Dawn came thin and metallic, a blade's edge of light prying at the clouds. Haven held its breath.
Ethan walked the ramparts one last time, checking faces more than fortifications. Marcus waited at the main gate with his Titan Bloods, jaw set, hammer across his shoulder. Darren stood to the right with his spear line, calm as a metronome. Ravi crouched at the command table under the half-roof, notes open, lips moving as he rehearsed contingencies. Kira rolled her wrists, twin daggers whispering together.
On the west, by the river, Keith's silhouette cut the mist, his beasts pacing — crocodile a shadow in the water, lion and tiger a low, prowling gold and smoke. Ellie checked harness buckles on her bear and gave her husky a scratch that earned a happy huff of frost.
North, the newly braced wall bristled with bowstrings and nerves. Sofia stood on a scaffold, breath slow, eyes narrowed to threads. Maya knelt with her palms against the stone, listening to the world through vibration. Tina moved between them with a pouch of bandages and a face of quiet resolve. Aria crouched near a buttress, one hand on the ground, the other stroking the glossy carapace of her spider. It hummed at her touch like a giant, patient engine.
Ethan stopped beside Aria. "Is your queen done?"
Aria looked up, eyes bright. "She says the tunnel reaches the cliff's belly. Two exits. Hidden." She swallowed. "She's waiting."
"Good." He squeezed her shoulder. "No one speaks of it unless I say."
Across the yard, a low, anticipatory hum threaded through stone and timber as the new turrets spun their gentle test-circles. The mines out beyond the main gate pulsed faint red under the soft crust of soil — a line of buried hearts.
High over the hall, golden script flared into being.
> Fortress Trial: Beast Eruption
Commencing in 00:00:30…
The courtyard stilled. A child coughed. Someone whispered a prayer. The glow ticked down.
> 00:00:10…
00:00:03…
00:00:02…
00:00:01…
BEGIN.
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The Sky Fell
The sound arrived before the shadow.
A long, shivering hush crawled over the stronghold — the kind that made the tiny hair along Ethan's forearms rise. Then the air changed: pressure deepening, as if a mountain had stepped into the sky. A hiss, a tremble, and a sound like ten thousand flags tearing at once.
Maya flinched so hard she almost fell. "Wings," she breathed. "So many—"
The sun went out.
It was not clouds. It was movement. The sky itself began to seethe — black shapes in a boiling mass, the light smothered under a tide of wings. Beaks like hooked knives glinted; ragged pinions showed bone where feathers should have been; eyes burned with a bad, hungry light. The flock descended as if pulled by gravity itself.
"Positions!" Ethan's voice cracked the stillness. "Keep your heads down — archers on my mark!"
Screams answered before the first arrows left the string. Three figures in the yard — support hands not quick enough to reach cover — were snatched from the ground in ragged yanks, feet dangling, fingers clawing at air. One managed a hoarse, disbelieving "No—" before another shape punched into him mid-flight. A flurry. A rain of dark feathers. A sound like meat torn from bone. Then only scraps obeyed gravity.
Blood pebbled the dirt near the fire pit in red constellations. Every other voice in the courtyard died into a terrible, clean quiet.
Everyone understood exactly what this was.
"Fire!" Sofia's voice cracked, fierce and clear. Arrows streaked upward in a disciplined volley, shafts whispering into the mass. Birds folded and fell like cut vines.
A heartbeat later, the first turret spoke — no thunder, just a deep iron hum and a white bolt cutting a line through the sky. A strip of birds crisped, bodies spinning, feathers bursting into light. The second turret joined it; the hum doubled, tracing another glowing trench through the black.
"Left tower — three diving, fast!" Maya shouted, eyes unfocused, hands pressed to stone. "Nine o'clock, low!"
Sofia pivoted before the words finished, three arrows leaving her bow like notes in a chord — left, center, right — each punching cleanly into a skull. Three bodies tumbled, their shadows collapsing toward the web-strewn parapet.
Aria's spider had felt the same pressure change Maya had; it reared and launched nets of silk, spraying a pale gauze over the gap between towers. Diving birds slammed into it with the meaty thuds of trapped fish and writhed, tearing and tangling, their furious shrieks smothered in glue.
