I dreamed that night, for the first time since arriving on August. They had always been nonsensical and disjointed, but sometimes I could still pick fragments of reality out from them.

  The unfortunate truth was that it was always my nightmares that were the most vivid in hindsight. Dreams were sweet and smooth and slipped away like honey sliding down an ice sculpture. Nightmares, in my experience, were more like serrated shards of glass impaling themselves into the base of your neck.

  The nightmare that visited me was a familiar one—recurring, to my dismay.

  First, came the howling. It was the sound that underpinned everything else. Before the smell, the sight, before even a single thought crossed my mind, the sound always reached me.

  A full-blooded wail, an anguished thing that erupted from deep inside someone gripped me. It reached past my ribcage with an untextured pressure. It was like someone pressed the feeling of drowning around my heart, my lungs, my whole body. There was no struggle though, no agency, nothing but the pressure closing in around me. The source of it all? That sound, that man.

  Just a civilian. My training described him in unflattering, calculating terms. Early thirties, weathered face, innocent eyes—but vengeful, too. I stepped forward, lifting my off-hand as if to comfort him as he held his dying dog in his arms. I remember feeling grateful that he’d lived alone. Even so, the matted fur and the blood pooling on the laminate flooring stuck with me. My eyes raked over the apparition, this spectre. A normal dog, a normal man, and our response had been too late.

  Marines were death on pirates—except when we weren’t. Our response had been swift, but not swift enough. In the time it had taken for my squad to breach, there had been three human fatalities and one… Labrador retriever.

  I reached my hand out to the man. I’m still not sure why. To keep him in order so we could clear the rest of his quarters? As an instinctive, empathetic reaction? Whatever the reason, before my outstretched fingers could bridge the distance between us, something intervened. It was always the same thing, each and every time.

  A blur of grey swept through the room, more like a heat haze compressed into a mockery of the human form. It was lithe and unnatural, too thin to be real. It looked at me with a wicked and sadistic—but playful—grin. As if it knew what it was doing when it attached itself to my teammates and latched onto the backs of their necks and shoulders, like some kind of devilish parasite. The men around me kept walking around the man’s quarters, examining the insides of closets or under beds. With each step the creature sapped the strength from them. When one man fell, it jumped from one man to the next. They continued, oblivious. Then the last of my teammates slowed, their steps faltered, they stumbled short of their goal… and then finally, they slept.

  It had no eyes, not even a real body, but I felt it watching me after it took my brothers from me. All I could do was watch, too spellbound to shield them from their fate. I had this unshakable feeling it was grinning at me, relishing in my wordless horror.

  And then, the howling started again. It was different though. Not howling, whistling, familiar whistling.

  Three pop-cracks condensed down into one sound and ripped me from my nightmare out into the waking world. Then the whistling started again, doubling up on itself, sharp and shrill and angry.

  Mortars.

  My wits returned to me and I launched myself into an upright position.

  “Lights up!”

  Harsh, white lights burned the room’s state into my unadjusted eyes. I blinked hard and made an immediate grab for the rifle tucked between the bed’s frame and mattress, then threw myself upright and bolted out into the corridor. My momentum slammed me into the hard wall and I scrambled towards the armoury where my suit was charging, shedding clothing one-handedly as best I could.

  When I hooked the edge of the armoury doorway to pull myself to a stop I tossed my rifle at the feet of my armour and placed myself behind its open cavity. Shedding my socks with two quick motions, I stepped into it by rote manuever. My movements were hurried, but controlled.

  The familiar closure of the armour behind me left me deaf and blind for a moment and a console over my eyes scrolled as my armour shifted from ‘standby’ to ‘ready’. A moment after, the HUD synced up with my implants and the suit’s eyes became my eyes.

  As I turned around I saw Larsen bounce off the inside of the doorway and hop into her suit, much as I’d done. I remained where I was to stay out of the way, and retrieved my weapon from the floor. Next came Chen, surprisingly the most graceful of us all as he deftly maneuvered his bulk and weight into the room with surprisingly little speed lost.

