Sara's army of three thousand rose like a wave over the hill. The yellowed grass was drowned under a tide of silver steel, the dull iron of musket barrels bouncing with every step. Beside them rose the high, glittering heads of halberds. The soldiers had discarded the rest of their kits on the far side of the hill, dropping them where they had stood, so the weight of halberd and musket was easier to handle. Either the enemy would break, and they could return to retrieve them at their leisure, or they would never need them again.

  No one seemed particurly concerned about this.

  Standing against them was an unwavering wall of brown and tan. In the short time since Graf had taken control of the army, he had already begun efforts to improve their equipment. There was nothing close to a uniform, not yet, but near every soldier at least wore a brown or tan smock over their gambesons. They each wore kettle helms and basic gauntlets, clunky metal things that looked like militant mittens, but that was it. If it weren't for their teeming numbers, she wouldn't have felt the slightest fear about her army's chances.

  But they did have the numbers. They outnumbered her force four-to-one. And they were being led by a commander who had nothing in his mind but absolute, uncompromising victory.

  Sara joined the teams at the center of her army, shed to a cannon like a beast of burden. Only the Napoleons got the honor of horses to pull them; the rest were dragged onward by teams of sweating soldiers. They took to the task with an eagerness almost baffling, as if they didn't even feel the leather biting into their skin or the sun bearing down on them.

  Sara did. She looked up into the blue sky, searching. There wasn't a cloud in sight, and it wasn't yet noon. It was going to be a long, brutal day.

  Her attention was drawn back forward as the horde of Sporaton soldiers rippled in pce, some word being passed through their number. She mentally checked the range, and realized they'd just passed the furthered reach of the 3-Inch Ordnance Rifle. That meant that Graf, somehow, was aware of at least the new weapon's range, and had warned the troops of it. She didn't know how that was possible.

  She expected that would be a common compint in the coming battle.

  To her mild shock, her forces were allowed to cover half the distance between the two armies unmolested. She called for a halt with the Sporatons still a mile away, the entire force an indistinguishable mash of shifting colors at such a range.

  Why let me do this? She wondered as the cannons were rolled forward. The caissons were detached from the carriages, ammunition brought forward, and still the Royal Army held their ground. Is it a trap? Does he want me to open fire? Should I order them to hold their fire?

  No. I'm not going to let him get into my head that bad.

  Her entire army watched the cannons as they were prepared. Many bent their head and murmured prayers. Amarat, unsurprisingly, was the deity most commonly entreated, in the form of requests to bolster the resolve of the Tulian forces while weakening the hearts of the Sporatons. But there were also requests made of Daygon, Otarion, and others. Sara had never interacted much with the rest of the pantheon, or religion in general. She'd had too much else on her mind. As she heard her troop's fervent pleading, she wondered if that was a mistake. The only thing better than a god on your shoulder, after all, was another god at their side.

  Artillery Lieutenant Shale stomped up to Sara with a dangerous gleam in her eye, snapping off a sharp salute.

  "Cannons made ready, ma'am."

  Sara spent one st moment thinking things over. Wondering why Graf was allowing this. Wondering if she should change her pns. Anxiety gnawed at her, acid and bile cwing at her throat.

  Oh, fuck it all.

  "Fire as you–"

  No sooner had the first word left Sara's mouth than did the entire artillery battery erupt with a cataclysmic thundercp, drowning Sara in a powder fog. Eight cannoneers ripped the string from their chosen weapons, releasing the projectiles which shrieked through the air with a horrid wail. She could track the shots of the Napoleons, round balls slicing through the air as the wind caught and slowed them, but not the tapered bolts of the Ordnance Rifles. Those kept their speed as they zipped onward, invisible, far outpacing their ponderous cousins.

  In the same instant the cannons fired, ste-gray shields flickered into being across the Sporaton army, sheltering every soldier under a multiplicity of angled ptes. The ordnance rifle's lead slugs whipped into the shields with a spray of otherworldly light, gouges rent from the shields as if they weren't magical constructs, but physical barriers. Chips of flickering light spun up into the air as weightless shrapnel, hanging in the air like eery fireworks before fading away. No casualties had been suffered by the enemy, but the Tulian army broke out into a ragged cheer all the same.

