The bugle woke him the next morning.

  It yelped like a hurt animal from somewhere in the yard, high and thin, and then a sergeant’s voice rolled over the barracks bunks like distant thunder.

  “On your feet, you lazy bastards! Reveille! Move like you mean it!”

  The boy came up from sleep in one clean motion. He’d never had a bed to roll out of before they came here. He still wasn’t used to the way a straw tick tried to cling to you. His feet hit the plank floor. Men cursed and groaned all around him, fumbling for boots and belts in the dim gray light.

  He’d been tucked on the end of a row, nearest the door. Somebody had shoved an extra pallet there and told him it was his. The air smelled of sweat, wool, and last night’s beans.

  He got his boots on fast. The leather felt strange and heavy compared to bare dirt. He shrugged into his coat, grabbed his hat, and followed the stream of men pouring out into the chill.

  Outside, Fort Mason’s yard was washed in early light. The flag hung limp. Breath smoked from mouths. The captain’s office windows still glowed faintly with lamplight; Hargrove might not have slept at all.

  The boy fell into line where Ben had showed him, near the end of Second Company. The men around him were a mix—long?service regulars with hard eyes, new recruits with soft hands, and a couple of locals pressed into service by fear if not by law. Some looked him over, puzzled over his presence.

  Sergeant Mallory stalked the line with a stick in his hand, tapping shoulders, shoving chins up.

  “Dress the line, damn you. We ain’t a herd o’ goats. Straighten that hat, Jenkins. You in the end—step up. Close that gap.”

  His gaze snared on the boy.

  “You. What in blazes am I supposed to call you?”

  “Boy, mostly,” the boy said.

  A few men snorted. Mallory’s mouth twitched.

  “Fine. Boy it is. You hear ‘militia’ or ‘Second’ or ‘Boy’, you move. You don’t hear your mama callin’ you, you hear me. Clear?”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  “Good. You’ll be in the front rank. You shoot better than half these sorry bastards, might as well get some use out of you before you catch a stray arrow.”

  They drilled.

  At first it was just standing where he was told and learning when to move.

  “Company—right face!”

  Boots scraped. The line turned. The boy turned with them, a fraction smoother each time.

  “Forward—march!”

  He’d walked more miles than any of these men, but never like this. Not heel?toe in time with fifty other feet, not to the beat of a sergeant’s bark. He learned it quick enough: eyes front, shoulders back, keep the man’s sleeve to your side just at the edge of sight. When the sergeant yelled “Mark time!” his feet kept going but the line held its place, marching in place like some strange machine.

  They wheeled left and right around the yard. The dust rose in thin puffs. Sweat prickled under his shirt despite the morning chill. Twice he found his steps drifting ahead; twice he forced himself to fall back into rhythm.

  You’re not alone, he told his legs. You don’t get to move how you like. You move how the whole does.

  By the time the bugle sounded again for breakfast his shoulders had settled into the feel of men on either side and the slap of synchronized boots had become something he could ride like a river instead of fighting.

  After beans and coffee that tasted faintly of boiled socks, they did it again—with muskets.

  The Model ’42s were lined up in racks by the barracks wall. Long .69?caliber smoothbores, nearly as long as the boy was tall. The same kind Captain Hargrove had had him shooting. A corporal with a scar down one cheek walked them through the steps.

  “On the command ‘load,’ you bite the cartridge, you pour the powder, you ram the ball. Don’t double?charge unless you want to take your own hand off at the wrist. Watch your caps. Watch your muzzles. You point that at your friend, I’ll take it away and beat you with it.”

  They loaded and fired in volleys at posts set along the backstop. The sound was less a series of bangs and more one big slam every time a rank let off together—smoke belched, shoulders rocked, bits of charcoal kicked from the targets. The boy worked to keep his own speed inside the group’s. He could have loaded thrice as quick as the man next to him, but there was no prize here for finishing first if it broke the line.

  “Front rank—fire! Rear rank—fire!”

  The rhythm settled in: pour, ram, cap, raise, breathe, squeeze; then step back as the rear rank stepped through. He felt his fingers getting surer, his motions cleaner.

  By noon his shoulder throbbed dully from the butt’s repeated kick, but his hands knew the path from cartridge box to barrel like it was something they’d been doing all their life. Powder fouling left black smears on his fingers and chin. His ears rang.

  Minor bonus gained!

  +1 Dexterity.

  Reason: Repeated Action (Drill).

  The words slid across the back of his skull. He blinked, then smiled, just a little.

  The System liked order too, it seemed.

  They didn’t let him see Lily or Mary until evening.

  He caught glimpses—Lily on the chapel steps with a wooden bucket in her hands, following a stout woman he guessed had to be Mrs. Brant; Mary bending over a wash tub in the yard behind the laundresses’ low house, sleeves rolled, the muscles in her forearms showing more than they had on the road. Ember sat propped on a windowsill to watch, her burned face turned outward.

