Ana was asleep when the camp descended into chaos. It still didn’t take her completely unawares; a high Perception and her Keen Hearing had woken her, and she was already armed, her protective Shaping active, and looking out from the tent when the first cries of alarm went up, quickly followed by Pirta’s magnified voice calling “To arms! To arms! Stand and fight!”

  Messy, who’d slept wrapped around Ana, had woken when Ana did and was already crouched behind her. She didn’t have that lost, sickly look now; she was closer to the flat, unexpressive state she’d been in during the battle before the gate. “Stay low, and stay close,” Ana told her, and Messy nodded silently. She took her own weapons — a hopeful sign to Ana — and they stalked out into the chaos.

  Only feet away the others in Petra’s Party were getting out of their own tents. So was everyone else. Almost all of those who used armor, which was most of the militia, were wearing it; nobody wanted to bother with donning and doffing their armor twice every night for their turns on watch. It was a good thing, too; many of them were fighting the moment they got out of their tents, as crazies streamed into the camp from every direction.

  They were being attacked. It was plain as day. This was no ones-and-twos, or small handfuls. This was no coincidence, with several crazies stumbling onto them. This was an organized night-time assault.

  Ana strained her ears, pushing 44 Perception worth of superhuman hearing with an Enhancement on top to the absolute limit. People were shouting, crazies were howling, and a few feet away from her Jisha was screaming bloody murder in French. She ignored them all.

  In the distance, outside the camp where no one should be, she heard human voices.

  They’d been looking for the enemy. Now, the enemy had found them.

  Ana struck down two crazies as they lurched out of the darkness, and a third went down with a smoking hole in its torso, courtesy of Deni. As her Party gathered around and behind her, Ana roared at the top of her lungs, “Non-combatants! To the center! Spearmen, circle around them! Core Parties, in front of the spearmen! Move! Move!”

  More quietly, so that only those closest to her could hear, she added, “Ladies’ Night — and friends, I suppose — you’re with me.”

  “What are we doing?” Petra asked.

  “Taking the fight to the sick fucks who set these poor bastard on us.” She turned to Jisha. The girl’s utility knife was only barely better than nothing. She considered giving Jisha her gun, but decided against it. Instead Ana drew one of her daggers and pressed it into Jisha’s hands, closing her fingers around the handle. “Jisha, listen to me,” she said. “Listen! See where everyone is gathering?”

  The girl turned her terrified eyes to the center of the camp and nodded stiffly.

  “You need to go there. Now! Run!”

  There wasn’t room in the Party, or Ana would have taken her. But with the original seven members of Ladies’ Night — counting Ana — and the addition of Sadie, Bragg, Trig, Sylt, and Waller, they were at the twelve member limit. All Ana could do was to arm the girl, give her a shove in the right direction, and hope for the best.

  As she led her Party into the trees, staying low, a bright light flared all around the camp. Ana threw a quick look over her shoulder and saw a blinding sphere, like a miniature sun, hanging still in the air directly above Jancia. It lit up the camp almost as bright as day, trees casting long, sharp shadows into the forest and what must have been hundreds of crazies stumbling as they were suddenly blinded.

  “Well done Jay,” Ana muttered under her breath.

  Doing her best to focus on her hearing, with Rayni as an extra set of eyes by her side, Ana led her Party in a long circuitous route around the camp. They weren’t the stealthiest, but with how loud and bright the group at the center was, they didn’t need to be. Every so often they had to strike down one of the crazies, but most of them simply passed the Party by, as close as a dozen feet or less in some cases, either focused or somehow targeted at the people inside the camp.

  When the Party started out, the voices Ana heard had been coming from almost, but not quite, directly across the camp. After a quarter turn around the circumference of the large glade where they’d set up, Ana directed them deeper in among the trees. Ray took point, leading them behind windfalls, logs, and small bumps in the terrain and through ditches to keep them hidden.

  The voices were louder now — much clearer. Ana still didn’t understand a word they said; by the sound of it, her guess was that they were speaking that Wanteul language that Jisha had gotten beamed into her head instead of something useful. Dilmik and Sendra both spoke it, but when asked neither could hear anything above the fighting.

  It would have been nice to go in knowing what the enemy was saying, but no such luck.

  It didn’t matter. Either way they weren’t going to be approaching from where their targets were no doubt facing. The voices slowly shifted from being mostly ahead, to being diagonally in front, to being to the side. With the enemy between her and the camp, Ana stopped her Party.

  “Alright,” she whispered. “These are people. Evil bastards who know exactly what they’re doing. We’re going to take them from behind, and we’re going to kill or capture these fuckers, okay? Are you all comfortable with that?”

  “No,” Sendra hissed without hesitation. “I’m not comfortable with any of this. But it’s necessary, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Ana said when no one else spoke. “It is. Come on. Let’s get this over with. Don’t hold back.”

  They broke into a jog, Ana, Petra, and Waller’s crew at the front, Messy and the two volunteer women just behind, and the backline a few steps after them. A handful of figures, arms raised to the sky, became visible, silhouetted against the light of Jancia’s ersatz sun. Ana held back, trying to keep as much of the Party as possible within the 12 foot range of Guardian Angel and Champion, but that went out the window when one of the figures turned, alerted by some sound or Ability, and shouted, “Behind us! Lord, Lady, behind—!”

