Chapter 9: A Peaceful Assembly of Concerned Citizens

The Blightstone Flats, the sprawling, debris-choked no-man's-land between the Collective’s fortified Amberlight Terrace and the proper Tangles, was not known for its scenic beauty. Its primary attractions were toxic fungal blooms and the skeletal remains of failed architectural ambitions. It was, in short, the perfect venue for a spontaneous gathering of like-minded individuals seeking to express their political dissatisfaction.

And express they did.

Thousands of them. A sea of humanity, with the occasional elf or acceptable demi-human sprinkled in like raisins in a particularly angry loaf, had converged. They filled the ancient, pitted stonegrain of the Flats, spilling into the narrower feeder streets that wormed their way toward the Collective’s shimmering defensive barrier. From a distance, it might have looked like a festival. The noise certainly had the same chaotic energy—a roaring, rhythmic cacophony of chants, shouts, and the primal scream of collective grievance.

Up close, the theme became clearer. This was not a celebration of harvest or art. This was a festival of blame.

“GOBLINS STEAL THE GLEAM!” a barrel-chested man bellowed, his face purple with the effort. The crowd around him took up the chant, a wave of accusatory sound. “GOBLINS STEAL THE GLEAM!”

A woman with a pinched face and hair pulled so tight it stretched her skin into a permanent look of surprise waved a hand-painted sign that read, in shaky letters: THEY TOOK OUR DRILLING JOBS (AND PROBABLY OUR SPOONS). She screamed at a cowering trio of dwarven miners trying to slip past the edge of the mob. “You let ’em in your tunnels! You’re traitors to your own beards!”

The logic was impeccable, in the way that a soup made of mud and rage is technically a soup.

The mob’s violence was as unprofessional as its rhetoric, but no less effective for it. A fruit-seller’s cart was overturned, its fungal wares trampled into a pulpy smear—the seller, a gnome with unfortunate timing, was accused of “harboring root-sympathizers” because one of his melons was vaguely green. A goblin child’s crude doll, lost in the panic, was kicked through the street like a political football before being set alight by a youth who seemed to believe he was performing a sacred rite of purification.

It was chaos with a thesis statement: Everything wrong in your life—the gnawing hunger, the damp clothes, the soul-crushing futility—is because of the small, green people who live in the dark places you’re too scared to go. It was a compelling narrative. It required no complex economic analysis, no understanding of monopolistic resource extraction or engineered scarcity. It just required someone to point at and hate. And the crowd, full of a pride born from having finally found the simple answer to their complicated misery, embraced it with open arms and closed fists.

They moved as one great, shambling id toward the Collective’s border, leaving a trail of shattered stalls, terrified non-humans, and refreshingly uncomplicated bigotry in their wake.

Inside the Collective’s common room, the world was still made of tea, quiet conversation, and the lingering scent of fungal loaf. The chaos outside was a distant rumor, muffled by layers of stonegrain and magical insulation. It was possible, if one tried very hard, to believe it was just a particularly rowdy market day.

Leo was trying very hard.

He held the spear Borin had made for him, turning it over in his hands. The weight was unfamiliar, but the smooth grain of the haft felt like an old friend. He’d spent years in his old life stirring vats of dye with wooden paddles not unlike this. The motion was similar: a firm grip, a push, a pull. Of course, the paddles weren’t tipped with a leaf-shaped blade of sharpened bark-scale that could punch through leather. That was a minor design difference.

“Borin,” Leo said, not looking up from the spearhead. The dwarf was sitting across from him, calmly packing a small pipe with aromatic hearth-moss. “Do you think… I should get armor? If this is just… you know. A protest.”

Borin lit his pipe with a touch from a smoldering twig from the hearth. He took a long pull, exhaling a cloud of smoke that smelled of cedar and contentment. “Armor’s for when you expect to be hit, lad,” he rumbled. “At a protest, you’re just… observing democratic discourse from an enthusiastic participatory angle.” He smiled around the pipe stem. “Probably fine.”

