Noah lay in the wet mud. Every breath sent a dull ache through his chest. His head buzzed, and a sickening taste of iron lingered in his mouth.
Bracing his elbow against the dirt with difficulty, he pushed himself up.
In his left hand, he gripped Elyria.
Right in front of him, through breaks in the smoke, Noah saw the magic pierce straight through Albert's temple, saw him die instantly, and saw Iron freeze in place.
Noah exhaled with a sob, forcing his numb legs to stand. He had no pockets, nowhere to put Elyria. Adjusting his grip on his sword with his right hand, he staggered a step forward.
"Let's go..." Noah wheezed to himself.
A hundred meters from the ruins, the continuous roar of explosions made their ears ring. Darwin, Marek, and Clara laid down fire on the advancing squads.
When the subterranean rumble of the detonation shook the earth, Darwin abruptly stopped shooting. He slowly turned his head.
Right where the fortified bunker had been—where all the wounded, the women, the children, the men, and Albert were—now stood only a smoking mound.
Darwin's eyes widened. His pistol slipped from his fingers. Ignoring Marek's shouts, the boy broke into a sprint and ran toward the bunker.
He vaulted onto the scorching debris, slipping on the fine concrete rubble.
"Albert!" Darwin screamed, his voice cracking.
He spotted him right at the edge of the collapse. Albert lay on his side, pinned by a heavy beam, a shard of bloodied, melting ice protruding from his temple.
Darwin dropped to his knees in front of him. His trembling hands blindly clawed into the blood-soaked lapels of Albert's clothes. Darwin frantically began to shake the motionless body:
"Albert... Albert, please say something! Come on, do you hear me?! Get the fuck up! Albert!"
Albert's head lolled helplessly from side to side. His glassy eyes stared at the sky, and coagulated blood slowly dripped onto the mud from his shattered skull.
A heavy knight appeared silently from the smoke-filled ravine behind Darwin. The soldier wordlessly adjusted his grip on his sword and raised the blade over the kneeling boy's neck. Darwin didn't even turn—he was completely oblivious to his surroundings.
A fraction of a second before the strike,
With a short motion, Lumon drove his blade into the unprotected gap between the knight's helmet and breastplate. A dry crunch of vertebrae echoed, the joint snapped, and the soldier's decapitated body slumped onto the concrete.
Iron's eyes locked onto Darwin. A dry voice tore from the engineer's throat:
"He's dead. Pull yourself together. We're in a war here, not a funeral."
Without waiting for an answer or wasting a single microsecond, Lumon pushed off the ground with his toe and vanished into the smoke, darting toward the next group of enemy soldiers.
Darwin remained sitting in the mud. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He pressed his forehead against the dirt and sobbed quietly:
"Why... why is it like this?!.."
Fifty meters behind, Marek and Clara witnessed the scene.
Marek froze for a second. His jaw clenched. Two cloudy tears rolled involuntarily from his eyes. He wiped them away sharply with the back of his bloodied gauntlet and racked the slide.
Beside him, Clara convulsively swallowed the lump rising in her throat. Tears blurred her vision, but her fingers automatically slammed a fresh magazine into the pistol's receiver.
"For Albert..." Marek growled through his teeth. "For Albert, we have to win!"
Up ahead, an isolated group of enemy mages had entrenched themselves. They took cover behind infantry shields and showered the defensive line with spells. To root them out, heavy suppressing fire was needed.
Marek turned to the right flank trench and roared at the top of his lungs, trying to cut through the din of explosions:
"Gaston! Gaston, where are you?! Help me, damn it! Cover me, I'll take out those mages on the run!"
Silence...
"To hell with you then!" Marek yelled.
Wasting not another second, he snatched a pistol from his thigh holster. Choking and coughing from the dense soot, Marek leaped out and charged headlong toward the smoke-covered outskirts of the village.
Two light swordsmen ran out of the smoke to meet him. Marek raised his pistols and pulled the triggers point-blank. The barrels barked with a deafening crack. Unstable energy detonated right inside the soldiers' armor: a flash of flame, a roar.
Marek slipped between the burning bodies, drew a short sword on the move, and slashed the throat of a third infantryman with a backhand swing. His feet slipped on the blood-soaked mud, but he pushed forward, shattering the enemy formation.
A short time later, Marek braked sharply. His boot tripped over something.
Gaston lay in a wet rut. His severed head rested face-up in the mud. Three steps further away lay his sword-hacked body.
Marek froze. His heart gave a heavy thump in his chest.
"Damn it..." he uttered in a caustic, strangled whisper.
Stepping over the pool of blood, Marek walked further down the street.
By the ruined porch of the next house, he saw Kaiden—his ribcage crushed by a collapsed beam. A little further, her back pressed against the stonework, Runa sat motionless with three wounds in her stomach. Aiden's lifeless body spilled out of a doorway.
