Chapter 23: Killing

Waiting for the sun to die was the worst part.

I sat on a bench near the central square, legs stretched out in front of me, hands folded across my stomach. The sword pressed against my hip beneath my robe. My room at Vael’s was already paid.

The sky bled orange.

I watched it the way a condemned man watches the clock.

Every second was a second closer.

I sat on a wooden bench in a town square and waited for it to happen.

The fountain beside me trickled softly. Somewhere down the street, a child laughed. A cart rumbled past, its wheels grinding against cobblestone.

Normal sounds of an ordinary life.

I hated how peaceful it was.

 

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Boots shook the ground.

I heard them before I saw them. A rhythmic thud that vibrated through the bench.

The Knights came from the south road.

Five of them, the same five I’d watched leave in the previous loop. They walked in loose formation through the square, their swords swinging at their hips and backs, their faces carrying a unbothered expression.

They weren’t leaving.

Without the carriages, the road south was a long march. A march that couldn’t be completed before nightfall. No officer in their right mind would walk through hostile frontier territory in the dark.

The tallest Knight led the group. He was built like something that had been forged rather than born. Shoulders wide enough to block a doorway. Arms thick as tree trunks. Across his back, strapped with leather bindings that creaked with every step, hung a sword.

That can’t be a sword.

It looked more like a slab of sharpened iron the length of a man. Its blade was as wide as my torso, its edge chipped and scarred from use, its guard nothing more than a crude crossbar welded to the tang. It looked less like a weapon and more like a piece of siege equipment that someone had decided to carry by hand.

When the Knight unslung it near the tavern’s entrance, the tip struck cobblestone.

The impact sent a tremor through the ground that I felt in my teeth.

I looked down at my own weapon. The short blade tucked beneath my robe.

The comparison was so absurd it almost made me laugh.

These were Knights. The kind Iris had called lunatics. The kind the crowd had whispered about with fear and respect.

Meanwhile, I was an undead with a butter knife.

The Knights filed into Vael’s tavern. “The city is packed. Two expeditions, soldiers everywhere, and now your group on top of it. We don’t have enough rooms for everyone.” I heard Vael say.

Three went inside. Two crossed the street to the tavern next door.

“Hot meal included. Stew’s already on,” Vael explained.

A grunt of acknowledgment. The scrape of chairs being pulled across a stone floor.

I didn’t smile. But I felt a weight being lifted.

In the worst case, when the fire came, there would be five Knights within arm’s reach from the tavern.

 

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The minutes crawled.

I sat on my bench and pretended to be bored.

Inside, I was wired.

My eyes tracked the square without moving my head. The fountain. The stalls. The lampposts with their mana-glow.

Every few minutes, one of the Knights glanced out through the tavern’s window.

I think they’d noticed me.

I could feel their gazes landing. A student sitting alone on a bench as night fell, doing nothing, going nowhere. To them, I was either a fool or something worth watching.

One of them studied me through the glass for a full ten seconds before turning away. Another, a lean man, made eye contact through the open door and held it.

I didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away.

I pretended I hadn’t noticed them at all. My attention was elsewhere. On the wall and the sky above it.

The moon climbed.

It rose pale over Grezheim’s eastern wall.

Soon.

My jaw tightened.

Any moment now.

 

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I heard it before I saw it.

A thin whistle. The sound of something sharp cutting through air.

My eyes locked onto the projectile.

A single point of light arced over the battlements.

One arrow. Its tip burned. It rose trailing a thread of flame like a comet’s tail, and descended toward a rooftop three streets to the west.

Fire caught. Bloomed with the same unnatural speed I’d seen before.

I tensed, waiting for the flood.

The second arrow. The third. The tenth. The hundreth.

They didn’t come.

One arrow. Then silence.

My breath caught.

What…

The bells answered.

Every bell answered.

The sound erupted from every direction at once. Tower bells, gate bells, wall bells, alarm bells. They rang with a deafening fury that shook the air and rattled window panes.

The signal tower is active.

The garrison had seen.

This time, one arrow was all it took.

Doors flew open along every street. Soldiers poured from barracks, staves in hand, crystals already blazing with mana.

Officers appeared among them, voices cutting through the chaos with trained authority.

“Civilians to the underground shelters! Move! All personnel to defensive positions! Wall units, reinforce the ramparts! Go, go, go!”