From the yard below, Marcus saw a cluster of smaller fliers breaking through on the southern flank — too low for arrows, too fast for the turrets.
He bellowed, "Tina! Get that shield working — protect them!"
Tina's hands were already glowing. At his shout she slammed her palms together, and a dome of soft gold bloomed from her position on the wall. The nearest volley of carrion-birds hit it like stones against water, bursting into sparks and feathers. The field held, rippling outward with every impact.
"Shield's holding!" she called, voice steady but strained. "Stay inside the light!"
The spider's web stretched taut above, Tina's golden barrier shimmered below, and between the two, Haven endured.
"Keep them grounded!" Ethan called. "Finish what falls!"
The ground crews obeyed. They did not chase glory. They did not leap for ladders. They tightened, shields up, spears angled. Anything that crashed and moved was dispatched with a single, brutal economy: a hammer blow, a spear thrust, a thread like a green garrote in Ethan's hand biting clean through a neck. There was no room for flourish. Survival lived in short motions.
A flash of pale wings burst from the hall roof. Keith's guardians — Ashwing and Galdra — hit the air like thrown spears, each a creature larger than a horse, each haloed in a thin shine of essence. They did not scream; they sang, a deep, clarion cry that cut through fear. They rose into the storm, beat once, and cleaved a corridor with their bodies. Smaller birds tumbled from the air in their wake as if gravity remembered them late.
"Good birds," Keith murmured. His voice was not loud, but everyone near him heard relief like a man taking a first breath after being held under.
"Turrets pivot — track center mass," Ravi snapped, fingers flicking through air as if the script obeyed him. "Spend twenty credits to overcharge — do it!"
Golden light ran down the turret housings like rain. The next two shots widened into fans. Whole sheets of the flock came undone. It was raining birds and burning feathers; it was raining ash; it was raining essence in soft, phosphorescent flakes that vanished as soon as they kissed the ground.
On the north wall, Riley stood too exposed. He didn't realize it; his eyes were on the sky, on the panic, on the small boy pressed behind a crate with his hands over his ears. A shadow fell toward them in a spike.
"Riley!" Ethan shouted, but his threads were busy binding a bleeding leg two towers down.
Riley didn't move so much as detonate. Electricity crawled over his forearms like cobweb fire. It jumped to his palms in fat, hungry tongues and then climbed the air as if it had found exactly where it wanted to live.
Lightning leapt — a savage, forked blade. The diving bird crisped to a sculpture and disintegrated into black snow. The bolt didn't stop. It reached for more, jumped creature to creature, turned a slice of the sky into a bone-white flash.
Riley stared at his hands, chest heaving. The smell of ozone bit the back of Ethan's throat.
Script bloomed above the boy's head.
> Evolution Unlocked — Path: Stormheart Adept
Abilities acquired: Thunder Pulse (AOE discharge), Chain Arc (ally-armed conduction), Skybreak (localized storm, high cost), Flashstride (short-range lightning step).
Riley's mouth worked around a laugh. "I— I don't—"
"Don't think," Ethan called. "Just use it."
"Left! High left!" Maya cried. "They're circling!"
Riley raised both hands. The air answered. Thunder Pulse rolled out of him like a bell toll; a circular sheet of blue-white snapped through a thirty-meter ring, and everything caught in it twitched, went still, and fell. He flinched as each body hit. "Sorry," he muttered to no one and everyone.
"Again in three!" Ravi called, eyes flicking between the carnage above and a tally only he could see. "Turret two is hot, turret one at half — Maya, I need another veil!"
Maya's eyes were wet with thin blood at the corners — too much pressure, too fast — but she set her teeth and pressed her palms harder into the parapet. Her power rippled out. It rode stone, tripped air like a glitch. Birds misjudged angles and slammed into nothing. For ten seconds, gravity reclaimed the sky in great, ragged handfuls. Tina grabbed her arm when she swayed. "Breathe, love. In, out. I've got you."
