Noon should have been bright. But in the Hidden Valley, noon was a bruised, purple twilight.

  Smoke from the burning mountains choked the sky, casting a sickly pallor over the three hundred souls waiting behind the barricades. The heat was oppressive, heavy with the smell of sulfur and fear.

  A silhouette vaulted over the wooden wall, landing in the dirt with a wet thud.

  Liam didn't look like an elf anymore. He looked like a statue dredged from a bloody river. His leather armor was caked in red dust and black slime. A gash on his arm was bound with a rag that was already soaked through.

  “Liam,” I said, stepping forward.

  He waved me off, stumbling toward the supply dump. He didn't ask for water. He grabbed a heavy quiver of arrows and slung it over his shoulder. Then a second one. Then a third.

  “You’re overloading,” I noted, eyeing the sheer weight of the wood and steel on his back.

  “I’m restocking,” Liam rasped, his voice sounding like sandpaper. He grabbed a waterskin, uncorked it, and dumped half of it over his head to wash the grit from his eyes before drinking the rest. “I bought us four hours. I killed a lot of officers. But the anthill is kicked, Kaelen. They are angry.”

  He wiped the water and grime from his face, revealing eyes that were hard and cold.

  “Get to the tower,” I ordered. “Don't miss.”

  Liam nodded and began to climb the supply crates to the sniper’s nest we had rigged.

  I turned to the line. The rebel soldiers were shaking. I could hear the rattle of spear shafts against shields. A young boy near me—no older than sixteen—was hyperventilating, his eyes fixed on the empty canyon mouth.

  I walked over to him. I gripped his shoulder. Hard.

  “Look at me,” I commanded.

  The boy tore his eyes away from the horizon and looked at me.

  “Don't look at the dark,” I said, my voice calm and low. “Look at your shield. Look at the man next to you. You protect him, he protects you. The rest is just noise.”

  The boy swallowed and nodded, his grip on his spear tightening.

  Then, the noise stopped.

  The wind died. The birds had long since fled.

  Thrum.

  The water in the cooling buckets rippled.

  Thrum. Thrum.

  Dust danced on the wooden logs of the barricade.

  BOOM. BOOM.

  The sound hit us like a physical blow to the chest. The drums. Thousands of them. A deep, bone-rattling rhythm that synchronized with the heartbeat of every soldier on the wall.

  The canyon mouth turned black.

  It looked like a dam breaking. The Red Tide spilled into the valley—a solid, moving wall of black iron and violet flesh.

  First came the Void-Thralls, mindless husks frothing at the mouth. Then the Cultists in white bone-armor. Then the massive, lumbering shapes of Siege Ogres, dragging war machines that scraped sparks against the canyon walls.

  Torches flared, thousands of them, turning the valley floor into a river of fire.

  They stopped at the edge of the Lower Fields.

  Twenty thousand monsters stood staring at us across fifty yards of muddy, empty farmland.

  A Void-Priest, floating on a dais of bone carried by six thralls, raised a staff tipped with a screaming skull. He pointed at the wall.

  “FEAST!”

  The vanguard charged.

  Three thousand Void-Thralls broke formation. They shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—and sprinted onto the soft, muddy earth. They saw no traps. They saw no pits. They just saw meat.

  They ran fast. They made it thirty yards.

  I looked at the gate.

  Willow stood there. She looked tiny against the backdrop of the hoard. She wasn't wearing armor. She was covered in soot, her green dress stained and torn.

  She didn't snap her fingers. She raised both hands high, her eyes glowing with a terrifying, neon-green light.

  She slammed her palms down onto the timber of the gate.

  “WAKE UP!” Willow screamed.

  The magic didn't flow; it detonated.

  The mud of the Lower Fields exploded.

  Iron-Maw Sunflowers burst from the soil like jagged spears. These weren't plants. They were biological weapons. Their stalks were as thick as oak trees, pulsing with aggressive, muscular veins. They grew ten feet high in a heartbeat, their leaves unfurling with the sound of sharpening knives.

