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A third spear struck. A fourth. The demon’s companions watched impassively. These creatures of Hell had no solidarity in their ranks, only loyalty to those higher up the food chain.

But they could also sense openings. With the eighth decade focused on the underling they’d caught, another decided to try its luck, rushing in so fast that the shieldbearers barely had time to react.

It hit the line with scrabbling claws searching for purchase in metal, flesh, leather, anything, and one of the soldiers howled in obvious pain, flinching back into the line as their comrades tried to force space for them to shake out their wounded arm.

Emory lunged, and Kat’s heart leaped with him as he brought his staff down hard on the demon’s skull, scoring a crack clean between its curving horns.

She fought down the urge to chastise him for the reckless move, for the way it had clearly startled the shields in front of him. It’d worked, hadn’tit?

She needed to let her soldiers fight. She couldn’t spare them all.

She was out of her depth.

It hit her like a blow to the chest—how she’d thrown herself headfirst into the fray untrained, fueled only by the raw necessity of it.

Kat had never seen battle from the core of a century, calling orders and praying she’d made the right choices as they twisted the fate of every soldier around her.

Mira always seemed so certain. It had always struck her as unquestionably correct to follow her directive.

Now Kat wondered how any of these decades could have confidence in what she was saying—and she felt how it was slowing her.

They’d felled a single underling and scored hits on three of the others, but the Lesser Lord was still out there.

It could wait for the smaller demons to tire them out, and it wouldn’t care about its losses in the slightest.

Kat couldn’t stop caring. Couldn’t stop herself from taking it like a wound to her own body every time another claw struck flesh.

The spearbearers were trying their best, but the demons were starting to circle wider, teasing apart their formation, loosening it up enough to create gaps that might seem obvious to Kat but couldn’t possibly be noticed by the shieldbearers, who only had eyes for their enemies.

“Two steps back, my count!” she shouted, thumping her staff’s butt again.

On the fourth beat, the decades moved—more steadily than her first command, but in a simple backward motion that didn’t fix the weakness in their formation.

“ Tighten that line! ” Kat corrected, flinching at the obvious stress in her voice.

Mira made her orders sound inevitable. Kat’s were almost questions.

Her soldiers were getting sluggish, the kind of sluggish where they’d start expecting the changeover whistle at any moment. But no changeover was coming, only another, bigger demon—one Kat had just spotted in the shadows of the tree line.

Her brief glimpse of it in the forest hadn’t given her an accurate read on its size—not while it was moving, bent low to the ground, and she was more concerned with staying out of its sights than getting a good look.

Now it stood stock-still, drawn up to its full height, only its head distinct in the darkness.

Its eyes burned with infernal fire, and its horns curled around its head like scythes.

It was easily twice the size of any demon warrior that had hit her line in the past, a full twenty feet tall.

Looking at it, she wondered why it bothered waiting.

It looked like it could crush her two measly decades with a single blow.

They were tiring. The opening was going to come soon. The only question was when.

“Seventh break right, eighth break left, on my count!” Kat hollered and pulled her token out from beneath her shirt.

Emory’s gaze snapped to her from where he’d inserted himself haphazardly in the seventh’s formation. He knew her too well to let her get away with what she was about to try.

At least, not on her own.

Kat stamped out the count. On four, the decades moved, splitting clean down the middle.

And Kat didn’t. She held her ground, eyes locked on the shadow in the tree line. Daring it. Beggingit.

It flowed more than it moved, spilling from the trees like liquid night, dragging the shadows with it as it lowered that massive head and charged. The Lesser Lords knew what they were made for. They’d only take the field to down an enemy commander.

Which was exactly what Kat had made herself. With her fragment of a century split on either side of her, with Aurean gold plain on her chest, she’d offered herself up on a platter to the demon.

It came to feast.

“ Spears center, shields take the line, ” Kat screamed. Every muscle in her body begged for permission to run, and she very nearly granted it—up until the moment Emory threw himself ahead of her, squared like he had to the shock knight.

He hadn’t learned a fucking thing. This fool of a man with his makeshift staff, a hinge shield with no decade but her to defend, rearranging her priorities in a heartbeat. Kat reached out, grabbed him by the shoulder, and forced him down.

The Lesser Lord’s swipe missed him by a hair. In the same instant, all nine of the decades’ remaining spears found their target as one.

Five glanced off, hitting a plated joint, a tough bit of sinew, a bone.

Two found purchase in muscle—one through the monster’s thigh and the other in the forearm that had been aiming for a second swipe.

One lodged in the demon general’s gut, flushing the night air with a vile scent as it punctured a bowel.

And one took it through the throat.

Black blood spewed like rain, spattering hot over Kat as the beast let out a gargled yowl. She tried to stagger back, pulling Emory with her, but nine sticks barely put a dent in the general’s momentum. It toppled, its weight coming down like a meteor, and Kat ducked, braced for impact.

But it never came. She cracked an eye open to find Emory crouched at her side, his tentpole held vertical where it plowed into the ground.

The other end was buried in the Lesser Lord’s soft palate, stalling its collapse with only inches to spare.

The bloody rain kept falling, drenching them both in its foul muck.

Kat blinked through it, collapsing back on her ass with her heart hammering.

She was vaguely aware of the decades rallying, free of her haphazard command.

The hinge shields took over, their lines charging after the leaderless, fleeing underlings, but everything was secondary to Emory’s eyes on her.

To the way he’d refused to accept the risk she’d taken, the way he’d defended her once again like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The way this foul general of Hell had robbed them of their moment back in the forest, and now that it was dead, if she only reached out for him—

A sudden smattering of applause jerked her back into context, and she saw herself with fresh eyes: drenched in blood, awash in the stench of bile, and ready to lay all that aside. She let her head loll back to find the source of the noise.

Adrien Augustine had stepped from the scribes’ tent, looking like he’d just been woken up from a very fine nap.

His golden curls were haphazardly mussed, and his eyes were bleary, though they’d widened an acceptable amount at the sight of the Lesser Lord’s steaming corpse barely ten yards from the flimsy canvas barrier he’d stepped through.

He let his applause fade as his gaze dropped to Kat.

Hers couldn’t help but lock on the one hundred golden tokens arrayed across his chest, all of them equally useless in the face of this beast. He’d been right, loath as she was to admit it.

Infantry alone could take on a Lesser Lord and win.

As if sensing her line of thinking, he lifted a finger and tapped it twice on one of his tokens—the lucky one, or so he’d told her.

“One down,” the prince said with a toothy grin. “Two to go.”