“It’s not a protest.”

Kaelen’s voice cut through the smoky calm. She stood by the high window, though the view showed only the interior courtyard. She wasn’t looking out; she was listening. Her body was rigid, her head tilted like a hound catching a scent on a wind that hadn’t yet reached the humans in the room.

“That noise,” she said, her voice flat. “The rhythm of it. It’s not shouting for change. It’s shouting for cleansing.” She finally turned from the window. The usual dry humor was gone from her eyes, replaced by a cold recognition that made Leo’s stomach clench.

An uncomfortable silence settled over the table, and hung in the air like Borin’s smoke.

Elara broke it, her analytical tone slicing through the unease. “The operational profile does seem remarkably similar to the incident at The Stubborn Vein.” She said the name with clinical detachment, as if referencing a case study in catastrophic structural failure.

At the name, Borin’s smile didn’t just fade; it was wiped from his face as if by a brutal hand. The pipe froze halfway to his lips. The twinkling warmth in his eyes solidified into something hard and dark. The Stubborn Vein wasn’t a case study to him. It was where friends had died under a magically-guided avalanche of machinery while enforcers took notes.

He placed his pipe carefully on the table, the movement precise and final. “Right,” he said, his voice devoid of all its usual rumble. It was just stone on stone. “Let’s go see.”

The transition from the Collective’s interior to its border districts was like moving from the warm belly of a beast to its clenched teeth. The air grew cooler, carrying echoes from outside. The tidy residential tunnels gave way to broader thoroughfares lined with shuttered workshops and fortified gatehouses.

Outside the shimmering auroral curtain of the main defensive ward, on the Flats now teeming with Purists, the scene had entered its second act: The Arrival of Civil Authority.

Just as the mob’s fervor reached a crescendo aimed at a group of cobbler dwarves who had made the fatal error of having prominent noses, the sector police made their entrance. They did not arrive from the main thoroughfares ahead of the mob. That would have been confrontational. Instead, they flooded from alleyways and side streets alongside it, materializing like particularly

dour fungi after a rain. Their uniforms were a practical grey, a stark contrast to the motley rage of the crowd.

Their leader, a sergeant with a jawline that looked like it had been chiseled by someone with a grudge against curves, raised a brass-bound bullhorn to his lips. When he spoke, his voice was magically augmented into a booming, impartial baritone that vibrated in the chests of everyone within two hundred yards.

“THIS IS A LAWFUL ASSEMBLY. ANY VIOLENCE FROM ANY SIDE WILL BE PROSECUTED AND DETAINEES WILL BE PROCESSED WITH DUE DILIGENCE.”

The pronouncement had the soothing, bureaucratic cadence of a death warrant being read aloud. Having established the ground rules for this vibrant democratic exercise, the police then got to work. Their task was not to disperse the crowd chanting for racial purification. Oh no. Their task was facilitation.

They moved with aggressive efficiency, not toward the Purists, but toward the periphery—the terrified tanglers, the curious dwarven miners, the families who had made the mistake of living near a popular site for political theater. With shoves from polished batons and barked orders, they cleared a wide, beautiful path through the bystanders. It was urban gardening of the most brutal kind: weeding out the inconvenient spectators to allow the prized, venomous blooms of the mob room to grow.

“NO COUNTER-PROTEST IS AUTHORIZED,” the sergeant’s voice boomed again, spotting a group of three elderly gnomes who were merely standing on their own doorstep, watching with horrified expressions. “A PERMIT WAS NOT ISSUED FOR THAT ACTIVITY. DISPERSE.”

When the gnomes, frozen in confusion, didn’t move fast enough, two officers bodily moved them, their delicate frames practically tossed back into their own doorway. The path was now clear. The Purists, emboldened by this official endorsement-by-inaction, resumed their march with renewed vigor, their harassment of any non-human face now conducted under the watchful, indifferent gaze of the sector police, who had formed a neat perimeter around them. A protective cordon. An honor guard for hatred.

