====================================
Partizan Spear of Command (Rare)
====================================
A short, one-handed partizan spear built for a mounted body and disciplined formations.
Shorter than a pike and heavier than most hunting spears, its weight sits forward for decisive thrusts. The head is broad at the base with a blade-profile point and a single hooked shoulder lug that tears on withdrawal.
Balanced for repeated thrusts, close control, and brutal withdrawals.
Item Rank: F
Attributes:
- Strength +10 while equipped
- Agility +4 while equipped
- Increased thrust stability (minor)
Weapon Traits:
- Hooked withdrawal increases bleeding when thrust and removed.
- Shortened shaft allows for better control, however balance can become an issue.
Enchantments:
- Commander’s Aura: People in your party have slightly increased power to their thrusts.
====================================
Kaizer stared at the stat line and then at the spear itself, letting the numbers settle in his head the same way you weighed a blade by feel rather than by sight. The difference was almost insulting. His old spear had been an inferior stick with a point, something you used because you needed reach and didn’t have better. This was a weapon, dense and honest in his grip, the kind that didn’t flex when you demanded a straight line. He read the enchantment and let out a quiet breath through his nose. Commander’s aura. Of course. A field commander had carried it, and the System had stamped that identity into the metal. Useless for him, because he wasn’t leading anyone, and the only party he trusted was himself. Still, it would do what he needed. It would go through things. It would come back out uglier.
Reality asserted itself as soon as he lifted his eyes. His shoulder throbbed where the General’s thrust had opened him, and every pulse was a reminder that the wound was real and had been shallow only by accident. His ribs stung where the spearhead had grazed him again, a hot slice that bled slow and constant down his side. He kept moving anyway, because those wounds were surface pain, the sort you could grit through if you had to. The pain inside his chest mattered more. His core felt overly full, blocked, with essence churning behind his ribs and refusing to settle, swelling and tightening until each breath felt like he was compressing something that wanted to burst. It felt wrong, like the pathways he’d never thought about were now too narrow, or bent, or simply inadequate for what he’d forced into himself.
That thought snagged. Pathways. When had essence used pathways? Didn’t it just burst from the core when he pushed it, like pressure venting through cracks? Kaizer realised, with an irritation he didn’t have time to indulge, that he’d never properly paid attention to how essence moved inside him. He’d focused on the core because the core was obvious, and he’d treated everything else as a side effect. Aside from circling his core, he hadn’t focused anywhere else in his body, hadn’t mapped it, hadn’t tried to understand what was happening under the skin. That had to change, because whatever was happening now wasn’t something he could just ignore until it went away.
The spear helped him cover the last stretch. Its weight and balance let him use it like a walking stick without it feeling like surrender, and as he moved, he kept glancing at the head, seeing it in flashes the way you remembered a fight in pieces. The Centaur General had definitely been a novice with the weapon, and the proof was in what it hadn’t done. It hadn’t slashed once, not even when Kaizer was pinned and delayed and it had room to punish him. It had only thrust, over and over, as if “spear” meant straight lines and nothing else. The hook on the head could have disarmed him, could have torn him open on a withdraw, could have turned one shallow graze into something that didn’t clot. Kaizer couldn’t decide if that was luck or incompetence, and he disliked relying on either.
He wasn’t even sure the General had made proper use of the enchantment. Not once had Kaizer felt any clear surge off the spear, but if the aura had been aimed outward into the beasts, if it had been subtle or situational, he might not have noticed it in the noise of debuffs and fog and blood. He stored the thought and pushed it aside before it became a distraction. There would be time for questions if he survived wave three.
When he reached the outer lanes, the noise hit him first. Not cheering and not relief, but labour, frantic and constant. Panic sat over everything like damp cloth. People were hammering new boards into place, shouting without rhythm, rope dragged over timber for extra strength. Kaizer stepped around a pile of broken stakes and immediately caught the stench of blood, a thick metallic stink layered over sweat and mud and fear. He followed it with his eyes and saw the gap. A massive hole in the walls. Camp 5 no longer existed, and the absence was so complete that it made the rest of the encampment look like a lie people were telling themselves.
