The third morning came in grey and close, low cloud pressing down over the basin, and the Orc army that formed up at dawn looked, if anything, angrier than the two days before had left it, drums beating faster, a harder, more desperate edge to the whole advancing mass that told Remus this wasn't going to be a probing attack. This was going to be everything they had left.
"Twelve charges," he said, mostly to himself, standing at the tower rail and watching the front ranks close the last stretch of open ground. "Twelve, and whatever's still standing on this wall by the time they run out."
He'd spent the night rationing in his head exactly the way Andrea had told him to, deciding in advance where each remaining charge would go rather than spending them reactively the way he had on the second day: four for the causeway approach if they tried to widen it, four held in absolute reserve for a genuine collapse, and four he'd allow himself to use defending the main gate, the position he'd judged, from every angle he could think to check, the most likely place a breach would actually happen.
He had not, he would think later, checked every angle carefully enough.
The main assault came exactly where he'd expected it, and the four charges he'd allotted there bought exactly what he'd hoped they would, a collapsed section of causeway and a Wind Archer working the gap methodically, arrow after arrow finding gaps in the press of bodies below. He allowed himself, for one dangerous half-second, something close to relief.
The shout that broke that relief came from the eastern wall, the flank he'd judged safest of all because it backed directly onto the acid lake itself, a natural barrier he'd trusted the way he'd trusted the moat, without ever actually testing whether anything Orcish could survive contact with that water long enough to matter. He'd been wrong. A dozen Orcs, skin blistered and smoking but alive, had crossed the shallowest stretch of the lake's edge on crude rope-and-plank rafts under cover of the main assault's noise, and they were already over the eastern wall by the time the alarm reached him.
"Remus!" Andrea's voice, from somewhere below, sharper than he'd ever heard it.
He was moving before he'd fully decided to, down the tower stairs two at a time, Stone Guardian nowhere near the eastern flank because he'd stationed it at the gate, Wind Archer mid-reload and unable to disengage from the causeway breach without leaving that gap wide open instead, and Remus arrived at the base of the eastern wall exactly in time to find three Orcs already inside the perimeter, one of them close enough that its raised blade was already falling before Remus's mind had finished cataloguing the danger it was in.
He could not equip a weapon. He had known that for six days. He had never, until this exact half-second, understood what that restriction actually meant, not as a rule on a character sheet but as a blade coming down at his own unarmed head with nothing between it and him but the length of his own arm.
The blade never landed. Andrea crossed the distance faster than Remus's eyes could properly track, the same blurred, impossible speed he'd seen her use in the alley outside Dinolfo's shop, and the Orc's arm separated from its body a hand's width above Remus's skull, close enough that a fine spray of dark blood caught across his cheek and the collar of his coat.
He stood frozen for a full three seconds after, staring at the fallen weapon inches from his own boots, hearing his own pulse loud and ragged in his ears over the continuing noise of the fight around him, before some old, buried instinct from a different life finally kicked his legs back into working order. His hands, when he looked down at them, were shaking badly enough that he had to press them flat against his own thighs to make them stop, and the fine spray of dark blood across his cheek had already begun to cool against his skin, tacky and strange, a sensation he suspected he was going to remember for a very long time regardless of how this siege ended. He had run the numbers on a hundred thousand Orcs without once, until this exact moment, running the much smaller and much more personal number of how close a single blade could come to ending him specifically, tonight, on this particular stretch of wall, because of a flank he'd judged safe and never once verified.
"Twelve," he said out loud, hoarse, mostly to himself, checking the number the way you'd check a wound to see how bad it actually was. "Two left. I have two left."
He used both of them without hesitation, not on the causeway, not on the gate, dropping the entire remaining reserve directly onto the raft-crossing point on the acid lake's shallow edge, the last charges he would ever have, the last forty-first he could never craft.
Gunpowder Charges Used: 2. Remaining: 0.
Note: No Gunpowder Charges remain. No further Charges can be produced from materials available on this site.
The blast collapsed the shallow crossing point entirely, sending a fresh wave of scalded, panicking Orcs back into deeper water they clearly hadn't planned to be in, and bought the eastern wall the handful of minutes it needed for the Stone Guardian, finally freed from the gate as the causeway assault broke, to arrive and finish what the last charges had started.
By early afternoon, the drums stopped entirely, and a lone figure walked out from the Orc line waving a white flag alongside a second flag, black sigil on red.
"Don't go down there," Andrea said, close at his side, her blade still unsheathed, still wet. "If I were commanding that force, I'd be sending exactly this to lure you out."
"It's a risk I have to take," Remus said, and found, to his own quiet surprise, that his hands had stopped shaking somewhere in the last hour. "We're out of charges. We're low on bolts. If there's a chance to end this without another day of fighting we can't actually afford, I have to try."
She didn't argue further, but she came with him, along with Leo, the Stone Guardian, and the Wind Archer, out through the ruined gate to where four Orcs waited, and the exchange went exactly as Andrea had translated the standard days before: a chieftain named Lord Goruk, dead in the previous day's fighting, his ceremonial blade offered by custom to the one who'd defeated him, and a plea, delivered with genuine, weary dignity, for the surviving Orc soldiers to be allowed to withdraw with their lives.
"We should finish them while we hold the advantage," Andrea said, low, for Remus's ears alone.
"I disagree," Leo said, quieter than she was, but no less firm, some new steadiness in him that hadn't been there four days ago. "Whatever they've done here, we prove something by choosing mercy that we can't prove any other way. I believe that's worth more than the bodies would be."
Remus weighed both arguments the way he weighed everything, and made his decision.
"I'll accept the surrender," he said, "in exchange for a thousand sets of Orc steel arms and armor, left here at the fortress."
"You shall have it," the messenger said, bowing his head, "and our thanks, for a mercy we did not expect to be offered."
A thousand Orcs filed forward within the hour and laid down their arms in a great, glittering pile at the fortress gate before withdrawing east in a long, ragged column, and only once they'd fully vanished over the horizon did Remus allow himself to say, out loud, the thing he'd been carrying silently since the second day.
"I ran out of gunpowder during that last attack," he told Andrea and Leo, watching their faces carefully for the reaction. "If they hadn't sent that flag when they did, I don't know what I'd have done next. I didn't have another charge to give this fortress. I want you both to know that, since you were the ones actually holding the wall with me."
Leo went pale, calculating, evidently for the first time, exactly how close the last two days had actually come.
"You should have told the rest of the wall crew that," Andrea said, but there was no real heat in it, only the same flat honesty she gave everything. "Not for their comfort. For their judgment. People fight differently when they know the truth about what's left in reserve, and not always worse. Sometimes better."
"I'll remember that," Remus said, and meant it, filing the lesson away in the same place he kept every hard-won rule the System had ever handed him.
Later, alone in the ruined keep's central hall, he turned Lord Goruk's blade over in his hands, admiring the fine, dark work of its edge, and pressed his palm against it out of pure habit.
"Identify."
Item: Goruk's Blade (Orc Ceremonial Weapon)
Design cannot be acquired. Prerequisite domain unknown: Orc Bloodforging.
He stood with that a long moment, turning the refusal over the same careful way he turned over every rule, and found, oddly, that he didn't mind it. Not everything had to be reproducible. Some things could simply be kept, once, as themselves, without becoming a template for a hundred more. He couldn't equip it, couldn't wield it, and would probably never fully understand how it had been made. He stored it anyway.
"Store. Preserve."
Item Stored (Preserve): Goruk's Blade!
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