order of operations. The aura said this plainly, with no heat and no anger, which was worse than if it had said it with both. His sword lopped off an arm from a lizard trying to take advantage and he didn't look at it, and he pulsed the aura again. The legionaries around him screamed their approval.
The lizards on the wall slowed.
Not the ones already in the middle of exchanges, but the ones at the parapet edge, the ones coming off the Rampback's head, the ones with one foot on the merlon ready to drop — they hesitated. A fraction of a second, then two. Just enough. The legionaries around Harold didn't hesitate, and the lizards that had paused paid for it.
Down the formation, somewhere past the middle of the advance, something roared back.
The commander's aura pushed back against his — weaker, angrier, built on aggression where Harold's was built on certainty, and where he said you are nothing but an obstacle and an ingredient, this one said we are many, and you are stone, and stone breaks. Harold felt it press against his and he looked toward the sound and found the commander on the Rampback's skull thirty feet away, standing upright, its crest raised, twin blades crossed at its chest, screaming at him.
Harold looked at it for a moment. Then he thought about the legionary who hadn't been moving when the medics reached him.
He increased the pressure without restraint, and let it carry every last thing he was — the mad alchemist, the budding lord, the man who had decided this time would be different and had meant it in a way that left no room for anything that got in the way of it. This time. This life.
The commander's aura collapsed.
The roar from the legionaries came up the wall like a wave breaking, centurions slamming their shields, the chant building until Harold felt it in his chest over everything else. Down the field the advance faltered — not stopped, not broken, but faltered, the front ranks pulling up, and the moment cost them seconds of ground and three volleys from the archers.
Then the commander launched itself off the Rampback's skull.
It came straight off the skull at a dead sprint and Harold's eye found it a half-second before it arrived — twice the width of the regular soldiers, grey-green scale heavier than anything he'd seen on the walk, a crest running from helmet to spine, twin short blades moving. It hit the guard like a cart hitting a fence post, the right blade going through Corwin's side in a single drive. Corwin folded and went down, and Harold moved before the thought caught up with him, mana flooding in hard and full as he crossed the distance and hit the commander with everything he had.
The impact drove the thing back a step and nothing else. Like hitting a wall that could hit back.
The commander's blades came around in a tight cross-pattern. Harold got his own blade up, angled his pauldron to take the second stroke, the force pushing his arm sideways, and he shoved back and reset.
"Leave him." Churchill's voice, flat. "He's the lord's."
Carter pulled back, jaw set.
Harold didn't look at Corwin. He kept his eyes on the commander and let the anger sit.
The commander was fast — blades working in tight alternating patterns meant to overwhelm opponents — and Harold gave ground for two exchanges just trying to understand the pattern. Right blade high, left blade low, a roll of the shoulder telegraphing the power stroke by a quarter-second.
He stopped giving ground and immediately paid for it.
The power stroke came in hard and Harold got his blade across it but not cleanly, the force wrenching his wrist sideways, and the follow-up caught him across the left forearm where the bracer ended and opened a line down to the bone. He stepped back, reset, felt the arm. Still working. The blood was warm going down into his glove and he had a sudden intense memory of the last time he'd bled like this, in a room that smelled like copper, and he pushed it down hard and focused.
The commander pressed. Harold gave ground again, three steps, four, back toward the merlon, and his heel caught the body of a dead lizard and he dropped to one knee and the commander's blade came down at his head and he got his own up and took the full weight of it on the flat, his arm buckling, and shoved sideways and got back to his feet with the wall at his back.
His mana pool was down from the extended fight. The commander's wasn't — or if it was, he couldn't tell. That was the problem with opponents who knew what they were doing. They didn't advertise.
He lit the blade.
The blue coating shone from the edge and the next exchange was different — it sliced into the armor surface instead of glancing off, and the commander shifted back, reassessing. But the mana resistance of its armor fought back, and the clean cuts he expected weren't landing clean. He was burning reserve for partial results and he knew it and the commander probably knew it too.
The commander's guard came over the Rampback's head — ten of them, hitting Harold's guard in a rush — and the fight compressed until it was just Harold and the commander with four feet between them and no one coming to help.
He had to find something or he was going to lose this on attrition. He was not losing this on attrition.
He watched the shoulder. Waited for the tell he'd seen twice. Kept the blade moving, kept the commander's attention, and ignored the burn in his left arm and the wet feeling spreading down into his glove. The commander drove a high combination and Harold let the first one through, angling the pauldron to catch it, took the impact across the shoulder hard enough to feel it through the scale work, and used the half-second the commander spent recovering its extension to drop low and drive his blade into the hip joint two-handed with a hard flare of mana behind it.
He felt it sink to the hilt.
The commander went to one knee with a pained hiss. Harold drew the dagger, found the neck above the collar, and did not stop until it stopped moving.
He straightened up. Left arm bleeding, right shoulder wrecked, mana pool scraped. He stood over the commander and breathed.
Churchill looked at him. "Not bad. Some bad habits to burn out of you."
Harold pulled his blade from the commander's hip, wiped it on his coat, and looked at the wall. The press had thinned — the rampback almost still now, the lizards being worked off the walkway in the methodical way that meant the cohort was finishing rather than surviving.
Harold turned toward him, his aura still unleashed, and Jack lowered his eyes slowly.