“Range!” Hale barked through the command net.

  “Eight hundred meters and closing!”

  Rail slugs slammed into the advancing pack in disciplined succession. Every impact burst the orange light around the outward in hard flashes. The fields were weakening, visibly faltering under repeated hits, but the creatures still ate ground at a terrifying pace. Fragments of black armor blasted away from shoulders and ribs. Dirt and shattered stone geysered around their feet.

  They kept coming.

  Now the shapes in the rail scopes resolved into something far worse than silhouettes.

  The creature leading the pack ran upright on long, skeletal legs. Black plates had grown from its ribs and curved outward like a cage of blades protecting its chest.

  To its right sprinted a four-armed Kindled whose upper limbs had fused into long scything blades while the lower pair still ended in clawed hands.

  Behind them thundered a broader monster with overlapping armor plates stacked across its back like the shell of some enormous beetle.

  Another ran low to the ground with elongated forelimbs and a spine that arched like a hunting cat.

  One of them moved with disturbing speed on stretched legs, its skull split into two vertical jaws that snapped open and shut as it ran.

  Ten ghastly shapes.

  Ten Kindled Starspawn.

  Below the wall, the spider walkers shifted into the western sectors.

  Their heavy legs struck the concrete in rapid metallic rhythm as they moved to intercept, hulking silhouettes dropping onto low firing stances. Turrets pivoted and opened up.

  The first shotgun burst rolled across the farmland in a wall of force.

  The spread chewed through loose soil, crater lips, and any Dormant Starspawn unlucky enough to rise between the walkers and the pack. One Kindled took the edge of it across the torso. The creature was tall and narrow with the split jaws. Its Will field flared violently. The blast did not punch through the barrier, but chunks of obsidian armor shattered from its ribs and one arm snapped backward at a terrible angle.

  The creature stumbled.

  Then drove itself forward again, forcing the broken limb back into alignment as orange Will surged across the joint.

  A second walkers added its fire to the mix. Then a third.

  The western approach became a storm of impacts. Shotgun blasts hammered the same strip of earth over and over, forcing the Kindled to push through repeated bursts of high-velocity metal while the railguns above kept smashing into their shields from long range.

  Kesi’s eyes narrowed.

  “They’re bleeding power, that’s better than expected.” Kesi said to an after-image of Dorian.

  Dorian was already moving.

  He stepped away from the railing and grabbed the tower communicator from its hook.

  “Disengage the Western Walkers,” he snapped into it. “They’re too close.”

  The tower gunner turned toward him. “They’re still in the lane.”

  “They’ll get overrun in seconds,” Dorian said. “Pull them now!”

  On the road below, the walkers continued firing while the order propagated through the machine crews. The Kindled had crossed half the distance already, Will fields flickering in uneven pulses under the sustained barrage.

  “Six hundred meters!”

  The lead walker finally pivoted hard and began striding back, still shotgunning the field as it withdrew. The other machines followed, peeling away in staggered retreat so none of them exposed their flank to the pack.

  The timing was close.

  One Kindled reached the edge of the walkers’ previous firing position just as the last machine cleared the lane. This one was the rib-cage brute with the outward-growing armor plates. A final burst from the rearmost walker struck it square in the chest and shattered several of those plates apart, exposing the ash-colored flesh beneath.

  The Kindled Starspawn didn’t slow.

  The outer gate began to open.

  Heavy panels split apart and a line of Illuminated soldiers poured through, moving in organized squads. Not all Illuminated were present. Only the strongest were called, the weakest among them carried five Remnants. The strongest held into the teens.

  They spread into a staggered formation beyond the wall, boot heels digging into the dirt, weapons lifting in practiced unison.

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  A tall woman with a shaved head stepped to the center line holding a spear tipped with the curved claw of a Fiend.

  To her left a broad soldier carried an axe forged from a slab of black Starspawn armor.

  Another fighter crouched behind them with two hooked talons as knives.

  Keis was already down the stairs.

  Dorian took the drop from the wall in one clean leap and landed hard enough to kick dust outward from beneath his boots.

  The moment he hit the ground, the air changed.

  His Territory spread.

  Pressure rolled outward from him in a widening radius, subtle at first, then heavy enough that nearby dust lifted and skittered away. Soldiers closest to him felt it immediately. The space around Dorian grew dense, charged with the sense that force could erupt anywhere inside it.

  Within that space, his Will sharpened into immediate threat.

  Kesi rushed beside him a heartbeat later, and his Territory spread as well.

  The effect around Kesi was different. His eyes flashed yellow, and the battlefield ahead seemed to arrange itself in invisible layers only he could see. Angles. Footing. Predicted paths. The charging Kindled left trains of near-future motion hanging just ahead of their bodies, faint and momentary, enough for him to see where each trike would be before it happened.

  Interesting point of order, territories could overlap. But they felt they could also forbid a territory weaker than theirs from entering.

  Several of the Illuminated glanced toward them.

  No one mistook what they were feeling.

  “Four hundred meters!” someone shouted.

  The rail towers kept hammering the field.