  I cursed the designers of the building. Why hadn’t they thought to make these doorways and corridors wider? Seconds later Carver arrived and we were all filing out of the room with rifles in hand, sidearms and magazines hanging from our vests or attached to our armour. I checked my suit's charge; Forty-one percent. More than enough.

  The deep dark blue of the sky overhead twinkled with little diamonds. Then the mortars sounded out again. I hurried to the waiting ammunition storage, stuffing an extra two mags into my pouches as fast as I could. I checked over my gear again. It was a nervous compulsion. I didn’t want any failures or faults, not now. I could rarely afford them, but especially not now.

  “Trouble at the wall, where I set the mortars up.” Carver said.

  I nodded. My HUD was already populated with threats. More than that, really. It was drowning in them. That made me anxious. The symbols for the Hailstorm mortars were positively dwarfed by the sea of red markers behind them. I couldn’t suppress a shudder as it ran down my spine. There were hundreds, but it was one thing to see a number and quite another to see the odds displayed so clinically.

  “Double-time it, I want eyes on the threat.” I said, breaking into a run. We had the city decently mapped, at least certain parts of it. I made good use of the preparations.

  A large red light flashed at the edge of the city, high up in the air. It was like a brief but powerful burst of red fire just appeared. A shrill ripping accompanied it, the noise scattering around the city and cutting through the din of the civilians around me. I’d never seen anything like it, but I had little doubt it was an alarm of some sort. I hurried towards the source of the red flame.

  By now it wasn’t even a question in my mind that we were under attack. The only question on my mind was the severity of the threat. It was one thing to see hundreds of threat markers, but quite another to know if they were any true danger.

  As we left our compound we sped through cobblestone streets and later paved ones, passing by panicked, disturbed and hysterical citizens. I saw storefronts being closed and locked up, others hurrying home and bracing doors and windows with furniture. It seemed to me that this was a big deal to the people here.

  I wasn’t ready to rely on the often random and unpredictable reactions of civilians as evidence of that, but it was an indicator that the trouble that so often seemed to find me was back again. Of course, I’d known that the moment I’d been alerted to the mortars firing. The parameters Carver had set had been rather stringent, so for them to fire on automatic meant there was a very clearly hostile response from our allies along the walls and that something was taking an aggressive posture towards the city.

  “Make way!” I bellowed, taking up position as point man as I put on a burst of speed. I couldn’t go too fast, not wanting to accidentally kill anyone by colliding with them at high-speed. The streets were annoyingly congested, but a combination of our public address systems and our belligerent yelling cleared the way of those not smart enough to stay indoors. We quickly reached the end of a narrow street and it yawned open into a huge walled courtyard. I realised that this was the main gate outside, and that it was closed.

  “All three of you, up on that wall!” I barked, making for the stairs myself. They were precise blocks with textured steel plates embedded across their faces—and a simple steel guard rail. I supposed all that was for safety, but right now I didn’t give a damn about safety.

  The huge gate nearby was not only closed, but braced with equally massive long slabs of wood, three massive rectangles barring the doors’ operation. There was so much silver on the gates and bars that I wasn’t even sure any of it was made of wood at first, but all of it was, it was just enchanted to the high heavens, apparently.

  The runes covering the gates were gleaming, though whether the result of the moonlight and numerous fires lit nearby I couldn’t say.

  My brain catalogued everything around me in an instant and I spared few things more than a single glance. The gate wasn’t really my main area of of focus. The mass of shifting red profiles behind it was.

  I spied a long set of steps rising up one side of an equally massive wall. From Carver’s suit data I knew it was something like ten or twenty metres thick and about triple that in height. Taking the steps three or four at a time, I bounded up the steps and onto the wall by the mortars.

  I stumbled, the horizon was clear, but the ground about six-hundred metres from battlements was disturbed, or I should say—ripped open.