  The boy made a point of walking past that way whenever he was sent on some errand—hauling water, hauling wood, carrying a message from one sergeant to another. Each time Lily’s eyes would flick up, find him, and her mouth would soften for half a second. Mary lifted a hand once, so quick it might have been a flinch.

  He didn’t wave back. He just met their eyes, nodded once, and kept moving.

  At night they ate together in the mess—Army stew thick with barley and a few gray scraps of beef, hard bread, more coffee. Lily wrinkled her nose but finished every bite. Mary ate slowly, like she was still learning to trust that there would be another meal after this one.

  “You march all day?” Lily asked that first night, watching him roll his shoulders. “You look like those puppets Mr. Bishop had once. All jerks and strings.”

  “March in the mornin’. Fire in the afternoon,” the boy said. “They like shoutin’ near as much as Cobb liked money.”

  Mary’s eyes flickered.

  “Did they… did they make you sign anything?” she asked. “A paper. Enlisting. Papa said once you signed, they owned you.”

  “They don’t own me,” the boy said. “Captain says I’m militia. Means when the bell rings, I take a gun and stand where he tells me. Rest of the time I’m just… here.”

  Lily’s mouth pulled sideways.

  “‘Just here’ still sounds a lot like ‘they own you,’” she muttered.

  He didn’t argue, because she wasn’t wrong. But he remembered the taste of road dust and the hollow behind his ribs and said, “Here’s got beans and roofs. Road doesn’t.”

  By the second day, the drill moved beyond the walls.

  They marched out the north gate in a line, following a wagon loaded with rolled canvas, poles, and shovels. The land dipped away from the fort to a flat stretch where the grass had been trampled down by repeated use. Somebody had called it the drill field. Beyond that, the scrub rolled away toward the horizon in pale greens and browns.

  “Today,” Mallory said, once they were formed up, “you sorry lot learn how not to die just ’cause the sky’s over your heads instead o’ stone. Captain wants every man here able to pitch a camp, throw up a decent lean?to, and keep from drownin’ if the sky pisses on you. You ever slept out before?”

  He glanced down the ranks.

  A few hands went up. The boy’s hand stayed down. Not like this.

  “Good. You’ll learn.”

  They started with Army tents. Two men to a shelter. Poles up, canvas over, pegs in. The boy found it simple as any snare once he saw the pattern.

  After that they cut brush from nearby mesquite and live oak, learning to weave branches between uprights to make a windbreak. The boy’s hands moved steady and sure, the muscles in his forearms working like ropes. A young private named Rojas watched him.

  “Done this before?” Rojas asked, sweat running in dark lines down his temples.

  “Built lean?tos, but out of junk wood,” the boy said. “This ain’t so different.”

  “Never thought I’d see the day some half?pint outwork me,” Rojas grumbled, but there was no venom in it.

  By afternoon the heat pressed down heavy. Shirts stuck to backs. They dug a slit trench for the latrine, learned where to put fires so sparks wouldn’t catch canvas, how to bank coals under dirt so you could bring them back in the morning. It was the sort of knowledge the boy had hacked out on his own over years of cold nights trying to keep Lily alive till morning, now turned into neat little lessons with names.

  It was almost funny.

  When they trudged back in under the walls at dusk, sweat?salt stinging his eyes, a corporal snagged his sleeve.

  “You. Boy. Captain wants you and three others over at the magazine. We’re goin’ over special ordnance.”

  Special ordnance turned out to be a low stone building near the far corner of the fort where they kept powder and anything else that went boom.

  Inside, the air was cool and dry. Kegs of powder sat like fat, sleeping animals against one wall. Crates of cartridges were stacked neat. And on a shelf waist?high, nestled in straw, sat a dozen black iron balls, each about the size of a man’s fist with a stubby iron neck on one side.

  “Naval hand grenades,” the ordnance sergeant said, seeing their looks. He was a narrow?shouldered man with spectacles perched on his nose and powder burn scars along his knuckles. “Leftovers from that whole debacle in Mexico. Captain had ’em shipped down with the guns. Figured they might come in handy. Emphasis on might.”

  He picked one up with care, like it was a sleeping snake.

  “Cast iron sphere,” he went on. “Hollow. Filled with powder and bits o’ scrap iron—nails, ball bearings, whatever the boys at the arsenal had handy. You drill out the fuse hole here, tamp a slow?match in, light it and throw. If it goes off where you want, it’ll make ugly meat out of anything nearby. If it doesn’t…”

  He shrugged.

  “If it doesn’t, you’re left with a hot rock that might blow in your hand or might just sit there laughin’ at you. Fuses go out in flight. Fuses burn too short. Powder cakes. They’re fussy. Navy used to drop ’em off yardarms at boarding parties. Not many folks been fool enough to try throwin’ them on land lately.”

