Killing that orc was not the end of my immediate problems, and, in fact, would lead to a great many more in the longer-term. I didn’t care about the longer term right then though. With one problem down, I was now faced with…a hundred more. Great.

  Fortunately, the men around me were doing a fine job of stopping us from getting overrun. For now.

  The orcs had size, strength and training, like before. On the other hand, this time, the human soldiers facing them were advantaged by laughably superior ground. Being defenders in a siege was a force multiplier for combat power—the golden rule, in case you’re wondering, is that you want three attackers for each man inside the walls to have decent odds of victory. That was skewed a bit here, but every leg up was one I’d gladly accept.

  “Hold!” I roared, not because I had any particular conviction for a plan that would require men, but more just because I was desperate to fight this fight with as much help as I could get, and had vaguely learned that yelling that word made people slightly less likely to run away. Certainly wouldn’t have changed things for me, that was for sure.

  While my men skewered and stabbed with spears, blunting the main bulk of our enemy’s assault, I kept an eye out for any other orcs who looked strongest and most important. This was no great act of courage on my part of course, I just realised that enemies who were intimidating for me were likely to be inspiring for the enemy, and cutting them down seemed like a great way to convince the bastards that they should stop attacking us and run.

  I didn’t actually know how effective that would be, but after the third ‘champion’ killed, even I noticed a distinct lack of bite to the enemy’s continued offensive. The men beside me seemed to notice it as well, for their own fighting redoubled in ferocity and started driving the things all the farther back. We were doing well, actually winning rather than just holding our own. I couldn’t accept the credit for this of course, my role was more akin to that of a battle standard than a leader this time, but I did feel a stab of pride if nothing else.

  That stab of pride withered like a rotting grape as I saw the latest line of orcs haul themselves up over the wall and start taking aim. Not archers, not crossbowmen.

  They were gunners, and I was staring down a line of Arvharest-made arquebuses before I knew it. Steel plate? Nothing. I was naked now. A roar went out among them and several guns lit up all at once, I flinched…then slipped on blood.

  What happened next is one of the most famous feats I have performed in my entire life, even decades later. It is, also, total bullshit from the ground up.

  The air filled with a rotten-egg reek as black powder burned and spat hot lead out, I saw men fall away with jagged holes torn through them. One was almost decapitated, his head ripped nearly in half by the shot. My fall sent me sprawling right in front of a squad I’d not seen behind me, and in my surprise I sent limbs flailing out uncontrollably to halt my drop by grabbing something. There was nothing to grab.

  What this meant was that, entirely by chance, I threw my sword up right as a musket ball smacked into it. Thaumaturgical steel caught the lead and deflected it in a shower of sparks and rended metal.

  The impact jerked my arm back and left me to awkwardly half-turn before I landed, but I was up on my feet again soon enough and watching as the orcs sneered before the sight of their destruction. Panic was spreading among the men, horror at seeing their own weapons—the very symbol of Arvharest—turned against them. The feeling was paralyzing, almost enough to keep you from realising that…the orcs were using the guns like idiots.

  Clearly, they weren’t as experienced with firearms as the defenders. Even as they started scrambling to reload, I knew how long it would take. Half a minute or more for an inexperienced shooter to fire again, well that was all the time in the world.

  In the end, a bunch of already-fired arquebuses were a poor weapon to bring into melee against a duelling sword. I killed each of the gunners so fast they’d barely been replaced by more orcs by the time I finished, and for the first time since the fight began it looked like things were turning in our favour.

  I fought all the harder to maintain that momentum.

  “After me!” I called out, “we have the advantage now!” I punctuated my call with a big jet of flames sent to wash over two orcs, courtesy of the now-cool corpses I’d left under my feet. Their kind don’t like being lit on fire anymore than us humans, and that quickly sent a spasm of chaos through the enemy’s forces. I kept chopping away during it, taking my time and lining up hits to make sure each blow was a killing one. Swing by swing we were mounting up casualties and taking back the wall, and before long the ladders were right before us.

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  Call me an idiot, I certainly felt like one, but it was only then that I stumbled onto the obvious solution. All the ladders were locked in place with metal hooks that seemed dug in and weighted down too well to move, at least not while fighting off more orcs. So I didn’t bother. Instead I took all the remnants of stored energy still left in me and spat it out over the top few rungs, keeping the fire low and restrained, forcing it to last. It took a few seconds for the wood to finally catch, but when it did the difference was instantaneous.