  A huge rhino-like creature—only with more symmetry—lumbered out of a gaping hole in the earth. The two sharp, curved horns protruding from its skull made it look almost demonic. Gleaming black carapace covered it from end to end and it advanced slowly, undeterred by anything we threw at it. All around it, hundreds of smaller creatures with similar appearances blazed across the flat, open ground.

  I watched as three streaks of something slid off the large creature’s slanted back and three explosions created plumes of dirt nearby. I growled, linking into the mortars. I needed to adjust their timing, as well as a host of other parameters. They were thinking of it as a soft-target, not a heavily armoured behemoth with slanted armour plating.

  Again, they fired. The HUD indicators told me that the mortars were just shy of depleting half of their stockpiled munitions. They’d paced their shots, I realised, not rapid-firing all their ammunition. That was good.

  What was not good, was that they were having little if any effect on such a target. I swapped them over to area denial, saturating the mass of smaller threats with high-explosive fragmentation shells.

  I stood next to the Hailstorms, thankful that they’d anchored themselves to the stone wall beneath their tracks so they could continue firing rapidly once I’d given them new orders.

  Even at a rate of six a second, we weren’t firing the mortars fast enough, I could see that. Of course, it was an entirely pointless observation; we didn’t have enough ammo to fire fast enough. We’d run out before we got them all if something didn’t change.

  “Carver, get some more mortar rounds up here! Whatever you’ve got, yesterday!”

  “Where the hell are all the mages?” Chen said, looking up and down the battlements.

  I growled. I didn’t like mysteries in the middle of a battle. It meant I was being outmaneuvered—if I was lucky.

  No doubt cursing my entire family line, Carver dropped from the wall, rolling up and away as he sprinted back the way we’d come. I turned my attention back to the battle quickly.

  “When they hit the wall, open up.” I said, checking my magazine and rifle again. I watched impatiently as the tide of red translucent profiles inched ever closer. They were fast for animals, or whatever they were. I was glad I’d grabbed an extra two magazine. I had no doubt I’d need them.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I realised this was what Davian had meant when he said that they would come from below. They had literally come right up out of the ground.

  Mercifully, the tide of shiny, black beetles had stopped bubbling up out of their hole in the earth. The ground outside the city was just fucking swarming with the bastards though, to say nothing of the big one leading the charge. Explosions tore gaping holes in the wave of smaller creatures, and I zoomed in one as they ran. They looked like the familiar I’d fought, only worse. They weren’t emaciated, they weren’t some raised construct.

  They looked designed, or perhaps evolved; more like an engineered weapon from a top-secret laboratory rather than an animal. I felt my lip curl into an expression of revulsion. They weren’t disgusting, exactly, but they were alien. They didn't really look like dogs, but that was the closest thing I could think of. Their skin, the way it moved and caught the light, it was all wrong, like compacted gravel undulating with the elasticity of flesh.

  I queried my suit for a comparison and a three-dimensional image of a half-size armoured Marine appeared superimposed on my HUD; So did one of those smaller creatures, both of them appearing to float next to each other. I supposed hounds were as good a name as any, at least until I figured out if the things had a name already. They were quadrupedal, so the comparison to a dog wasn’t entirely wrong, but no one would ever mistake them for one, or even a wolf. They were just too alien.

  The hound was about half the size of a man in armour, coming up to midsection of the Marine. Unarmoured, that’d be more like chest-height. Encased in black chitin and sporting jagged triangular teeth that filled a snarling maw, they looked deadly, and definitely predatory.

  Something told me these things loved to chew on bone, they exuded menace. I’d bet my suit’s air conditioning that they had serrated teeth. Two blade-like pincers jutted out from each shoulder more like tails than an arm or a leg. No doubt those pincers could pin a man down or just bisect him with a casual ease. My skin crawled, but it passed quickly when my focus shifted back to the fight.

