In the moments before the crazies hit, as they used the ten feet of solid footing they had to build their speed up again, the short range support mages let loose. Wide blasts of force, earth and water didn’t necessarily kill, but they felled and slowed. Strobing flashes of light burned out retinas, and arcing lightning made muscles seize. Bursts of fire— those weren’t great. Now they had flaming crazies to worry about. Ana’s first order would have to be to only use fire at longer range unless absolutely necessary.

  The support mages didn’t kill. They weren’t trying to. They did exactly what they were supposed to, and thanks to them the crazies didn’t hit like a shock, but as a ragged wave, a pressure that, though it pushed the defenders back a step or a half, was manageable.

  A man a foot taller than Ana lunged for her. A spear took him in the throat the moment before Ana push-kicked him hard enough that her back foot skidded in the grass, and he flew back to knock over the two behind him. The third, a woman, stepped on and over the fallen and kept coming. Ana caved her skull in, then shoved her back.

  The crazies kept coming. Hammers and axes rose and fell, spears stabbed, swords cut and sliced, and the fallen carpeted the ground. Keeping the dead back became a problem. Ana could only see a few feet in front of and around her. Messy, eyes wild, stabbed at eyes and cut at throats and knees, relying on Ana and the man to her left to push the dead back. Petra was grim but determined, her hammer working mechanically, and Waller was an asshole but he knew what he was doing and held his own. Pirta was a point of calm in the chaos; nothing came within ten feet of her that wasn’t already dead.

  Projectiles, mundane and magical, tore through the air above them, close enough that Ana could feel it. More experienced Delvers called targets to their nearest companions. Sometimes they were terse burst of single words like “Bear! Left!” Sometimes they were more emotional. One man wailed, “Oh gods, that’s Pellar. Bastards! Bastards!” which was followed by outraged shouts and a visible increase in the amount of fire toward whatever revenant the bereaved man had spotted.

  And the noise. God, the noise! The snaps and Tchunks of bows and crossbows, whooshes and roars of magic, those were the least of it. People cried and screamed and shouted, in fear and rage and in pain — Ana had no idea what their own losses looked like; she knew she’d felt some blows and scratches she herself hadn’t taken, but everyone around her was up and fighting. The sound of steel striking flesh was constant and nauseating. A spear broke with a crack that was almost drowned out, and the man holding it kept using it as though he hadn’t even noticed.

  Above all there were the enraged, feral howls of the crazies, raw and wild, sounds no human throat should ever make as they threw themselves at the defenders with no fear of pain, injury, or death. It was like there was nothing human left in them. Animals would have been more wary. If not for her Death Dealer Achievements, and if not for having spoken to Jisha, Ana would have been tempted to think that they were entirely gone. But they weren’t, and Ana was killing them, a seemingly endless tide of them, and she thanked whoever might be listening that true empathy and sympathy were not things she felt.

  Beside her, Messy fought mechanically. Her amber eyes, normally so bright, were dull. Empty. That shook Ana far more than the noise or the bloodshed.

  After thirty seconds or an eternity of carnage, the first demon made it through the press. Ana almost welcomed the change. It died under a barrage of projectiles before it could charge, staggering, stumbling, and finally coming apart as a plasma bolt and a spray of sharp slivers of something — stone, maybe? — hit it simultaneously. But others followed it, too many to be focused down, and they quickly came too close for the backliners to target at all.

  Everyone in the front line was a demonslayer, and the demons died, just like the crazies. They just took longer, and every time a section of the line had to spend extra seconds slaying a demon it meant a few crazies who weren’t killed, who weren’t cleared out and pushed back to the extended pile that was growing between them and the prepared ground, like a dike to keep the flood somewhat at bay. Every time, the pressure increased. Soon they were falling back, inches at a time. Inches they could ill afford; they only had a few feet before the spearmen would hit the flatform.

  Ana became aware of pained screaming that didn’t stop. Of the gates creaking open, running feet approaching and taking the injured away.

  They were taking casualties.

  Ana told herself not to worry. Inside the gates Touanne and her three assistants would be ready with magic, potions, and plain, if primitive, medical know-how. Rituals had been prepared ahead of time, and mages who could do little to help in the fight stood ready to power them, to purge any infection before it could take root. There was no reason to worry about who’d been hurt, because until proven otherwise, they’d be fine. And to be perfectly honest, the kind of brutal honesty that Ana couldn’t share with anyone, unless a select few people got hurt it wouldn’t matter to her in the long run anyway. It was a question of numbers, of having enough fighting strength to keep the ones that mattered alive and well.

  Messy’s dull, empty eyes haunted her. What if this broke her? What would Ana do then?

  She didn’t have time to worry.

  She kicked away the man she’d just killed, and he didn’t clear the pile of corpses behind him; not because Ana was losing steam, but because the pile just kept getting higher as the backliners killed or maimed those who were climbing over it. There was a second’s lull in the fighting right in front of her. Then someone in the backline shouted a name, followed by, “What’s she—?”

