Sous stood at the head of the vast centaur host, gazing across the valley where their lines formed an unbroken barrier of flesh and steel and fury. The ground itself trembled beneath the restless weight of countless hooves, a deep rhythmic pulse that traveled up through her own legs and settled in her chest like the heartbeat of something ancient and unstoppable.
She breathed in the morning, rich with the smell of torn earth and crushed grass and the bright edge of coming violence, and she welcomed every particle of it. They were ready. They were alive. They were hers to lead.
Sous had walked those filthy ghetto streets only the night before, had seen the hollow eyes of foals who had never known a horizon without walls, had listened to elders whisper of a time when centaurs ran free beneath starlight that belonged to no master.
She had promised them that the night just past was the last they would spend in cages. They had believed her. They had followed her. And now the moment of reckoning waited just beyond the rise.
A scout came thundering back from the ridge, mane whipping like a banner of war, and reported that the werewolves had come in force. Thousands of them ringed the far slope in a seething circle of teeth and claw and yellow eyes, already snarling their hunger for slaughter.
Sous dismissed the scout with a nod and walked forward until she stood alone before the entire front line. She did not need to quiet them; the mere sight of her did that.
Ten thousand centaurs fell silent as completely as if the world itself had drawn breath and held it.
She raised one hand, palm forward, and the valley became a bowl of silence so pure that even the wind seemed unwilling to disturb it. Then she spoke, not in the soaring cadences of generals who loved their own voices, but in the low, steady tone of someone who had nothing left to lose and everything to give.
She spoke of the foals sleeping behind walls tonight who would never again wake to the smell of fear. She spoke of the ancestors whose names had been beaten out of them until only whispers remained. She spoke of the simple, ferocious truth that no creature deserved to live on its knees when it was born to gallop beneath open sky. When she finished, she lowered her arm, and the earth answered.
They moved as one organism, a tide of muscle and bronze and vengeance that rolled forward with a roar deeper than thunder.
Across the field the werewolves gathered themselves into no formation at all, only a hungry knot of bodies that wanted nothing more than to rip and rend and feast.
"Gladius!" Sous shouted.
The collision was cataclysmic.
Sous met the first werewolf mid-leap and opened its shoulder to the bone with a single economical stroke. Hot blood spattered her chest and she was already past it, blade singing again, carving a path through fur and fury.
Behind her the second and third ranks loosed their arrows in black clouds that fell among the wolves like iron rain. Spears lowered and centaurs drove forward in perfect overlapping wedges that turned the werewolf rush into a churning slaughter pen.
On the left flank the enemy tried to pour around the edge, seeking to envelop and overwhelm. Sous caught the motion from the corner of her eye, raised her blade high and swept it in a sharp arc. An entire company peeled off without a word and galloped to seal the breach, their hooves drumming counterpoint to the dying screams of wolves who discovered too late that centaurs could turn faster than any predator could bite.
She fought at the center now, surrounded by the storm she had summoned. Every strike was deliberate, every movement an exercise in controlled devastation.
A werewolf lunged for her throat and lost its head for the ambition. Another raked claws across her flank, drawing thin lines of fire that only sharpened her focus; she spun inside its reach and buried her blade to the hilt beneath its ribs.
She did not roar or scream or waste breath on battle cries. She simply advanced, relentless as winter, carving order out of chaos one corpse at a time.
The centaurs felt it. They saw their Alpha moving through the enemy like a scythe through ripe wheat and something fierce and bright woke in them. They pressed closer, shoulder to shoulder, a living wall that no amount of snarling fury could break. The werewolves began to falter.
Then he came.
The Apex flank commander was a mountain of muscle and scar tissue and old hatred, taller than any two of his kind, claws long as sickles and eyes burning with the promise of slow death.
He shoved his own warriors aside to reach her, blade raised, lips peeled back from fangs that had torn out a thousand throats. Sous met him without hesitation.
Steel met claw in a shower of sparks. They circled in the eye of the storm, trading blows that would have shattered lesser warriors.
When he swept low to take her legs she was already moving, leaping over the strike and bringing her blade down in an overhand blow he barely parried. The shock rang up both their arms. He snarled and lunged again, claws seeking her face; she slipped inside the reach, felt the wind of the strike graze her cheek, and drove her sword through the gap in his guard straight into his side.
He howled and backhanded her hard enough to send her staggering, but she rolled with it and came up inside his reach again. Blood poured from the wound she had given him, thick and black in the morning light.
He attacked in a frenzy now, all control abandoned, and that was his mistake. Sous waited for the opening she knew would come, caught his wrist on the backswing, twisted, and opened his throat with a single perfect stroke.
The commander dropped to his knees, clutching at the ruin of his neck while the life poured out of him in steaming pulses. For one heartbeat the entire battlefield seemed to pause, every eye drawn to the falling giant.
The werewolves broke.
What had been a pack became a mob became a panicked rout. Centaurs poured after them, arrows still falling, spears rising and falling in terrible rhythm.
The valley echoed with the screams of the dying and the triumphant thunder of hooves that would not stop until the last enemy was driven into the dirt.
When it was finished the sun stood higher, indifferent and bright, painting the trampled field in shades of red and gold.
Sous walked among her warriors, touching shoulders, meeting eyes that shone now with something fiercer than mere survival. They had remembered who they were. She had given them that gift, and they had paid for it in blood and pain and unbreakable will.
She ordered the wounded gathered and the dead honored. Already runners were riding for the ghettos with news that the walls would come down tonight, that the foals would sleep beneath stars that belonged to no one but the sky.
Sous looked out over the battlefield one last time, at the bodies of wolves and the weapons that would never again be raised against her people, and felt the weight of the promise she carried settle deeper into her bones.
The year was coming to a third. Three years in war. She was looking forward to this ending.