Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 733: Steady Hold

They cut every last one of them free. When the final shroud was pinned and burned, the count came back and Kayla made them run it twice before she believed it. Wounded in the dozens, some badly, three of the wrapped archers unconscious and half-crushed, but breathing. All of them breathing. She stood a moment with her hand pressed to her mouth, let out one long unsteady breath, and then went back to work, because breathing was a starting point and her healers had a long night ahead of keeping it that way.

"Third build-up," Marcus reported from the rise, his voice careful now. "Big shapes. Very big. John said it never sends the same thing twice. He undersold how fast it changes its mind."

"I see them," Fraisea said. "Six signatures. Each one masses more than everything we have killed tonight put together."

They saw the towers before they understood them. Six vast silhouettes detached from the wave, and at first the eye insisted they were siege engines, because nothing alive stood that tall. Then the nearest one took a step, and the ground carried the shock all the way to the Regalon line, and every fighter on the stretch adjusted their understanding of the night.

They were walkers of black plate, taller than the twin spires, with runners swarming their feet like dogs around hunters. The heights’ first massed volley burst across the lead tower’s chest and left scorch marks and nothing else. It came on, one earthquake stride at a time, straight for the center line.

Big D watched it come, and his old eyes measured it without a flicker. "Marcus. The ravine teams. Now. And get me a bait squad with fast legs and good nerves."

The trap was Aryan’s, dug over both preparation days into the lip of the dry ravine, and it needed the tower to take one specific path. A squad of the fastest vanguard fighters went out and made themselves irresistible, striking at the tower’s ankles, running exactly as fast as they needed to and not one step faster, while Natalia’s heights carved apart the runner packs that tried to cut their retreat.

The tower followed, and stepped where Aryan needed it to step, and the undermined lip of the ravine let go beneath eighty tons of black plate.

The sound of it going down was felt more than heard. It dropped to its chest in the collapsing earth, arms plowing the ground, and then the heights buried it, every archer and caster pouring fire onto its head and shoulders in one unending cataract, and the tower thrashed, and dug, and burned, and took long terrible minutes to die, and died.

"One," Aryan said grimly, already moving his teams up the ravine. "Five more coming."

"Then we do it five more times," Big D rasped.

They did it twice more. Two more towers took the bait and the ravine ate them. Then the fourth tower reached the edge of the killing ground, stopped, and turned its head toward the smoking ruin of its kin, and every officer on the stretch felt the same cold drop in their stomach.

It walked around. Wide around, ignoring the bait completely, and it came at the left flank where the ground was honest and there was no trap at all, only Maya and her corks and her broken rocks, and its runners flooded ahead of it in a screaming tide.

"Left flank!" Marcus’s voice carried across the whole stretch. "Everything we can spare, left flank now!"

What happened there was the hardest fighting of the night. The runners hit all the gaps at once, more than at any point before, and behind them the tower’s strides came on like a slow drumbeat of the end of the world. Maya’s line bent. Corks cracked, fighters were dragged down, and she gave ground by inches, trading rocks for lives, screaming her people into new positions with a voice already torn raw.

"Bend!" she was shouting. "Bend, don’t break, give them the rocks, keep your feet! Ground is cheap, you are not!"

Then the tower’s shadow fell over the flank, and its foot came down on the boulder line and turned it to gravel, and it raised one immense plated arm over the bent and bleeding rank.

Two things hit it in the same heartbeat.

The first was Hiroshi, arriving with half the center at his back, no trap, only momentum and a shield wall moving at a dead run, and the whole formation struck the tower’s planted ankle where black plate met black plate. The joint did not break. The leg slid, eighty tons lurched, and the descending arm missed the rank and gouged a trench in the earth instead.

The second came out of the sky trailing fire, because Gopu had been circling above the flank for an hour, waiting with a dragon’s patience for something worth his breath, and this was worth it.

He stooped on the tower’s raised arm and opened his jaws, and what poured out was not ordinary flame. The dragonfire carried its layered properties into the black plate all at once, compression that crushed, heat inversion that froze the plate’s core while its surface burned, and beneath both, the slow conceptual erosion that made the armor forget, molecule by molecule, what it meant to be armor. Where every volley of the night had left scorch marks, Gopu’s breath left the tower’s arm pitted, softened, and coming apart.

"The joint!" Hiroshi bellowed, pointing his sword at the seam his shoulder had met. "It moves, so it opens! Everything into the joint, and follow the dragonfire!"

The flank stopped bending and turned on the tower like one animal. Fighters swarmed the ruined leg while the heights, redirected by Natalia, poured fire onto its head to blind it, and Maya went up the plate itself, using the gouges as handholds, driving her blade to the hilt into an ankle seam gone soft under Gopu’s erosion. Around her a dozen others did the same, wedging steel into every gap the joint exposed each time it flexed.

The tower tried to step, and the step failed.

It came down slowly, the way vast things do, one leg locked and ruined, plate screaming against plate, and the Regalons scattered out from under its fall and closed back over it before it finished settling. Gopu landed on the dead thing’s shoulder, folded his wings, and let out a rolling snort of smoke that needed no translation.

"Yes, you were very helpful," Maya rasped at him from the ankle, and the young dragon’s tail curved upward in acknowledgment.

The runners kept coming for a quarter hour more, and the family fought them hand to hand across the corpse of the tower like a battlefield that had grown its own terrain, and then the tide slackened, and the fourth wave was over.

The fifth and sixth towers stopped at the edge of the killing ground, stood a long moment, and turned away down the rim toward someone else’s stretch. Nobody cheered. Everyone understood they had just been measured, and that the dark had decided the price here was too high, and that somewhere down the line it expected the price to be lower.

Maya stood on the fallen tower’s black plate with her chest heaving and her voice gone, and looked down her flank, and found it still a line. Bloodied, gapped, propped up in places by fighters who should have been carried off an hour ago, but a line.

"Report," she managed.

"Bent, not broken," her second answered, and along the rank, exhausted fighters actually laughed, the short ragged laughter of people who had just found out what they could survive.

It was Silvester, during the lull, who noticed the numbers. He had been running water and arrows and stretcher teams for six hours, and when he finally looked at the board, he stopped walking and stared.

[Ananta Regalon. Contribution rank: 214th.]

"We haven’t taken a single mission," he said, calling the other admins’ eyes to it. "This is just from holding our own ground."

"It means we are holding it well," Marcus said. He looked out at the wave, which had not shrunk and would not shrink for hours yet, and his eyes drifted to the mission panel, where the calls for aid had multiplied from hundreds into thousands. One pulsed close, two territories down the rim, above a kingdom whose name he did not know, on a stretch going slowly and steadily red.

Fraisea followed his gaze, and then his thought. "The fifth and sixth towers walked that way," she said quietly. "Whatever is failing down there is about to fail faster."

Marcus did not say anything about it yet. The night was long, the family was bloodied but whole, and the dark was already gathering its next argument out beyond the light.

But he left the panel open.