The second day opened grey and damp, a low mist clinging to the acid lake's surface and drifting in ragged sheets across the basin floor, thick enough that the first sentries mistook it for smoke and nearly sounded a false alarm before the actual Orc engineers came into view behind it. Rocks replaced shields as the day's opening move, the Orc engineers hauling boulders forward under covering fire from archers positioned well outside crossbow range, building a crude, makeshift causeway across the ruined moat crossing one backbreaking load at a time while ladder crews assembled behind them out of green-cut timber that still wept sap along its raw edges.
"They're going to reach the top of the wall this time," Andrea said, watching the causeway's slow, grinding progress with a professional's flat calculation. "The causeway's ugly, but it'll hold weight. We should assume they make it."
"Then we make the top of the wall a worse place to be than the ground they're leaving," Remus said, and went to work.
Item Created: Mortar!
The mortar's construction had eaten a full day of design work he hadn't advertised to anyone but Leo, hours spent hunched over the same scrap of butcher's paper, charcoal wearing down fast enough now that he'd started rationing his own strokes the way he was rationing everything else in this fortress, sketching and rejecting three separate barrel lengths before the arc finally sat right in his head. Too short, and the shell would clear the wall and land uselessly beyond the causeway. Too long, and the added weight would eat into the charge's own force before the round ever left the tube. He settled, in the end, on a squat iron tube braced into the tower's foundation, angled to lob a charge well beyond the wall's own base rather than simply detonating against it, and he'd built two of them, one for each flank, hoping he'd never actually need to test whether his math on the trajectory held up under real conditions.
The Orcs reached the causeway's far end by midafternoon and began raising ladders in a ragged, overlapping wave, dozens of them at once, more than the wall crew's crossbows could realistically thin out before the first climbers reached striking distance.
"Fire the mortars," Remus ordered, and Leo, stationed at the second tube with hands that were shaking slightly and a face gone pale with concentration, dropped the first charge down the barrel exactly the way Remus had drilled him to. It was not, Remus knew, the work Leo had spent his whole life imagining himself doing, hunched over a weapon of war instead of a research thesis, and yet the man's hands, for all their shaking, didn't hesitate once.
Gunpowder Charges Used: 4. Remaining: 24.
The round arced out over the wall and detonated squarely behind the advancing front line, throwing bodies and debris into a churn of smoke and screaming, and Remus, at the first tube, fired his own round a half-second later.
Gunpowder Charges Used: 4. Remaining: 20.
"Again," he called, and again, feeding charge after charge into the tubes as fast as the barrels could cool enough to accept the next round, each detonation buying another few seconds of chaos in the Orc ranks below, another few climbers who never made it to the ladders at all.
Gunpowder Charges Used: 8. Remaining: 12.
"Remus." Andrea's voice cut through the noise, sharp and immediate in a way that made him turn before he'd fully processed the words. "Twelve left. You're burning through this faster than the ladders are actually reaching the top."
"I know the number," he said, and heard, even as he said it, how flat and clipped it came out, more defensive than he'd meant it to sound.
"Then use it like you know it," she said. "Or tell me what you're actually planning to do when it hits zero, because right now you're the only one holding that number in your head, and everyone else on this wall is fighting like the mortars are going to keep firing forever."
He held her gaze a beat longer than he needed to, something in him wanting, badly, to simply say I have it handled the way he'd have said it to a client back on Earth, projecting a confidence he wasn't sure he actually possessed, and made himself, instead, tell her the truth.
"I don't have a plan for zero yet," he admitted. "I'm building it as I go."
"Then stop feeding both tubes and start rationing," she said. "Save the second tube's charges entirely. Fire only the flank that's actually under real pressure. You can't defend both sides at full burn and still have anything left for the third day."
It was, he recognized, exactly the kind of advice he should have given himself an hour ago if he hadn't been so busy performing competence at everyone around him instead of actually practicing it. He throttled the second mortar down to nothing and concentrated every remaining charge on the flank actually taking climbers, and the ladders that did reach the top that afternoon met crossbow fire and the Stone Guardian's blade rather than a second wave of shells, costing more of the defenders' own strength than the mortars would have but leaving something, finally, in reserve.
The fighting ran raw and close along the wall for the better part of two hours, the retired soldier's voice cutting through the noise again and again with the same barked, practiced corrections he'd been giving all morning, and more than once Remus caught himself gripping the mortar's iron rim hard enough to hurt, watching climbers he couldn't spare a charge for get turned back by nothing more than crossbow fire and the sheer, stubborn refusal of twenty-eight ordinary people to step back from a wall they'd been told, by a boy not much older than most of them, that they could actually hold. By nightfall the causeway crews had lost close to fifteen thousand more, and the Orc drums went quiet for the first time since the siege began, the whole basin settling into the particular, heavy silence of an army deciding what it still had the stomach for.
"Twelve left," Remus said quietly, to Andrea, once the wall had gone still enough for a private word. "Thank you. For saying it plainly instead of letting me find out the hard way."
"I'm not interested in watching you find things out the hard way when saying them plainly costs me nothing," she said. "Try to remember that before you decide, next time, to carry a number like that alone."
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