Grezheim woke like a war machine shaken from sleep.

People stumbled from their homes. Families clutching children, old men hobbling on canes, women carrying bundles of whatever they’d grabbed first. Soldiers directed them with outstretched arms, herding the flow toward the shelter entrances.

I could see opening in the ground, heavy stone hatches lifting on iron hinges.

The first soldiers reached the wall within sixty seconds of the bells.

They scaled the stairs in pairs, staves raised, and took positions along the battlements.

Mana crackled. Shields shimmered into existence along the parapet, translucent barriers of blue light that connected one soldier’s position to the next.

The second arrow volley was nothing like the first. Dozens of burning points arced over the wall, each one aimed at a different rooftop.

Yet, the shields caught them.

Not all. Some pierced through gaps in the barrier line. Some found angles the defenders hadn’t covered. Fires bloomed on canvas awnings, on timber roofs, on a cart left unattended in the market lane.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

However, the wall held.

The shadows came next.

Dark figures vaulted over the battlements. They moved the same way I remembered.

But this time, they landed on defended ground.

The first elf to clear the walls met a bolt of compressed mana that struck him mid-drop. His body convulsed in the air, momentum carrying him sideways, and he crashed into the walkway at a broken angle that told me he wouldn’t be getting up.

A second elf landed cleanly, blades already drawn, and sprinted along the rampart toward the nearest defender. He covered half the distance before three staves pointed at him. The combined discharge tore through his cloak and dropped him where he stood.

Others, however, made it through.

Some were fast enough to dodge the first barrage and reach the inner edge of the wall. They leapt from the rampart into the streets below, rolling on impact, disappearing into alleys and side lanes.

But not hundreds. Not a wave.

The wall’s defenders cut the invasion at its source. What had been an unchecked flood in every previous loop was now a trickle. For every elf that reached the streets, three were stopped on the rampart. Blasted from the wall. Pinned behind shield barriers. Driven back by concentrated fire.

The elves who made it into the town arrived wounded and exhausted.

Their magic was diminished. The flames they commanded flickered where they should have roared. They grasped at nearby fires and tried to spread them, tried to hurl flame at buildings and defenders, but the results were thin.

There was no cascading infernos that turned the air into a furnace.

Just scattered fights. Isolated skirmishes. Pockets of violence that were suppressed before they could spread.

The battle was different.

It was winnable.

 

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The Knights moved like they’d been born in combat.

The moment the bells rang, all five of them had risen from their seats with a synchronized calm.

They drew their swords and walked into the street.

Walked.

As if the burning arrows overhead and the hooded figures dropping from the walls were a mild inconvenience rather than a threat.

The first elf to round the corner into the square met the tall Knight’s massive blade.

The impact wasn’t just a cut. It was closer to a demolition.

The slab of iron caught the elf at shoulder height and continued through without slowing, as if the body it passed through was made of wet paper. The elf came apart. Two pieces hit the cobblestones separately, trailing arcs of golden blood painted the stone in metallic streaks.

The tall Knight didn’t pause. He stepped over the remains and continued forward, scanning the next approach.

I watched from the square’s edge, my back pressed against a building’s wall.

A soldier ran past me, then stopped.

“You!” He pointed at my Academy insignia. “Get to the shelters. This isn’t a place for students!”

“I’m enlisted,” I said.

“I don’t care if you’re the king’s nephew. Get the fuck out of the combat zone!”

Another soldier, passing behind the first, jerked his thumb toward the western lane. “Shelter entrance is two streets that way. Move, kid.”

I didn’t move.

My eyes were on the tavern.

 

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The front door was still open.

Through it, I could see movement.

Vael emerged first.

He pushed through the doorframe with his bad leg dragging, one arm wrapped around a bundle of cloth, the other braced against the wall for balance. His mechanical eye swept the street.

Lucy was behind him.

Pressed against his side, fingers in the fabric of his apron, her golden hair wild and her face streaked with tears. She was shaking.

They stood at the threshold, scanning the chaos for a gap.

The square was a battlefield. Soldiers clashed with hooded figures on three sides. Mana bolts streaked through the smoke. The Knight with the massive sword was forty paces away, driving two elves toward the fountain with sweeping cuts.

The path to the shelter was blocked.

Vael turned Lucy toward the eastern lane, the narrower street that connected the square to the residential blocks. It looked clear. For the moment.

They ran.