Adarin surveyed the next battlefield—the burned-down militia camp, the ritual circle swathed in the eerily dancing light, the prisoners enclosed by a thin wall of pike-wielding undead. The barricaded streets, alleys, and main arteries alike, with the barricades just like the one he was so desperately holding.

  Hundreds pushed down the street, and he could see the main thrust of the enemy army coming his way. A quick check-in told him that the others faced significantly less pressure. He ordered troops to be redistributed. Just my luck that I'm facing the main thrust. Well, better me than some other incompetent.

  Liora was running to the ritual circle, Rüdiger dreamily reaching out to her, his voice sounding drunk with something beyond power.

  That was when it happened.

  A raucous cheer went up from the prisoners—hundreds of throats giving a war cry in unison, raw and defiant. Stones arced out of the smoke, crashing into undead skulls with sickening cracks. Adarin saw a mage buckle, blood streaking down her face, and the sudden chaos was like a second battle igniting within the first.

  The girl who had been with him—the one Liora had worked with, the one who had talked to the children—fell with a wet crack, her head twisted at an impossible angle. Her spell fizzled out mid-chant, blood pooling as her eyes glazed in shock. The stone that killed her clattered beside her, as if mocking the silence she left.

  Adarin saw blood and groaned, letting his deep weariness show for a split second. “Of course this was gonna happen. Why didn't I just massacre them?”

  Liora froze and began screaming, but no one could hear her over the din of battle. She reached out to Adarin. ‘What do we do? They are not supposed to do this!’

  Adarin hissed back at her. ‘Yes. Prisoners are rarely supposed to do certain things. But for some reason, they tend to want to do those.’

  Rüdiger's voice roared over them all. “Solve this. Now.”

  It wasn’t the voice of a man. It was the voice of an angry god.

  For a second, the battle paused. Goblins and reluctant human militia alike pushed back from the barricade of pikes, whose tips were wreathed in blood. Busy extracting a harvest, the undead were the only ones to not hesitate. They leaned forward, stabbed and jabbed, weeping cries of pain and the thumps of collapsing bodies.

  The prisoners were quickly breaking down the pike barricade of the zombies containing them.

  ‘Holy Mother, please show me the way, show me…’ Liora was babbling over the connection.

  Then Adarin felt the cold return, and he grew icily certain about the fate of the captured. She gestured, and the swamp troll picked up another wooden beam and marched threateningly toward the vicious mob. As Liora took control, the undead stiffened. Adarin kept throwing out root whips, scurrying behind the formation, finding the positions that most needed his assistance.

  His spiders were scurrying along the feet of the enemy, jabbing and pulling enemies off balance into the pikes. Another musket volley went off, pushing the enemy back.

  But of course, things got worse. The wall of the building next to him splintered. Cracks spread out, and it began to vibrate.

  “Someone is breaking it down! They are in the houses!” Adarin screamed at maximum volume, not caring for the pain it caused him. “Defend the houses! Watch the walls!”

  Zombies were pulled back, hitting the defensive line even further. Adarin gave one look.

  “Fall back to the entrances of the streets!”

  At other places, the walls were also bulging.

  “We can't get encircled. Give up the barricade!”

  They left a quarter of their undead behind, the forlorn hope on the barricade, and fell back—as did nearly everyone else. This was planned. The enemy commander wasn't a complete moron. Fuck.

  The rearguard became another pile of corpses. Another piece of fuel for the pyre Rüdiger was building. He floated in the swirling magics above the chaos, trying to set it alight. Adarin clenched his jaws. Just as long as the conflagration will start before the enemy wins.

  With the retreat done, he watched the desperate battle against the prisoners. It rained stones, and weapons were liberated from the fallen undead. But under Liora's command, the troll was wading into the masses. People backed away, and Liora kept screaming.

  Then she balled her fist and screeched: “You asked for this, you—!”

  She pointed her finger accusingly, and the troll obeyed. The massive beam whooshed through the air and came down with bone-splintering weight, scattering bodies like broken dolls. Screams tore through the mob as two dozen were crushed in a single arc, panic rippling outward in waves.

  Liora got even angrier, screaming with the shrill tones of despairing fury. “This is all your fault!”

  And she took a deep breath in.

  Adarin steadied up the next line, securing the wavering musketmen. From all sides, like cockroaches spilling from cracked stone, the enemy poured through collapsed walls, surging around the barricade. The last line of undead was hacked apart in seconds, their defense folding under sheer numbers. Encirclement had become reality.

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  Another cold wave of the ritual's energy washed over them. More intense—cold enough that humidity turned into fog in the air. The enemy soldiers hesitated for a brief second before their officers kicked them into the attack again.

  Adarin lashed, and his root whips extracted a harvest of goblin faces.

  Meanwhile, Liora drew in a desperate, shuddering breath—and then exhaled with a hiss that seemed endless, a torrent of green necrotic fog spilling from her lips. The cloud rolled out, clinging to skin, rotting flesh where it touched. Prisoners collapsed, writhing and choking, while her own body shrank before Adarin’s eyes—cheeks hollowing, shoulders trembling as though the spell was eating her alive.

  Yes—he literally saw her body grow gaunter. A strange pang of fear made itself flet in his guts.