They were dead.
Something seemed to snap in Marek's head. His mind clouded over. Losing all control, he roared wildly and, without looking around, charged headlong straight at an advancing squad of thirty heavy knights. He fired without even looking where he was aiming, driving Chaos charges into steel shields, and hacked with his sword at anyone he could reach.
A veteran swung at him silently from behind. Marek didn't even turn his head, ready to take the blow to his back.
In the last fraction of a second, Lumon wedged himself between them. The engineer's sword sliced through the air with a whistle, severing the knight's hand completely, after which Lumon kicked the soldier backward with a precise strike.
"Your mind is clouded by anger," Lumon stated in a dry tone.
"Shut up!" Marek yelled at the top of his lungs, spraying saliva and blood, and forcefully shoved Iron away with his shoulder. "Shut up and stay away from us!"
Lumon instantly recalculated priorities. Assessing that Marek would not obey orders, Lumon simply restructured his own combat route—he began to relentlessly follow Marek, silently and at colossal speed clearing his blind spots and cutting down enemies a moment before they could deliver a lethal blow to Marek.
While Marek and Lumon fought their way through the enemy ranks on the right flank, Clara held a small position by one of the ruined houses.
The girl held two pistols in her hands. One that Iron had given her. The second—with a scratched grip and traces of dried mud—she had picked up from the ground a second earlier.
Clara fired with both hands.
Every shot echoed with harsh recoil into her shoulders. The slides whipped back and forth, ejecting hot casings right into the mud at her feet.
Clara's lips trembled. A continuous ringing filled her ears, and a sticky veil of smoke and involuntarily rising tears clouded her eyes.
She bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood to regain focus, and breathed heavily through her nose.
"No... Don't you dare..." she whispered under her breath between shots, trying to drown out the roar of battle. "Emotions shouldn't control me. That's a mistake. Everything is fine... Everything is under control. Pull yourself together, Clara. Everything is fine..."
She sharply raised her left hand, cutting down a passing soldier with a short burst of fire, and immediately shifted fire with her right hand to a shielded knight.
At that moment, two kilometers from the village, inside his armored carriage, Olgerd sat over the map, pressing the crystallograph to his lips. Through the artifact's glass, he could see the frontline bogged down by the house ruins.
"Volley! Right now!" Olgerd barked, his voice dropping to a rasp. "Blanket everything!"
"But our infantry is stuck there too!" the commander's voice broke through the static.
"I don't give a damn about the infantry! Fire, I said!" Olgerd squeezed the artifact with a wild shout.
A second later, the deafening crack of a hundred guns firing simultaneously echoed out.
Clara didn't even have time to reload her left pistol. The air above her head instantly compressed.
The first large caliber bullet slammed into Clara's right forearm. The bullet shattered the bone, and Iron's pistol slipped from her fingers, flying into the mud.
Before she could cry out from the blinding pain, a second impact—cracking into her left shoulder, spinning the girl's torso and knocking her off her feet.
Right after, a solid wall of fire blanketed her as she fell. Bullets pierced straight through her thigh, shattered her right knee, and lodged deep in her stomach, shredding her insides.
The shockwave violently hurled Clara flat on her back.
The second pistol, slipping from her fingers, sank into the mud somewhere nearby.
Her breath caught. Warm blood instantly welled up in her mouth, which Clara couldn't spit out—it simply trailed down her chin, pooling past her collar.
The girl lay on her back, staring helplessly at the sky. The sounds of battle—screams, gunshots, the crackle of fire—began to quickly fade away, turning into a dull hum.
Her fingers twitched weakly, trying to feel the ground, but her arm wouldn't obey.
"Looks like..." the last, quiet thought drifted through her fading consciousness. "Looks like this is... the end..."
Meanwhile, on the section of the battlefield where Marek fought his way through the enemy ranks.
The air was torn by a dense crackle—the unit had switched to mass fire.
With the sword pulled from the mud and his right prosthetic arm, Lumon kept his sword and prosthetic moving in an unbroken defensive arc. Bullets struck sparks from the prosthesis with a metallic ring, flattening against the cast steel, while the blade of the sword deflected the trajectories of flying shrapnel with a hiss.
However, two ricocheting bullets grazed the exposed skin of Iron's left forearm and neck, leaving deep, jagged gashes. In less than a second, the edges of these wounds began to rapidly darken and take on a green hue. The skin around the tears instantly charred and shriveled.
"Lumon!" Iron growled in his own mind, feeling a burning cold spread through his veins. "Poison! On my neck and arm!"
[Neutralization initiated.]