  "AGAIN!" Shale roared.

  The cannoneers were already in motion, rolling the cannons back into position. Every shot had struck at least somewhere in the Sporaton formation, none falling short or flying over, but that wasn't good enough for Lieutenant Shale.

  "Ordnance Rifles, pce your shots on the center of those fucking ptes! Napoleons, skip fire, blow it up under their goddamn skirts!"

  Sara watched as the cannoneers adjusted their aim, the Ordnance Rifles shifting to the left and right, the Napoleons lowering their barrels. Shale had drilled her crews well, unsurprisingly. It wasn't even thirty seconds before another volley tore out from the cannons, slightly more ragged, but just as effective.

  A second spray of rainbow light ripped itself from the gray shields as the Ordnance Rifles struck home, but this time Sara's attention was drawn towards the 12-pounders. She watched through her spygss as one cannonball impacted the dirt just before the blocks of shielded spears, only to recoil up and away, skimming beneath the shield to tear a ragged line through the Sporaton formation. Ruby mist sprayed as a dozen men and women were cut down in a surreally precise line, their blood erupting upward to coat the underside of the shield. At this distance, her spygss let her see the way chunks of ragged flesh clung to the artificial ceiling, only to slowly peel away, gore dripping down in fat chunks onto the head and shoulders of those who had survived.

  "Good shot," Sara murmured. Because what else was there to say? It was horrific. And it was exactly what she'd wanted.

  The third volley tore through the air without reply from the Sporaton forces, other than the way the frontmost rank of magical shields tilted further forward, pressing up against the dirt, to prevent the bouncing cannonballs from tearing through as they had a moment ago. It was an impressive reaction, Sara had to admit. Only one cannonball had succeeded in bouncing under the shields, yet every mage responded as one, preventing it from happening again.

  But even with that being said, the Sporaton Army continued to sit there and take the abuse. As the third volley turned into the fourth, then the fifth, Sara's mind raced. Without wind to carry away the sulfurous smoke, it was growing almost impossible to see the enemy from the perspective of the cannons, which were drowned in a growing fogbank. She had to move a dozen yards away from the cannons just to keep her eyes on the Sporaton army, which continued to passively sit under the barrage. Why? What was the game here? The new mage-shields were more effective, that was certain, but they wouldn't st forever. The trenches the cannonballs tore in their skin were being repaired, but at the cost of the greater whole; every time the shields repaired themselves, their width shrunk, thin gaps opening in the protection of the army. It was only a matter of time before Shale would be free to lob rounds into those gaps with impunity, and when the shields were properly porous, she could switch the Napoleons to explosive shot. If the Sporatons just stood there and took it, the battle would be decided by artillery alone.

  After the sixth volley, the shields briefly flickered out of existence, only to reappear an instant ter. The mages had re-cast their spells, refreshing the shields so that they were sturdy and whole.

  That was the final clue that managed to worm its way through Sara's idiotic density. This wasn't Graf's tactics on dispy. This was politics. The King's cultist advisor had invented their fancy new shield, and wanted to prove to the King that it would be enough to nullify the advantages of Sara's cannons. They were trying to prove that firearms weren't necessary, that Sara's warning of an armed peasantry was nothing more than a fairy-tale, because mages could defeat their advantages. Desperate to believe it, the King had overruled Graf, allowing the mages to show off the fruits of their bor. No doubt he hoped that Sara would abandon the artillery barrage in favor of a more standard advance, where his numbers could be brought to bear.

  Sara felt a wicked grin slide up her cheeks. Graf had to be going fucking insane over there.

  Not so fond of Kings right now, are you?

  "Lieutenant Shale!" Sara had to yell to be heard over the deafness the cannons induced. Her voice sounded warped and muffled in her ears. "Forget trying to get around the shields! Focus everything on one mage, break 'em down!"

  The artillery Lieutenant gave Sara a strange look, but didn't question the order. She marched up and down the line of cannons, directing their fire towards a single target, occasionally tearing one of the lead cannoneers off their weapon to adjust its screws herself. The next volley was deyed while Shale ensured the shots were well-aimed, but not overly so.

  "Stagger fire!" Shale bellowed. "Ordnance Rifles, one second dey!"