  There were hundreds of the things rushing full speed at the outer walls, and the battlements where I stood, which were on top of them. The wave of hounds hit the wall with a thunderous crash, scrabbling against the stone, clawing at it. I swear I actually felt the impact, but it was probably just in my head. My suit had pretty good insulation from that sort of thing, and the wall was big and sturdy.

  The half-sized Marine and hound disappeared as I glared down at the seething mass of dark and angry monsters.

  “Open up on those things, full auto!” I yelled.

  I pressed my gun onto the parapet and depressed the trigger, dumping my magazine into the mass of flesh in front of me. It wasn’t that they were close, but that there were so many of them; I couldn’t miss.

  Explosions appeared near the base of the wall and I winced. I hated to think we might accidentally destroy the only thing keeping those hounds outside the city, to say nothing of the big bastard crawling along behind them but we couldn’t let that stop us from fighting, or they’d just rip the wall to bits themselves.

  Rather than resembling a dog or any kind of quadruped, the larger one was the size of a dozen shipping containers stacked together, it dwarfed any man I saw defending the city and if not for the sheer height of the outer walls it would’ve probably walked right over the top of them. Easily surpassing ten metres, it’s size and bulk was impressive. It’s general shape resembled a beetle or a scarab, though with a more rotund shape and almost certainly a tough outer shell. It’s slothful pace was perhaps the only good thing I could say about it, given that nothing we threw at it seemed to make the slightest bit of difference to it. I’d have placed good money on an air to ground package from an FTL-capable gunship making short work of it, but we didn’t have one of those, obviously.

  Finally, magic began to ripple through the enemy formation and reinforce us mundanes. I was certain that this wouldn’t be a single-pronged attack. Davian and his cult might have drawn up a twisted plan involving the wanton slaughter of an entire city, but they weren’t stupid. They wouldn’t go for a plan with a single point of failure.

  They were smart, fanatical amateurs, a tricky combination. A professional has limits, usually knows them and sticks to the realm of the possible and the sane lacking a good cause. An amateur usually doesn't know their limits, doesn't care what's possible and regularly flirts with insanity because they don't know any better or don't care enough to learn. Fighting a skilled amateur was in many ways, worse than fighting a professional.

  I emptied the magazine into the Hounds at the base of the wall again. I’ll happily admit that lacking the need to aim wasn’t actually a positive, since it only spoke to just how many of the damned things there were.

  I glanced to my left. Mages and mundane archers were doing much the same as I was, lightning and fire washing over the forces below with equal fury. The arrows were remarkably less effective, but there were far more of them at least. I grit my teeth, if the wall fell…

  Another red burst of fire appeared behind me somewhere deep inside the city, the familiar sound only adding to the rising tension. I whirled to get my forward-facing sensors oriented on it.

  I hated to do it, but if they were already inside, we needed to deal with that threat first. Perimeter defense had just become a secondary concern. “Leave the wall, we need to go check that out.”

  “What? You’re not just gonna leave them!” Chen said, turning to me as he threw a hand out, motioning to the archers and few mages providing a defense for the city.

  “We have to. We’re barely making a dent, anyway. Something’s going on in the city and we need to make sure these things don’t find another way in.”

  Larsen dropped from the height, much the same as Carver had, rolling to disperse the impact. From such a height, I had no doubt that the drop would create a small impact crater, but now wasn’t the time to worry about property damage.

  I went next and leaped lightly off the battlements, tucking into a ball in slow motion. I watched as the ground came rushing up to meet me with exhilarating speed. I slammed into the ground with a solid impact, it was like being hit by a car, only without the jarring pain that would accompany that. Immediately I put my head to one side slightly and my shoulder to the floor, bleeding my motion off as I came up out of the roll and onto my feet.

  “Proc, isolate that red flash and mark it as a combat signal. I want to know if anything else needs our attention.” I said, checking my rifle to make sure it hadn’t been damaged.

  A double-chirp sounded in my helmet, barely distinguishable from the noise of battle and the snarling and screeching on the other side of the wall.

