The first wave didn’t last long.

  Alvine and Julie took out the Copper-ranked chaff fairly quickly before moving their sights to the tougher Bronze-ranked beasts. Only a few of them died before they reached the minefield.

  The rest got obliterated instantly the moment they set foot within the first defensive line. The explosive traps tore them to shreds.

  “Damn! What did you pack in those things?!” Bori shouted from below. “That made the ground shake!”

  Eri grimaced. He was too busy analysing the field to answer.

  Most of the mines in the first line had gone off. Eri had instructed their ranged Chosens to deliberately target the weaker swarms first so that the mines would not needlessly detonate. But if even the Bronze-rank demons were hardy enough to shrug off their regular attacks…

  Well, they still have their Arts to play, and Eri had more bombs besides. So long as Elen reached them in time…

  “More incoming!”

  Silver-Cores this time: a trio of Marrowcrabs and a worrying new demon.

  /-/

  Sludge Eater

  Lvl 76 Mud Demon

  A disgusting Silver-Core aquatic Demon born from the alchemical refuse of Caustic Oil reactions. Its body is a formless mass of tar-like ooze, constantly shifting and dripping with corrosive slime. Despite its sluggish appearance, the demon is deceptively strong, able to engulf prey in its viscous bulk and dissolve flesh within minutes.

  /-/

  “Ew, gross!” Julie gagged. The stench from the creature was horrendous. “Raharim, do something!”

  “What am I, your personal purifier?” the priest grumbled before waving his glowing medallion and mitigating the horrendous odour.

  Alvine threw a supersonic javelin towards the enormous blob. The tip sank into the gelatinous mass and did no harm.

  “Normal attacks seem ineffective,” Alvine asked, grimacing. “Should I use an Arte to tear it apart?”

  “I should hope so! I don’t want to fight that thing in close combat!” Bori pleaded.

  “Sheesh, all he does is complain,” Julie murmured, holding up a detonator to Eri. “So I just twist this and it works, right?”

  Eri nodded. “You should probably give the people below some notice before—”

  Julie twisted it.

  A spark of electrical charge ran down several hundred metres of conductive wiring before reaching the pile of satchel charges buried beneath the monsters.

  The resulting explosion knocked everyone to their feet. The building vibrated hard, and for a dreadful moment, Eri feared he had miscalculated the yield and was about to cause the station to collapse.

  Thankfully, the building held on — dwarven engineering once more proving its worth in gold.

  “Maybe it’s just me, but I would like some warning before I GO DEAF AGAIN!” Bori yelled. “MY EARS ARE BLEEDING! MEDIC!”

  Eri groaned as he sat up. The Silver-Cores were dead; the explosives did their job.

  “That. Was. AMAZING!” Julie giggled excitedly. “Hey, can you teach me how to make them? I think I might be able to strap some to my arrows.”

  “M-maybe if we survive,” Eri coughed. Alvine was glaring at him.

  “More incoming!” Joarris shouted.

  That quickly? Eri swore and sat up, eyes peering into the ruins. He counted the colossal, hulking figures of Silver-core Demons approaching from the hazy mist.