  A body, flailing and snarling, flew over the defensive line and smashed into the backliners on one of the platforms toward the left end of the line. Over the heap of bodies came a woman, or the possessed remains of one. She crossed the short distance to the defenders in a heartbeat, and a gurgling scream and a cry of dismay told Ana that things were going terribly wrong.

  In the next second a few things passed through Ana’s mind. There was a revenant in their line. There was a crazy behind them. Someone may have just died. Another bunch of crazies were coming right for the center, toward her and Messy. Could she leave her position? Could she move down the line to help with the revenant? Would that put Messy and Petra — and fucking Waller — outside of the range where she could absorb any hits they took?

  That whole train of thought was rendered moot as the revenant was flung back, stumbling among the corpses and hitting the blood soaked ground. She scrambled to her feet, but was quickly brought to her knees, struck by a shard of ice that nailed itself into her hip, and a streak of purple afterimage that must have been one of Deni’s plasma bolts. It blasted into the revenant’s left shoulder, leaving the arm to dangle grotesquely as the remaining charred flesh folded outward. Together with the magical attacks came two arrows to the chest, and close behind those came Tarkan, who took advantage of the revenant’s stumbling to land a terrific blow to her head with a long-handled warhammer. The revenant went down for good, and as the crazies closed in on Tarkan his nearest companions came forward, the line bulging slightly to defend Tarkan as he retreated.

  In the next short lull, Ana took a quick moment to look around. Tellak was swinging a large axe now instead of the sword she’d started with, focused and steady, targeting any demon that made it to her part of the line. Messy looked as absent as ever, but there was no time to do anything about that. Her sword still cut and stabbed, and that was what mattered in the moment. Petra looked grim, and gave Ana a curt nod when she saw her looking. But beyond those closest to her…

  The platforms were all populated, the people on them still fighting. Less intensely, now; the mages were running out of steam, mana depletion taking its toll, and some of the archers were out of arrows, but they were fighting. The line had fallen back almost all the way to the platforms, and it had grown shorter as they took casualties, but they were fighting, dammit. And they were supporting each other. They were holding. What had she told Messy? “When it’s your friend at risk, you’ll fight?” Something like that. And they were fighting for each other, no doubt about it.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Ana should have known that. She’d seen her soldiers fight when they went out. But for some reason she’d taken the whole responsibility on herself, as though the whole fight revolved around her. And she was an important part, sure, for morale and for her Command Enhancement, but she was doing a very small part of the total work.

  How long had passed? A minute and a half? An hour? It was impossible to say. Ana’s mind was working so quickly that she had no concept of time, only of keeping her section clear and decreasing Messy’s burden as much as she could.

  Someone cried, “Last ones are twenty, twenty-five feet back!” In response someone else called, “Round the wall! Still coming round the wall!”

  The initial horde was almost worn down. That sounded reasonable. The ground before them was littered with bodies, two or three deep in places, some moaning and clawing, most still. And that was the ten feet between the line and the heap, which was taller than Ana, twelve or fifteen bodies deep at least. At the same time, the crazies from around the north of the outpost would have taken longer to react, longer to cross the clearing, and would have bunched along the walls. Ana couldn’t see a thing, but she could imagine the press was higher at the sides.

  Dammit, she needed to see!

  Good thing she had a nine-foot elf only a few feet away.

  “Captain!” she called. “Captain Pirta! Situation along the wall?”

  To her right, Pirta’s sword-staff licked out, cutting the throat of one attacker before coming down to neatly separate the head, neck, and one shoulder of another from his torso. “Both sides pushed back to the platforms, Marshal,” Pirta called back, voice strong and steady. Ana couldn’t tell if the elf sounded focused or bored.

  Ana took a second to visualize the battlefield, and she didn’t like what she saw. The sides had nowhere to fall back, and if the very edges buckled they wouldn’t be able to pull back their casualties through the gate. Not to say that they’d be surrounded.

  But the pressure from the south was dropping steadily.

  Ana was going to have to work harder.

  She raised her voice, and with her Attributes, when Ana wanted to get loud, she got loud. “Spearmen, Parties three and four! On my order, to the dawnward flank! Parties five and six, to the duskward! Core Parties Halmer, Petra, Pirta, Sira! We’re pushing to give the spearmen room to move! To the pile! We only need to hold a little longer! Their center is almost broken! Stand strong! Now! Core Parties: Push!”

  Ana didn’t wait for acknowledgements. She pushed. She threw herself forward, her weapon flashing, and made herself into a magnet for the incoming crazies. Not to be outdone, Pirta did the same, followed closely by Marra Falk and then, in a ragged line, the rest of the four Parties Ana had called out. They fought their way across the ten feet between them and the pile. Ana gave the command, “Spearmen, move!” and then they climbed that damned pile, striking down the crazies, the demons, and the single revenant that came over the top and throwing them behind themselves.