He moved into the clearing to inspect the damage, and the first thing he saw wasn’t the broken wall but the bodies. They lay scattered across the ground in disordered heaps, but the worst of it was toward the rear of what used to be the camp. People were stacked, jammed, and crushed in the narrow throat between the junk walls erected to form a path to Gareth’s camp. The simple hole had never been opened. These people hadn’t been killed in a clean fight. They’d been funnelled, pinned, and broken when panic turned a corridor into a trap. Kaizer looked at it and felt his stomach tighten, not in grief, not in horror, but in a flat, practical certainty. This place had never been ready. Why didn’t they get reinforcements? They were severely undermanned, and the walls here were, quite frankly, shit, ripped down and shredded until there was virtually nothing left. There was no way this could be cleaned up within the four-hour window, and people weren’t even pretending to try.
Wardens stood at the lane mouth in red cloth darkened by blood and filth, weapons lowered but grips tight, eyes darting at every sound as if they expected a beast to crawl out of the pile and finish the job. They weren’t letting anyone push deeper without orders, and they weren’t letting anyone drag bodies out to clear laneways either. Kaizer didn’t stop to watch. He didn’t have time to stand there and stare, because four hours was all he had to work out what his core meant, and he refused to waste it.
He found Elira near the seam where her wall met the ramshackle junk line, and the contrast with the chaos he’d just passed through was immediate. She wasn’t sitting and she wasn’t resting, directing repairs with an exhaustion that didn’t slow her voice. “Pack that,” she snapped at an earth essence user pressing mud into the base of a loosened stake. “Not there. There. It is already leaning.” The man adjusted, palms pushing down as the mud thickened and hardened into a packed collar around the timber, and the stake held. Elira’s head turned as if she’d sensed him before she saw him, her eyes finding Kaizer immediately, then dropping to the spear, then to the blood on his arm and the torn shoulder. Relief thawed into her expression, controlled but real.
“You’re still walking,” she said.
Kaizer stopped two steps away and snorted. “Barely. That thing’s throwing whatever it can at me.”
“So… does that mean this,” Elira gestured to the encampment, “is the least of the problems?”
Kaizer’s gaze flicked once toward the smashed lane and the crushed bodies, then back to her. The dead beasts he’d seen around the camps were far weaker than what he’d been facing, and most of what the General had thrown at him would have torn through those walls like wet paper. He lifted his head, something sour and heavy in his eyes. “If it doesn’t end on this wave, everyone will die. I trust you can hold your walls for a while at least.”
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
Elira’s gaze stayed on him, then flicked to the lanes behind as if she was already measuring where the next breach would happen. “I can, but I doubt others will. Reports are that Camp 2 was breached but held and Camp 5 is destroyed. They’re requesting help everywhere, but if I send my people out, they’ll just end up dead too.”
Kaizer’s jaw tightened. “Do what you can. Hold. Survive. Don’t listen to Gareth, he’s created chaos. When all of this is over, he’s going to be a problem.”
Elira exhaled slowly through her nose, as if “of course” wasn’t a response but a verdict.
A runner stumbled up behind her, eyes red, face smeared with mud, voice pitched high with panic. “Elira, the camps need your help. There’s chaos everywhere. Gareth is ordering you to empty out and help the others.”
Elira didn’t react the way most people did when they heard that sentence. She stayed calm and let the runner sit in it for a moment, like she was giving him time to understand what he’d just asked.
“Tell Gareth the same thing I told him earlier,” she said. “If he wants to glue a hole shut with bodies, he won’t win this fight. My men will survive. If I let them go they’re just fodder. Now fuck off.”
The runner hesitated, a desperate, “Please—” catching in his throat, but Elira cut it off without raising her voice. “I said fuck off. Go. Scram. Don’t come back.”
The runner ran, and Elira looked back to Kaizer with the same assessment gaze she’d used on the wall. “You are bleeding.”
Kaizer’s mouth twitched. “So is everyone.”
“Not like you,” Elira said, and there was no softness in it. Not pity. Not reverence. A commander deciding whether an asset was about to collapse.
Kaizer shifted the spear to his left hand and the motion sent a knife of pain through his chest, but he didn’t grunt and he didn’t give it voice. “I need time,” he said. “As much as is left and maybe even some at the start of the wave. I need somewhere to sit without people trying to talk to me.”