  He held the thing out. The boy took it.

  It was heavy. Not as heavy as the powder stick bundles from the hermit’s cabin, but dense for its size. He could feel the packed weight of powder and metal inside. The fuse hole was plugged with a carved wooden stopper darkened by oil.

  “They’re like my sticks,” he said under his breath. “Only prettier.”

  That the one stick he threw at that hairy monster actually blew up now seemed more a miracle than it’d ever been.

  “What was that?” the sergeant snapped.

  “Nothin’, sir.”

  They didn’t light any that afternoon. The sergeant just walked them through the steps—pull the plug, push in the fuse, check for cracks, keep your thumb away from the fuse when you throw unless you wanted to lose it. He made them practice the motion of pitching with sand?filled dummy shells, judging distance and arc.

  The boy’s arm knew throwing. He’d spent half his childhood lobbing stones at rabbits and the other half hurling tins over fences to Lily. He let his hand remember the weight, the swing, the release.

  You have to feel where it’ll land, he thought. Like seeing the path of a bullet.

  By the time they were done his shoulders ached in a different way.

  That night, after lights?out in the barracks, he sat on his pallet with the musket across his knees, the oil rag in his hand. All along the row, men did the same. The steady, clicking rhythm of metal on metal, rags on steel, filled the dim room. A few jokes passed low. Somebody hummed a hymn.

  He broke the musket down the way Captain Hargrove had shown him, pins and screws out, barrel free. He wiped fouling from the bore with long, even strokes, listening to the soft rasp. He checked the lock, the nipple, the trigger spring. Then he put it all back together and did it again.

  And again.

  After the fourth time, his fingers moved automatically. He barely had to look. The world shrank down to small precise motions in the lamplight.

  Minor bonus gained!

  +1 Dexterity.

  Reason: Repeated Action (Maintenance).

  The third day blurred.

  They drilled on the walls now—learning where to stand, how to lean out over the parapet without offering your head up for an arrow, how to hand cartridges from the boxes along the walk without knocking some poor bastard off his feet. They practiced firing down into the ditch where targets had been set up—planks propped at angles, straw dummies, a couple of old barrels.

  Artillery crews ran their own drill beside them. The squat howitzer boomed and belched smoke with monotonous regularity, the crews swarming over it like ants—rammer, worm, powder, ball, hands on the wheels, fuse cut and lit. The boy watched them whenever he could steal a glance, memorizing. There was a pattern there too.

  Once he caught sight of the enslaved men again, hauling stone under a corporal’s eye even out here near the wall. Chains clinked soft at their ankles. The older one with the gray at his temples glanced up at the sound of the gun, watched it thunder, then went back to his work.

  By evening the boy’s shirt was stuck to him with sweat and his throat felt like someone had poured sand down it. He drank from the barrel by the pump until his belly sloshed, then went to find Lily and Mary.

  He found them on the chapel steps, as the sun bled low along the horizon, turning the limestone walls gold. They sat side by side, Ember perched in Lily’s lap facing outward like a third small watcher. Mary’s hair was damp and braided; Lily’s had escaped whatever attempts had been made to tame it and stuck out in frizzed curls.

  “How’s soldierin’?” Lily asked, as he sat down two steps below them.

  He rolled one shoulder.

  “It’s a lot like bein’ a mule,” he said. “You walk where they point you. You carry what they hand you. Sometimes you get to shoot at things.”

  Mary’s fingers tightened in Ember’s skirt.

  “Has the captain said anything else? About… Dallas?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Says he’ll look for a party headed that way with enough rifles to keep bandits off. Says he ain’t sendin’ us out until he does.”

  Mary nodded slowly. The idea of somewhere better hung in the air between them like something fragile and bright.

  Lily picked at a loose thread on Ember’s arm.

  “You like it?” she asked suddenly. “The drillin’. The guns. The way they say ‘militia’ like it’s a badge.”

  The boy thought about it.

  “I like knowin’ what to do when the bell rings,” he said at last. “Better than guessin’. Better than runnin’ blind.”

  Mary shivered.

  “I just want the bell not to ring,” she whispered.

  He didn’t say me too. It would have been a lie. Some part of him, the cold part that had felt so still watching the fort from outside, that tasted numbers every time he pulled the trigger, knew the bell would ring no matter what any of them wanted.

  It rang that night.

  The first sound was the bell itself, the chapel bell, slamming back and forth so hard it made the air jitter. The boy came awake with his heart already beating fast, not the slow, confused stagger he used to have on the road. His hand found his boots by feel. The bugle took up the cry a heartbeat later, a shrill alarm call that set his teeth on edge.

  “On the walls! On the walls! All companies, stand to!”

