The aranae woman beside me, a random warrior who replaced a dead [Brood Guard], saved my life and lopped off the claw of a lanklatt trying to wrench my shield out of my grasp. Pain flared along my forearm and the Howling Wind raced to devour it. Each desperate pull agitated the gash where a lance had thrust through my shield into the flesh.

  When the lanklatt reared back in agony, nearly tossing its rider, I surged forward. I wove around a lance thrust and brought my hammer down on its jaw, shattering teeth and breaking bone. Fresh blood splattered against my veil as the lanklatt swiped at me with its new stump. It was a mistake from the beast I punished. In a quick series of attacks, I forced its head low enough for me to drive the spike of my hammer through its eye.

  When the corpse slumped over the wall at my feet, the rider launched herself from the saddle and charged me. She dropped her lance and pulled a burnished short sword from the scabbard at her hip. Clearly unused to the weapon, she died easily. The lanky corpse pulled back from the front line by a pair of laborers. Her death made little impact. As soon as she was no longer a problem, a new goblin presented themselves.

  This goblin carried a small shield and wielded a spear as if born with it. The Willow’s Wrath held ground and punished mistakes, but this hoblite made none. She moved with a stoney ferocity that constantly had me on the back foot. No matter how I moved or where I blocked, her spear was exactly where it needed to be, already halfway through a thrust that would end my life.

  She used numerous skills. If I managed to weave just under her spear tip, the shaft would bend ever so slightly and score a cut where she should have missed. After every exchange I was left with a new cut or dented scales on my armor. If I managed to push her back with a punch from my shield, the very stones who shift to carry her back immediately into the fray. The woman pushed me so hard I almost fell out of position and ruined our formation.

  My exhaustion made it all worse. I’d been fighting continuously for ten minutes, and on and off for hours at this point. The goblins having resorted to goblin wave tactics to overrun our defenses. Their soldiers only getting better as the fodder fell.

  We got occasional breaks, but Helle and her subcommanders always made sure Ellen and I, alongside the remaining [Brood Guard], were quick to return to the front.

  Nora and three scholars got reassigned to the left wall five minutes ago after a goblin gained a foothold on the wall itself. She’d been a terror atop her lanklatt. Her flanged mace descending from on high along with the claws of her mount to break skulls and tear limbs.

  I’d watched that goblin fall to a concentrated beam of water from Nora. The condensed river blasting through the eyeholes in her helmet and out the out the back of her head. Even with the threat gone, they hadn’t reassigned Nora to the gap, and we keenly felt the loss of her mists.

  Ellen was currently engaged with an orc who’d stepped into the second line after an aranae warrior died and no one took her place fast enough. Wind whipped past my ear as I ducked to the side, narrowly avoiding a thrust that would have gone through my eye mask and into my brain. It was that near miss that forced me to realize this woman had me beat. Her style was almost an exact perfect counter for my own.

  I needed to take a risk if I was going to survive this encounter. When she thrust forward next, the small glow of Ylena’s manifestations casting a golden light on her spear tip, I leaned only far enough to send the thrust into my shoulder instead of my heart.

  Pain, hot and desperate, lashed through me. Only to be sapped of its heat as it threw itself against Iona’s divine grip on my consciousness. The goblin’s spear tore through the already damaged scales on my armor and parted flesh like a hand through water, only halted by my collarbone. The feeling of metal against bone sent shivers down my spine and, had it not been for Iona, I would have been incoherent with pain.

  Instead, it was with terrible clarity that I could focus on the subtle vibration rattling my skeleton from the impact. Fighting while injured was something we practiced extensively growing up. No one was perfect and it would be incredibly foolish not to practice combat while in pain or injured.

  It was more a result of muscle memory than conscious thought that I dropped my shield’s grip and latched onto the woman’s lead hand. Keeping both her and her weapon firmly attached to myself.

  If her delay was anything, I managed to at least shock the woman, but she was a professional. After testing my grip and finding it solid, she swung her shield in a hook that would have caught me upside the head if I hadn’t ducked. The movement cost me as it made the spear, still lodged into the underside of my collarbone, twist.

  The duck forced the spear upwards, deepening the fracture, and when I came back up, the head twisted. I heard the snap distantly, and although I felt no pain besides Iona’s ever tighter grip. I could feel when the new point of my collarbone tore through flesh to make an appearance underneath my armor.

  Screaming in an anguish more instinct than torment, I let go of my hammer and grabbed the back of the hoblite’s neck before she could take a backswing with her shield. In a motion made more violent by my shaking hands, I tore her head into mine. The full steel of my helmet battering into the thin plating of her nose guard over and over and over as I roared with the joy of the Howling Winds.

