Chapter 60: Just Numbers
Getting Kaizen's dead weight back over the shattered remains of the northern wall was a special kind of hell. It wasn't a heroic carry; it was a grunting, sweating, three-man drag. A soldier with a broken shield-arm and a gash on his forehead had taken one of Kaizen's arms over his good shoulder. Freya had the other, her own muscles screaming in protest. A third adventurer, a wiry woman with two short swords, was pushing from behind, shoving Kaizen's limp legs up over a pile of rubble that used to be a defensive parapet.
"Easy, easy! His head, you louts, watch his bloody head!" the soldier, a man named Gerric, grunted as Kaizen's skull bumped against a stone.
"Should we? Might knock some sense into him," the adventurer, Lyra, panted from behind, giving another heave. "What was he thinking, playing human shield?"
"Don't know, don't care. He's heavy," Freya snapped, her breath misting in the cold air. Her silver armor was smeared with Kaizen's blood and the black gore of a dozen beasts. Every part of her ached.
They finally tumbled over the crest and into the relative safety of the city-side. The scene that greeted them was different from the one they'd left. The panic had been replaced by a grim, weary determination. The wall was still a wreck, but the defenders had formed solid, if battered, lines at every breach. The constant, coordinated pressure was gone.
Gerric and Lyra dumped Kaizen unceremoniously onto a stretcher held by two waiting volunteers from the guild. "Get him to the healers. Tell them he took a hit from some kind of dark magic. Don't know if they can do anything, but… good luck," Freya instructed, her voice hoarse.
One of the volunteers, a young man with wide, terrified eyes, looked from Kaizen's pale face to Freya. "Is it true? The big one? The beast commander?"
"It's dead," Freya said, the words feeling like a physical weight lifted from her shoulders. "The Iron Fangs turned it to ash. The ones out there now… they're just animals. Loud, angry, stupid animals."
The young man's face split into a grin that was pure relief. He and his partner scurried off with the stretcher, suddenly moving with a new energy.
Freya turned back to the wall, drawing her sword again. The familiar weight was a comfort. Gerric spat on the ground, hefting a replacement axe he'd picked from a pile of discarded weapons. "Right then. Back to it. Easier, she says. I'll believe it when I'm not getting my arse chewed on."
They climbed back up to the firing line. The difference was immediate. Before, the beasts had moved like a single organism, testing weak points, flanking, supporting each other. Now, it was chaos. A pack of wolf-things was trying to scramble up the rubble, but a larger, boar-like beast was shoving through them, more interested in getting to the front than cooperating. They were getting in each other's way.
"See?" Freya said, pointing with her blade. "They're fighting each other more than us."
A grizzled old sergeant nearby, his helmet dented and one eye swollen shut, let out a wet, phlegmy chuckle. "Aye! Saw two of the big cats tear into each other over a dead wolf. Saved us the trouble!" He nocked an arrow and let it fly. It sank into the boar's shoulder, making it squeal in rage and confusion. "They're just numbers now, lads! Big, ugly, stupid numbers!"
The mood on the wall began to shift. The terror was replaced by a weary, almost professional contempt.
"Oi, Lyra!" a guardsman shouted from further down the line. "That one's got your name on it! The one that looks like your mother-in-law!"
Lyra, now back in her element, flipped him a rude gesture with one of her short swords before leaping down to meet a scaled horror trying to claw its way up. "Piss off, Davik! My mother-in-law's got better teeth!" She ducked under a clumsy swipe and drove both blades into the creature's throat.
Davik laughed, a real, genuine sound that seemed alien in the midst of the carnage. He turned to the man next to him, a young recruit who was shaking so hard he could barely hold his spear. "See, son? Just meat. Ugly, stinking meat. You skewer the meat. Understand?"
The recruit, his face pale, nodded shakily. "S-s-skewer the meat."
"Damn right! Now, watch." Davik turned, took a deep breath, and bellowed at a cluster of beasts below. "YOU HEAR THAT, YOU UGLY GITS? YOU'RE NOT AN ARMY! YOU'RE JUST A MOBILE BUTCHER'S SHOP, AND WE'RE HERE TO COLLECT!"
A ragged cheer went up from the soldiers around him. The line stiffened. Spears thrust with more purpose. Arrows found their marks more easily.
Freya found herself fighting next to Gerric again. He was humming a drinking song under his breath as he methodically chopped down at anything that came near. "You know," he said conversationally, between swings, "I was havin' a right nice pint when all this started. A lovely dark ale from the Sunken Barrel. This is really puttin' a damper on my evenin'."