  Men were already moving in the dark. Someone knocked into his pallet, swore. The boy was half dressed before the curse finished. Coat, belt, Colt at his hip, hat jammed on his head. He grabbed his musket from the rack on instinct, then thought of the long rifle in his [Inventory] as well and snatched that up instead.

  He was out the barracks door with the first wave, boots thumping, breath puffing in cold puffs. The night air slapped him awake. The sky overhead was black and thick with stars, no moon. Torches flared along the walls as men ran, throwing wild light on stone and faces.

  He knew where he was supposed to go. Third squad, south wall, near the gate. His feet took him there, weaving through the chaos. He bounded up the ladder to the parapet two steps at a time.

  From the top, the land fell away in a shallow slope, then rose again in the far distance in a row of low, dark shapes. Brush and scrub and rock… and something else.

  He saw them first as a darker darkness against the night. Then as the torches on the wall flared brighter, details emerged.

  Greenskins.

  Dozens at first. Then as his eyes adjusted, he realized it was more. A sea of hunched, broad?shouldered forms spread across the south approach. Their armor—leather, bits of metal, stolen plates from who?knew?where—caught the torchlight in dull flashes. Their tusks gleamed pale in snarling mouths. Banners of flayed hide flapped in the faint wind.

  Behind them, looming larger, came the beasts.

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  One looked like a bison had been crossed with a nightmare—massive, shaggy, its hump towering above the heads of the warriors around it, horns tipped with metal. Plates of bone armor had been strapped over its shoulders and flanks. Chains hung from its nose ring, held by six greenskins straining to keep it in check.

  Another lumbered along on four splayed feet like a huge, scaled toad, its skin ridged and knotted, eyes glowing a sickly yellow. A crude wooden platform had been lashed to its back, and archers squatted there with bows as tall as men.

  Farther back, something moved that the boy couldn’t quite see; he glimpsed only a ridge of spikes and the gleam of multiple eyes.

  They were still forming up, massing just beyond musket range. A deep, rhythmic boom came from their lines—drums, skin drums the size of barrels beaten with clubs. The sound rolled across the night like someone pounding on the sky.

  The boy rested his elbows on the parapet and brought his rifle up. The long barrel felt like part of his arm.

  He heard boots behind him, the slap of men taking their positions, the ragged mutter of curses.

  “Hold your fire!” a lieutenant shouted down the line. “Wait for the captain’s word! Nobody shoots ’til I—”

  The boy’s heartbeat slowed.

  The world narrowed like it always did when he aimed. The drums, the shouts, the clatter—all of it slid away. There was only the ridge, the black tide of shapes, the bobbing of torches. His eye found a form near the front—a greenskin a head taller than those around it, with a wolf skull strapped over its helmet and a long spear in its hand. A leader, maybe.

  He tarried his breath, held it halfway out. The front sight settled a hair above the thing’s chest, knowing the drop.

  The rifle cracked.

  The recoil came and went. Smoke snapped past his cheek.

  Out there in the dark, the greenskin’s head popped like a melon dropped from a height. It just… vanished in a pink mist. The body stayed standing for a sick blink, then crumpled. The warriors near it jerked back, roaring.

  Level up!

  Level 7 achieved.

  All attributes +1

  4 free points awarded.

  The words flared cold behind his eyes, sharper than ever. He didn’t have time to savor them.

  He dumped the four points into Vitality without thinking, the way a drowning man would grab a log. Something deep in his chest thickened and steadied, like a rope being doubled.

  “Who fired that shot?” the lieutenant snarled, until he saw the effect. His mouth snapped shut.

  The captain’s voice cut through everything then, from near the gate tower.

  “Rifles—pick your targets! Artillery, load case! Get those grenades to the wall! Move, damn you!”

  Men surged around the boy, finding their assigned posts. Powder monkeys ran with cartridges. The howitzer crew scrambled like a kicked anthill to obey.

  The boy reloaded on instinct, his hands already in motion—cartridge, powder, patch, ball, ramrod, seat. His fingers moved faster than they ever had and still felt too slow.

  Below, the drums changed. The greenskin line shuddered.

  Then it began to move.

  “Steady,” Captain Hargrove said. He’d come up onto the wall, his blue coat flapping open, hat shoved back on his head. His eyes were pale slits. “Steady… Steady…”

  The drums pounded faster. The greenskins broke into a trot, then a run, their formation ragged but full of murderous energy. The beasts bellowed, stumbling forward under kicks and prods.

  “Now!” Hargrove roared. “Artillery—fire!”

  The howitzer spoke.

  At this range the case shot had nowhere to go but through bodies. The shell burst a dozen yards out, and a fan of iron shards ripped through the front ranks. Greenskins flew backward, legs taken out from under them, chests punched in. The bison?thing staggered as bits of armor rang and flew.