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  The blooms opened. They weren't petals. They were armored jaws, lined with rows of three-inch thorns.

  The first rank of the Thrall army didn't stop running; they were impaled.

  SNAP. CRUNCH.

  A massive stalk whipped out, snatching a running Thrall by the waist. The jaws clamped shut. The plant bit the demon in half.

  Black blood sprayed into the air, coating the leaves.

  And that was when the true horror began.

  As the blood hit the soil, the garden screamed.

  Willow threw her head back, laughing—a sound that wasn't entirely her own. She channeled the death. She fed it to the roots.

  The plants reacted to the blood like sharks to chum. They turned red. They grew teeth on their leaves.

  Vines erupted from the ground, wrapping around the ankles of the second rank, dragging screaming demons down into the mud, pulling them under the surface to be mulched by the roots.

  The flowers turned their heavy heads toward the trapped hoard.

  THWIP-THWIP-THWIP.

  They fired.

  Heavy, black seeds the size of cannonballs launched from the flower heads at point-blank range.

  A Cultist took a seed to the chest. It didn't just stop him; it punched a hole straight through his bone armor and out his back, blowing his spine apart.

  It was a meat grinder. The field became a slurry of mud, metal, and gore.

  “By the Gods...” Captain Vane whispered, stepping back from the parapet, her face pale.

  “Don't look away!” I roared. “Ready the line! They won't stop!”

  And they didn't.

  The enemy commanders didn't care about casualties. They pushed the third wave forward.

  The Void-Thralls began to climb over the piles of their own dead. They stepped on the corpses of the first wave to reach the stalks. They hacked at the vines with rusted axes, smothering the garden with the sheer weight of bodies.

  The meat grinder clogged. The ramp of flesh grew higher.

  They reached the kill zone.

  “Elmsworth! Now!” I signaled.

  The old man was running along the walkway, his beard tucked into his belt.

  “Volley!” Elmsworth shrieked. “The white tips! Aim for the biological mass!”

  Fifty rebel archers drew and fired. The arrows, coated in Elmsworth’s limestone-and-salt paste, rained down on the mass of demons climbing out of the garden.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  When the arrows hit, the alchemical paste reacted with the necrotic flesh.

  HISS.

  Smoke rose from the pit. Demons screamed as their skin bubbled and melted, their magical regeneration failing. The front line dissolved into a pile of steaming sludge.

  But behind them, ten thousand more were pushing.

  They hit the wall.

  Ladders slammed against the wood. Grappling hooks flew over the parapet.

  “Disorderly conduct!” Faelar bellowed.

  The dwarf stood on the walkway, kicking a ladder away with a metal boot. But below us, the main gate groaned.

  BOOM.

  A Siege Ogre had reached the doors. It didn't have a ram. It was using its shoulder.

  CRACK.

  Dust rained down. The heavy timber bar began to splinter.

  Faelar looked down.

  “Oh no you don't!”

  The dwarf vaulted off the walkway. He dropped twenty feet into the inner courtyard, landing with a ground-shaking thud.

  He sprinted to the gate. He didn't brace it with a beam. He slammed his shoulder into the wood, timing it perfectly with the Ogre’s hit.

  THUD.

  The force was immense. Faelar grunted, his boots sliding backward in the dirt, digging deep furrows.

  “Is that all you got, you ugly sack of suet?!” Faelar screamed at the wood.

  He turned his back to the gate, planting his feet, his armor locking up. He was holding two tons of monster back with sheer dwarven stubbornness.

  “Keep them off the walls!” Faelar yelled up at me. “I’ve got the door! Just don't let them open it!”

  On the supply tower, Liam was a blur of motion.

  He held three arrows in his drawing hand at once.

  Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.

  Three Cultist Sorcerers dropped from the ladders, arrows in their throats.

  Liam didn't stop. He was a machine. His fingers were slick with blood where the bowstring had cut through his calluses. The wood of his bow was smoking from the friction.

  He reached back to his first quiver. Empty. He reached for the second. Empty. He reached for the third.