"Think of it as working up a thirst," Freya grunted, parrying a wolf's lunge and running it through.
"Aye, there's a thought!" Gerric agreed, brightening. "When this is over, drinks are on the City Lord. I'll tell him so myself, if I have to."
The battle wasn't easy. The beasts were still numerous and deadly. But the soul-crushing pressure, the feeling of being outmaneuvered and overwhelmed by a cunning intelligence, was gone. It was just a fight now. A brutal, exhausting, messy fight that they were slowly, surely, starting to win. One stupid, angry beast at a time.
The new rhythm of the fight was almost meditative. Defend, strike, breathe. The frantic, panicked energy that had defined the first hours of the siege had bled away, leaving behind a deep, stubborn endurance. The defenders were no longer a hair-trigger away from breaking; they were a wall of tired, pissed-off people who just wanted to go home.
Freya felt it in her own bones. The swing of her sword was less a desperate bid for survival and more a tedious chore. A particularly stubborn boar-beast, its hide bristling with broken arrows, kept charging the same section of rubble. On its fourth attempt, a burly guardsman finally lost his patience.
"Will you just give it a rest, you daft pig!" he roared, slamming his shield into the creature's snout with a wet crack. The boar stumbled back, shook its head, and charged again. "Oh, for the love of– Lyra, a little help?"
The wiry adventurer rolled her eyes, vaulted over a low pile of stones, and plunged both her short swords into the beast's neck from behind. It collapsed with a final, gurgling squeal. "There. Happy, Bren?"
"Ecstatic," Bren grumbled, prodding the carcass with his boot. "It's like they've forgotten how to be properly dangerous. Just… annoyingly persistent."
A young mage apprentice, his blue robes stained with soot and something unidentifiable, was cautiously peeking over the wall. He'd been flinging weak, sputtering embers for hours. Now, he managed to conjure a decent-sized fireball and hurl it at a cluster of hyena-like creatures. It hit one square in the back, setting its fur alight. The creature didn't strategically retreat; it just ran in a screaming, burning circle, setting two of its packmates on fire in the process.
"Did you see that, Master Haldor?" the apprentice yelled, a note of triumph in his voice. "A direct hit! They're just… standing there!"
An older mage with a singed beard sighed from his position further down the wall, where he was methodically encasing beasts' feet in ice. "Yes, Lyle, I see. Very impressive. Now stop gawking and do it again before one of them remembers it has teeth."
The banter was a lifeline, a way to stitch their frayed nerves back together.
Davik, the guardsman, was now taking bets. "Two coppers says the big one with the tusks gets stuck in the rubble again!"
"You're on!" a woman archer called back, notching an arrow. "I think he's learned his lesson."
The tuskered beast in question charged, tripped over the same hidden chunk of masonry it had the last three times, and plowed snout-first into the ground. A chorus of groans and a few cheers went up along the line.
"Pay up, Marta!" Davik crowed.
"Ah, stuff it, Davik," Marta laughed, tossing the coins his way. "The thing's dumber than a bag of hammers."
Freya allowed herself a small, tired smile. This was what it meant to hold a line. It wasn't just about strength or magic; it was about this shared, gritty humanity. The complaints, the stupid jokes, the tiny bets that made the horror recede for a moment.
Gerric, having finally caught his breath, leaned on his axe. "You know what I'm looking forward to?" he mused, not to anyone in particular. "A proper bath. A long, hot one. With scented oils, the fancy stuff my missus buys. I'm gonna sit in that tub until I prune up like a dried apple."
"A bath?" Lyra scoffed, wiping her blades clean on a less-gory patch of a dead wolf's fur. "I'm looking forward to a bed. A real bed, with a mattress that doesn't have rocks in it. I'm gonna sleep for a week."
"Nah, a feast!" a young soldier piped up. "A massive roast, with all the trimmings! And a whole barrel of that ale Gerric was going on about!"
The conversation devolved into a good-natured argument about the merits of sleep versus food versus drink, all while they mechanically cut down the endless, but now manageable, tide of beasts.
Freya didn't join in. She just listened, letting the normalcy of it wash over her. They were making plans. However simple, however focused on basic comforts, they were thinking about a future beyond this wall. Beyond this night.
She looked out over the seething, disorganized mass of creatures. The fear was gone, replaced by a solid, unyielding certainty. They were just numbers. And numbers, no matter how big, could be whittled down.
The Iron Fangs had cut off the head. Now, it was their job to grind down the body. And for the first time since the sun had set, it felt like a job they could actually finish.
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