  One, two, three… ten, eleven, twelve…

  Goddamnit, I knew I should have prepared more bombs…

  ~~~

  Sometime later…

  “How… How long have we been fighting?” Bori panted, sabre drenched in blood. “An hour? Two? A whole day?!”

  “Calm down, it’s only been thirty minutes,” Joarris groaned, pulling his longsword out from a demon corpse — one of many that surrounded him. “Stay sharp! More incoming!”

  “I’m beginning to hate you saying that…”

  Howls and roars surrounded the pumping station as hell descended upon it.

  Eri struggled to light his matches as he crouched behind a loaded missile rack. Beside him, Julie fired arrow after arrow, barely stopping for breath or levity. Alvine was further in the building, sitting against a pillar. She was breathing hard, her face pale in pain as she clutched her bleeding chest, where a massive barded quill from a Krillfang had struck between her heart and her shoulder.

  “A single inch closer to the left, and you would be dead,” Raharim murmured as he healed her with glowing hands. Sweat beaded heavily on his forehead as he exerted himself. “Count yourself lucky.”

  “Your bedside manner is shit,” she hissed. “That is absolutely NOT what I want to hear.”

  Eri finally lit the missile rack and backed off as the fusillade went off.

  A dozen iron tubes belched fire and smoke all at once, the rockets shrieking skyward like enraged banshees. Trails of crimson sparks arced wildly against the night sky — some spinning end-over-end, others weaving drunkenly — before plunging down into the seething tide of scaled flesh below.

  Explosions ripped the ground apart. Jagged firebursts tore through the masses and made great choking plumes that mixed into the purple fog. The swarm stampeded through their own burning comrades, only for stray rockets to crash into their ranks, scattering limbs. Amidst the cacophony, one rocket buried itself in a Marrowcrab’s joint, hissing before erupting like a firework, showering the battlefield in deadly shards of bone.

  Dozens died, joining the mangled remains of the fallen within the third, second, and last defensive line. Yet still more came, meeting the blade and shield of the two Chosens below.

  Bori, for all his frequent and exaggerated complaints, was a competent Swordfighter who duelled against any approaching beast with precision and fury. His sabre felled all who came too close, and his masterful parries and lightning-fast deflection were made for quite a sight as steel sparked against claws and barbed projectiles.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Joarris was less graceful by far, but his presence was an immovable rock against the swarm. With a greatshield in one hand and a longsword in the other, the man used his massive weapons to cleave and crush his foe. His armour and defensive Artes made the swarms’ talons and claws useless. It was as if he were a steel giant playing among children.

  But exhaustion was catching up with them. Joarris slipped up, his steel helm coming loose when a stray talon sliced through the strap. The loose helmet impaired his vision for a second, and he would have died from a jumping mass of Blackwater Spawns had Bori not intervened at the last second and cut them to bloody ribbons with a Second Form Sword Arte.

  “Come on, Bossman. You’re supposed to be the one guarding me, not the other way around.” Bori was shaking badly, his body reacting poorly to the overtaxed Core.

  Joarris took off his ruined helmet and used it to bludgeon a Blackwater Spawn gnawing at his greaves. “Fall back! You can’t keep fighting like this!”

  “Well, I would really like that, but you’re a little outnumbered here, pal. Can’t leave you alone,” the Swordfighter panted. “How did this plan go again? ‘Oh, let’s light up a massive bonfire in the middle of demon-infested territory. Surely nothing could go wrong, right?!’ Why did we think this was a good idea?!”

  “It was the only idea.” Joarris rested against his longsword. “Either help arrives, or we are dead. There was no way we were going to fight our way out of the port.”

  A bone-chilling roar filled the air. The ground started shaking with heavy tremors. Joarris nearly stumbled. Bori fell to the blood-soaked ground and groaned, not even bothering to get up.

  “Oh, come on!” he wailed. “You lot again?!”

  From behind the mass of trampled demon corpses, three King Hydras slithered forth, their horrid bulk flattening bodies to gooey black paste.

  “Oi, demon kid! I take back everything bad I said about you!” Bori shouted, his voice cracking. “If you kill those three, I’ll name my firstborn after you!”

  “As if a pervert like you could ever get a wife, you nasty highborn bastard!” Julie shouted from above, never one to miss an insult even in the face of impending death. “Also, Eri can’t fight anymore, so don’t bother asking!”

  “Retreat into the building!” Joarris shouted, pulling Bori up. “Lure them in, then hit them with everything you got!”

  The advancing Hydras slithered over the remaining mines, detonating them beneath their mass. Explosion tore chunks of acidic flesh from their entangled serpentine bodies, but their absurd regeneration soon restored them to fullness.

  Joarris and Bori retreated into the building. Alvine and Raharim were already downstairs.

  “Where’s Eri and Julie?” The leader shouted, his voice barely hard over the trembling building and the world-ending roars outside.

  “Preparing one last volley for our friends outside,” Raharim grinned, a touch mad. “I would tell you to cover your ears, but I doubt it will help one bit.”

  ~~~

  “Where in the world did you manage to get an entire goddamn battery of naval cannons?”

  Julie’s question was not without merit. Presented before her was the crowning monument to Eri’s pyromanic tendencies.

  Lined up at the front of the entire second floor’s North-facing wall were twenty-two 18-pounder bronze-cast cannons, each loaded on wheeled wooden carriages and ready to fire.

  All were aimed beyond the collapsed wall and towards the encroaching King Hydras.

  “I stole— Er, borrowed it from House Elathion’s armoury,” Eri hastily explained. “They used to maintain a fleet at Lake Violet Maw, so they had plenty of spares, and I thought— Look, it doesn’t matter!”

  “I think it does! All this time, I thought you were just a cute little kid, and you were packing enough firepower to take out an entire district in Kaldreach?!”

