The silence was heavier than the Juggernaut had been.

  I pulled my spear from the ruined chest cavity of the behemoth, the metal grating against bone. The monster lay still, a mountain of twisted flesh and dark iron, finally cooling in the mud.

  But the victory felt hollow.

  "Faelar?" I rasped, my voice sounding like it was coming from underwater.

  The dwarf was sitting in a puddle of sludge a few yards away, his helmet resting on his knees. He was staring at his hands, his eyes unfocused. Blood trickled from his ears into his beard.

  "Did we..." Faelar mumbled, his tongue thick. "Did we win, lad? Or am I drinkin’ with the ancestors?"

  "We won, buddy. We won." I limped over, grabbing the dwarf’s shoulder. It was rock hard, but Faelar swayed under the touch. Concussion. A bad one.

  "Liam!" I scanned the wreckage.

  "Here," a wheeze came from a pile of shattered crates near the wall.

  The elf was slumped over, clutching his side. His face was gray, sweat cutting clean lines through the dust on his skin. Even from here, I could see the unnatural angle of his ribcage on the left side.

  "Ribs," Liam grunted, trying to smile but grimacing instead. "Think I punctured a lung. Landed soft, though... on a pile of rocks."

  I turned to Willow, but the gnome was already slumping against a broken wagon wheel. Her staff lay in the dirt. Her hands were trembling so violently she couldn't clasp them together.

  "Willow?"

  "Empty," she whispered, her voice a dry husk. "I’m dry, Kaelen. No mana. I can't... I can't cast."

  [Warning: Mana Burnout. User Willow cannot access Arcane reserves for 4 hours.]

  We were wrecked. The Juggernaut was dead, but it had taken everything we had to put it down. I fumbled at my belt, my fingers stiff, and pulled out the swirling red potion we’d looted from the Otter days ago.

  [Item: Potion of Greater Regeneration]

  I popped the cork with my teeth and knelt beside Liam.

  "Drink," I ordered.

  "Save it for..." Liam started to argue, coughing up a speck of blood.

  "Drink it, or I pour it in your ear," I snarled. I tipped the vial.

  Liam swallowed, choking as the liquid went down. Almost instantly, a red flush hit his cheeks. The elf gasped, his back arching as bones snapped back into place with audible clicks. It wasn't a full heal—he still looked like he’d been run over by a carriage—but his breathing deepened. The wheeze vanished.

  "Better," Liam breathed, wiping his mouth. "Tastes like strawberries and gym socks."

  "Captain!"

  I turned. Captain Vane was limping toward us, her armor dented, her sword notched. She looked like a ghost.

  "Report," I said, helping Liam to his feet.

  Vane looked around the courtyard. The smoke from the burning siege tower was starting to thin, drifting away on the wind. And as the veil lifted, the sound returned.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The drums.

  Through the gap in the broken gate, past the burning wreckage, the Red Tide was reforming. They weren't retreating. They were reorganizing.

  "I have forty soldiers left who can hold a spear," Vane said, her voice flat. She pointed through the gate. "There are fifteen thousand of them out there. The courtyard is gone. The gate is shattered. We have no walls."

  I looked at the army. It was a sea of black iron and red banners. They were done playing with siege engines. Now, it would just be a wave of bodies.

  "We make a stand here," Vane said, gripping her sword. "We die well."

  "No," I said immediately. "We don't die today. We retreat to the cave mouth. We bottle-neck them."

  "A bottle-neck against fifteen thousand?" Vane shook her head. "They’ll climb over their own dead to get to us. We’ll just be cornered rats."

  "Bottlenecks are boring!"

  The voice cracked through the tension like a whip.

  Elmsworth scrambled out of what used to be the alchemy lab. The building had been flattened by a stray boulder during the siege, but the wizard had apparently just dug himself out. He was covered in soot, his beard singed, and he was cradling a bundle of glowing, jagged purple crystals against his chest like a baby.

  "Elmsworth, get back!" I warned. "Those look unstable."