The watchtower was a squat, sturdy affair of mortared stonegrain, less a romantic spire and more a raised fist with windows. It overlooked the main gate district, offering a panoramic view of the Flats and the shimmering, translucent wall of magical energy that separated order from chaos. The wall hummed at a frequency felt in the teeth, a barrier that said ‘thus far and no further’ in the language of pure force.

Varga, the militia commander, stood with them, her spear leaning against the stone sill. Her small squad—the human woman with calm eyes, the young goblin trying to look twice his size, the dwarf checking his crossbow, the gangly teen whose Adam’s apple bobbed nervously—was spread out at other view-slits. “Not playing it safe after the Stubborn Vein,” Varga had said tersely when they arrived at the muster point. “Sector militia is on standby. Warning signal is manned and ready.” Kaelen had simply nodded and led them up the tight spiral stairs to see for themselves.

Now they saw.

From this vantage, the choreography was obscenely clear. The mob wasn’t being contained; it was being channeled, like sewage through a planned conduit, straight toward the Collective’s glowing shield. The police perimeter wasn’t a barrier; it was a parade route cordon.

“They’re escorting them,” Elara said, her voice quiet with dawning horror. It wasn’t a question. The empirical evidence was irrefutable. The cops were clearing the way, managing traffic for a riot.

Kaelen glanced at her. For a fleeting second, something other than grim tension touched her features—a faint, hard-won glimmer of approval. The elf who once would have parsed this scene through a lens of ‘maintaining public order during difficult negotiations’ now saw the naked machinery of collusion. It was a ugly milestone, but a milestone nonetheless.

Borin’s knuckles were white around the haft of his hammer. The enchanted shield he’d snatched from the forge was strapped to his other arm, its star-quartz veins pulsing softly with contained potential. “Something doesn’t feel right,” he growled, his voice low. The understatement hung in the watchtower air, thicker than the dust.

Then Borin turned his head. He looked directly at Elara, his face utterly serious, all trace of his earlier pipe-smoking avuncularity gone. “Elara,” he said, his tone that of a commander asking for a scout’s report. “What do your elf eyes see?”

Leo’s jaw dropped. He sputtered, “Borin! That’s… that’s really racist!”

From a shadowy corner of the tower where he’d been observing like a particularly grim gargoyle, Grishka let out a snort that escalated into a wheezing laugh. “What does your elf eye see?” he mimicked in a high-pitched squeal, pulling the skin at the corner of his own eye back into a squint. He dissolved into cackles. “Can you tell from here which ones are true believers and which are just lackeys trying to get a promotion? Look for the ones whose hearts are full of hate versus the ones whose hearts are full of… performance review forms!”

Kaelen couldn’t help it—a short, sharp laugh escaped her. “She deserves that,” she said, shaking her head at Elara’s affronted expression.

Borin looked genuinely baffled at Leo. “What? It’s not racist, it’s biology! Elves can see details leagues away. Like eagles. They can… zoom in.” He made a vague gesture with his thumb and forefinger as if adjusting an invisible lens.

“I didn’t know that,” Kaelen admitted.

“Is it true?” Leo mumbled, Grishka was still laughing, the sound dry and scraping.

Flushing with a mixture of embarrassment and irritation, Elara turned her back on all of them and pressed her face to the cool stone of view-slit. She took a deep breath, letting the familiar, ancient sensory adjustment wash over her—a subtle tightening of focus, a world resolving from a blur of color and motion into hyper-clarity.

She scanned the seething mass below. The hatred was uniform; it was the details that betrayed.

And then she found him.

Almost in the center of the mob, but not part of its rhythm. While others screamed and shook fists, he was still. His eyes were fixed on a single point on the Collective’s shimmering shield-wall with an intensity that was… professional. A small, serene smile played on his lips.