  “Not an entire district… Maybe a street or two, at most…”

  “Absolutely not my point—!”

  The Hydras’ roar blocked out any further conversation. The demons were seconds away from hitting the building.

  Eri had a half-smile on his face. The feeling blooming in him was unfamiliar. He was almost certain that even with this ‘broadside’ of cannonfire, the King Hydras could not be stopped. Death was almost certain, yet he found himself looking forward to the erupting fusillade nonetheless.

  Is this that ‘heroic defiance’ people keep talking about? Eri wondered, fingers held tight on the firing chord connecting all twenty-two cannons. One last stand. A roar of cannon fire to drown out the monsters.

  If I’m going to die, I might as well have some fun first.

  With a foreign, savage grin on the boy’s usually innocent face, Eri pulled the firing chord.

  The erupting howl of gunfire completely ruptured his eardrums.

  In a thunderous chorus, all twenty-two cannons roared at once, bronze throats belching iron at maddeningly close range to the demons. The broadside of 18-pounder balls shrieked through scant metres before slamming right into the towering forms of the howling Hydras.

  Flesh and scales simply ceased to exist as the iron shots turned the beasts into reeling crimson mists. Their scaled hides were of little protection, with each 18-pounder tearing clean through bodies while leaving enormous gaping holes. Heads shattered in sprays of blood and bone, others severed completely or hanging loose where cannonfire shredded neck and spine.

  Through the haze of blood, the Hydras’ immense bodies writhed, reduced in mass and churned into a frothing, venomous maelstrom. The ground boiled with toxic blood; the acid-soaked air melted the dwarven stones of the building.

  Eri was prone, brain-dazed and unable to think. Seconds passed before he had a mind to sit up. He could not hear anything. His vision was blurred with red.

  With shaking hands, he downed another health potion, letting the regeneration mend his overtaxed body. When his eyes finally healed, what he saw led him to despair.

  None of the three Hydras was dead.

  Oh, the cannons did their bloody work brilliantly. At such close range, the sheer force of the fusillade had completely mulched flesh and bones. The Hydras’ intact mass was reduced to barely a quarter.

  The problem was that the hasty and unaimed barrage lacked accuracy against the true target: the Hydras’ necks. And there were a lot of necks to sever.

  All three Hydras were missing heads, but not a single one of them was unfortunate enough to lose all nine of their heads. And so it was that their regeneration still kicked in, mending grievous wounds with ghastly speed.

  In a few minutes, the Hydras would be up again. Not fully recovered, perhaps, but still more than enough to finish the party off.

  Eri could only sit and watch.

  One minute passed. The mangled bodies of the Hydras began to stir.

  Two minutes passed. The first of their surviving heads rose with pained, savage fury.

  Three minutes passed. Half of the Hydras’ body mass had returned, though their severed heads were still bleeding stumps.

  Of the 27 heads present from three Hydras, Eri saw that only six were left in total: two on one of the Hydras, three on another, and the last one only had a single head left.

  So close. If only we had just a little more strength… Eri sighed. It was almost maddening to have failed when success was but a scant more effort away.

  Should have stolen more cannons, he thought to himself as the fourth minute passed and the Hydras howled once more. One of their heads locked onto him and began hovering closer.

  Elen had not shown up, nor had any of House Elathion’s men. Eri’s gambit had failed.

  Time for the big kaboom… Eri numbly pulled out the Hellbomb from his inventory. The Hydra's jaw opened, revealing rows of hissing fangs. Elen, sorry I couldn’t fulfil my promise. Take care of yourself—

  Seconds away before the Hydra lunged for him, a whirling motion at the periphery of his vision stopped him.

  Before he could even turn to look at it, a spinning greatshield slammed into the Hydra’s neck. The razor edges of the enormous steel slab decapitated the beast instantly.

  Eri blinked. His strained senses detected a flood of new Mana signatures approaching.

  Silver-Core Chosens, led by a Gold-Core.

  Eri deactivated the Hellbomb and chuckled, his voice nearly cracking with relief.

  “What took you so long?” he said.

  Elen leapt up and violently retrieved her thrown greatshield from within the meat, her boots crushing the dead Hydra’s head in the process.

  “More like what didn’t take me so long, brat,” she panted heavily, armour damaged and blood leaking from a gored eye. “You woke up the whole damn nest. I was kidding before, but I’m not now: you are grounded for the rest of your bloody life, you hell-cursed troublemaker.”