  “First rank—fire!”

  The muskets along the wall leaped as one. Smoke rolled down and out, white against the black. The front edge of the greenskin wave stuttered, buckling as big balls tore into it at chest height, breaking bones, unzipping flesh.

  “Second—fire!”

  Another slam. More bodies fell. But there were so many. For every greenskin that went down, two seemed to step over it.

  The boy fired his rifle as fast as he could load, ignoring the broader volleys except as cover.

  He picked anything that looked like it was yelling orders, anything carrying a horn, anything with a banner in its hand. Each time he squeezed the trigger, a head burst or a chest caved in. Each time, a faint wisp of something rose above the dead—a gray?green haze.

  [The Hollow] tugged.

  He let it in.

  Stat increase gained!

  +2 Strength

  +2 Dexterity

  +2 Vitality

  +2 Magic

  The numbers stacked. He stopped reading them. There wasn’t time.

  The bison?beast hit the ditch like a ship hitting surf. Dirt fountained. For a moment it teetered, front legs scrabbling at the far side, massive weight fighting the angle.

  “Put it down!” Hargrove bellowed. “All guns on that beast!”

  The howitzer crew swung the piece as quick as they dared, hands black with powder. The next blast hit the animal almost point?blank. Iron tore away half its face and one horn. It bellowed in agony, stumbled, and toppled sideways into the ditch, crushing two greenskins beneath it.

  That made a bridge.

  Greenskins poured over its carcass, climbing its shaggy flank, using its ribs as steps. Arrows came with them—long, thick shafts launched from bows that took two human hands to draw. The crude iron heads whistled as they came in.

  One glanced off the parapet a foot from the boy, showering him with limestone chips. Another slammed into Private Marsh’s chest two men down, punching through coat and ribs and the man behind him. Marsh made a sound between a curse and a cough and folded.

  “Down!” someone yelled, but there was nowhere to go except back.

  The boy ducked under the parapet, heart hammering, then popped back up to shoot. His world shrank to a cycle: aim, fire, duck the arrows, load.

  He lost track of how many he killed. Each time a greenskin fell under his fire, [The Hollow] drank. The System flickered messages like distant lightning—more +2s, more boosts, until his body felt both light and heavy at once, like he could jump off the wall and land without breaking anything.

  Somewhere along the way, another chill wash rolled over him.

  Level up!

  Level 8 achieved.

  All attributes +1

  4 free points awarded.

  He jammed all four into Vitality on reflex.

  Later—minutes or hours, he couldn’t have said—the same thing happened again.

  Level up!

  Level 9 achieved.

  All attributes +1

  4 free points awarded.

  More into Vitality. Keep the meat strong. Keep moving.

  The greenskins reached the base of the wall in earnest. They didn’t have proper ladders—nothing like the regular armies in the captain’s books—but they had raw determination and logs they’d dragged from the scrub. They rammed those against the stone, tried to scramble up, fingers clawing for purchase. Men leaned over with bayonets and pushed, stabbed, pried hands loose. Less than half the muskets were firing down now; more were being used like spears.

  “Gate!” someone shouted. “They’re on the gate!”

  The boy spared a glance.

  The main gate shuddered under repeated impacts. The behemoth he’d only half seen before had come lumbering up there—an ugly thing with a squashed face and tusks like a boar, its back armored in overlapping plates of bone and metal strapped down with rawhide. Greenskins clustered behind it, shoving and heaving, using its sheer mass as a battering ram.

  Each time it threw its weight against the timbers, the iron bands groaned. Splinters flew.

  “Get those grenades up here!” Hargrove yelled. “Mallory! I want grenadiers on that gate! Now!”

  The ordnance sergeant appeared on the wall like a conjured ghost, a crate in his hands. Two privates flanked him, each carrying another. They set them down hard enough that the grenades inside clinked.

  “You sure about this, Captain?” the sergeant called over the din. “You know these bastards don’t always—”

  “They’ll do more good here than in a box!” Hargrove snapped. “Get your fuses cut!”

  The boy’s hands were moving before his brain had fully caught up. He slung his rifle, grabbed the nearest grenade, jammed the fuse in, bit the end to fray it just enough. His fingers felt clumsy for the first time all day—not from lack of Dexterity but from the press of time.

  A shadow fell across him.

  “Let me,” a small voice said.

  Lily.

  She’d come up onto the wall at some point, he realized, in all the chaos. Her coat was too big, sleeves rolled. A pistol hung at her hip, the grip worn where someone else’s hand had held it for years. Mary was just behind her, eyes wide and white in her soot?smudged face, a smaller pistol in both hands. Ember was nowhere in sight.

  “What are you doin’ up here?” he snapped.

  “Captain said anybody who could hold a gun might need one,” Lily said. “He gave us these. Mrs. Brant nearly fainted.”