  She collapsed to her knees, but the damage was done. The swamp troll and the undead were taking care of the remnants of the prisoners, herding maybe two hundred survivors with jabs and pokes, uncaring for injury or culpability. Those who could not walk were simply put down with quick and efficient jabs.

  Liabilities in a moment of weakness. Adarin’s lip curled as he watched. Exactly as I predicted. They beg for mercy, then turn the first chance they get.

  Just as I had known it would happen. Adarin hissed, but did not reach out to Liora. She had scurried over to the girl that had fallen. The young necromancer tried to cast a healing spell on her, but it was too late.

  The girl was dead.

  Well, I guess you have a new zombie friend now, the sardonic part of Adarin’s mind remarked.

  Then he focused on the battle again.

  Rüdiger—and he—reached out at the same time to her.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Get to the ritual circle, girl.’

  She slurred, “I was—ohhh, Rüdi—I cursed...”

  Adarin dismissed her from his thoughts. I need to keep fighting. Keep commanding.

  Enemies began spilling out from the buildings facing the market. They had broken through the back walls, coming through the backyard.

  He reached out to other commanders, other officers, and the defensive cordon fell back from the streets, forming a circle around the ritual. Musketeers were dragging over dozens of prisoners to the ritual circle, where mages waited for them, daggers at the ready.

  “We have to time the sacrifice correctly. Without Liora, there is no other way. The spell might grow unstable—and if it grows unstable, we are all dead,” Rüdiger's voice thundered, giving the instructions to the mages as he desperately tried to adjust for not having Liora empower the ritual.

  “Just hold out a little bit longer. This is our victory!” Rüdiger roared over the din of battle.

  Adarin observed what followed as if caught in a dream of amber. Slow. Heavy. Inevitable as gravity.

  How the cordon contracted.

  How the enemy broke through building walls and attacked.

  How the dozens of sacrifices—each held by a zombie at each arm—struggled, but were pulled to wait near the mages.

  Another musketeer volley.

  Another hum in the ever-growing storm.

  Another volley in the waves of attacks.

  He kicked back against the burned remnants of a tent, creating a way for the further stepwise retreat.

  Step by bloody step, the pikemen zombies crumpled. Step by brutal step, the defensive circle shrank tighter, musketeers firing desperately into the press. Step by step, doom closed in—grinding, inevitable, as if gravity itself dragged them toward annihilation.

  The moment of truth was closing.

  Then—ten mages. Ten daggers. Ten trembling prisoners forced to their knees. The blades flashed in ritual unison, slicing throats open, blood spraying as eyes bulged and mouths gurgled their last. The circle drank the red offering greedily.

  Seven sets of ten. They died without any ceremony. The first ones weren’t even done twitching, still being held up by the undead as blood spilled from smiling throats.

  As the blades found the throats of the last group, then the ritual's power dove into them.

  Tendrils of necrotic energy reached out, and their bodies aged and starved as if in accelerated time. In the places where Adarin had learned the magic cores were located—hands, head, guts, heart—it was as if small black holes had formed.

  The magic is consuming their cores. They collapsed inwards, were sucked into the vortex of magic while being turned inside out.

  Adarin stepped back, stumbled into a corpse, and cursed. He steadied himself and lashed his whips out, blinding an orc for the trouble of approaching the front.

  Maybe I can do something. A little bit of misdirection.

  He set his volume to max and jumped away toward the center of the circle—away from the front, as not to stun his allies.

  “Attention! Attention! Human militia! You know your loved ones are being kept in prison by the orcs. If this ritual succeeds, all the orcs will die in the city! Turn against your oppressors! Turn against your enemies! Fight for your freedom!”

  He screamed out the message again.

  And then he saw it.

  A young human boy—maybe thirteen—turned around, and the halberd of the orc pushing his unit onwards split his skull. His comrades howled.

  An old man and a young adult hurled themselves at the orc, rage lending them strength. The axe and hatchet hacked into soft spots in its armor, blows fueled more by desperation than skill. Their defiance sparked a ripple of chaos in the ranks.

  Hatred unloaded.

  It wasn’t an all-out rebellion. Only a few rebels here and there, catalyzing the actions of others. All were put down brutally. But it caused a disruption in the ever-marching step of the enemy.

  Enough for the ritual’s repeated blasts of cold wind to turn into gale force.

  The aurora borealis were dragging everyone in, forming a hurricane of thickening light.

  Until the ritual detonated.

  Adarin’s body shivered as if he’d attached a live wire, and everyone gasped—hands going to mouths and hearts—as even the zombies were staggered by the energy going off.

  For a terrible few seconds, the world stood still.

  Nothing happened.

  Then Adarin saw it, saw one of the burned corpses in front of him, how something had been left behind by the waves of green energy.

  Something wriggling.

  Worms of sickly green and pale blue writhed from the ground, burrowing into charred corpses. Fingers twitched, spines arched, and with grotesque inevitability the bodies jerked upright. Adarin watched as death itself convulsed into new, ravenous life.

  Within a few heartbeats, fingernails began to grow out millimeter by millimeter as flesh warped.

  Then the creature took a deep breath, its burned chest shuddering and skin flaking off—and in tune with thousands, ten thousands of other ghouls—

  It let out a terrible howl of bloodlust that echoed all over the city.

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