"Load!"
A rough male voice cracked along the battlements. Iron answered in a rushing chain, rhythmic clanks of shells sliding into the hungry chambers.
"Aim for the Daemons’ legs! Three, two, one—fire!" The commander’s word snapped like a drumbeat; they fired as one. The barrage scythed through legs; Daemons fell in swaths like cut wheat.
From the wall, the field looked like a black sea heaving, a dark wave buckling and crashing.
With few cycles behind them, the Daemons healed poorly; they needed time. Yet that death-soldier instinct kept them crawling, left index fingers pointing forward like grim compass needles.
"Load! Aim for the Daemons’ hands! Three—two—one—fire!" The rhythm held like a metronome in rain. Every arc was true, shells tracing meteors; every Daemon received its iron reward.
"All units, reload. Rest as a whole. We attack again when the Daemons recover." Orders fell like steady stones.
Men dropped to the stones like shedding packs, and breathed. Jokes sparked like campfire embers. The howling below was just background, Daemons treated like free-range pets; no fear stirred.
"Commander, the King says your command is a success. Just hold a few more rounds." The one addressed was the same man who had first bellowed Load into the wind.
At his elbow, a man had somehow appeared—a creep in a skintight black suit, face wrapped so tight only a nose slit breathed like a vent.
The commander didn’t flinch; shadows slipped in on him often, and he’d grown used to it. He tipped back a can of liquor and let it fall like river water.
His face didn’t ripple. The label said 55%, and the numbers didn’t lie.
"Hell—we can hold a few more rounds, even a few hundred, no problem. But why won’t the King tell us why we’re holding? Some brothers already think his orders are nonsense—"
A gloved hand struck up and clamped his mouth. The man in black scanned through his hood, head twitching like a bat scenting danger.
Seeing no one nearby, he exhaled, a thin hiss under cloth. "You got a death wish? Don’t drag me with you. I told you, stop drinking—drunk, you don’t hear your own treason."
The jab stung. The commander hurled his bottle—still a third full. It burst on the wall with a bright clang, and the spray bloomed into a silver flower.
"How am I talking nonsense? The King’s orders are strange. I already saw slackers in that last volley—no clear purpose, and rot spreads.
"If we don’t name a goal, more will think, ‘others are serious; one less of me won’t matter.’ Then it’s not a gap I can plug with a couple cover shots."
The man in black had no answer. He knew nothing of battle, had never stood in a line. He did the King’s dirty work; today, short on hands, he was a runner.
The commander knew he’d swung his anger at the wrong target; you don’t cut a shadow with a blade. The man was only a mouthpiece.
"Forget it. We’ll drop it. A few more rounds, fine. Go tell the King this from me: I’m holding the line for him here today.
"If he’s got no plan and just parked us here on a whim, I swear this— A Daemon will crawl out of his toilet drain the very next second."
Cold sweat beaded under the hood, but he only nodded. He would sand the edges off those words; the wrong tone, and his head would roll for another’s fire.
"Roooar!" The man in black had one foot on the threshold when a thick roar split the quiet, a beam through fog.
Unlike the Daemons’ earlier battle howls, this one carried deference, a bowed head hidden in sound.
No joke—living in the Ulu Empire, the commander heard that tone every day at the King’s residence. The King’s beloved dog made that sound for its master.
He’d been tasked to tend the hound; he knew that flattering, respectful whine like a familiar scent.
Now the Daemons roared in that same key. Only their master could tune them so.
And their master was—
"The Demon King?!"
