For one, single, beautiful moment, there was silence.

  It was the heavy, ringing silence of a plan so perfectly and instantly rendered obsolete that it looped past failure and became a form of abstract art.

  We stood on the ridge line, staring down into the abyss. Below us, Faelar Stonefist—our glorious, drunken idiot—surfed down a steep cliffside on a wave of shifting gravel, dust, and dwarven rage.

  Liam was the first to speak. He lowered his hand from his face, his silver eyes wide.

  “Gods above,” he whispered, his voice tinged with horrified admiration. “He’s magnificent. He’s like a landslide with a drinking problem.”

  The moment passed. Reality crashed back in.

  “DAMN IT!”

  The word was torn from my throat. It was a sound of pure, primal frustration. All my training, all my discipline, all the hours spent staring at maps—gone. I didn't have a plan anymore. I had a crisis management scenario.

  “ALRIGHT, NEW PLAN!” I roared, drawing my spear and banging it against my shield. “LIAM, KILL THE ARCHERS! ELMSWORTH, DO SOMETHING CONFUSING! WILLOW, PREPARE FOR CASUALTIES!”

  “Which part?” Willow cried out, looking between the cliff and the cultists.

  “ALL OF IT! MOVE!”

  Liam didn’t need to be told twice.

  “Finally, a strategy I can understand,” he muttered. His bow was in his hands before he finished the sentence.

  He moved with a liquid grace, a blur of motion against the setting sun. Twang. An arrow hissed through the dry air.

  A hundred yards away, the cultist in the western tower jerked back as if punched by an invisible giant. A black-feathered shaft sprouted from his chest. He toppled over the railing, plummeting into the pit.

  Twang.

  The second guard on the eastern tower had just enough time to register his companion’s death. He turned, raising a crossbow. Liam’s second arrow took him neatly through the eye.

  He crumpled without a sound.

  “Two down,” Liam called out, reaching for a third arrow. He frowned at his quiver. “I’m light on arrows. This is going to be tight.”

  “Then don’t miss!” I yelled. “Elmsworth! Support!”

  “A glorious, beautiful mess!” Elmsworth cackled from beside me. His eyes were gleaming with scholarly zeal. “Unplanned variables are the crucibles of discovery! Observe: a practical application of Kinetic Petrology!”

  The wizard slammed his staff onto the ground. The purple light that pulsed from it was not a flash, but a deep, resonant hum that sank into the rock beneath our feet.

  The cliff faces around the quarry seemed to groan in response.

  With a sound like a thousand grinding teeth, dozens of crude, flapping shapes peeled away from the stone walls. They weren't living creatures. They were shards of slate and granite, animated into the shapes of jagged bats.

  “Fly, my pretties! Fly!” Elmsworth shrieked.

  The stone bats swooped down into the quarry, a chaotic swarm of razor-edged rocks. They dive-bombed the cultists on the floor, chipping at armor and slicing open unprotected flesh.

  And then Faelar arrived.

  He hit the quarry floor with the force of a dropped anvil. He didn't stumble. He didn't roll. He landed in a crouch, a chaotic heap of dwarf and iron that somehow transferred all that momentum into a devastating spin-attack.

  “HELLO!”

  The nearest cultist, who had been looking up at the stone bats, looked down just in time to see Bessie’s axe-head coming for his sternum.

  The sound was a sickening, wet crunch that echoed in the sudden chaos.

  Faelar roared with laughter, pulling his axe free from the ruined torso with a spray of blood and gore.

  He was a bellowing, staggering, unstoppable problem, and he was having the time of his life.

  “Right then, you black-robed bastards!” he bellowed, his voice slurring slightly as he swayed. “Who’s next for a trim? The barber is IN!”

  “He’s drawing their attention,” I said, analyzing the flow of battle instantly. “He’s going to get surrounded. Charge!”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  I didn't wait for the others. I charged down the cart path, my shield up, my spear tip steady. I wasn't just a commander now. I was a weapon.

  I hit the quarry floor at a sprint. It was already a charnel house.

  Faelar was a whirlwind in the center of the pit. His axe was a continuous blur, his drunken footing making him an unpredictable, weaving target. But he was fighting three men at once.

  I saw a cultist with a spear moving into Faelar’s blind spot.

  “Faelar, six o'clock!” I shouted.

  I didn't slow down. I threw my weight behind my shield and slammed into the cultist just as he lunged. Bones cracked. He flew backward.

  I didn't stop. I stepped over him, thrusting my spear into the throat of a second attacker who was raising a sword.

  Thrust. Twist. Retract.

  The movement was muscle memory. The Citadel had taught me to fight in lines, in formations. But here, in the mud and dust, there were no lines. There was only the space I controlled with my reach.

  “Kaelen! Left!” Liam shouted from somewhere above.

  I ducked instinctively. A heavy iron chain whipped through the space where my head had been.

  I spun. A hulking overseer was swinging a length of chain like a flail.

  I stepped inside his guard. He tried to backpedal, but I was faster. I swept his legs with the shaft of my spear, bringing him down, and finished him with a downward thrust.

  “Status!” I barked, scanning the battlefield.

  “I’m out!” Liam yelled.

  I looked up. The elf was sliding down a scree slope on a stolen shield, firing his last arrow into a cultist’s knee.