  "Of course they're unstable!" Elmsworth cackled, his eyes wide and manic. "They're Void-Crystals! I scavenged them from the runners we killed! Nasty stuff. Highly volatile. Reactions to kinetic energy are... exuberant!"

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  "Put them down," Vane ordered.

  "No, no, listen!" Elmsworth hopped over a corpse, his robes flapping. "Let’s try geology! Look up!"

  He pointed a bony finger toward the sky.

  The defensive camp sat in a box canyon. Steep, red sandstone cliffs rose on three sides, creating a natural cul-de-sac. Above the main courtyard—the entrance to the valley—were massive, jagged overhangs of rock. They had been eroded by wind for centuries, heavy shelves of stone waiting for gravity to win an argument.

  "If I detonate these crystals at the stress points..." Elmsworth gestured wildly. "I can bring the cliffs down. All of them. Bury the courtyard. Seal the valley."

  Silence fell over the group. I looked up at the cliffs, then back at the narrow entrance to the valley.

  "You want to cause a landslide," I said.

  "A really, really big one," Elmsworth corrected.

  "It will trap us inside," Vane said, horrified. "We’ll be sealed in. With no way out."

  "But they will be locked out," I finished the thought. I looked at the army massing in the distance. The drums were getting faster. They were preparing to charge. "Vane, get your men to the back of the cave. Get the civilians as deep as possible. If this works, the dust alone might kill us."

  "And if it doesn't?" Vane asked.

  "Then we won't have to worry about the dust."

  We had minutes. Maybe less.

  The white fire on the siege tower finally sputtered and died. The moment it vanished, a roar went up from the enemy army—a sound like a breaking dam.

  "Liam," I said. "Can you climb?"

  The elf looked up at the sheer cliff face, then at the bundle of purple crystals in Elmsworth’s hands. He rolled his shoulder, wincing. "Do I have a choice?"

  "No."

  "Then I can climb."

  Liam took the crystals. He didn't ask for instructions; he just sprinted for the wall. Despite the broken ribs, he moved like water, finding handholds in the red rock, hauling himself up toward the overhang.

  "Elmsworth, get to the cave!" I ordered. "Prep the detonator spell or whatever you do!"

  "Signal flare!" Elmsworth chirped. "Big flash, boom goes the crystal!" He scooped up Nugget and ran for the rear.

  "Faelar," I turned to the dwarf. "I need you to look scary."

  Faelar slapped his cheeks, shaking off the last of the concussion fog. He slammed his visor down. "I can do scary, lad."

  We walked out into the center of the ruined courtyard. Just the two of us.

  The enemy vanguard was surging forward now. Hundreds of orcs, void-knights, and screeching monstrosities were pouring through the gap in the walls. They saw the two lone defenders standing amidst the rubble.

  They didn't slow down. They sped up.

  "Hold..." I murmured, my spear leveled.

  The ground shook under the stampede. Five hundred yards. Three hundred.

  I glanced up. High above, a small speck was clinging to the underside of the rock shelf. Liam was planting the charges.

  Come on, Liam. Move your ass.

  The enemy was two hundred yards out. I could smell them now—rot and rusted iron. A massive orc at the front howled, raising a jagged axe.

  "Steady, Faelar," I said.

  "I’m steady," the dwarf grunted. "Just hopin’ the elf doesn't miss."

  Above them, the speck detached from the wall and began to slide down a rope. Liam dropped fast, burning his gloves, plummeting toward the cave mouth far behind us.

  "Now!" I screamed. "Run!"

  We turned and bolted.

  We didn't look back. We sprinted for the cave entrance where Vane and the others were huddled behind a barrier of overturned wagons.

  Behind us, the enemy horde poured into the courtyard, filling the kill box.

  "Elmsworth! Now!" I roared as I dove over the barricade.

  Elmsworth raised his staff. He didn't chant. He just screamed.