Ashwing folded, hammered through a knot of attackers, beat once, and rose again with streaks of black along its white primaries. Galdra cut a wheel through smoke and shattered skeletons. Keith stood below, head tilted, eyes distant, as if he were whistling silently into that high and empty place where bond lived. "There," he said softly. "Turn. Now." Above, the birds turned like flags in a coordinated wind and ripped the flank off the nearest swarm.
"Chain Arc!" Ethan barked, pointing to Sofia. "Give her a line!"
Riley nodded, shook out his hands. Lightning jumped to Sofia's bow through a thread he could suddenly see. Her next shot left the string like a comet and then… multiplied. The arrow struck one bird; electricity leapt without asking, climbed three more, found a fifth, and finished in a thundercrack that shook dust from the tower seams. Sofia lowered the bow slowly. A tight, feral smile tugged one corner of her mouth. "That'll do."
The turrets found their voice and kept it. Beam after beam scythed the sky. The world smelled like a storm and a slaughterhouse.
On the ground the fighters moved only when needed. Marcus did not chase the fallen; they came to him as if a tide decided he was where land was. He broke necks quick, with short, hateful swings. Darren's blade spun and set, spun and set — a wheeled saw in the hands of a surgeon. Caleb stood a half-step ahead of the others, weight over the balls of his feet, two-handed blade level, eyes calm in a way that made Ethan both proud and worried.
When bodies crashed through the nets and hit stone and staggered, Caleb gave them a single, perfect cut. No flourish. No miss.
It lasted forever. It lasted minutes.
At last, holes in the black widened into patches of wan morning. Screeches thinned. The living cloud frayed. The remnants wheeled, gathered, thought better, and peeled away. They fled toward the east in three torn streams.
Silence rolled down into the stronghold like fog.
No one cheered. Breath returned with shakes. Feathers, cooling and charred, drifted like black snow in the still air. The yard was a mess of slick and red and white down, the ugly glitter of broken beaks and bone.
"Status," Ethan said, voice hoarse.
Ravi swallowed. His eyes flicked over the script hanging faintly above the table, numbers tick-tick-ticking before settling. "Nine dead. Seventeen wounded." He swallowed again. "Stronghold earn: plus two hundred and thirty credits. Current total: seven hundred."
Keith whistled, and the two great birds limped home, landing on the tower tops with the caution of things that had almost spent themselves. They were bloodied, but when they lifted wings to shake out feathers, Ethan saw no gaps. Keith reached up as if to touch the air they cut and let his hand fall. "Good," he told them. "Good."
Aria slumped against her spider's abdomen, hands shaking. The spider twitched with the same nerves; silk still trailed from its spinnerets and caught on Aria's wrist like a bracelet. "Are they gone?" she asked without opening her eyes.
"For now," Ethan said. He crossed to her, raked his gaze over the wall. "Tina, triage by the north parapet. Anybody who can walk helps the ones who can't. Darren — rotate the spear line. Thirty down, thirty up."
He glanced at Riley, who was sitting against the battlement with his head on his knees and smoke curling gently from his sleeve cuffs. "You all right?"
Riley looked up, eyes too bright. "Think so." Lightning flickered under his skin in tiny ripples, as if a storm had moved in and remembered to close the door but not to turn off the light. "Everything smells like… coins."
Ethan huffed something like a laugh. "Ozone," he said. "And burnt feathers. You did well."
"Am I—" Riley stumbled, then tried again. "Am I going to… you know…"
"You're going to drink water," Ethan said. He set a hand on the boy's shoulder, let a thread run from his palm into the fabric of Riley's jacket until it found skin — just a brush, a test. The essence there was a wild animal that had learned a new trick and was waiting to be told it could do it again. It was not tearing itself apart. "And you're going to listen when Maya says to duck."
Maya, who had blood dried in thin rivers from her ears, looked up as if she'd heard her name from across a much larger room. "I'll try," she said, and tried to smile. Tina dabbed at her temple with a scrap of linen and clucked, "Head down, sweetheart. Don't be noble."
Marcus wiped a hand down his face and came away streaked with soot and something that might have been bird. He didn't look at it. He looked over the yard — the bodies, the wounded, the broken roofs — and nodded as if the world had confirmed a suspicion he'd long held. "If that was the warm-up," he said, "I'm going to need a bigger hammer."