Apparently undead were harder to disturb than I’d previously thought. Or at least these ones were. I saw them shambling up to their feet, well over a score—more than two, even—and felt the terror of it run through me. It seeped deep into my muscles, weakened and slackened them like I was bathed in ice-water, made me a trembling mess unable to so much as lift my arm.

  Then the frenzy of combat came on like a molten flood to wash the weakness away.

  Rotters, I was facing down rotters again. In the dark, again. Surrounded by stone walls and ancient crypt-smells again. All the old fears were swarming in my brain, but they were held back now by some sudden, unrelenting will to act.

  “Form up!” I roared, just as the first of the monsters started for us. Shields raised and swords started poking out as we fell away. I was still right there at the front, having not gotten the time to scramble for the back, and now rotten features were mere hand-spans from my face.

  I could smell the reek of them, the stifled decay as reanimating magics froze the desiccation of death and time but left it half-done. I could see the terrible speed and force with which they moved, the mindless clumsy motions that were more animal than human.

  All of it took me back to those months ago, to my youthful fear and incomprehension, to the stupid decision I’d ruined my life with. And they hardened me.

  “Back!” I growled, though we were already slowly being pressed away. I saw more rotters rising up behind the ones already attacking us, coming faster than our shitty short-swords could put them down. We should’ve switched to polearms when we had the chance, now that we were in a more open area, but…no, no time for regrets, I thought, I could only focus on the fighting now.

  And it gave me quite a lot to focus on.

  Even with nine soldiers, myself included, and all of us well trained in defensive fighting, our shields and guards would’ve kept us alive for only a few seconds. It was the corridor that saved us, pinching the undead in tight and forcing them to all attack two or three at a time while we backed away. Being swarmed wasn’t a danger anymore, so all we needed to do was fight a retreat and last long enough to finish it.

  Not a small ask, still, because we were hundreds of paces into the fort already.

  Fighting retreats are difficult things to pull off properly, and I won’t take credit for how well this one went. It was the veterans present who kept everything together—the real spine of any army—while I just stood in the front row and pulled my stupid grin while rotters tried to eat me.

  You need to focus on defending yourself, unit cohesion and moving backwards all at once, and if someone trips then god helps you. We’d have been screwed if I’d actually taken charge for that. Fortunately even I knew better than to do so.

  Following the not-so-subtle leads of those nearer the back, because the veterans had known better than to get themselves stuck near the front, we slowly and clumsily shuffled our way through the fort. More than once, a wound found one of us. Most of the rotters’s wings scraped off thick breastplate steel, proofed against handguns the material was easily a match for even their strength. But luck was not an infinite resource, and two of us caught hits to the gaps in our armour that bit deep. There were, despite this, no fatalities. The injured fell back and were hauled back, while those behind them stepped up and fought in their place. Twice this happened beside me, and the third wound landed on my own shoulder.

  I would’ve eagerly seized the chance to cower back into the mass of bodies, of course, but for the fact that we were heading around a rather tight corridor, and I didn’t know how well my large frame could be redistributed through our wall.

  This is one of those things that would come back to haunt me later, of course, but for the time being I was in the last leg of my escape and didn’t have the spare brain power to give much thought to anything besides that. I just yelled and kept fighting.

  Finally, blessedly, we finished our pitiable scramble and reached the door through which we’d first entered. Just as we stepped out over the threshold and put heels back down on soil instead of stone, we remembered that the fort was built upon a hilltop.

  We remembered because we were reminded, and we were reminded of that fact by falling down the hill in question.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever rolled down a fucking hill while wearing chainmail and a steel breastplate, but it’s not an experience I’d recommend. The best way to describe it, I suppose, would be as a ‘reverse massage’. In that it finds all the sore parts of your body and then makes them worse.

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  Only after rolling and smashing the dirt a dozen times was I finally able to stop myself, digging one gauntleted fist into the soil and scarring a trench longer than my forearm before I’d finally exhausted enough momentum to stop my descent. The other soldiers did even worse, but none of us died.

  Which wasn’t to say that we were all doing fine, because fighting your way through a thousand feet of corridor and falling down about half as much of a hill is far from the nicest start to a day. When all of us got up after that, we were groaning and grunting as the pain racked our bodies and stiffened our joints.

  I ended up getting off the best of course, being both seventeen and having recently enjoyed that odd explosion of physical prowess meant my youthful tissues took the fall a lot better than most. The others who recovered fastest were on the younger side, too.