  The moment the woman turned, Ana broke into a sprint. [Themion Summoner (24)], [Human Binder (28)] — those were probably casters, Ana guessed — [Human Cultist (15)], [Revenant of Pneron (Threat: Lethal)]. That was all she had time to see before the woman who warned the others, the human Cultist, died with the bit of Ana’s axe in her skull. There were a few others she hadn’t had time to focus on before things became chaotic, to say the least.

  Ana turned to attack the Binder, going by highest Level meaning greatest threat. She hoped to be able to surprise them and take them down before that revenant reacted, but as she moved she heard movement from the side and was unable to react quickly enough. An unseen figure emerged from the darkness, blindingly quick, and tackled Ana to the ground between two steps.

  Old, practiced reflexes took over, and Ana began to grapple with the… [Revenant of Stretia (Threat: Lethal)].

  Awesome. Beautiful. Amazing. Two revenants, both of them Lethal. Ana could take one. She had no concerns there. It had even been stupid enough to get into a grapple with her, which was where Ana truly shone. The problem was that there were two fairly high-Level bastards and their minions to deal with, plus the second revenant.

  With one half of her Split Focus on the developing melee around her, Ana bent the rest of her concentration toward destroying this revenant as quickly as she could.

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  One of the nearby enemies screamed furiously, in what was quickly confirmed to be Wanteul when Dilmik screamed right back in the same language. Ana’s fellow frontliners piled on with swords, axes, and hammer, Sadie and Braggie stabbing with their spears, as arrows, blasts of water, and Deni’s plasma bolts started streaking in sporadically. No doubt the backliners were worried about hitting their friends in the dark.

  Revenants were stronger than the creature, or person, whose corpse they were created from. Stretia’s revenant was currently stradling Ana, her left forearm to its throat as it tried to get close enough to tear her face off. Stretia had been a fairly bulky woman, no doubt a melee fighter of some kind, though what remained of her face looked like it might have been soft and girlish in life. But whoever Stretia had been, she’d been nowhere near as strong as Ana was, and demonic possession wasn’t enough to make up for the difference. A snapping elbow cracked the revenant's cheekbone, and a second broke it and the jaw. The force was enough to push the revenant off balance, and with a pull, a shove, and a push with her hips, Ana was on top, kneeling above it.

  Ana brought her hammer down. The Revenant threw its arms up, to deflect or block or attack; it didn’t matter. The hammer continued through, breaking the bones of both forearms before bouncing off the corpse’s forehead. A second strike resulted in a dull Grunck. A third, and the head of the hammer lodged two inches into the revenant's skull, just moments before one of the two casters unleashed a bolt of… it wasn’t lightning, but a sickly greenish light that arced and flickered. Ana couldn’t tell who it struck, but she was the one who spasmed, her whole body locking up, making her jerk upright and collapse on her side as her soul tried to escape through her eyeballs.

  The pain couldn’t touch Ana thanks to Fight Through, but from her new position on the ground, as she forced her muscles to relax, she did her best to take in the situation. The caster who hadn’t just fired off a bolt of lightning had turned to flee. They already had an arrow in their back when Ana saw them and was stumbling forward. As she looked another arrow took the caster between the spine and shoulder blade, and they fell on their face. Stupid, she thought. Getting away from the melee just made them easier to shoot.

  Meanwhile there were noises of fighting from all around her — snarls, grunts, steel on steel or cutting flesh, the snapping of bowstrings and of Sendra’s water whip, and the tearing, howling noise that accompanied the flashing light of Deni’s bolts. Every so often a sharp, stabbing pain or a deep, dull ache would blossom somewhere on Ana’s body, making her stiff muscles twitch reflexively, trying to escape the damage she was absorbing from her Party members.

  The remaining caster was screaming again, high and feminine and utterly mad, hands up in a way that unmistakably suggested Shaping. There was an indefinable thickness in the air, the smell of ozone and a prickling on Ana’s skin that radiated from the woman, and Ana knew that she couldn’t let the Binder unleash whatever she was preparing. She tried to warn the others, but all she managed was a guttural, drooling moan.

  The Binder raised her hands higher, and in the momentary light of one of Deni’s bolts her eyes bulged, her mouth locked in a triumphant grin.

  By sheer stubborn will Ana got her feet unsteadily under herself and shot forward like a rabid animal, barely above the ground, limp-fingered hands slapping down to keep herself from crashing into the dirt. The Binder’s screaming slid into a surprised shriek as Ana tackled her at knee height, taking them both to the ground.

  The Binder reacted as well as she could have. Despite her rage and surprise at her ruined Shaping, she managed to draw a dagger, and Ana felt it slide against her armor, between two of the skirt plates, and into the flesh of her left hip.

  Ana couldn’t clench a fist to punch. She barely trusted her arms and shoulders to let her elbow the woman under her. So she used her head, as hard as she could. First to the sternum, forcing the air out of the Binder in an explosive gasp. Then, pushing herself higher with her scrabbling feet, to the clavicle, which broke with an audible Snap. And then to the face. On the first strike of Ana’s forehead, the Binder’s lips split. On the second, her nose flattened against her face, and her eyes rolled back.