  [Spell: Solar Flare]

  A blinding streak of white light shot from his staff, arcing high into the air, straight toward the overhang where Liam had planted the purple crystals.

  The spell hit the crystals.

  For a heartbeat, there was no sound. Just a pulse of purple light that seemed to suck the color out of the world.

  Then, the sky fell.

  CRAAAACK.

  It wasn't an explosion; it was the sound of the earth's spine snapping. The entire southern face of the canyon sheared off. Millions of tons of red sandstone, boulders the size of houses, and sheets of shale detached in slow motion.

  The enemy vanguard looked up. The roar of their charge died in their throats.

  The mountain came down.

  The impact knocked me off my feet, even deep inside the cave mouth. The ground jumped a foot in the air. A deafening roar washed over us, a physical wave of pressure that popped ears and shattered glass.

  Dust—thick, red, choking dust—blasted into the cave like a pyroclastic flow.

  "Cover your mouths!" Willow screamed, pulling her cloak over her face.

  Darkness swallowed us. The roaring continued for what felt like hours, a grinding, churning sound of rock settling on rock.

  Then, slowly, silence returned.

  I coughed, pushing myself up. I was covered in red dust. Everyone was. Faelar looked like a statue made of clay.

  "Sound off," I croaked.

  "Still here," Liam coughed from the corner.

  "Alive!" Elmsworth cheered. "Nugget is... dusty."

  I stumbled toward the cave entrance—or where the entrance used to be.

  It was gone.

  In its place was a wall of rubble a hundred feet high. The courtyard was erased. The gate, the walls, the Juggernaut’s body, the thousands of enemy soldiers who had charged in—all of it was buried under a mountain of stone.

  A single shaft of sunlight filtered through a gap near the top of the new wall, illuminating the swirling dust motes.

  The drums were gone. The screaming was gone.

  "By the gods," Captain Vane whispered, walking up beside me. She placed a hand on the raw stone that now sealed us in.

  We were trapped. The valley was now a perfect prison. But the army outside couldn't get in. Not without months of excavation.

  I scanned the edge of the rubble pile near the interior. A massive hand, clad in black iron, stuck out of the debris. It was the Juggernaut. The landslide had buried it, but the force of the falling rock had cracked the chest plate open even further.

  I walked over, sliding down the loose scree. I reached into the chest cavity, ignoring the slime, and wrapped my hand around the pulsing dark heart of the machine.

  I pulled. With a wet suction sound, it came free.

  It was a Void-Core. Roughly the size of a melon, swirling with black and purple energy. It hummed in my hands, heavy and cold.

  As my fingers tightened around it, a shockwave—invisible but bone-jarring—slammed into me. It wasn't pain. It was... density.

  For a heartbeat, the world seemed to sharpen. The dust motes stood still. The exhaustion that had been dragging at my limbs for days evaporated, replaced by a terrifying, boundless energy. It felt like a lock clicking open deep inside my chest. I gasped, my eyes widening, feeling a sudden, unexplained weight of knowledge settle into my muscles—spear forms I’d never practiced, tactical instincts I’d never learned.

  I tucked the core into my pack and climbed back up to Vane, my movements unnervingly smooth.

  The Captain stared at the wall of rock, then turned to me. Her face was unreadable.

  "You buried us alive," she said softly. "We can't get out."

  I wiped the dust from my eyes. I looked at my exhausted, broken, magnificent team. Willow was sleeping sitting up. Faelar was drinking something from a flask. Liam was picking splinters out of his arm.

  They looked different to me now. Not just friends. They looked... solid. Like pillars of iron in a world of glass.

  "I didn't bury us," I said, my voice carrying a new, strange resonance that made Vane flinch. "I built you a fortress."

  I dropped my pack and sat heavily in the dirt.

  "Now we rest," I said. "Tomorrow, we figure out how to kill Malacor."

  Vane looked at me, then at the sealed wall. She let out a long breath, and for the first time in weeks, she sheathed her sword.

  "Tomorrow," she agreed.