Elira’s eyes narrowed. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Kaizer swallowed and kept his voice even. “I’m not going to explode, if that’s what you’re asking. No. I’m at a bottleneck. I can feel it.”
Elira held his gaze, then nodded toward the inner lanes of her section. “The tailor has space behind his tent. He will complain. You will ignore him. That is your best option.” The conversation continued a little longer, but Kaizer only held onto what mattered. A place of cultivation. A place to work out what was truly happening to him. He moved toward the tailor’s tent, and it was easy to find.
***
A runner came bustling into Gareth’s camp. He jumped the queue only because Gareth had deemed him a priority to the Wardens. “Sir… it’s the same as before. She’s refusing,” the runner said as he knelt, taking a position that felt absurdly formal for a refugee camp.
Gareth had turned fear into structure and structure into obedience, and the people around him clung to it because it gave them something simple to do when the world stopped being simple. The middle encampment had been largely shielded from the worst of the fighting, and Gareth had used that safety to build a hierarchy like he was rebuilding civilisation by force of personality. Very little fighting, at least, until Camp 5’s fall and beasts began flooding toward the centre. Gareth knew he was in trouble. He knew something needed to be done, so he used bodies. He piled as many corpses as he could against the inner walls to act as a further barrier, a squishier one, something that could slow the onslaught just enough to buy time. He made holes and gaps, channels only wide enough to let one or two beasts funnel in at a time. Say what you wanted about the man, but he knew how to throw resources at problems.
“If she won’t help, go check on Camp 6. There isn’t much time and we need whatever we can,” Gareth said.
The runner stayed kneeling, then spoke slowly, like he hated saying it. “Sir, we’ve already been there. Camp 6 is completely gone. Walls are still up. It’s like the people there just vanished. Further… that place feels eerie somehow.”
Gareth stared at him for a moment, jaw working as he recalculated, then waved the idea away as if the world could be dismissed by order. “Leave it then. We’ll have to make do. Arm any person who looks competent enough to at least swing a weapon. Doesn’t have to be fancy, just anything. We’re in for the fights of our lives and we will get through this. Follow the structure.”
Mira moved forward and began issuing orders, having become Gareth’s right hand and mouthpiece. She handed out weapons to anyone who could wield one, checked grips and straps, and provided advice where needed with a patience Gareth didn’t have. She was the soft edge to his structural design. No matter how futile it was, Mira believed Gareth would find a way.
***
Kaizer found the tailor’s tent with instruction from Elira. It was one of the busiest areas of her camp, because everyone needed gear after a wave like that, and the line of people waiting looked less like a queue and more like a collection of small injuries that had decided to stand in the same place. Makeshift awnings had been dragged up. Lanterns burned low even in daylight. Torn sleeves, ripped straps, punctured vests, broken boots. Faces that kept flinching at noise because their bodies hadn’t realised the wave had ended. The tailor was in the middle of it, sleeves rolled, hands moving constantly, needle and thread snapping through cloth with speed that felt almost cheerful. He talked while he worked, not to perform, but because silence was where panic lived, and he’d decided that wasn’t allowed in his workspace.
“Hold still,” he snapped at a man with a bleeding forearm. “If you twitch again I’m sewing you to your own shirt and calling it reinforcement.”
The man froze.
The tailor’s mouth twitched as he tied off a stitch. “There we go. See? Easy. You’ll only lose that arm later.”
A couple of people actually laughed, quick and thin, like they didn’t trust the sound, but it still loosened something in the air.
Kaizer stopped at the edge of the tent and watched for a moment. The man looked different when he wasn’t being threatened or shoved around. Same face, same hands, but the posture was his now. He wasn’t cowering. He was in control of something real, something useful, and it made him brighter. The tailor’s head lifted as if he’d felt Kaizer’s presence the way a good craftsman felt a flaw in fabric before seeing it. His eyes found Kaizer, then dropped to the spear, then to the blood-dark shoulder. He exhaled through his nose as if he’d been holding his breath for two hours straight.
“Well,” the tailor said, voice dry, “if it isn’t the camp’s favourite problem.”
Kaizer’s mouth twitched. “Good to see you too.”
“So… you here for something?” the tailor asked, but there was relief under it. He jerked his chin toward the spear. “And don’t you dare lean that thing on my table. I’ve got enough holes in my life.”