  “Get back down. Now.”

  “No,” she said, and her chin lifted. “I’m not leavin’ you.”

  An arrow hissed over their heads and stuck in the parapet, quivering. Mary flinched.

  Lily reached for the grenade in his hands.

  “I can light ‘em faster,” she said. “You throw farther. That makes sense.”

  She was right. He hated that she was right.

  “Fine,” he grated. “You don’t wait for me to say when. You see me cock my arm, you put fire on that fuse and duck back. Understand?”

  She nodded, eyes huge but steady.

  They fell into a rough rhythm. He and two other men pitched grenades down from the wall, aiming for the knot of greenskins pounding at the gate and the behemoth’s thick skull. Lily darted from one to the next, jabbing out [Spark] with her fingertips—little, bright tongues of flame that kissed the fuse for the barest second then died.

  The first grenade landed and rolled in the churned dirt. For a terrible half?breath nothing happened.

  Then it went off.

  The blast punched the air out of the boy’s lungs even all the way up on the parapet. Fire and iron shards fanned outward, ripping through greenskins, gouging chunks from the behemoth’s hide. The thing screamed. Men below yelled in triumph, then in fear as a second grenade’s fuse burned shorter than expected and it blew in midair, showering them with hot metal.

  “Keep ’em going!” Hargrove shouted. “We lose that gate, we lose the fort!”

  The crate emptied faster than the boy would have believed. Each time Lily’s [Spark] touched a fuse, he felt his teeth clench, wondering if this would be the one that went too soon. Once, a fuse sputtered and went out on the way down; the grenade bounced off a greenskin’s shoulder and tumbled into the ditch, a dead lump.

  The behemoth hit the gate again.

  The timbers cracked. The center bar, a thick log of pine, split with a sound like a rifle shot. The next impact would break it.

  “Last of ’em, Captain!” the ordnance sergeant yelled. “That’s all we got!”

  The boy looked down.

  The gate’s base was a writhing mass of greenskins now, some dead, some living, all pressed together. The behemoth’s massive head loomed above them, breath smoking, eyes bloodshot. The iron straps on the gate groaned visibly.

  A thought came to him, cold and whole.

  “All of them,” he said.

  “What?” Lily looked up at him, cheeks streaked with soot.

  He grabbed the last crate before the sergeant could. It was heavier than the others, fuller. His Strength sang in his arms.

  “All of them at once,” he said. “Right at the gate.”

  “You’ll blow the wall,” the sergeant protested, eyes wide behind his spectacles.

  “They’ll get through anyway,” he said. “Might as well blow ‘em up at the same time.”

  Hargrove heard that. He met the boy’s eyes. For a heartbeat they just looked at each other, a captain and a nameless child.

  Then Hargrove nodded once.

  “Do it,” he said. “Everyone back from the gate! Fall away from that section! Now!”

  Men scrambled along the parapet, dragging wounded with them. The artillery crew hauled the howitzer back on its trail to keep the carriage from tumbling.

  The boy kicked the crate’s lid off. Grenades winked up at him like dull black eyes.

  “Lily,” he said.

  She was already moving.

  She planted her boots, shoulders squared, face set. As he lifted the crate to the parapet, she thrust both hands out.

  [Spark].

  Fire danced along her fingertips. She jabbed them into the crate, touching fuse after fuse in rapid succession. Tiny flames sprang up, sputtering hungrily.

  “Go!” she gasped.

  He went.

  He shoved the crate over the parapet and gave it one last heave with all the strength in him, pushing it just far enough that it cleared the stone and dropped straight down onto the tangle at the base of the gate.

  For a heartbeat, no one breathed.

  The crate hit something hard—maybe the behemoth’s skull, maybe a greenskin’s helmet—and burst apart, spilling iron fruit.

  Some of the fuses blew out as they fell. Some burned faster. One grenade went off almost at once, a flash amid the dark. That blast kicked others around, tumbling them, shoving them into new positions.

  Then the world turned white.

  The blast that followed was bigger than anything the boy had ever heard, bigger than the howitzer, bigger than thunder. Heat slapped his face. The stone under his boots jumped. He staggered back, ears screaming with a sound that had no pitch.

  Pieces of iron, wood, flesh, and something that might once have been bone flew up into the night. The front of the gate vanished in a storm of splinters and fire. The behemoth’s front half simply ceased to exist. The back half toppled, spasming, spilling steaming innards.

  A section of wall to either side of the gate cracked, stones jarred loose. One parapet merlon tumbled, smashing into the yard. A man near the blast went over the edge with a wordless cry, arms pinwheeling.

  The boy hit the deck without remembering deciding to. Lily landed half on top of him. Mary flattened herself against the inner face of the wall with a strangled sound, pistols clutched to her chest.