  Ana smashed her head down again. If the Binder lived to be interrogated, fine. If she died, so be it.

  Ana was moving before she knew it. The sound of familiar voices howling in pain had made her push off backward, spinning on her heel mid stride. She’d let herself get too far from the others, and they were facing off against a revenant and an unknown number of living opponents. Or, they had been. Only the revenant still stood, a shadowy shape that spun and struck against her friends that surrounded it. Those four that still stood.

  Petra, Waller, Syltfer, and for some reason Rayni had the thing contained in a loose square. On the ground a distance away Braggie was tending to Sadie, who lay in a heap. Trilgayeri was slowly crawling away. For them to be down despite enjoying the benefits of Ana’s Fight Through, it must be bad, but as long as she was fighting she could buy them time.

  Just behind Rayni, Messy writhed on her back.

  Ana took this all in during the split second it took to cross the distance and wrap her arms around the revenant’s waist, after which it was pretty much over. The revenant managed to get a few good hits in on Ana’s back before Rayni and Petra smashed its head to pieces. They hurt like hell, even through the armor, but that was it.

  Dilmik and Sendra rushed in to help the wounded as the noise from the camp diminished, the screams of the wounded drowning out the sounds of fighting. “Go!” Ana snapped as she knelt by Messy, who was staring blankly, her breathing fast and shallow as she cradled an arm that was bent below the elbow, the broken bone distending the skin. “Help mop up! We need potions, and healing. Sylt, help Trig. Braggie, stay with Sadie. Ray, I’m trusting—” Ana’s voice broke. She didn’t want to go. “I’m trusting you with Messy. Weapons ready. There could be more of the bastards. The rest of you, with me.”

  “I’ll be right back,” she whispered, bending down and kissing Messy’s forehead. It was cold and clammy. Shock, she thought. “Right back. Be strong!”

  Mopping up went quickly. Either the casters and their Cultists had been drawing the crazies and demons in and were no longer doing so, or all the hostiles in a large area had simply been wiped out; whatever the reason, the flood of attackers turned into a trickle. It finally petered out entirely, and the sounds of fighting vanished, leaving only the screams and moans of the wounded and the frantic shouting of those trying to help and restore some semblance of order. Bodies littered the ground. Piles of supplies had been scattered, and tents had been knocked down and trampled, some of them burned when fires were disturbed in the chaos. And among all this, they had to deal with their losses.

  In the battle at the gate, where they’d controlled almost every factor, they had lost four, with dozens more wounded. When the butcher’s bill came in for the night’s assault it stood at over thirty dead and nearly a hundred wounded. Most of the casualties had come before the organized defense at the center of the camp, and it would likely have been far worse without it.

  The knowledge was cold comfort to Ana. She’d led them out here. They’d trusted her, and she’d failed them. The dead didn’t affect her as such. Some had been her students, but none had been her friends. But the failure? That stung.

  No. It didn’t “sting.” She felt like shit warmed over — though part of that might be because her bonuses had all fallen with the last of the crazies.

  “There you are, Marshal!” Captain Pirta’s voice cut through the noise, and Ana turned sluggishly to see the towering elf approach. “Miss Petra told me what you all did. You have a prisoner?”

  “We did when I last saw her,” Ana replied. She was tired in a way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep, or the night’s exertions and pain catching up with her. Gods only knew how many of the wounded would be infected.

  “Good, at least we might learn something from this mess. Gods’ grace that none of the Life-mages got hurt, and that Touanne prepared such a big stock of potions before we left.”

  “Thirty dead,” Ana said flatly. She didn’t elaborate. The pain was really cranking up now.

  The Captain seemed to understand. “Could be worse,” she said. There was a kindness in Pirta’s voice that Ana couldn’t remember ever hearing before. “And that number shouldn’t go up much. Potions are going out, and Touanne and her helpers are working hard. Speaking off, did you get looked at?”

  “Others worse off,” Ana mumbled. Her eyes were getting heavy. Why was she so tired? “Messy. Sadie. Trig. They need…”

  She leaned back heavily against a fallen log and waved in the general direction of where Touanne had set up. When had she sat down?

  “They need you alive,” the captain said tersely, bending down to lift her to her feet. Ana didn’t have the energy to do more than mutter an incoherent protest.

  “Gods, woman, don’t be an idiot!” Pirta said, her voice low. She had a solid grip on the neck of Ana’s armor, and was doing more than Ana’s own legs to keep her upright at the moment. “What do you think it’ll do to morale if you fall over dead in the next ten minutes? You’re going to Touanne immediately! It’ll look better if you walk in with a friendly hand on your back than if I have to carry you, but I will if I must. So, walk! That’s an order from your captain.”

  For some reason, Touanne became very upset when she arrived, and it only got worse when they got her armor off and saw all the blood. Ana wasn’t sure why. She was just glad that Pirta had finally let her sit down again.

  As Touanne talked to her, saying lots of words that didn’t mean anything, Ana took a little nap.

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