Adarin saw it at the last second after the order. Not only orcs were fighting them—humans in decrepit armor, the forcefully recruited and hostage-held militia the orcs had drawn from the city. “Fuck. Should have tried to—”

  Too late. Whomp-whomp-whomp. The volley of the muskets tore into the attackers. One of the charging orc adventurers even stumbled as his blue defensive shimmer seemed to fail a split second earlier than the ones of the others. But a few bullet hits wouldn’t take out an adventurer, if the green healing magic swirling around the three was any indication of what was going on.

  “Berserkers,” Johan said, his voice mixed with awe and trepidation.

  Adarin spun around. “Blow the fucking depot.”

  Johan shook himself. “Yes. Sorry, I—”

  Then—WHOOM.

  The world buckled like a spaceship doing an evasive combat burn at double-digit Gs. Orcs, musketeers, and debris pelted the ground. Adarin felt something warm and sticky on his body. “Oh. Orc goulash.”

  On some level he was aware that time had passed. Johan was kneeling behind him on the barricade, nursing a clearly broken arm. Liora scrambled over to him, cut her hand, and soon a wave of healing scales ran over Johan’s body. Liora’s mouth moved, her face angry, but Adarin’s sensors were still shaken up.

  Maybe I should have checked how much powder there actually was in that depot before blowing it. Ah well. Mistakes happen to the best artists.

  He glanced up over the barricade while moaning and cursing. A hundred meters from them, the city was just gone. The market square, with the once beautiful well and the town hall—nothing but a smoking crater remained.

  In the distance, across the crater, Adarin could make out orcs—thousands—mixed with human auxiliaries and their goblin slaves. A howling war cry erupted.

  Adarin poked a musketeer. A stone had hit the man in the head. “Fuck. I should have ordered cover. I didn’t expect this to be this big. Musketeers! How long till the next volley?”

  “Forty, fifty seconds,” the musketeers answered. Understandable, after what had happened.

  His eye fell on the three orcish adventurers righting themselves, fifty meters from the barricade. “Liora, get your abomination ready. We need to buy time.”

  And Adarin charged forward together with the undead abomination. Liora stayed behind, flanked by a dozen spear- and shield-wielding undead. Adarin’s spiders scurried forward, one of them carrying the last of his butyric acid–hydrogen sulfide grenades. He made it jump, and the orc with the two-handed axe swung as if to bat it back like a baseball.

  Adarin smirked viciously.

  This is not going to go the way you think.

  The axe hit, cutting the spider in two. A painful feedback hit him when the shard was struck and splintered. Then the gas grenade ruptured, and the orc was engulfed in a wave of putrid fumes. He went down to his knees, choking—but the other two were unharmed and charged.

  Adarin focused on the orc wielding the two hatchets. He dimly noted that the abomination had picked up two small boulders in each of its meaty, putrid, sticky hands.

  Beams of green and purple shot out as Liora attacked the choking orc with necrotic blasts. But the creature’s defensive field apparently registered them as a threat—unlike the gas.

  Adarin was at full speed, sprinting, and the orc raised his hatchets over his head, howled, and jumped. Well, two can play at that game.

  Adarin pushed himself off the ground—and they collided midair. But this was reality, to the orc’s misfortune, not some dramatic story where an aerial clash throws two combatants back, as Adarin had watched so often when he was younger.

  No.

  Adarin hit like a wrecking ball, his momentum higher by nearly an order of magnitude, and the orc bounced back and flew into a building. Adarin chuckled to himself. The spiders were closing in, ready to do some field amputations.

  The shield wielder was getting pummeled, but the abomination took two bad hits in return.

  Thirty seconds on the muskets.

  The orcs were pushing the humans and goblins forward as they were crossing the crater. We need to finish this up quickly or we’ll get overrun.

  Another wave of the ritual’s cold necrotic wind hit as Adarin scurried forward, advancing on the orc he had just bowled into a building. The poorly mortared wall had cracked. Adarin smirked again.

  In stories, people just walked off getting thrown through a building wall. But this orc was walking nothing off—very clearly. His spine was broken. He howled, his legs motionless, and threw his axes at Adarin sharply. They cut into his wooden body without causing any real harm.

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  Adarin raised one last leg and simply clubbed the orc three times hard over the head until it splintered and clear fluid mixed with blood. The fourth swing flattened the skull like a melon that had been dropped to the ground.

  Adarin spun around, his spiders at the ready. The abomination was engaged in a vicious melee, but the orc was eating crow. His shield was splintered, and the axe had been lost in the guts of the undead abomination. Just as Adarin watched, the orc was hit at the side of the shoulder with one of the rocks, losing the backup dagger they had just grabbed for.

  Then the spiders were upon him. The orc never had a chance. Four spiders—two of them wrapped around each ankle. He looked down and screamed as the nooses tightened. Seeing the opening, the abomination brought down an overhead strike with a stone, and with an audible crack, the orc’s skull was shattered.