  His hand grasped air.

  He looked down. The ground around the tower was paved with spent shafts.

  “Out,” Liam whispered.

  A Berserker crested the wall directly in front of him, screaming a war cry.

  Liam looked at his useless bow. He looked at the Berserker.

  “Catch,” Liam said.

  He threw the bow. It hit the Berserker in the face, distracting him for a split second.

  Liam vaulted off the tower, landing on the walkway. He didn't draw his daggers. He grabbed a pot of boiling oil that was sitting on a brazier.

  “Hot soup!”

  He kicked the pot over. The oil cascaded down onto a cluster of ladders.

  SCREECH.

  Six demons fell, clawing at their melting faces.

  Liam spun. A Cultist threw a spear at him.

  Liam didn't dodge. He snatched the spear out of the air mid-flight, spun his body, and drove the butt of the weapon into the Cultist’s stomach, flipping him over the wall.

  “I’ll take that, thanks!”

  He looked around for a weapon. He saw a crate of rusted junk Faelar had left—scrap metal intended for melting down.

  Liam grabbed a handful of rusty horseshoes.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” he muttered.

  A Void-Runner leaped onto the wall.

  Liam threw a horseshoe. He put his whole body into it.

  CLANG.

  The heavy iron shoe struck the Runner directly in the forehead. The demon went cross-eyed and collapsed.

  “Strike one!” Liam yelled, grabbing another handful.

  While the melee raged on the walls, a squad of Void-Runners detached from the main force.

  They sprinted along the far canyon wall, defying gravity, their claws digging into the stone. They were carrying glowing purple crystals on their backs.

  “Sappers!” Vane shouted. “They’re flanking! They’re going for the alchemist!”

  Elmsworth was busy mixing chemicals near the rear tower. He didn't see them.

  I was engaged with two Thralls. Liam was throwing horseshoes. Willow was exhausted from the garden.

  Nobody could reach them.

  Except one.

  Nugget was perched on top of a loaded catapult near the rear tower. He was watching the battle with the critical eye of a general.

  He saw the Sappers. He saw the purple crystals. He saw Elmsworth’s exposed back.

  The chicken looked down at the catapult. It was loaded with a spray of loose river stones, aimed at the sky. But the Sappers were on the wall to the side.

  Nugget hopped down onto the firing lever. He looked at the locking pin.

  Peck.

  The pin slid out.

  TWANG.

  The catapult arm snapped up. But because Nugget was standing on the lever, his weight shifted the aim. The spray of stones didn't go up. It went sideways.

  It was a shotgun blast of granite.

  The stones raked across the canyon wall.

  One stone struck a Sapper’s crystal pack.

  BOOM.

  The crystal detonated. The explosion triggered the Sapper next to it. And the next.

  A chain reaction of violet fire blossomed against the canyon wall, vaporizing the entire squad in a spectacular display of fireworks.

  Nugget, thrown into the air by the recoil of the lever, flapped his wings and landed gracefully on Elmsworth’s shoulder.

  He fluffed his feathers and let out a triumphant crow that cut through the noise of the battle.

  “Good bird!” Elmsworth shrieked, checking his eyebrows for singe marks.

  The first wave was dead. The garden was a pulp of mud and meat. The ladders were burning.

  We had held.

  I leaned against the parapet, gasping for breath, wiping ichor from my eyes.

  “Is that it?” a rebel soldier asked, hope in his voice.

  I looked out at the canyon mouth.

  The smoke parted. The ranks of the enemy army split down the middle.

  The ground shook. Not a drum beat. A footstep.

  From the darkness of the pass, a figure stepped forward.

  It was twelve feet tall. It wore plate armor that seemed fused to its flesh. In its hand, it dragged a flail with a head the size of a boulder, dripping with green fel-fire.

  The Void-Juggernaut.

  It didn't roar. It didn't run. It simply raised the flail and pointed it at the gate Faelar was holding.

  I gripped my spear until the wood groaned.

  “Brace the gate,” I whispered. “The heavy hitter is here.”