  Which is what you might expect. Certainly, the orcs closest to the top rung noticed it fast. The ones already on those burning grips were the most unfortunate, with some letting go on reflex and dropping back down to land upon their allies below, while others managed to resist the instincts that would’ve sent them to a fast death. Their reward was a much slower one, cooking on the flames.

  If the sight of burning people was at all disturbing for my allies, none of them showed it. Soldiers to their bones even if I hadn’t yet become world-weary enough to hate them for it. In the short-term, of course, the results of this display was a new surge of improved morale to the rest of us as the enemy’s tide of bodies was stemmed by no small fraction.

  Fatigue started to eat away at me, the unexpected exhaustion of rapid movements under an extra quarter of my weight in steel, the great expenditure of Thaumaturgical powers, the unique intensity of my fighting against the orcish elites. My limbs were getting heavy and slow, my wits dull.

  Had things continued, I’d probably have died. And maybe they would have. Maybe those orcs would’ve pushed for another few precious minutes if they’d known how close they were coming to tiring me out into death, but like usual I got just lucky enough to survive the day. The orcs started breaking right when my legs were about to give out, and I maintained precisely enough strength to shout after them and look intimidating as they fucked off.

  Then I fell down, but soldiers’ arms caught me and hauled my limp form back from the front of everything before I could be made to suffer for my vulnerability.

  What came next is a bit of a blur. If anything, I’m happy to report that there was no great headache accompanying this bout of unconsciousness. I’d just drained all my strength away by fighting so hard and for so long. People who’ve not tried combat in full plate are probably laughing as they read that, but it is what it is.

  I came to within one of the walls, nice and far from the outer section, where arrows were now plinking off in an attempt to shoot through firing slits, and surrounded by the sound of scraping boots. By the time I’d gotten up and waddled my way back out to survey the remnants of our battle…we’d already won.

  Or temporarily not lost, at least. The orcish ranks were pulling back from Arvharest’s walls and leaving a carpet of corpses in their wake. Thousands, it looked like. Some riddled with arrows, others knocked flat by dropped stones. A few were messier. Cooked alive by oil or flames, or just obliterated entirely by cannon fire.

  Call it desensitisation, but I didn’t feel all that much as I saw the carnage. Not even the bodies piled at the base of where I’d been fighting, who I knew had, at least in part, been killed by my own blade and Thaumaturgy. It seemed I’d finally graduated from ‘coward’ to ‘apathetic coward’, because only my own death had any fright factor for me.

  I wasn’t left to dwell on that for long. Before I knew it, soldiers were celebrating and churning up the air with half-manic cheers as they watched the orcs fuck off. I couldn’t help but smile with them.

  “Kyvaine!” one of the men roared, grabbing my arm—causing me to jump in a momentary spasm of battle-born twitchiness—”Kyvaine! Hero of Arvharest!”

  I heard excited chattering at that, so much it all blended into one. It felt surreal. People were far more impressed with my performance than I’d have expected, as someone who’d mostly just gotten beaten up and lucked out of dying outright, but then I heard the big misconception and it all made sense.

  “Smacked a bullet right out of the air! Saved my life!”

  They thought I’d parried that gunshot on purpose? Believe me, I was surprised to hear that then, but looking back on it the very idea is even more ridiculous. Even from an old-fashioned arquebus you can expect a lead ball to cross something like a thousand feet per second, at least straight from the muzzle. I could’ve been fired on from a hundred feet and still not had time to wave my sword around and block it.

  But none of these men seemed to know enough specifics to realise how ridiculous the idea was. They weren’t thinking about the logical implications of me swinging my damned weapon faster than a crossbow bolt, they had their story and they were going to damn well run with it.

  I weathered the nauseating praise for as long as I could, but didn’t manage to outlast it. Eventually I just headed for where I thought Morlo was—the place where I’d seen the most uncontrolled pyrotechnics elsewhere on the wall—in the hopes that being near him would distract from all the attention thrown my way.

  As usual, I was wrong. Dead wrong in this case, and in a fairly predictable way. Of course Morlo wasted no time in levitating me high and calling out my praises, and embellishing tales I wasn’t even certain how he’d heard as he did it. The man had been quite up-front about his intentions to turn me into a hero, I’d have seen it coming if I weren’t so damned tired.

  Being essentially juggled with Thaumaturgy for a few more seconds actually gave me time to compose myself, and once I was dropped back down to the ground I knew what I had to do.

  Smile, of course, because it was clear now I wasn’t getting out of this new wave of acclaim. Say what you will about why I’d come to hate the spotlight, I’d at least matured in that small way. But that didn’t change that I knew full well a Thaumaturge’s plans revolved around me hogging it.

  And I was in no mood to foil them.

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