  I followed along as Larsen led the way towards the alert. We passed through a street with a series of tall residences on either side, solidly built and tiled in a familiar fashion. It wasn’t a perfect funnel, but it was enough. We were vigilant, but I didn’t catch the motion in time.

  A hound leapt from a nearby roof, knocking me off my feet.

  Those two pincers, prehensile limbs of a sort scrabbled and slammed into my armour trying to find something they could puncture. My right arm was pinned to the ground by its forelimb at my elbow and another of its limbs had cleaved into my rifle. I growled, matching it’s own. I tried to twist and buck beneath it and get my limbs free but it was like an entire couch was on top of me.

  “Get this fucking thing off me!” I roared, trying to squirm free and get my gun hand free. Even as I did so, my left leg came up and kicked the thing in the stomach. It barely budged and felt more like a stone wrapped in leather than an animal, but the small movement it made was enough.

  I wrenched my left hand free and drew my pistol, firing into the thing’s stomach. The dull boom-boom of the hand cannon dislodged the creature with a pair of satisfying thunderclaps. It stumbled back and my right hand strained against nothing but air as its clawed limb left my arm. I raised myself to a prone firing position and fired directly into its head as it backed away. It didn’t run, or try to attack, just backed away, almost fearfully.

  I snarled and emptied the pistol. Four shots rang out and tore ragged chunks from its head, but I couldn’t tell if I hit anything vital, it screeched at me even as its head belched out a thick scarlet liquid. Then it turned and ran, leaping up onto the side of the building and scrambling up it with all the agility of a cat.

  I whirled round, suddenly aware that we weren’t alone. Another magazine found its way into my pistol on automatic. Carver and Chen struggled with their own beasts while Larsen had the honour of dealing with two, on on her gun hand and the other attempting to gorge itself on her armoured head.

  I picked Chen’s target, purely because his was the closest to me. I didn’t wait around and proceeded to fire six shots into the Hound’s centre of seen body mass. It barely budged, the pistol’s rounds left no discernible marks. I resisted the urge to spit and scream profanities, instead opting for a more practical solution.

  I and ran up and tackled it. It shifted, barely. It’d braced itself for my attempt to dislodge it. No stupid animal, clearly. Undeterred, my arm found the knife at my shoulder and the blade’s edge glittered as I pulled it from its sheathe. It aligned itself in the slice of time it had before it met the foe in front of me, a good thing, because I didn’t slow down for it.

  I drove the point of the blade into the thing’s neck, wrenching my knife around in an arc. A more low-tech solution appeared to be effective, and before I’d gotten around to a clean decapitation the creature sagged and then went limp.

  Rather than help Chen dislodge the corpse, I looked back up the street where I’d originally been pinned down and ran over to retrieve my rifle. Before my hands even touched it, I knew it was toast. A set of deep scars ran through the metal, destroying it’s functionality.

  I stifled a hot surge of shame and rage. What the hell was I going to do now, with just a shitty little pistol and a knife? I needed to stop getting myself into stupid situations, I was supposed to be smarter and wiser than this, damn it.

  I fed another magazine into my pistol and fired at Carver’s opponent. We’d all been fairly close together in a staggered dual column—insofar as you could have one with only four people. We’d kept a six metre gap between each of us. That meant Carver—who was at the rear of our formation—was only about ten metres way.

  My pistol spit out a steady authoritative boom as rounds slammed into the head of the hound standing on his chest. Fortunately, my aim was true and there wasn’t any blue-on-blue. Unfortunately, my attack wasn’t very effective and did little more than piss the hound off.

  Chunks of it’s head went missing, but it didn’t turn the thing into a gory modern art piece. The pistol I was carrying wasn’t as powerful as my battle rifle and while it was good for soft-shell and even hard-shell up to a point, this thing was tougher than that.

  It’s neck twisted and its obliterated mouth snarled at me, or tried to. Missing chunks of its mouth and jaw on one side made snarling a difficult prospect for it.

  I reloaded again, my knife leaving its sheathe again as I repeated my earlier effort. I ran up to the thing’s ruined head and made to plunge my knife deep into its skull, driving my weight into the blow.