  I felt the metal of her helmet give way and felt bone break under the onslaught. With a final scream of misery, I brought her head down onto my own and the two of us collapsed together. The goblin’s corpse landing on top of me and robbing all breath from my lungs.

  Falling on an active battlefield was often tantamount to suicide. Thankfully, the team of laborers who’d worked the entire battle darting to the front and removing corpses from our footing; worked equally fast to get to the wounded. Still unable to breathe, they dragged me away.

  As they pulled me away, I saw Ellen return to where she’d been resting, waiting for her turn at the front, after she’d rolled the several hundred pound goblin off of me. Her actions had caused the laborers carrying me to scowl, and one of them stopped to grab the corpse. Even through the Touch of the Black Hand, the pain of having the tunnel floor scythe at my back and broken bone was too much; and after the laborer dragged me over a large rock, I blacked out.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  When I came to, I was on a makeshift cot fashioned out of someone’s well worn clock and my weapons sat in a haphazard pile next to me. I could still hear the sounds of battle raging around me. Lazily, I cast my eyes from side to side and saw ladders propped against the wall and goblins now holding several contained pockets.

  I watched a taller hoblite, dressed in loose-fitting gambeson ignoring the rest of the army’s kit, stand on top of the wall and chant something loud enough for me to hear but quiet enough to be unintelligible from this distance. He slashed his hand across his chest on the final word towards another section of wall a dozen feet away.

  I don’t know what he expected to happen, but what happened was the runes Mika carved flashed a brilliant green and an explosive burst of pure mana shot the lanklatt and its rider into the air. The tender flesh of the lanklatt’s stomach ruptured under the force and showered the goblins on the other side of the wall in bile. When the pair landed, they did so as mist. Having built up enough speed on the descent that both died on impact.

  Cries of alarm spread across the wall as similar deaths happened, loud explosions followed by the crunch of impact painted five portions of wall in a misting of red gore and viscera.

  I expected the hoblite casters who’d climbed the wall to stop now that the results were clear and paid for, but they didn’t. Each of the casters I could see chanted faster. Mika’s mana release valves activated quicker and sent whatever unfortunate was on top of the wall flying atop a burst of pure mana. The [Clerics] were the only ones to remain eager to cast.

  At the sight of their soldiers raining from the sky at regular intervals, the goblins hesitated. That hesitation granted the aranae, who’d lost a third of their numbers if I counted right, the opportunity to gain back what they’d lost.

  [Clerics] up and down the wall shouted commands in their native language and stuck people in the back of the head as soldiers gave ground. Whatever they said influenced the other hoblites. To a man, they all surged forward, throwing themselves once more into the fray.

  The orcs weren’t as easy to command and it took them being swept up in the momentum of the people around them to overcome their hesitancy.

  I wanted to rejoin the fighting, to win glory for my people, but even standing took monumental effort. The Touch of the Black Hand struggled again to keep the pain away. Agony, hot and furious, crept in on the edges of my consciousness and it took me three attempts to stand. Even then, I did so only with the help of a laborer, who’d been running around supplying water, supporting my broken collarbone so it didn’t jostle.

  Now standing, I did my best to communicate what I wanted to the laborer and after a few miscommunications, she gently placed the strap on my shield around my good arm; that way, the shield’s face fell limp against my chest, and she put my hammer back into my hand. Just looking at the battle I knew we wouldn’t hold. The goblins committed too many resources to its capture and us too few. When the wall fell, I would not be another casualty amongst the injured, trampled in the abject chaos of an unorganized retreat.

  I spent the next ten minutes just observing my party. Nora meditated amongst a group of ten aranae scholars, having rotated out of the fight so they could regain mana. Parts of her mist still swirled haphazardly around the feet of the front lines. But without her intent behind it, the mist was slowly dissipating.

  A team of ten warriors surrounded Mika as he carved the final sections of runes into the wall. He looked nervous. His hands shook when they paused from carving, and he couldn’t stop himself from shooting glances at the front. However, I noticed that every time one of his mana vents would go off, a small smile bloomed across his face before the nerves suppressed it again.

  Both of them were as safe as you could be in an active battle, but Ellen worried me. She was one of six from the original fifteen, tasked with holding the gap that still stood. Seven of the [Brood Guard] died, the bodies not integrated into the corpse wall tossed haphazardly in a small pile next to the injured. Ellen fought fantastically, and it wasn’t her skill that worried me. It was the fact that she fought without a shield in a tight enough press that any errant blade could snuff out her life.

