"AH! FUCK YES!"

  "Harder! Come on, bastard, more!"

  From Micheal's tent came a mess of moans, screams, and the slap of flesh.

  Two voices.

  Female.

  Both wanting more, harder, more savage.

  About twenty meters away, around a beat-up wooden table, the officers had stopped even pretending to eat.

  Sergeant Lorhus, beard greasy with fat and wine, spat a chicken bone onto his plate.

  He looked up.

  "How fucking long does this last?"

  Next to him, Captain Velric—gray hair, scar cutting through his eyebrow—took a sip of beer.

  "Long enough to remind us we're all half-dicks."

  Another officer, younger, pockmarked face, scratched his beard.

  "I say he pays them to scream that loud. Nobody actually fucks like that."

  "You don't fuck at all, Kerast," said Velric without looking at him.

  A smack.

  Sharp.

  Violent.

  A slap that could be heard even at that distance.

  Then a high-pitched scream: "FUCK, MIKE!"

  Sudden silence.

  Lorhus let out a long sigh.

  "Finally done. I was getting tired of it, seemed like they could go on forever."

  Velric laughed.

  "Never hear a damn thing from your tent. Maybe that's why you're so relieved—at least when those girls scream you don't have to think about the fact you can't make it happen."

  Lorhus turned sharply.

  Red in the face.

  "Shut the fuck up, you old bastard."

  "Bastard to who?"

  "To you, dickhead."

  The table flew.

  Cups, plates, a jug: everything airborne.

  Lorhus grabbed Velric by the breastplate, Velric threw a punch that landed on his shoulder.

  Shoves started, insults, a few poorly aimed kicks.

  Didn't last long.

  Then they stopped.

  All of them.

  From the tent came the first girl.

  Blonde, wearing a light linen dress that barely covered her thighs.

  Torn in several places—on the right shoulder, along the side.

  Messy hair, swollen lips, red marks on her neck that looked like bites.

  She walked slowly, legs trembling slightly with each step.

  Behind her came the second.

  Shorter, messy brown hair barely tied back, similar dress but worse off—one sleeve completely ripped away, the hem crooked and raised.

  Red marks on her arms and thighs, a purple bruise peeking out from under the fabric.

  She leaned on the first girl, one hand on her shoulder to keep from falling.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  Finally, Micheal came out.

  Completely bare-chested, skin slick with sweat that gleamed in the light of the camp fires.

  Pants still on but unbuttoned, belt undone, top button loose.

  On his chest, red scratches—long, deep, clearly made by female nails that hadn't held back.

  More on his neck, one starting from his collarbone and running down to his ribs.

  He stretched.

  Arms above his head, back arched, every muscle tensing under his skin.

  Yawned.

  Long.

  Unhurried.

  Then he lowered his arms and looked at the scene in front of him: overturned table, Lorhus and Velric still clutching each other's breastplates, the others frozen mid-movement.

  Micheal looked at them for another second, then turned around.

  Walked back into the tent without another word.

  The flap closed behind him.

  The officers stayed there, frozen, until Lorhus finally let go of Velric's breastplate.

  Nobody said anything.

  Around them, the camp continued its evening routine.

  Fires being fed, voices calling out orders, the clatter of armor being stowed away.

  The sun was sinking toward the horizon.

  Orange light bleeding across the plain, stretching the shadows of tents and siege towers long and thin.

  By morning, they would attack.

  Morning came fast.

  Too fast for some, not fast enough for others.

  The camp woke in stages.

  First the cooks, stumbling out of their tents to light the fires.

  Then the soldiers, kicked awake by sergeants who didn't give a shit if you'd slept three hours or none.

  Armor clanking, boots scraping dirt, voices low and rough.

  Nobody talked much.

  Everyone knew what was coming.

  The siege towers stood ready now, fully assembled, looming against the gray sky like wooden giants waiting to move.

  Ladders stacked near the front lines.

  Battering rams on wheels, reinforced with iron plates.

  Weapons sharpened the night before.

  Shields checked for cracks.

  Everything in place.

  Micheal stepped out of his tent just as the first light broke over the city walls.

  Bare-chested.

  Dark leather pants, boots high to the knee.

  No armor.

  No sword.

  He didn't need them.

  Hair tied back.

  Face calm.

  Almost bored.

  He looked at the city in the distance.

  Still.

  Silent.

  Waiting.

  He smiled.

  "Let's go fuck them up."

  Hours passed.

  The army kept preparing.

  Soldiers hauling equipment, officers barking orders, engineers making last adjustments to the siege towers.

  Routine chaos.

  Then something strange happened.

  Strange for the conscripts, at least, or anyone who'd been drafted into the army recently.

  For Micheal, it was obvious.

  The sky changed.

  Fast.

  Clouds rolled in from nowhere, spreading across the blue like spilled ink.

  Not normal clouds.

  These were wrong.

  A mix of fleshy pink, deep violet, and charcoal gray—colors that didn't belong together, that looked painted on rather than natural.

  They moved in uneven patterns, expanding asymmetrically, pulsing like they were alive.

  Then the lightning started.

  Not white.

  Not blue.

  Multicolored.

  Purple, green, gold—crackling across the cloud cover in jagged lines that split and reformed, illuminating the strange hues from within.

  The camp went quiet.

  Soldiers stopped mid-motion, staring up.

  Some made signs with their hands—prayers, wards, whatever they thought might help.

  Others just stood there, mouths half-open.