  When I launched myself at this one though, one of those pincers diverted itself from Carver and lashed out at me. It hit me right in the shoulder, spinning me around and completely ruining my attack as my knife hand spun away from it.

  I jumped back, putting my knife between my body and its pincer again. I slashed defensively as that pincer tried to follow up with a stab, but it seemed to predict my movement and avoid the blade.

  Before I could close the distance, Carver got his left leg free and used it to kick the hound’s hind leg off his right leg. What followed was almost comical.

  Using both legs and his pinned arms as leverage Carver kicked the stomach of the beast and sent it flying into a building nearby. I whirled, only to see Larsen streak past with all the fury and speed of a graceless leopard. She headed for the building and I turned to take stock of the situation properly.

  We were all free of our death-puppies, but as my eyes flicked from each end of the street to the rooftops I realised we were being encircled. The roof held a number of these things, hissing and even growling at us as they prowled along the tops of the buildings.

  Ominously, the street in front and behind us was clear.

  “Why aren’t they attacking?” Chen asked.

  “Don’t worry about that shit right now, just move it!” With my knife in hand I kicked off from the ground and went soaring up and over the line of buildings on our right. As I crested the rooftops I tucked my legs in and dropped down on top of one of the sturdier two-story buildings, some kind of bakery.

  Normally, any Marine doing that kind of crap would be either chewed out by his drill instructor or shot by the enemy. Making yourself an easy target by jumping high into the air was about as obvious as wearing a big neon sign saying ‘shoot me’.

  Fortunately for us all, these were not exactly a conventional enemy and nothing took a shot at me as I hit the rooftop. My elevated height gave me the vantage point I needed to see a couple streets over. The streets crawled. Something must have opened a hole up for more of these things to come through because there were easily dozens. My suit couldn’t keep track of them all on visual but there were a confirmed forty, and it was a big city.

  I checked, and sure enough there was next to no return on most of my sensors. Ultrasound, radar, thermal, infrared, most of it was useless. A few worked, but they were extremely fuzzy and unreliable.

  “Move it! These things are cloaked and we’ve got to investigate that alert. Hold your fire unless they’re a threat. We don’t want the whole city noticing us.”

  “Investigate?” Carver said. “This whole city’s about to become a bloodbath!”

  “Yeah, and if it does, how long do you think we’ll last without our fabricator? We have to secure our gear. That fabricator is priceless.” I scowled. “Screw the civvies, we can’t afford to help them.”

  The harsh calculus of war was an old familiar friend to me, but I knew I’d catch some flak for my words from at least one of my friends.

  While I’d been talking, the other three had joined me on the rooftops and miraculously managed to hold onto their rifles, all three of them intact. I’d have to pinch one off one of the guards, if they were still alive anyway. It was a sobering thought, but I was sure I’d find one who wouldn’t miss his rifle.

  The sounds of battle blanketed the city. My processor’s estimate of the enemy was in the low hundreds now. The bestial sounds of these monsters and the sound of battle was ever-present, infusing itself into the cityscape. It didn’t take a genius to see we were losing badly.

  Despite that, I leapt from building to building, keeping off the ground to avoid getting into another fight. A second behind Carver, Chen and Larsen followed, mirroring my movement. I had to try and secure our means of production. Winning this battle was looking like a bad joke, but even if we did win, without our fabricator it would be a pyrrhic victory.

  It reminded me of an age in warfare when autonomous tactical networks and producing munitions via automation and fabrication wasn’t an option. Humans had once been necessary to ensure those tasks got done and that things ran smoothly.

  Blind as I was to the bigger picture and unable to get in touch with anyone who might have any idea of what was going on, I felt a deep well of frustration bubbling up inside me, and fear. I’d assumed that the mad ambitions of a lunatic cultist weren’t that serious, that we’d be able to handle whatever greeted us with ease. I’d been wrong, and for my sins the city burned.