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The noise was astounding. No matter how many battles Kat weathered, she always forgot how senselessly loud everything got in the thick of it.

The battlefield was awash in the screams of thralls hurling themselves artlessly against the century ranks, and the shrill peal of Mira’s whistle barely cut through the clatter and squelch of bodies and weaponry colliding.

Kat hefted her spear as the fore of their formation dropped back through the lines, leaving nothing but Emory between her and the slavering hordes.

She laid a hand on his shoulder, as she had hundreds of times over the past three years on the front. He bent low under the weight of his shield, sweat already trickling from beneath his helm. A droplet traced down the join of his shoulder, over the bruised impression of teeth.

She was back in her centurion’s tent, no armor but her skin, laughing helplessly in the tangled remains of the cot their combined weight had collapsed.

“Kat,” Emory murmured.

No, he muttered.

No, he shouted. Kat’s grip on her spear tightened, and she barely got one foot back to brace before the next wave of thralls was upon them.

She hadn’t aimed—hadn’t been thinking straight enough to sight her target—and she caught the thrall by the shoulder, the point of her spear lodging in sinew as it let out a horrific wail.

She’d never be used to this part either.

To looking into a human face that had been stolen and twisted for the Demon Lord’s foul purposes, into eyes that had gone glassy with their final rest, lodged in a body that still walked, animated by a scrap of demon flesh welded to the back of its neck.

Driven now by its cruel lord’s hunger for conquest, that body would throw itself ravenously against the legions of Telrus, doing everything in its reanimated power to drag new converts to the Demon Lord’s cause from the ranks of the living until its vital functions had been, as they put it in training, “sufficiently destroyed.”

A spear in the shoulder wouldn’t do it. The thrall shoved hard into the blow, doing its damnedest to burn the shaft through Kat’s palms. She tightened her grip and heaved, wrenching another scream from its throat.

All the battlefield’s noise was awful, but this was the worst of it.

Thralls could feel pain, but it never slowed them.

They weren’t really the enemy, only unfortunate corpses, and so Kat could never keep her sympathy at bay when she made them wail, even if they were relentlessly trying to kill her through all that writhing and screaming.

The best she could do for them was gifting the poor things a quick, clean ending.

Usually she was better at it than this. With the first thrall caught on her spearpoint, there was nothing to stop the next one from slipping past and driving itself hard against Emory’s shield.

He met it with a grunt, his footing sure and steady as he deadened its momentum, shoved, and bludgeoned its neck with his shortsword.

The slice bit deep enough that the thrall’s entire body jerked, loosing another warbling howl at the indignity of losing its motor functions.

Its head wobbled uncertainly, and Emory threw it back with another shove as Kat bore hard into the base of her spear and put the thrall she’d stuck on its ass.

It tried to get up, but another scrambled over it, their limbs catching in a haphazard tangle.

Kat saw her opening. She yanked back her spear, lined her blow up with the fresh thrall’s chest, and drove it home with everything she had.

The sturdy iron tip plunged through ribs, through meat, through organs so vital none of Hell’s magic could convince the dead to wake without them.

Kat tugged, the thrall coming with her, and Emory stepped forward, punching ahead with his shield to clear the body from her spear.

Before Kat had been drafted, she’d imagined battle the way it sounded in stories.

Heroes fighting valiantly back-to-back, blades whirling in dazzling forms that pushed the limits of each combatant’s skill.

The ugly reality was this: Battle was a machine, one Telrus had perfected over the long years since the Mouth opened and the Demon Lord’s conquest spilled into their plane.

The thralls were a mindless horde, and the only way to win against their overwhelming numbers was unbreakable order.

There was no elegance. You waited for the whistle. You moved with your decade rank, five soldiers across and five rows deep, one half of the century on either side of your centurion. You waited for her whistle. You took up your spear and thrust it into flesh until the whistle said you could stop.

And you hoped against all hope that you’d last until that call.

If there was any heroism on the lines, it was in the cooperation between battle partners.

The shield, the spear, the work they did in tandem.

Kat and Emory had survived three years honing their craft in the effort to beat back Hell’s invasion that culminated in this long slog to the Mouth, but today was Telrus’s last stand—the last chance they had to defeat the Demon Lord before he alchemized the end of Aurean power.

Their odds were clear. Until their time was up, they’d continue to fight, continue to lead their line forward.

Two pairs of battle partners on either side of them, five shields locked together in a line that advanced with every step Emory took, five spears that worked in a rhythm to match Kat’s.

The only glory they could hope for was in the perfect, determined silence that hung between them.

But fatigue was inevitable. Spears began to dip.

Shields began to shudder in their bearers’ grips.

On her left, Kat caught the flash of Sawyer’s bared teeth.

On her right, Ziva took her next squalling thrall with a bitter shout of her own.

Exhaustion was sinking its claws in Kat, no matter how hard she rallied againstit.

For all the fear and anxiety of being at the fore of the ranks, the relief of Mira’s whistle was always paired with a pang of disappointment.

Kat wanted to do more, to prove she could fight harder.

Her spear had just gone clean through a thrall’s guts when the shrill blast came, and the next pair behind her crowded at her back as she tried to jerk her weapon free from the poor corpse trying to pull its way down her shaft.

“Break, my count!” Emory shouted over the clamor, ramming the pommel of his sword four times into the back of his shield to mark it off, but he hesitated when Carrick and Elise dropped back on either side of him.

He wasn’t supposed to hesitate. He’d never hesitated before.

“ Go, ” Kat grunted.

He caught her gaze, stricken, but she only ducked her head, dropping her bulk to her knees as the spearbearer behind her lunged forward and took the thrall through the eye.

Kat hauled back, her spear coming free soaked with foul-smelling bile, and with Emory’s shield tucked behind her, they rushed from the battle line and down the other four ranks to the rear of the century.

Under the clamor of battle, the back rank was a chorus of lungs wheezing like bellows.

Some soldiers dropped to their knees for a brief respite, and the century’s aides ran up and down the line, swiping already-filthy cloths over their gore-spattered weapons and offering sips from waterskins that carried a lukewarm, frothy brew laced with salt and stimulants.

It was a moment to appreciate the mechanism of the Telrusian legions—a moment that could only happen because for a few brief minutes, they could do nothing but watch the machinery chew forward.

Kat tipped her head back, her spear’s butt driven into the ground like an elder’s cane as she bore her weight into it.

She’d lost count of how many turnovers they’d been through today.

The only markers that gave her a vague sense of the battle’s progress were the red-ribboned flags that towered over the legions, each marking another hundred yards of ground gained.

There were far too few of them. The Mouth ahead seemed no closer than it had been this morning.

Under the glare of the afternoon sun, its brimstone scent choked the air, making it even more of a fight for Kat to get her breath back.

The Mouth’s malevolent glow had a tendency to draw the eye, the pulse of flowing magma hypnotic even from this distance.

It wasn’t just magma. Kat barely understood the high science, but she knew it was forged by some interplanar magic that held the Mouth of Hell open and loosed its evil upon her world.

Looking upon it felt like looking a predator in the eye.

Like looking away would be your next mistake—and the last you ever made.

But the Mouth was trifling against the citadel that loomed beyond its gullet.

The Demon Lord had built a shrine to his malice over the rift, a towering obsidian palace that reflected the Mouth’s writhing glow.

The High King of Hell was fortified within it, watching his armies make way for his evil as he inched closer and closer to alchemizing the end of Aurean magic and his own invincibility.

From the reports—from the scouts who survived getting close enough—he was on the verge of succeeding.