  Sara didn't recognize that order.

  "Fire!"

  The Napoleons barked, carriages leaping backward, and a second ter, the Ordnance Rifles joined them, a white fog once more clogging the air. Sara realized what Shale was doing as she watched the 12-pound balls crash into a mage's shield in the same instant the Ordnance Rifle's lead slugs caught up, all eight projectiles impacting within a fraction of a second.

  The gray shield visibly warped under the force of the blow, rigidity failing. It twisted and buckled like a sheet of minated paper, a fsh of shimmering colors racing across its skin before it abruptly, violently shattered. The force of the shield's failure was so great that Sara heard it even over the ringing in her ears, a sound like tearing cloth and shattering gss echoing over the field of battle. Fortunately for the soldiers beneath it, the bulk of the resulting explosion was directed upward, but not all of it. Sara watched several tendrils of magical force scythe downward into the soil, whiplike lines of energy tearing limbs from bodies.

  "Again!" Shale bellowed. "Target next shield left, staggered fire, one second dey!"

  The cannoneers never got the chance. It wasn't five seconds after the first shield failed that every other gray pte vanished, some predetermined order taking effect. The entire Sporaton army had been waiting for the moment, when Graf's point was proven, and he was finally handed the reins. The army ground into motion as one cohesive mob, drums and bugles signaling the advance.

  It was breathtaking.

  The army unfolded from its mock formation like the spiraling leaves of a blooming flower, every step of every soldier pced with a painter's precision. The fact that it was seen out by half-trained, illiterate, unmotivated troops didn't hamper it. In fact, Graf's orders, clearly prepared well before the battle, anticipated it all. He had given every block of spears just the right amount of space to maneuver, just the right margin of error so that they didn't collide with their fellow soldiers, and despite the complexity of the dance, it was working. The curved ranks of spears advanced at varied rates, some jogging forward, others barely crawling, and for a moment Sara allowed herself the vain hope that it was an uncoordinated mess, but that sted only until the lines suddenly snapped taut, their old arrangement abandoned, repced by a single unbroken wall. They fell down the hill with the inevitability of a grinding gcier, churning the earth to mud beneath their boots.

  And before them, simultaneously, the dispersed archers began to seemingly meander through the grass, all of them looking at their feet as they walked. Searching for something. One by one, slowly at first, then quicker as others realized their fellows had found their mark, the once-scattered formation colpsed into thin rows. Sara swallowed bile as they formed their impossibly neat lines. She was forced to realize that Graf had set some kind of marker in the grass, giving the archers a reference on the featureless field for where they should stand, and he'd done it well before she'd arrived. Stones, she assumed. Something that she couldn't see or anticipate from a distance. Judging by the way the archers were arranged and how little they had to shift to let the spears pass them by, he'd guessed exactly, to the very yard, where she was going to pce her army.

  The spears didn't break their stride as they passed the archers, and when the space was cleared, the lightly equipped archers filed in behind, sheltered behind the armor of their fellows.

  "Keep firing!" Sara yelled to Shale, as if the order needed to be made. The cannons continued to bark, their volleys growing increasingly haphazard as the gunners inevitably fell out of sync. There was a mob of twelve thousand bearing down on them. They were firing as fast as their bodies could allow. The halberdiers nearest them cheered them on.

  Sara counted the enemy's steps, tapping it out on her armored thigh. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Twenty steps every ten seconds. They were marching at the double, as fast as anyone could expect a group of half-trained troops to maintain any kind of organization. If they kept at it through the entire advance, they might cover a mile's distance in little more than fifteen minutes.

  The once-neat face of their lines was wavering as they lost a measure of cohesion to the pace of their advance, however. Maybe they would have to slow. She doubted it. Graf wanted them out from under the guns as soon as possible, and no doubt throught the stuttering of their formation was worth it.

  Sara had to agree. The artillery had already tallied a butcher's bill in the hundreds, and with every volley, dozens were added to the score.