  There was a madness to it unlike anything Ana had seen. The people beside her were fighting with almost the same feral fury as the crazies, seemingly heedless of the danger. Perhaps it was the simple act of pushing forward, the change from reactive to proactive. Ana herself felt the rush of impending victory as she climbed the heap of bodies, Agility making the blood-slick, shifting surface no harder to balance on than the muddy surface of the road she’d just left.

  What she saw, with the heap no longer restricting her world to a ten-foot bubble around herself, made her grin. There was only a handful of crazies making their way through the difficult terrain beyond, and a few more still trickling in from the surrounding forest, with nearly a mile of open terrain to cross.

  She booted some poor bastard back into a trench, then raised her voice. “Party Halmer! Go support the duskward flank! Party Sira, the dawnward! Parties Petra and Pirta, spread out and hold! Backliners, with your respective Parties, wherever you have a clear shot! Let’s finish these bastards off!”

  The aftermath was anything but quiet. It was just a different kind of noise. Instead of snarling and screaming and the sounds of a dozen kinds of killing, now the air was filled with a mad mix of laughter, cheers, and weeping.

  Four dead. They’d only lost four, with dozens more wounded. It was a goddamn miracle, as far as Ana was concerned.

  Some of the tears were for the dead and wounded, but only some. Most were like Messy, who’d gone back to the position she’d held during most of the battle. There she’d stared silently at the dead, with their tiny, precise cuts and punctures, before collapsing to her knees, wailing in Ana’s arms.

  “I killed them,” was the gist of what she managed to get out between the sobs. And she had. Not as many as Ana, or the man to Messy’s left, but Messy had seen to a fair share of the crazies. It was hard to say how many, with how many different wounds most of the dead had.

  Of the ones that Messy was responsible for beyond any doubt, two of them were Jisha’s age or younger.

  Messy was broken, and Ana could only hope that she’d pull herself together. That Touanne or someone else knew what to tell her to help her. Ana had no idea.

  “I can’t,” Messy sniffled into Ana’s shoulder after exhausting her tears. “I can’t do this again. I can’t. Demons… demons, maybe. But poor, sick people like this, I… I can’t.”

  “I can’t promise that you won’t have to,” Ana whispered, stroking her sweat and blood-soaked braids. “But this should be the worst. I’ll try to keep you out of the rest.”

  “Thank you,” Messy sobbed, almost breathless. “I… I wish I could. But I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “Okay. That’s okay.” Ana held her a little longer, then said, “Let’s get cleaned up. We need to get everything moving, alright? I’m going to turn you around, toward the gate. Try not to look around.”

  “Okay,” Messy sniffled and let herself be lifted to her feet.

  Ana didn’t know how long they’d sat there. She’d been aware of people moving around them, giving them some respectful distance. Looking around, there were some hardened souls moving the bodies away from the road, including getting to work on the heap. Others were further out in the field, working together with some of the support mages to make long trenches. Mass graves, Ana realized. Right. They couldn’t just leave all these bodies here, like they had before. She hadn’t even thought of that.

  The platforms had already been dismantled, and the gates stood wide open. The open space just inside was filled with resting fighters. Touanne, her three suborned Life mages, and several assistants had worked hard through the battle and beyond to get the wounded healed and to make them comfortable.

  Along the wall lay the four, draped in sheets. The bodies would have to be burned before everyone left.

  “Bring her back here after you get cleaned up,” Touanne told Ana as she passed with Messy. That was it. The Healer had taken one look at her fellow elfin woman and hadn’t even tried speaking to her, and there was no hello, no anything. Touanne just looked tired, and sad.

  No wonder. They’d promised to save as many of the crazies as they could. Ana intended to hold to that, but in the aftermath of the battle, they hadn’t left a single downed enemy alive. They couldn’t afford to take prisoners; that would have to wait until the main threat, whoever was summoning and infecting them, was dealt with.

  “I will,” Ana said, matching Touanne’s tone.

  She took Messy to look for Sendra, but on their way up Main Street a man who Ana recognized as one of the attendants from the baths led them aside into the same small yard with the fruit trees where Ana had first met Waller. Three Water mages were hard at work doing just what Ana had been hoping, cleaning up those of the fighters who hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Messy didn’t quite need to be posed, but she did need to be directed to stand straight, arms out, turn around. It hurt Ana more than she ever could have imagined.

  When they were as clean as they’d get without taking their clothes off, Ana left Messy with Touanne, with a kiss and a promise that she’d be back. Messy mumbled “Alright,” and nodded, but Ana had to wait for a little while before Messy actually let go of her hand.

  Leaving her there was possibly the hardest thing Ana had ever done, and she’d driven a dagger through the heart of a boy she’d sworn to protect. She had to duck into a narrow alley to fight down the tears and steady her breathing before moving on, telling herself that her anxiety about Messy possibly not bouncing back was about she herself losing that foundation and comfort. That it wasn’t about Messy’s pain itself, and Ana being partially responsible for it.

  She couldn’t quite make herself believe it.

  and read every finished chapter of Splinter Angel! You also get to read anything else I’m trying out — which is how Splinter Angel got started.

  Join us if you want to chat with other readers, or just hang out!