  For a long moment there was nothing but ringing and the taste of grit.

  Then sound came back in pieces. Groans. Shouts. The crackle of small fires. Farther out, the confused roars of greenskins trying to understand what had just happened to the front of their line.

  The boy pushed himself up and looked.

  The gate was gone.

  Where it had been was a jagged hole choked with smoke and bodies. Dozens of greenskins lay in a torn circle. Some were simply halves. Others were missing arms, heads, chunks of torso. The behemoth’s rear legs kicked weakly, then stilled.

  [The Hollow] howled.

  It wasn’t a tug this time. It was a flood. Soul?echoes boiled up from below in a gray?green storm, each one a shrieking little knot of hate and fear and pain. They swarmed at him like flies.

  He didn’t have to open to them. They broke over him like a wave hitting rock, and [The Hollow] drank.

  Stat increase gained!

  +2 Strength

  +2 Dexterity

  +2 Vitality

  +2 Magic

  Stat increase gained!

  +2 Strength

  +2 Dexterity

  +2 Vitality

  +2 Magic

  Stat increase gained!

  The messages stacked, tripping over each other, until they blurred into one cold rush. His muscles tightened as if someone had wrapped wire under his skin. His vision sharpened despite the smoke. His heart pounded once, twice, each beat strong as a drum.

  He might have screamed. He wasn’t sure. Lily’s hand was on his sleeve, fingers digging in, anchoring him.

  Outside the gap, the greenskin host reeled.

  The front and middle ranks had been erased. The behemoths that remained balked, snorting and shying at the smell of burned meat. For a few precious seconds, the assault faltered.

  Hargrove did not waste it.

  “All units!” he bellowed, voice raw, cutting through the chaos. “Form on the inner line! Prepare to receive breach! Rifles, to me! We hold this yard or die in it! Move!”

  Men stumbled into place, coughing, bleeding, faces black with smoke. The howitzer crew dragged their piece around to face the new gap, shouting hoarsely. The enslaved men who had been hauling stone threw themselves flat behind a stack of unused blocks, eyes white.

  The greenskins found their rage again.

  A horn wailed—a deep, ugly sound. The tide surged forward once more, around the smoking crater, through the shattered gate, over the dead of their own kind.

  They poured into the yard.

  What followed was not a battle so much as a series of close, ugly collisions.

  The boy found himself at the front without meaning to be, shoulder to shoulder with a regular in a torn blue coat and a teamster still wearing his apron. There was no room for long barrels here. Muskets became clubs. Bayonets flashed and jammed. Pistols cracked point?blank.

  He shot one greenskin in the face with his Colt at a distance of three feet. The back of its skull painted the one behind it. He shoved the next away with the rifle’s stock, felt bone give. The Hollow drank again and again.

  Somewhere to his left, Lily fired her pistol. The boom almost drowned in the noise. A greenskin that had clambered up onto a stack of crates to drop down behind the line jerked and fell, his shoulder and neck torn open. Lily stared at the smoking pistol in both hands for half a heartbeat, then scrambled to reload, fingers fumbling at the cap box Hargrove had pressed on her.

  Mary huddled behind a barrel, Ember nowhere, pistol rigid in her grip. Her eyes tracked every movement. When a greenskin broke through the line and charged for a wounded soldier on the ground, she shot it in the side. The ball punched under its arm, through lung and heart. It staggered, looked down at her with astonishment, then collapsed at her feet.

  She made a small, sick sound, but when another came, she fired again.

  The chaplain was out there too, black coat flapping, Bible nowhere in sight, a borrowed musket in his hands. He swung it like a club, teeth bared.

  The captain moved like a blue?coated anchor in the swirling chaos. He shouted orders, but they were down to simple ones now.

  “Hold!”

  “Back two steps!”

  “Left flank, refuse!”

  The greenskins kept coming.

  Every time the boy killed one, more strength flowed into him. His arms should have tired. They didn’t. His lungs should have burned. They didn’t. Cuts opened on his coat and skin—here a slash along his forearm where a crude blade had bitten, there a bruise forming on his ribs where a club had landed—but they felt distant, unimportant.

  His world narrowed to motion and impact. Duck, shove, fire, stab, [The Hollow] drinking and drinking until he wondered what would be left of him when it was done.

  More men fell. The yard was turning slick underfoot. Somewhere behind him a cannon went off with a deafening boom—Hargrove had ordered grape loaded and fired almost point?blank into a knot of greenskins that had broken through near the sutler’s wagons. The blast tore friend and foe alike. There wasn’t room anymore to be delicate.

  The boy lost sight of Lily and Mary in the crush. A spike of cold panic cut through the heat of the fight.