  But if she'd thought Graf was just going to stand there and take it, she'd never have made it this far in life. So she wasn't shocked when a sharp bst of bugles sounded from within the Sporaton ranks, a quick burst of three. The first and second rank of spears continued onward, maybe even speeding up slightly, while the third rank on drew to a halt. Shale started to order the cannons to adjust their aim, grinning viciously at the thought of a static target, but before she finished giving the command, the bugles sounded once more. This time it was a brief tap of two, and at the sound, the third and fourth ranks lurched forward, resuming the advance. A moment ter, another two, and a moment after that, yet another.

  Sara realized what they were doing in an instant. She had no cavalry, not like the enemy did. No matter how weak their formation was, she couldn't risk charging out to take advantage, because it was a certainty that the Sporaton cavalry would roar out in answer, sweeping aside her disorganized troops. The ranks of spears were therefore free to spread themselves thin, two rows at a time.

  The effect on the artillery barrage was obvious. Instead of a scythe ripping through ten or more soldiers at once, each cannonball took away one or two, bouncing up and over the heads of the second row without effect. Occasionally the skipping projectile would be on a ft enough trajectory to bounce through two or three of the dispersed ranks, but that was more due to luck than anything else. The rolling terrain was varied enough that there was no predicting the exact way they would bounce, no replicating the ideal shots.

  "Load explosive shell!" Shale roared, a moment before Sara was about to give the same order. "Lead cannoneers, mark the range and cut the fuse for your loaders! I don't want to lose a single fucking second on these shots! Twenty five or the noose!"

  "Twenty five or the noose!" The cannon crews called back, chanting it as a mantra.

  Sara shot Shale an incredulous look, mouthing the words. Twenty five or the noose? Really?

  The Lieutenant fshed a savage grin, unashamed. It works, don't it? She mouthed back.

  Sara shook her head, turning away. If they lived through this battle, she'd have to make sure Shale wasn't actually threatening her cannoneers with execution for taking longer than twenty five seconds. She doubted it, but when it came to her cannons, Shale was... unpredictable. The burn marks on her lips proved that much.

  Explosive shells began to crack over the heads of the enemy army, showering dirt, soil, and flesh with hot shrapnel. They'd covered half the distance by now, a half-mile from Sara's troops. No one else in her army could, but with her Blessings, Sara could now hear the screams. The explosive shells were almost worse to suffer than the solid cannonballs. At least when twelve pounds of iron scattered the pulped remains of your lungs across your closest friend's faces, it was over quickly.

  She couldn't imagine what it was like for someone to get a three-inch long sliver of iron shot into deep the meat of their shoulder, so hot to the touch that for the first few instants it was lodged in their body, their blood literally boiled. Through her spygss, she watched one woman suffer that very fate. She dropped to the ground with a hand over her shoulder, wailing and rolling on the ground as drops of deep, arterial red rolled down the front of her tunic. A man walking past her hesitated, leaning to inspect her wound. An iron sliver was sticking half out of her chest, blood leaping free in pulsing fountains. The man shook his head sadly. He held her down with a foot, face-up, and shoved the tip of his spear through her eye. She shuddered, then fell still. He wiped the iron free of gore on his pants leg, then hurried forward, retaking his pce in the line.

  "What I would fucking give for cavalry," Sara whispered. Evie, even with her feline ears stuffed with white cotton, flicked her attention up to Sara.

  "Against weapons like ours, would unenchanted cavalry really be effective?"

  "I don't know." Sara waved her sword at the scattered enemy. "Against that, though? It would be a sughter."

  "It already is." Evie sniffed the air. "The scent of iron is on the wind, Master. And it is not from the cannons. The fields of Tulian are being watered with blood."

  "God help us," Sara muttered.

  Evie looked askance at her, an expression Sara ignored. She had never been religious. Her father raised her explicitly atheist, in fact. But no matter how little faith someone might have, certain sentiments could only be expressed in certain ways. She still remembered being in a bar with her dad, not too long before she was torn away from her life to this new world. Their weekly outing had been interrupted by news coverage of cruise missiles raining down on Kiev. She'd been watching the little TV over the bartender's head with her dad, but she'd been detached, analytical. Wondering at the political implications, what it would mean for the world. She'd expected her dad, the military history buff, to be thinking the same. Then he'd murmured that phrase, quiet enough she'd barely heard it. God help us.

