The sentries raised the alarm on the second afternoon, a thin, ragged shout passed hand to hand along the new wall until it reached the tower where Remus stood watching the horizon through a spyglass improvised, days earlier, from a Craft he'd been rather proud of at the time.
"Orcs," the nearest sentry called down, voice cracking. "A lot of them."
Skill Activated: Search!
Enemy Force Detected: Orc Army, Approximate Strength: 100,000.
Even having braced for the number, seeing it confirmed in cold, bloodless System text hit differently than hearing it secondhand from Octavius's captured officer had. A hundred thousand. Twenty-eight defenders, plus a Lorekeeper's apprentice, a demon wearing a servant's face, and a Stone Guardian and Wind Archer he'd built out of two dead wyverns' cores.
"Positions," he called, and the wall crew scrambled to obey, crossbows already loaded with the steel-tipped, Reekus-laced bolts he'd spent the last day supervising in earnest, thirty men and women who two weeks ago had been farmers and shopkeepers now holding weapons they'd only fired at practice targets a handful of times. The baker's wife took her place at the eastern angle of the wall without being told twice, jaw set, knuckles white around her crossbow's stock, and the retired soldier moved down the line checking grips and stances with the brisk, muttered corrections of a man falling back into an old, well-worn habit that his knees had never quite let him forget even after his body had.
Down in the basin, the drums grew loud enough to feel through the soles of Remus's boots before they were loud enough to properly hear, a slow, patient, bone-deep rhythm that seemed designed less to intimidate than simply to say, plainly, we have all the time we need, and you don't.
The Orc army halted at the sight of the new fortifications, a visible ripple of surprise passing through their ranks, clearly having expected an undefended eastern border and finding instead raised walls, a moat, and murder holes along a battlement that hadn't existed the last time anyone had scouted this position. The surprise didn't last. Within the hour they were advancing again, drums beating a slow, patient rhythm that carried across the whole basin.
"Hold," Remus called, watching the front ranks close the distance through the spyglass, forcing himself to wait past the point his own nerves wanted him to give the order, the same discipline he'd learned running load tests back on Earth: you didn't fire the safety margin away before you actually needed it. "Hold. Hold. Now."
The first volley went out in a ragged, overlapping wave, bolts arcing down into the advancing lines and dropping Orcs by the dozen, the Reekus root doing its slow, secondary work on anyone merely grazed rather than killed outright. The Orcs kept coming anyway, absorbing the losses the way a tide absorbs stones, and it took three full volleys before the front ranks finally broke and the whole force pulled back out of range, leaving something close to ten thousand of their own dead and dying scattered across the basin floor.
A ragged, disbelieving cheer went up along the wall. Remus didn't join it. He was already watching the enemy camp reform in the distance, already doing the math on how many more times that exact volley would work before the Orcs adapted to it, which, he suspected, wouldn't be very many times at all.
They didn't have to wait long to find out. The second advance came with shields raised overhead in a tight, disciplined formation, Orc steel dense enough to shrug off bolt after bolt without so much as slowing the advance.
"They learn fast," Andrea observed, standing at his shoulder, unbothered by the sight in that same unshakeable way she seemed unbothered by most things.
"They're not stupid," Remus agreed. "Just outmatched on materials, so far. Bring up the second measure."
The shielded ranks reached the fortress's outer approach exactly as planned, packed shoulder to shoulder onto the narrow bridge his design had forced them into, and Remus gave the signal himself, watching from the tower as the Wind Archer's flaming arrow found the charge buried in the bridge supports below.
Gunpowder Charges Used: 12. Remaining: 28.
The bridge went up in a single, tremendous crack that Remus felt in his own chest from two hundred feet away, timber and shield-wall both pitching sideways into the moat's acid-dark water, a scream rising up from the ranks that had been standing on it a half-second before and were, now, dissolving in a churn of dark water that Remus made himself watch rather than look away from, because he'd built the weapon and he owed it, he thought, at least that much honesty about what it actually did.
Twenty-eight remaining, he thought, watching the number sit there in the corner of his awareness like a gauge he couldn't stop checking. Twenty-eight, against a hundred thousand and change, minus however many the day's fighting had already cost them. He didn't say the arithmetic out loud to anyone. He only did it, over and over, every time he closed his eyes that night, the number refusing to leave him alone even in the brief, thin sleep he allowed himself between watch rotations.
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