  He fought toward where he’d last seen them, not even sure which direction that was now. A greenskin bigger than the others stepped into his path, axe whistling. The boy dropped under the swing, felt wind ruffle his hair, and fired up into the thing’s armpit.

  The ball drilled through. The greenskin roared, swung again. The boy twisted aside. The axe bit deep into one of the gate’s fallen beams, lodging. Before it could wrench it free, the boy stepped in close and fired the last round into its throat.

  It toppled, blood pumping black.

  Soul. More numbers. He barely noticed.

  The press eased just a fraction ahead of him. In that sliver of space he saw them.

  Lily had taken cover by the chapel’s low wall, back pressed to whitewashed stone, pistol empty but a fallen musket in her hands. Mary was beside her, hands shaking as she tried to ram a cartridge into her pistol with fingers that didn’t want to work. A greenskin with a curved sword was bearing down on them, tusks bared.

  There was no time to aim.

  The boy threw his empty Colt.

  It spun end over end and cracked into the greenskin’s temple. Not enough to kill, but enough to stagger. The thing’s head snapped sideways. It snarled, turning toward him.

  He hit it like a bullet.

  His shoulder drove into its middle. His hands scrabbled for a weapon and found the hilt of the greenskin’s own sword. He wrenched and felt something tear in his wrist, but the blade came free. He shoved it up and in with all the Strength the System had pumped into him.

  The sword slid between ribs. Hot, stinking breath washed his face as the greenskin choked. Its hands scrabbled at him, claws digging, then slackened.

  He pushed the body away.

  Lily stared at him, mouth open. Mary’s eyes were full of tears and soot.

  “You said—” Lily began.

  “Complain later,” he panted. “Stay behind stone. Shoot anything green.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He turned back to the fight. There was nothing else to do.

  Time lost meaning.

  He knew only that at some point the greenskin wave began to thin. The grenades and guns had taken their toll; the gap was choked with bodies, making it harder for the next rank to get through. The beasts lay dead or dying. The greenskins were still vicious, still strong, but less of them.

  He killed another, and another. [The Hollow] drank.

  Then he faced one that felt… different.

  It was taller than the rest, even hunched. Its armor was made of overlapping plates that looked almost like stolen cavalry breastplates hammered into a crude coat. Its tusks were capped in iron, its helm studded with spikes. It carried a massive two?handed axe, the blade nicked and stained.

  It moved with purpose, not the brute rush of the others. Its eyes, a dark, muddy red, locked onto the boy across the battlefield.

  They closed on each other.

  He fired the last round from a hastily?reloaded pistol at its chest. The ball hit, but the layered metal turned most of the force. The greenskin grunted, staggered, then roared and kept coming.

  The axe came down.

  He sidestepped, felt the wind of it, heard it smash into the ground where he’d been, sending up a spray of dirt and a broken paving stone. He darted in, tried to shoot the thing in the face at close range, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber with a click.

  He threw the gun and grabbed for his knife instead, but the greenskin’s backhand caught him and launched him into the chapel wall.

  Pain flared along his ribs. For a moment the world whited out. When it cleared, the greenskin was already closing, axe rising.

  He rolled.

  The blade bit sparks from the stone where his head had been. He came up inside its guard, knife in hand, and jammed the blade up under its chin with all his Strength. The point punched through soft tissue, found the gap behind the jaw. He shoved until he felt the hilt press to bone.

  The greenskin spasmed. Its hands flailed. One caught his shoulder, claws tearing. Blood ran hot down his arm. He held on, teeth bared, pushing until something gave.

  The axe slipped from its fingers. The big body sagged against him, heavy as a collapsed wall. He wrestled free and let it fall.

  Soul.

  This one was different. He felt it even as the gray?green haze rose. It was denser, darker, full of more violence, more will.

  [The Hollow] opened like a mouth and swallowed.

  For a moment the world around him faded. The screams, the clash of metal, the smell of blood—they all dropped away like someone had thrown a blanket over reality.

  Only the System remained.

  Level up!

  Level 10 achieved.

  All attributes +1

  4 free points awarded.

  Global Notice: A sapient being has attained Level 10!

  Monster instances will now be increased threefold.

  A new race will be introduced into the world.

  To provide breathing room, monster attacks will be severely reduced for the next two days.

  The words were not just in his head this time. He felt them rumble through the world, like distant thunder. Time around him seemed to hitch. A man’s shout froze half?formed, mouth open. A greenskin mid?fall hung in the air, suspended, blood droplets beading like red glass between here and there.

  He stood in a stillness that went deeper than silence.

  Level: 10

  Strength: 113

  Dexterity: 109

  Vitality: 128

  Magic: 104

  Unspent free points: 4

  Another window unfolded in front of him, hanging in the air of his mind.

  Class advancement available!

  Choose one:

  Assassin

  Sharpshooter

  Beastmaster

  Ranger

  Arcanist