Her vision tightened further. His clothes were wrong. The cut was simple Tangle-fashion—rough tunic, patched trousers—but the weave was too fine. The ‘dirt’ smeared across his chest looked applied in artistic strokes, not earned through grimy labor. And his skin… beneath the artful grime, his neck and hands were clean. Not recently-washed clean, but never-known-a-day’s-real-grime clean. The hands of a clerk or a minor functionary, not a root-dweller.

Then, like a lantern being lit from within, he began to glow. A faint, golden nimbus surrounded him.

“There’s a man,” Elara said, her voice tight. “In the middle. He’s… glowing.”

Leo blinked, peering out. From this height, the mob was a teeming anthill. “Glowing? I can’t even tell if they’re dirty from here.”

“He is reaching into his tunic,” Elara continued, her voice clinical despite the adrenaline. “He’s pulling something out… something that glows brighter. He must be blessed. Channeling power from his demigod patron.”

The smile on the man’s face widened. He had his prop.

On the ground, in the thick of the roar and the press of bodies smelling of unwashed fury and cheap glimmerbrew, the perspective was somewhat less analytical.

The crowd around the glowing man sensed his purpose and parted with a rough, eager reverence. He strode forward, no longer pretending to shuffle with Tangle-fatigue. In his hands he held an object that stole the breath from even the most hate-drunk Purist: a chunk of raw star quartz the size of a human heart, held in a cage of ornately carved runic brass—a focusing bale worth more than every scrap of Gleam in the Flats.

He raised it above his head like an offering to a cruel god. Which, in a way, it was.

The star quartz ignited with an actinic blue-white light. It hummed, a sound that cut through the crowd’s noise like a razor. Then it floated free of his hands, hovering in mid-air. The runes on its bale flared like captured lightning.

A reverse gravity took hold. Instead of falling, the quartz began to lift him. His feet left the cracked stonegrain of the Flats as he was pulled upward by the artifact, rising one foot, then five, then twenty into the air until he dangled below it like a puppet on a luminous string. He spread his arms wide in a pose of benediction or sacrifice.

Then came the surge.

Visible energy—a torrent of stolen power, siphoned from some distant demigod’s reserve or perhaps directly from Jeff’s own despair-fattened veins—erupted from him. Raw magical force screamed out in all directions, a star going nova in miniature. But instead of dissipating, the raging energy was violently sucked toward the floating star quartz. It passed through the crystal lattice, where it was focused, amplified, and tuned into a single, ruinous harmonic.

With a sound like the world-tree itself screaming, a beam of condensed annihilation lanced from the quartz toward the Collective’s shield.

The impact wasn’t an explosion; it was a violation. The shimmering wall didn’t shatter so much as unravel. Where the beam struck, glowing threads of defensive magic snapped and writhed like severed nerves. A jagged fissure tore open in the barrier, edges sizzling and sparking as the spellform tried and failed to knit itself back together against the invasive resonance.

The man’s glowing aura flickered wildly, drained by the colossal expenditure. The star quartz winked out and dropped like a dead stone. He plummeted after it, landing in a heap on the hard ground with a thud that was lost in the crowd's sudden roar of triumph.

For a moment, he lay still. Then the aura sputtered back to life around him—a weaker, guttering flame now—and he pushed himself to his feet. He brushed imaginary dust from his artistically-dirtied tunic with absurd fastidiousness.

He lifted his arms again in victory. Then he pointed one commanding finger directly at the smoking fissure in the Collective's defenses.

His other hand closed around empty air. And a sword appeared in it. The mob inhaled as one beast. And charged

The sword that appeared in the demigod-blessed operative’s hand was not a thing of beauty. It was a brutal, efficient length of enchanted steel, its edge humming with a residual echo of the shield-shattering power. He didn’t need to swing it. It was a symbol, a starting pistol.