  Every impact now hit hard enough to make the Kindled shields shudder visibly. Orange light erupted around them in violent ripples. Some of the slugs punched through after the Will weakened for a fraction of a second, carving black wounds into their legs, shoulders, and flanks.

  The damage was real.

  It just wasn’t enough to stop ten of them before the line met them.

  “Hold!” a squad leader barked.

  The Illuminated tightened formation.

  Kesi rolled his shoulder once, axe head hanging low at his side. He held the future in his hands as he spoke. “I should take the front right cluster.”

  Dorian tracked the center two on instinct alone. “I’ll break the middle.”

  “One-fifty meters!”

  The lead Kindled entered the last stretch of open ground.

  A final walker burst struck the split-jaw runner across the head and nearly spun it off its feet. Another creature took a rail slug to through the chest that cratered its shield and left the orange barrier flickering weakly over half its body.

  Then the pack hit the line.

  The collision came all at once.

  The rib-cage brute slammed into the front rank and smashed into the spearwoman. She held her ground for half a second before the impact launched her backward ten feet. Her boots carved trenches through the dirt before she crashed into the second rank.

  Two soldiers stepped into the opening immediately.

  The axe wielder chopped into the creature’s flank. Sparks exploded where the weapon struck its Will.

  The spearwoman recovered and drove the Fiend claw back through a weakened point in the barrier and buried it deep in the creature’s side.

  The rib-cage brute shrieked and tore the weapon sideways, dragging her off balance.

  Kesi arrived before it could finish the motion.

  Within his Territory, he had already seen the angle.

  His axe struck the same point behind the creature’s right knee three times in less than a second. The first hit rang against orange Will. The second spread a fracture. The third punched through the joint.

  The rib-cage brute dropped.

  Kesi reversed the axe and buried through the back of its skull as it was allocating its Will toward its legs. A perfect execution.

  His boots were dusted in ash as it started to disintegrate.

  To his left another Kindled drove shoulder first into the line. This one was the beetle-backed brute with the layered armor shell. It smashed through three soldiers with raw mass alone.

  One man clutched a shattered forearm.

  Another jammed a reinforced spear into the creature’s chest while two soldiers behind him struck at the neck.

  They landed both their shots.

  Neither finished it off.

  The creature swung wide and ripped one man off his feet.

  Dorian hit the center pair.

  He needn’t raise his hand as compressed blue Will appeared in his territory. The pressure around the lead Kindled thickened, folding inward from all directions at once.

  Implosion.

  The orange shield around its chest collapsed inward under the pressure, twisted, and tore itself open in a jagged breach.

  Dorian stepped through the opening and drove his saber-tooth blade up beneath its ribs.

  The creature froze.

  He ripped the blade through whatever counted as organs as he pushed deeper, then ripped it free as the Kindled Starspawn lost all of its strength.

  A second Kindled came in from the side. This one moved low like a hunting animal with elongated forelimbs.

  Its claws were already mid-strike, slathered in orange Will to enhance its lethality.

  If this were Kesi’s territory, the attack would have been predicted.

  Inside Dorian’s, it entered pressure.

  Another Implosion formed against the creature’s shoulder and caved the armor inward with a heavy crunch. The strike went wild. An Illuminated veteran took the opening and slammed a pole-sword made of a vicious Starspawn’s weapon through its throat.

  The line surged.

  Then bent.

  A heavier Kindled crashed into the left flank and blew through two soldiers before they could fully brace. One of them caught the hit on a partial Will guard and still went tumbling across the dirt. The second stayed upright long enough to chop into its wrist with a jagged axe made from black armor plating. The hit bit deep into its Will. The creature answered by driving its other arm through the man’s chest.

  An instant later, three Illuminated hit it together and dragged it down under a storm of blows.

  The battle lost all shape.

  It became a grinding knot of bodies, ash, blood, flashing orange fields, and short violent bursts of combative Will.

  Kesi moved through it like he was already there before it happened. Every time a Kindled committed to a strike, he was at the weak angle before the Starspawn’s motion even existed. He crippled one by the ankle, cut another across the neck while it was still turning toward a soldier behind him, and took a glancing hit to the ribs that would have broken bone if he had been half a heartbeat slower.

  Dorian fought differently.

  His territory turned space itself into a weapon. Kindled entering his radius met pressure. Their movements thickened. Their shields folded inward wherever he planted an Implosion. The strain was brutal. Every use burned through him. His muscles trembled between strikes, but each breach he opened gave the line another chance to kill.

  “Seven left…” Kesi noted.

  Dorian turned in time to see one of the creatures tear through the second rank and start driving toward the gate.

  He ran.

  The Kindled barreled forward through two spear thrusts and a sword strike, one arm hanging ruined from repeated rail hits, the other still clawing for the densest mass of souls it could sense.

  Dorian caught it before it reached the opening.

  He planted both feet, Territory compressing hard around the creature’s center mass, and drove an Implosion straight through its chest shield.

  Orange Will tore apart in a burst of plasma.

  His first blade punched through the opening. His second followed a heartbeat later.

  The Kindled dropped to ash at his feet.

  He looked up through the dust.

  The Outpost line still stood.

  Barely.

  And the six remaining Kindled were still trying to tear it apart.