  All of us were about as miserable, however.

  Trudging back to the remainder of our forces took a while. We could’ve hurried if we’d really wanted to, but our brief explosion of activity had wrung out most of the strength in all of us—myself included. Besides, the rest of the men could clearly see us approach. Only the rotters chasing us out could have hurried us, and as usual the undead seemed content to remain inside.

  Our reception was not as warm as I’d hoped it would be, which was predictable as anything if I’d taken even a single moment to truly think about it. Of course we weren’t being met with open arms, the men we were heading back to had no idea what we’d fought our way out of. The officers were no more knowledgeable, but far more convinced that they were, and so once we were surrounded, called for debriefing and drilled on the answers our immediate reception was a great deal of scepticism and doubt rather than any acceptance or elaborating questions about what we’d seen.

  It took a while before our story seemed to even register as possible, which I found quite surprising. These days I recognise it as a feature of my upbringing. People who live in the rural areas of Anglyn simply have more exposure to undead than most others, our villages and towns being more vulnerable, and thus more frequently threatened.

  For these officers, most of them men raised in the urbanised city of Eoryg and far from any countrysides like the one we were occupying now, what I was reporting was tantamount to being told a myth had attacked us. The only reason we were taken seriously at all was our obvious wounds.

  Even the most sceptical officers were forced to admit—really forced, I should note—that the injuries we’d received were unlikely to be self-inflicted. One of them seemed on the verge of suggesting we’d cooperated to stab one another, but tapered off short of actually saying that outright when it became clear how silly the prospect struck everyone else as being.

  What followed was a bit disorganised, largely because nobody seemed to have actually expected what we’d brought back as our word regarding the inside.

  Not even Bakeswill, at that, who’d sworn on his mother’s grave that the remaining nine of us had died before his very eyes. Now claiming confusion and panic for the cause, he was having a terribly hard time in explaining that, and I was loving every moment of it.

  It didn’t last though. A few hours later, as me and the other unfortunates who’d headed in first were tended to, plans were finally made after a consensus on what had really happened was decided.

  Perhaps unexpectedly, those plans involved storming the fort with greater numbers. And we, naturally, were expected to tag along. Our wounds were deemed too light to excuse us from it.

  Fortunately, we were at least not being expected to head the attack this time. Our forces would be entering through multiple points, and I got to tuck myself away safely in the middle of the third of our three splits.

  You may be thinking that it’s incredibly stupid to voluntarily break up our numbers before storming a largely unknown fortress with clearly dangerous enemies awaiting within. Anyway, we made for the structure shortly and were closing fast.

  Of the main body of our force—I don’t think army is a remotely accurate term—only about one hundred were designated to fight in melee. Men at arms and the works, while a further thirty were made up of the increasingly scarce longbowmen. Another dozen were gunners.

  This was my first time seeing firearms in any appreciable number, and I’ll admit to curiosity about them. They were so disparate to all the other weapons I’d learned to be familiar with.

  My curiosity would turn into an altogether different impression soon enough, for several reasons. Within minutes the larger bulk of our forces had made its way into the fort and started falling in through its various holes, and I felt that familiar fraying of my nerves as I marched towards what I knew was danger.

  Problem was, of course, I was still more scared of being called a coward than of dying. That means that any fate I managed to avoid down here was, in my opinion, a failure of natural law. It also meant I had to tolerate having a lot of eyes on me from my fellow soldiers.

  None of them said anything at least, one good thing about the army is it keeps people quiet. That quietitude meant that we also heard a great deal from our surroundings as we headed deeper into them.

  Unlike the first venture inside, however, we didn’t take hundreds of paces to find resistance. The ghuls and shamblers were out near-instantly.

  Shamblers first, a tide of them that encircled us the moment we were out into an open space—some emerging from cracks and crannies in the corridor we’d passed through, at our backs, keeping us from retreating into the tight hall to hold them.

  That wasn’t the only change, either. This time around the ghuls were better armed and armoured, perhaps having had the chance to equip themselves better than those we’d accidentally surprised before. They hung back as their stupider cousins swarmed us and threatened to break the formation with sheer weight of numbers.

  Veterans for the most part, the force held better than might have been expected. Especially with our commander. He fought at the front and did so in a full set of plate armour that I could somehow sense was more than just steel. This sense was confirmed when I saw a hammer rebound from it without so much as a scratch. Its wielder fought well, not panicking, keeping his orders tight.

  But the enemy kept coming.

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