  “Out of arrows!” Liam corrected, drawing his daggers. “Switching to close quarters! I hate close quarters! It ruins the fabric!”

  “Overseers are going for the prisoners!” Willow’s voice cried out, high and panicked.

  I looked toward the back of the quarry. The guards, realizing they couldn't stop Faelar, were turning their rage on the captives. A line of archers was taking aim at the huddled workers.

  “Willow, stop them!” I ordered, deflecting a sword blow with my shield.

  “I won’t let you hurt them!” Willow screamed.

  She ran past me, ignoring the fighting. She slammed her open palms onto the dusty, stone ground.

  “GROW!”

  She wasn't trying to build a wall this time. She was trying to summon a shield. But the corruption in the soil twisted her intent.

  The ground groaned.

  Thick, gnarled roots—grey and hard as iron—erupted from the quarry floor. They didn't just block the arrows. They lashed out.

  “Willow, control it!” I shouted.

  The roots wrapped around the archers, crushing bows and bones alike. But they kept growing. They wove together into a massive, thorny dome over the prisoners, trapping them inside but keeping them safe.

  It was effective. It was also terrifying.

  A new roar, this one deep and inhuman, ripped through the air.

  The command tent in the center of the quarry exploded outward.

  A hulking, goat-headed demon—twice the size of the ones in the swamp—burst forth. It held a massive iron maul. Beside it stood the Cultist Leader, a man in ornate crimson robes wielding a curved, serrated dagger that glowed with a sickly green light.

  The Leader pointed at Faelar. “Kill the dwarf!”

  The demon charged.

  “Oho! The big uglies are out to play!” Faelar cheered.

  He met the charge head-on. Bessie clashed with the iron maul in a shower of sparks. The impact drove Faelar’s boots inches into the stone floor.

  He was strong, but the demon was stronger. It shoved him back. As Faelar stumbled, the Cultist Leader lunged, his serrated dagger flashing.

  “Faelar!” I shouted, sprinting toward them.

  I was too far away.

  The dagger carved a deep line across Faelar’s side, shearing through mail and leather. Blood sprayed.

  Faelar roared—not in laughter, but in pain. He swung Bessie wildly, forcing them back, but he stumbled, clutching his side.

  “The subject is compromised!” Elmsworth yelled from the ridge. “He requires a morale boost! Nugget! Vocalization Alpha!”

  The chicken, who was now the shimmering, iridescent color of an oil slick, launched from Elmsworth's shoulder. She soared down into the pit.

  She landed squarely on the helmet of a stunned cultist, puffed out her chest, and opened her beak.

  We expected a cluck. Maybe a squawk.

  Instead, the chicken let out the deep, resonant, earth-shaking roar of an Ancient Red Dragon.

  ROOOOOOOAAAAARRRR!

  The sound was impossible. It vibrated in our chests. The demon flinched, looking up at the sky in confusion. The Cultist Leader stumbled, dropping his guard.

  That was the opening.

  “For the beard!” Faelar gritted out through his teeth.

  He ignored his wound. He swung Bessie in a low, sweeping arc. The blade caught the demon behind the knee, hamstringing it. As the monster fell, Faelar brought the axe down on its neck.

  The demon dissolved into ash.

  The Cultist Leader, seeing his champion fall, turned to run. He sprinted toward the cave entrance, clutching his glowing dagger.

  “He’s getting away!” I yelled, engaged with two more guards.

  “No, he’s not,” Liam’s voice said.

  The elf appeared from the shadows of a cart. He had no arrows. He had thrown all his knives.

  He scooped up a discarded miner’s pickaxe.

  “Improvised ballistics!” Liam shouted.

  He hurled the heavy pickaxe end-over-end.

  It struck the Cultist Leader squarely in the back. The man arched, let out a choked cry, and fell face-first into the dust, dead.

  I finished my opponents and ran to the center. The battlefield was quieting. The remaining cultists, seeing their leader dead and a dragon-roaring chicken circling overhead, threw down their weapons and fled.

  “Secure the perimeter!” I ordered, my chest heaving. “Liam, check the Leader! Faelar, sit down before you fall down!”

  I moved to Faelar, who was leaning on Bessie, looking pale beneath the grime.

  “Tis but a scratch,” the dwarf muttered, swaying.

  “It’s a gash, you stubborn mule,” I said, checking the wound.

  Across the clearing, Liam knelt by the body of the Cultist Leader.

  He retrieved the pickaxe with a grimace of distaste. He patted down the corpse quickly, checking pockets.

  I watched him pause.

  He pulled the serrated, green-glowing dagger from the Leader’s dead hand. He held it up for a second. His head tilted, as if he were listening to something. A strange look crossed his face—confusion, then a cold, guarded curiosity.

  He didn't call out. He didn't show it to me.

  Quickly, smoothly, he slid the dagger into a hidden sheath at the small of his back.

  He stood up, wiping his hands on his tunic, and turned to face us, his mask of indifference back in place.

  “Target neutralized,” Liam called out. “And I am charging the Citadel for a manicure. This mining equipment is murder on the cuticles.”

  I looked around the quarry.

  Willow was dismissing the root-cage, freeing the terrified prisoners. Elmsworth was chasing a glowing beetle. Faelar was bleeding but grinning. Nugget was preening on a corpse.

  It was an absolute disaster. And it was a victory.

  “We’re clear,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Good work. Now someone find me a bandage.”