Kaizer looked at him properly, a hint of amusement creeping in. “If I recall, the last time we spoke you needed materials.”
The tailor snorted. “What, you gone for the other team now? Waving a pink bracelet at me doesn’t mean I’m taking you out to dinner, and I’m not tanning the fur on your arm. Try again.”
Kaizer lifted his right hand and turned the pink bracelet once, the motion casual enough to look like fidgeting. The air beside the worktables rippled, and then weight hit the ground in a wet series of thumps, one after another, as bodies spilled out in a pile that made a few people in the line step back without thinking. Wolves, boar, and worse, all unprepared, still wearing the forest.
Kaizer kept his tone flat. “Some magicked corpses for a tailor in need.”
The tailor stared at the heap, then looked up at Kaizer, and something in his expression shifted. Not horror. Not greed. Recognition, sharp and practical, like someone had just handed him a toolbox in the middle of a fire.
“You’ve been busy,” he said, and it didn’t sound like judgement.
Kaizer nodded once. “Straight line.”
The tailor crouched, inspecting a boar. He pressed a thumb into the hide, checked thickness, then tapped a wolf pelt near the shoulder. “Not shredded. Not rotten. Fresh enough to matter.”
He stood again and grinned, not small and not polite, a real grin that made him look younger. “Look at that. That’s good work. That’s useful work.”
He raised his voice toward the waiting line without even turning his head. “Oi. Everyone listen. If you’re here for a patch job that isn’t bleeding out, you can wait. If you’re bleeding out, sit down and stop swaying like a drunk. I’m not chasing you when you fall.”
A few muttered complaints rose.
The tailor’s eyes sharpened. “Or you can go sew yourselves. I’m sure you’ll do a lovely job.”
That shut them up.
He looked back to Kaizer and nodded toward the rear of the tent. “You. Behind. Now. Before you drip on someone and they start worshipping you again.”
Kaizer didn’t move straight away. He glanced at the line, then back at the tailor. “Why are you responsible for patching these people up? Where’s your doctor or healers?”
The tailor barked a laugh. “Too many people. Not enough healing to go around. I’m good with a needle, so I get the job.”
Kaizer’s eyes narrowed slightly. “That’s insane.”
The tailor shrugged like it was a Tuesday. “Welcome to the tutorial.”
Kaizer moved around the tables and into the back space. It wasn’t fancy, but it was quiet. A cleared patch of tamped earth, a rolled mat, a crate used as a seat. It was intentionally set up for someone who needed room, and that alone told Kaizer the man wasn’t just surviving, he was thinking. The tailor followed, glanced at Kaizer’s shoulder, and didn’t bother pretending.
“Take the vest off.”
Kaizer drew breath to answer.
“You’re not fine,” the tailor cut in. “You’re standing because you’re stubborn and you’ve got a spear you like. Sit.”
Kaizer hesitated, then sat, and the moment he stopped moving, the pressure behind his ribs surged as if it had been waiting for permission. His jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
The tailor noticed. His expression didn’t soften, but it sharpened with the kind of attention that came from having watched men pretend they weren’t dying. “That’s not a normal wound face.”
Kaizer peeled the vest enough to show the torn cloth and blood-darkened skin. “Not a normal day.”
The tailor clicked his tongue, grabbed a rag and water, and dabbed briskly but carefully. “This is going to hurt.”
“It already does.”
The tailor snorted. “Good. Then we’re not adding anything new.”
He tied off a strip of cloth, cinched it firm, then sat back and looked Kaizer in the eyes like he’d decided something. “People keep calling me Tailor like that’s my name. It’s Hugh. Hugh Weller.”
Kaizer held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Hugh.”
Hugh nodded back, satisfied, as if that had been the actual work. “Good. Now we’ve done that properly, you can stop bleeding on my workspace and start using my meditation zone. God knows you need it. I’m going to strip those hides. I’ll bring you clean cloth. Don’t touch my good thread. If you pass out, try not to do it face-first.”
“I won’t.”
Hugh started to leave, then paused in the doorway and glanced back without turning fully. “Kaizer.”
“Yeah?”
Hugh’s mouth twitched. “If you explode, do it outside. I just fixed that corner post.”
Kaizer let out a short breath, humourless but real. “Noted.” He found the comfiest spot, sat down and closed his eyes.