The mob needed no further encouragement. With a roar that was equal parts rage, release, and the sheer joy of sanctioned violence, they surged past him like a filthy tide breaching a dam. His serene smile returned, a curator watching his exhibit of chaos finally open to the public.

The fissure in the magical shield wasn’t the main gate—that was several hundred yards to the east, a massive construct of reinforced fungal-wood and iron bands. The shield was the true barrier; the physical gate was merely a polite formality within it. With the shield compromised at this point, the gate was suddenly just… a very large door.

From the shell of an abandoned resin-refinery, a second, more disciplined group erupted. These weren’t ragtag bigots; they moved with purpose, their faces covered by rough scarves. Among them, eight burly individuals carried a log of petrified heartwood, its tip sheathed in crude iron—a battering ram that had clearly been waiting in the wings for its cue.

The vanguard of the Purist flood reached the gate first. They hurled makeshift firepots—jars of glimmerbrew and tar-soaked rag—that shattered against the wood, spreading hungry, chemical-fed flames that licked up the timbers. The gate, designed to withstand push, not bake, began to groan and blacken.

Then the ram team hit.

THOOM. The sound was a sickening heartbeat of war. THOOM. Splinters the size of daggers exploded inward. THOOM. With a final, wrenching crack, the central beam of the gate gave way. The doors, burning and broken, burst inward in a shower of embers and shattered wood.

On the other side of that disintegrating door was not empty air, but a line of shields.

Varga had not waited for the tower debate to conclude. The moment the shield fissured with that otherworldly scream, she was moving, barking orders that sent runners spiraling down the tower stairs and into the district streets. By the time the ram struck its first blow, a militia line was forming in the gate plaza—three ranks deep, shields locked, spears bristling over the top like the spines of an angry beast.

As the smoke and the first screaming Purists poured through the breach, Varga stood just behind the center of the line, her own shield braced. Her voice cut through the chaos, not with magical amplification, but with raw command.

“HOLD THE LINE! THE MESSAGE IS OUT! WE JUST NEED TIME! BUY IT!”

The first wave of Purists hit the shield wall with the uncoordinated fury of a storm surge. Clubs hammered on shields. Rusty knives skittered off reinforced leather. The militia line swayed but held, answering with short, brutal jabs of their spears over the shield rims. It was less a battle and more a gruesome form of crowd control against a crowd that actively wanted to be impaled.

But they kept coming. A flood of bodies fueled by hate and the intoxicating belief that they were winning. From side streets and residential arches, more Collective citizens emerged—not militia, but bakers with rolling pins, carpenters with hammers, miners still in their gear. They saw the broken gate, the line of their neighbors holding back the howling tide, and they didn’t hesitate. They filled in behind the militia, adding weight and numbers and a forest of improvised weapons.

Yet for every citizen who joined the ranks, two more Purists seemed to spill from the Flats. The breach was a funnel, and it was funneling an ocean of malice into their home. The line began to bulge in places, gaps appearing as militiamen were dragged down by sheer weight of numbers. The tidy defense was becoming a desperate, seething scrum.

The party exploded from the base of the watchtower into a world transformed. The orderly Amberlight Terrace was now a warzone in microcosm. The air stank of smoke, ozone from the shattered shield, and coppery blood. The sound was a physical assault: screams, battle-cries, the clash of metal on wood, and beneath it all, Varga’s voice, constantly rallying.

“PUSH THEM BACK! FILL THAT GAP! YOU’RE NOT FIGHTING FOR PAY—YOU’RE FIGHTING FOR YOUR HOME! FOR THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU!”

They saw her directing traffic like a maestro of catastrophe. She’d pull two citizens from the milling reserve and shove them into a weakening point in the line. She pointed archers onto nearby rooftops. She was building not just a defense, but a dam, trying to hold back a tsunami with quick thinking and sheer force of will.