  As I watched the fighting, a team of laborers wrapped my arm to my body in a thick layer of silk to keep my shoulder from moving too much. Eventually, I convinced a laborer to help me put my hammer back onto my belt and attach my shield to my good arm.

  The laborers who’d wrapped my shoulders made weak protests as I left them and the medic behind to re-approach the fighting. Every other step, spikes of cold and flashes of white forced me to pause as the pain threatened to overwhelm me. I advanced but didn’t rejoin the much thinner line. Instead, I took up a spot behind Ellen. I needed to be there purely in case she took an injury and so I could guard her while the laborers removed her. I knew I was in no shaped to rejoin the actual combat.

  I wasn’t needed even as more and more goblins threw themselves onto our weapons. Pushed forward by the press of bodies and calls of their officers. Like I predicted, it wasn’t being outmatched that almost killed Ellen, but an errant strike, parried by a warrior beside her, that spiked through her thigh, puncturing her plate and driving her to her knees.

  The orc across from her would have killed her. None of the [Brood Guard] reacting fast enough to cover her, before I interposed my shield between her neck and its sword. The impact rattled my chest and lit a bonfire of pain that pushed back Iona’s hold on my psyche. With only minimal agony, I felt metal scrape against exposed bone marrow as the shard which pierced through my skin rubbed against my armor.

  To my immense relief, as I stood over the injured Ellen, the smiling orc across from us died to a [Mage]. A dozen small beads of fire alighted inside his open mouth before they exploded. To my further relief, the goblins sounded their retreat before someone fresh could fill the place of the dead orc.

  For a long moment, I watched the goblins, the edges of my vison tightening as I focused on one of their officers. With narrowed focus, I made out one of the hoblites atop the largest lanklatt I’d yet seen. A banner strapped to their back and pulled taught against poles of stone to display a pair of yellow eyes with stalactites underneath, as if they wept the distinctive ceiling feature.

  I knew without a doubt that this was not the last retreat and the goblins were simply regrouping for another charge. We were simply too depleted; our defense would break soon even if the wall wouldn’t. Looking around at all the aranae bodies, I knew for certain we were stretched too thin to do anything but retreat if they came back.

  I kept staring after the goblins even as their commanders raced up and down their lines, hollering commands and their beleaguered troops. Slowly, ever so slowly, my jaw dropped as the goblins kept getting further away. They had to be coming back. There was simply no way.

  But they didn’t. It was only when the first goblins reached their cavern again that it really sunk in. They were retreating. They actually retreated. Dumbfounded, I let my gaze shift away from the goblin backs and to the tunnel floor.

  It was a slaughterhouse.

  Hundreds of bodies lay scattered about, blood, limbs, offal, and more painted the space around me. Even the corpse wall, which had chipped several times during the fighting, now bleed. Blood weeping from the cracks. Looking around me, it finally clicked why they retreated.

  There was only so much death you could force upon an army before it rebelled, and I guessed the goblins found their limit.

  With a silent prayer to Ylena, I slumped to my knees, exhausted.

  It was over, and we’d survived. All that was left now was to see to the injured and find out if the spiress would command us to hold the wall and die. A groan tore itself from my throat and I fell forward onto my shield, my hand clutched to the arm wrapped at my side. Iona’s grip loosened on my neck and the bonfire of pain that’d lit when I blocked that sword stroke for Ellen was now a pyre.

  Slumped there, holding the ruin of my arm and waiting for the pain to sweep through me like a wildfire, I wondered why the spiress hadn’t sent reinforcements yet. There’d been time, there’d been opportunity, but she hadn’t.

  The more I thought of that, the more this felt like a tantrum. An inexperienced commander’s response to not being able to do as they pleased.

  “Be proud!” Helle shouted and broke the silence of the moment as the survivors watched the goblins retreat. “We have slain many and lost few! Survivor Sylvie sends us carriers to return! Be proud! We have won a glorious victory! New tapestries to commemorate this day shall hang from every spire! All of us shall live on in the annals of Clan Virtanen for centuries!”

  Thunderous uproar followed the cry as every aranae present let out a terrible screech of victory. Their elations rocked the tunnel around us and amidst the noise, I was sure I heard Nora and Mika’s voices. Breaths came to me in great heaving gasps and I looked to Ellen to find she’d already been moved.

  Slowly, I made my way to join her and passed by a still screaming Nora. Her head back and eyes closed as she screamed her joy, terror, and glory. I smiled as I passed her, the joy infectious.

  Helle was right. For all its foolishness, today was a great victory. One I knew would go a long way to building both the glory of the Grace Mother, and the legend of my party.