  Before Adarin’s spiders could reach the one that was still trying to dodge Liora’s death beams, his defense finally broke. The first one caught the creature in the stomach. Its skin rotted, turned to parchment, and the guts burst out like some abomination being born from a human body. He tried to hold it in with a hand, dropping the axe, but Liora was merciless. “Die, foul creature. Die for Annie and the others.”

  Her voice sounded as if she was between tears of anger and rage. The next blast hit the creature in the head, and its eyes rotted away, bursting, and putrid water ran down its face.

  Adarin rushed over. “Let’s go.”

  He checked the tattoo of the System.

  Tattoo: You have defeated Orc Berserker (Level 11).

  Average normalized strength difference: 90%.

  You have gained 0 levels.

  He saw a similar message, just with Level 9, on Liora’s arm.

  He centered himself and looked around. His blood grew cold as Adarin saw that not a hundred and fifty meters away, the first goblins and human conscripts were scrambling over the crater wall and approaching.

  Ten seconds on the muskets.

  He made a split-second decision, picking up Liora and placing her on his back. “We run. Everyone fall back to the next barricade! Run! Run! Run!”

  Everyone scrambled. The towering undead made the earth quake as Adarin galloped and jumped over the barricade. The human conscripts were cautious until they were prodded by orcish sergeants holding halberds. The goblins had no such compunctions and charged with wild hollers.

  Adarin just jumped the barricade, and a split second later the swamp troll just bowled through it as if it were made of paper, not sand, sacks, and wood.

  The enemy was closing in.

  Fifty meters.

  Adarin ran three-quarters down the street.

  Forty meters.

  “We won’t make it at this rate. Liora! Tell your creature to get to the side!” He ordered her while grabbing her with two legs. She struggled, but his limbs locked on her like manacles.

  ‘Musketeers!’ Adarin reached out over the noospheric link. ‘Get ready. Aim. I will get to the ground!’

  Halfway down the road, the enemy thirty meters behind them, and Adarin dropped and slid forward, carried in a tumble by his forward momentum. Liora screamed as she rode him like a sled.

  The troll jumped to the side, crashing through a house wall. Adarin noted they were close to the house the old woman had been in with the children.

  But it wasn’t that house. That would have been fucking ironic.

  Then another wave of thunder and gunsmoke, and the pursuing goblins were cut down again.

  Adarin scrambled to his feet and turned his attention backward. The troll was already coming out of the building, resuming its lumbering sprint down the street. The front ranks were tumbling—tangled up with the dead and dying.

  They ran, but the maneuver had merely bought twenty meters.

  A howl made Adarin turn. Goblins riding wolves were closing in fast.

  They charged, and Adarin kept going down the road, Liora clinging to his core with a death grip, her face a rictus mask of terror.

  Just as they reached the welcoming envelope of the undead pikemen, Liora screamed. A wolf rider’s javelin had hit her in the small of the back. She whined, but then bit her teeth together and cast a healing spell.

  The javelins reaped a harvest of the pike-wielding undead. “Commit more of them!”

  Undead scrambled back over the barricade. Then the next volley erupted from their gunners, and over the short distance the musket shot extracted a terrible toll from the attackers, cutting into the cavalry like a knife into hot butter. Riderless wolves tumbled, and the pikes took the charge, braced into the barricade as they were.

  The pillar of the ritual illuminated half the city now.

  Adarin looked at Liora. “You need to get there. They need you to finish it.”

  “Yes. I…” she said in a voice—that of the young girl again.

  Adarin didn’t waste any time. “Musketeers! Anyone who doesn’t hold the barricade—run, run, run! To the next one!”

  They barreled down the street, and behind them—men sweating and sprinting, undead shambling and clangoring, mages. He would have liked to make a joke about nerds lacking fitness, but none of the mages even looked winded.

  He had heard bickering and cursing about the fitness programs Rüdiger was putting his soldiers through. Now this is paying off. Good thing that he can be such a hard-ass.

  Two more barricades were fought in the same manner. Close escapes. The muskets always extracted a rich harvest.

  Merely a third of the undead remained as they reached the last barricade—the encampment—the ritual site.

  Flickers and tendrils of green and purple energy were dancing over the square like aurora borealis.

  Adarin stopped in front of the barricade, together with the swamp troll abomination, whose control Liora had handed to Johan. She rushed off to the ritual circle.

  Rüdiger was floating, hands and legs outstretched, in the middle of the spire, chanting what sounded like nonsense words while rotating with the inevitability of a planet.

  Another breeze of the cold necrotic wind hit Adarin.

  He looked at the incoming tide—at the storm of humans, goblins, and hollering orcs.

  “How long?” He reached out to Rüdiger.

  “Three more minutes.”

  Adarin stared down the road again. There were thousands. He shook himself like a wet dog.

  “Three more minutes, eh?”

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