Without a word, the party sprinted toward her. Borin with his shield and hammer was a moving bulwark. Kaelen’s blades were already in her hands. Grishka melted slightly into their shadow, eyes scanning for threats beyond the obvious melee. Leo gripped his spear, the training drills running on a frantic loop in his mind. Elara clutched her dagger as if it were a lifeline.

They skidded to a halt beside Varga. Kaelen didn’t waste breath. “Where do you need us?”

Varga’s eyes flicked over them, assessing like a quartermaster counting munitions. She pointed a gauntleted finger toward the eastern edge of the line, where the press seemed fiercest. “East flank’s getting soft. They’ll break soon. Go there—wait for my signal, then fill the hole.” Her gaze landed on Elara, specifically on the small, pathetic-looking dagger in her white-knuckled grip. One eyebrow arched. “You planning to give them a nasty scratch with that?”

Elara swallowed hard. For a second, the old Elara might have floundered, offered an excuse about improvised weaponry. The new Elara met Varga’s gaze. “No,” she said firmly.

With her other hand, she pushed back her sleeve, revealing the braided leather bracelet adorned with its deceptively simple goblin beads.

Varga’s eyes widened a fraction. Then she gave a sharp, approving nod. She pointed toward the rear, behind the main lines, where a rough formation had gathered—a dozen people with bows, a woman holding crackling energy between her hands, a youth with a sling and pouches of alchemical powder. “Spell and arrow support. Back there. Tell them Varga says shoot at will when you’re in position.”

Elara stumbled toward the support line, the reality of her task solidifying with each step. The archers and casters were a tense, focused group, their eyes on the seething line ahead, waiting for a clear shot. A human woman with a longbow saw her approach, saw the beads.

“Varga says shoot at will,” Elara managed, her voice thin.

The woman nodded once, not taking her eyes off the fray. “About gods-damned time. LOOSE!”

The command wasn’t for Elara. It was for the line. But it happened right in front of her.

A dozen bowstrings thrummed as one. The sound was a visceral twang-thump that Elara felt in her teeth. A volley of arrows, dark against the smoky air, arced up and then plunged down into the packed mass of Purists pushing at the militia’s eastern flank.

Simultaneously, Varga saw the arrows fly and made a sharp, sweeping gesture with her arm toward the militia line in front of that flank.

Themilitia line splits open like a gate, forming a pathway that Purists fallowed like sheep.

The effect was instantaneous and horrific. The row of Purists who had been on the verge of breaking through simply… dropped. Some screaming, some silent. A gap of bloody ground opened up.

“NOW! PUSH!” Varga roared.

The militia line, feeling the pressure vanish, surged forward with a collective shout, driving their shields into the disoriented mob, reclaiming a precious few feet of cobblestone.

Elara didn’t see the tactical victory. She only saw the consequence. She was close enough to hear the wet impacts, to see bodies crumple. The clinical distance of the watchtower evaporated. This wasn’t theory or a diagram of force distribution. This was meat and screaming. A strangled cry escaped her lips, and she dropped to her knees, hands flying to her head as if to block out the sights and sounds, the dagger forgotten on the ground beside her.

Varga’s attention was already elsewhere. Her arm shot out again, this time pointing directly at the spot where Kaelen, Leo, Borin, and Grishka stood waiting. The signal.

They moved as one with a dozen other hastily-armed citizens, rushing into the space Varga had indicated—a spot where the line was thin, where tired militiamen were flagging. They hit the fray just as Varga’s own contingent from the center slammed into the Purist mass from another angle, a coordinated hammer and anvil.

Leo found himself instantly, and deliberately, marginalized. As they slotted into the line, Borin didn’t just take a position; he planted himself like an ancient oak, his enchanted shield covering not only himself but a significant portion of Leo behind him. It was less protection and more containment—a living wall ensuring the newest recruit’s spear would have a very limited field of fire, preferably none.