  It had shocked Sara to hear. It was the first time in her life she'd heard the word "God" from him, at least without the name being twisted by sneering contempt. She'd turned back to the news, watching it in a different light, and been horrified with herself. That she'd ever seen rockets flying, buildings falling, and had thought anything other than God help us.

  Evie pursed her lips, remaining silent. Sara could see that she wanted to object to Sara's empathy for the enemy, but the sentiment faltered before reaching her tongue. Sara was gd for that. Faced with something so horrific, it would have taken a monster not to feel something for the Sporaton troops.

  Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Sara found another emotion welling up in her.

  Respect.

  The troops of the Sporaton Army marched doggedly on, high-stepping over the corpses of those that had tread their same path but a few moments before. They had no shields to protect them, wood or magic, and many tucked their heads towards the cannonfire like they were walking into a stiff wind, as if the metal brim of their kettle helmets could protect them from the hail of shrapnel. But they kept walking forward. Sara didn't know if she had that in her, even now, even with all she'd done. True, they didn't have anywhere to run. The Tulian countryside was abandoned, the one city that could offer shelter overtly hostile. They were hundreds of miles from home. But still, even with all that, she found herself shocked more didn't flee. She'd never truly been in an army, never had to follow orders like a soldier did. Looking inward, sinking deep into her soul, she thought... she knew she would have broken. Run and fled. She might have justified it by trying to find a different way to attack, something less suicidal, but the fact remained that she didn't have what it would take to keep marching. Those Sporaton commoners, those so-called peasants, were braver than her.

  It was a weakness she was going to ruthlessly exploit.

  When the distance closed to only eight hundred yards, the slow, grinding pace changed. The battle began to shift, both sides realizing the moment was near.

  "First Combat Engineers, forward!" Sara yelled, throwing her voice out over the field. The front ranks of her army stepped to the side as Shale's former command rushed to the front, their arms loaded high with wooden supplies. At the same moment, drums began to snap and rattle in the Sporaton lines, coded commands rolling out from wherever Graf was hidden.

  Sara was once more struck with awe as the Sporaton army shifted. Even with their ranks so separated, each block of two hundred spears moved as one, spreading out across the field. From the start Sara had been outnumbered, easy to surround, but now she felt it. The Sporaton line widened, widened, and widened yet further, yawning open like the jaw of some great jungle beast.

  But this, at least, she'd anticipated. In answer, Sara's own prepared orders took effect. The back half of the Tulian halberdiers broke off from their positions, sliding toward the left and right fnks, whichever was closest. Ten ranks deep was the standard, the ideal number with which a commander could cycle out the exhausted front lines, yet few enough that a single shouting voice could send the troops into a defensive square, warding off the menacing approach of cavalry with bristling weapons set into the soil. She didn't have that luxury here, however. If they were going to entirely surround her, she was going to at least make them work for it, goddamnit. With her ranks half as thick as the enemy's, she risked opening herself to a breakthrough, but she didn't have much of a choice.

  The 1st Combat Engineers followed the expanding line, impaling a row of stakes in front of the halberdiers. Thin rows of improvised spikes were standard fare for protecting against cavalry, and Sara certainly hoped these would work to that effect, but they weren't purpose-built for it. These were thinner, more fragile variations, shed together with every st scrap of rope and twine the quartermasters could scrounge from the increasingly-depleted Tulian capital. Unlike cavalry stakes, these were dense enough to hold off infantry, at least until the flimsy things were hacked to pieces, and they weren't the only thing the 1st Combat Engineers had prepared.

  Graf's army, meanwhile, continued to spread wider. She realized it was a trick of the eye, yet Sara couldn't help but feel their numbers were somehow growing, the entire army swelling in size. She also realized for the first time that she could see no sign of Knights or Mages among their number. Every soldier was wearing the same brownish tunics and tabards, not a single suit of glittering armor to break the pattern.

  Sara cursed herself. She should have realized they were disguised far sooner. It was why the Ordnance Rifles had been aiming for the Royal Army as a whole, rather than acting as snipers picking off the nobility. Shale had obviously noticed, but she hadn't said anything because she took it for granted that Sara would have as well. And she should have. She should have noticed. There was just too much for her to juggle, too much to keep in mind.

  The Tulian army moved on, ignorant of their leader's struggles.