Even before Iron finished speaking, Lumon redirected a residual mana pulse straight into the afflicted tissues. The green residue burned away before his eyes, turning into a dry gray crust. The wounds sealed with a dense, thin film, blocking the toxin from entering the bloodstream.
Blinded by anger, Marek paid no attention to the barrage fire. He took another step forward, raising his pistol, and at that moment a bullet pierced clean through his right shoulder. The force of the impact spun Marek in the air and knocked him to the ground.
Lumon instantly recalculated the movement vector. In three long, low leaps, the engineer was beside the fallen man.
Placing his bloodied palm over Marek's mangled shoulder, Lumon poured the last drops of regenerative mana into it. The boy's muscles began to knit together with a quiet hiss, the arterial bleeding stopped, but in the next second, the enemy line unleashed a second, concentrated volley.
Two bullets entered Marek's left thigh simultaneously, shattering the bone. A third and fourth tore through his right knee and shin. Three more projectiles then punched straight through both of his arms. His torso remained intact only because Iron covered it with his prosthesis, taking the brunt of the impact on his metal arm.
Marek collapsed back into the mud with a hollow, choking scream. Thick, dark-crimson blood gushed from the severed arteries in his legs and arms.
"Damn it! What the hell is this?!" Iron roared in a frenzy. "Lumon, heal him! Heal him and drag him back!"
[Execution of order impossible. Mana reserves for healing and regeneration are completely depleted. Further attempts will result in the immediate lethal outcome for the host.]
"I don't care!" Iron screamed, trying to tear back control of his body. "Use whatever it takes! Take the rest! Save him!"
[Physical evacuation protocol initiated,] Lumon replied emotionlessly.
Expending no energy on magic, Lumon grabbed Marek's collar with his left hand. Utilizing pure physical strength, Lumon violently dragged Marek through the mud to the side, simultaneously defending against the hail of bullets.
On the move, he attempted to apply a micro-pulse to cauterize the wounds on Marek's legs, but nothing happened.
Moments later, Lumon dragged Marek's body beneath the protective shade of pine branches.
Finding himself in a relatively secure zone, Lumon momentarily turned Iron's head back. His eyes locked onto the far flank near one of the ruined houses.
There, Clara lay motionless.
Inside his own consciousness, Iron exploded in a powerless, feral scream.
"Lumon! Pull her out! Do something! Use mana! Access the hidden reserves!"
[Execution impossible. Subject 'Clara' has sustained injuries incompatible with life. Physical death occurred thirty seconds ago. Host's regeneration resources are entirely depleted. Attempting to use them will result in immediate cardiac arrest.]
Marek inhaled heavily. His fingers, coated in soot and blood, weakly closed around Iron's sleeve. Marek barely showed signs of life, but his clouded gaze was fixed on him.
"Leave..." Marek squeezed out with a thick sob, hacking blood onto the dirt. "Leave me, Iron... Don't waste your time on me..."
"Marek, shut up!" Iron growled, feeling fury flood his mind.
But Marek slowly and firmly shook his head.
"Enough..." he whispered.
Iron froze for a few seconds. He stared at Marek's dimming gaze, at Clara's motionless body in the distance, and felt the chaotic rage inside him begin to cool. His mind cleared. The engineer forced himself to take a deep breath, forcibly seizing control over his emotions.
"Alright..." Iron exhaled. "That's it. Lumon, enough. Stop trying to keep him alive."
Thirty meters to the right, an unequal battle still raged on. Noah, breathing heavily and barely staying on his feet, fought off three knights. With his left hand, he pressed Elyria to his chest.
Noah twisted, cutting the first soldier's legs out from under him with a short sweep, but the moment he raised his blade for a lethal strike on the second, a violent spasm seized his body.
Noah's muscles instantly locked up. His sword froze in the air.
Seeing his opponent paralyzed, the third knight adjusted his grip on his two-handed blade in one fluid motion and drove the point with all his might straight at Noah's unprotected chest.
Straining his locked neck and back, Noah shifted his center of gravity with his last ounce of strength and collapsed sideways onto the rocks. The enemy sword bit into the dirt right next to his shoulder.
Never letting the spirit go from his left hand, Noah tumbled down the slope and came to a heavy stop at Iron's feet.
"Iron..." Noah rasped, trying to lift at least his chin. "I... I can barely move... My legs won't obey..."
[Damage analysis for subject 'Noah',] Lumon responded instantly. [Micro-pulse discharge from enemy technology has spread through the circulatory system, causing a temporary total block of motor neurons. Muscular paralysis. Physical response reduced by ninety-four percent.]
Iron looked down at the motionless Noah, then shifted his gaze to the unconscious Marek and the barely glowing Elyria.
"Damn it..."
The ground beneath their feet began to tremble again.
From the forest massif, a fresh wave of infantry marched onto the clearing in uniform formation.
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