Confused, Leo tried to step to the side for a clear thrust, only to have Borin shift subtly, blocking him again. Flustered, Leo stepped back instead, out of the direct press, and the reality of the line unfolded before him.

To Borin’s other side, Kaelen had inserted herself. She wasn’t trying to hold a wide space; she was a precision instrument in a world of blunt trauma. As a Purist swung a club at Borin’s shield, Kaelen’s short sword darted out from around its edge like a serpent’s tongue, finding the inside of the man’s elbow. He screamed and dropped the club. Her dagger finished the job with a swift, economical motion before she withdrew behind Borin’s bulk again. She used him as mobile cover, her movements calm, methodical, and utterly lethal.

And there was Grishka. He didn’t hold a static position at all. He was a phantom in the half-space between Borin and Kaelen and the next militiaman over. When a knot of Purists tried to rush Borin’s flank, Grishka didn’t meet them steel-on-steel. He flicked his wrist; a bead on his bracelet pulsed with sickly green light. The air around the attackers’ heads rippled with a sudden, deafening cacophony of imagined screams and breaking glass—a chaos spell that left them clutching their ears, staggering blind. In that moment of disorientation, Borin’s hammer swept out in a crushing arc, or Kaelen’s blade found a throat, or Grishka himself slipped in and his bone-knife flashed twice, leaving two men gasping on the ground.

It was a brutal, efficient dance they had never practiced but performed instinctively. Borin was the anvil, Kaelen the hammer’s sharp edge, Grishka the grit thrown in the enemy’s eyes.

Leo watched, his own spear feeling useless and heavy. His gaze swept back, searching for Elara, hoping for… he didn’t know what. Solidarity in incompetence? He saw her still curled on the ground behind the archer line, a figure of paralyzed terror.

Then he saw something else.

Behind the archers, about thirty paces back, the air itself seemed to wince. It distorted like heat haze over a forge, then flashed with a silent discharge of actinic light. Where there had been empty space, there now stood a tight squad of ten figures.

They were not Purists. They wore uniforms of fitted grey leather reinforced with polished bark-scale plates. Their faces were obscured by full helms with dark visors. They carried not clubs and hatred, but short, heavy spears and small round shields in perfect unison. Private military contractors. Professional violence, arriving by magical teleport right into the Collective’s rear.

The training lectures pounded in Leo’s head. Flanking maneuvers. Disciplined enemy units. Code responses.

His mouth was dry as stonegrain dust. His heart hammered against his ribs. The noise of the battle seemed to recede into a dull roar. He sucked in a breath that felt like shards of glass and screamed at the top of his lungs, voice cracking with panic:

“RED BARK! RED BARK!”

The militiaman next to him, parrying a axe blow, jerked his head around at the cry. His eyes widened as he saw what Leo had seen. “RED BARK!” he bellowed, turning to shout down the line.

Like a neural impulse through a living creature, the call was taken up. “RED BARK!” “FLANK RIGHT!” “PROFESSIONALS IN THE REAR!”

Varga’s head snapped around. She saw the teleported squad already forming a spear-wall and beginning their advance toward the unprotected backs of her archers and casters. Her face hardened into a mask of grim calculus.

“PULL BACK! ORDERLY!” she roared, not in retreat but in reformation. “TIGHTEN THE LINE! FACE THE NEW THREAT! THEY ARE IN OUR HOME! WE ARE NOT RUNNING—WE ARE TURNING TO FIGHT!”

The entire scrum began to shift, a slow, painful rotation as the militia line tried to disengage from the mindless press of Purists to face the disciplined advance of professionals at their backs. It was chaos compounding chaos. The Purists, sensing confusion, redoubled their mindless assault.

Leo was shoved backward in the press, Borin’s shield now facing sideways as the dwarf tried to reorient. For a moment, Leo had a clear view of the plaza: their beleaguered lines caught between a frothing sea of hate and an advancing wall of silent, polished spears.

They were being folded in half. And there was nowhere left to go.