  Micheal didn't move.

  Didn't look surprised.

  He tilted his head back, watched the clouds spread and twist above him.

  Smiled.

  *Katherina*, he thought.

  Micheal turned and headed toward his lieutenants.

  He found them near one of the siege towers, motionless, eyes fixed upward like everyone else.

  He approached at an easy pace.

  Hands behind his back.

  A wide smile on his face.

  "Look at that. The whore decided to come out and play."

  The lieutenants turned—stiff, uncertain, with that expression of people who don't know if they should prepare to fight or shit themselves.

  Garreth, the oldest of the group, had a scar running across his jaw like a crooked signature; he opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it without making a sound.

  Vorund, younger but with the eyes of someone who'd seen enough shit not to be easily surprised, shot a glance at Micheal and then back at the sky, his hand sliding instinctively toward his sword hilt—a gesture as useless as it was pathetic.

  Kelmar, the third, stared at Micheal with that face halfway between relief and pure terror.

  Micheal laughed, flaunting a sick, almost joyful cheerfulness.

  "Won't even have to go looking for her. She's offering herself up. Fuck, this day just keeps getting better."

  None of the lieutenants said anything.

  Micheal's smile widened further.

  "I'm going to play."

  The ground beneath him opened without warning—a sudden, silent collapse that swallowed him whole in less than a second.

  The lieutenants jerked backward.

  The earth closed back up, smooth and compact, like Micheal had never been there.

  A few hundred meters away, the ground began to swell.

  Slow at first.

  Then faster and faster.

  A monstrous bulge rising from the earth like a boil ready to burst, growing in height, width, volume—until it transformed into a megalodonic obelisk seized by epileptic convulsions, trembling and writhing like it was made of gelatin just slapped by a black pornstar.

  Every spasm changed its shape, stretched it, compressed it, redesigned it.

  Then the convulsions became more controlled.

  More precise.

  The shapeless mass began to take on a recognizable form—anthropomorphic, but crude, sketched out like an unfinished statue: shoulders emerging from the top, arms extending to the sides, legs separating from the base and planting themselves in the ground with a thud that shook the plain.

  A sort of primitive mecha made of compressed mud and molten rock.

  No details.

  No refinement.

  Just the rough outline of a giant.

  It was about fifteen meters tall—enough to slightly exceed the city walls that stood gray on the horizon.

  The colossus bent down with an unreal, fluid gracefulness, as if it weighed nothing instead of tons.

  It plunged its hands into the ground—large, shapeless hands—and tore away two compact masses of earth and rock.

  It lifted them, quickly molding them, crushing and compressing them until they became two irregular but solid spheres.

  Then it stepped back.

  Took a running start—three steps, four, each step making the ground tremble.

  It stopped.

  Rotated its torso.

  And hurled the two spheres with ferocity, arms whistling through the air like whips.

  The balls of earth and rock flew fast—too fast for objects that size—tracing two sharp arcs toward the city walls.

  But the course of the trajectories was abruptly interrupted.

  Two pink lightning bolts tore through the air horizontally—parallel to the ground, thick as tree trunks, pulsing with an energy that had nothing natural about it—and struck the spheres mid-flight.

  The impact was instantaneous.

  The masses of earth and rock exploded in midair, disintegrated into a rain of incandescent shards and dust that fell back onto the plain like ash.

  Silence.

  One second.

  Maybe less.

  Then came the second lightning bolt.

  Golden.

  Not pink like the first two—pure gold, a beam of condensed light as wide as a plaza and as long as an upside-down tower.

  Of Old Testament proportions.

  The kind of thing that shouldn't exist, that seems ripped from a biblical tale about cities razed to the ground and wrathful deities.

  It tore through the sky with a dull rumble that made the air itself tremble.

  It hit the mud mecha dead center.

  There was no explosion.

  No roar.

  Just a blinding flash that erased every color for an instant.

  Then silence.

  The giant pulverized.

  It didn't collapse, didn't disintegrate—it pulverized, reduced to particles so fine they looked like golden mist that expanded and dissolved in the wind within seconds.

  Nothing remained.

  No pieces, no fragments, no trace.

  Just a smoking crater ten meters wide, its edges vitrified by the intensity of the heat, in the exact spot where the colossus had been.

  On a battlement of the walls, standing against the anthracite-colored sky, a figure stood out.

  Small.

  Female.

  Blonde hair falling over her shoulders, moved by the wind like strands of ripe wheat.

  Slavic features—high cheekbones, sharp jaw, pale eyes cold as lake ice.

  Katherina.

  She was looking toward the smoking crater, toward the empty expanse where the mud giant had been pulverized.

  No movement.

  No sign of Micheal.

  But it was impossible he was dead.

  Impossible.

  She knew it.

  Then, right at the foot of the walls—no more than twenty meters from the stone base—the ground moved.

  Something emerged.

  A hand.

  Then an arm.

  Then a head.

  Micheal rose from the soil as if he were coming out of water, slow, calm, while earth slid off his body in large clumps that fell at his feet.

  He brushed the dirt off himself with a couple of lazy movements—from his shoulders, his chest, his hair.

  He stopped.

  Standing.

  Bare-chested, still covered in dust and mud, but whole.

  Unharmed.

  He raised his gaze.

  The two locked eyes.

  Her from above, motionless on the battlement, with the wind tousling her hair.

  Him from below, with a slow smile spreading across his dirt-covered face.