Displaced

Chapter 79

Arlette sprinted along the wall, pushing her tired body to its limits as the ground around her darkened with startling speed. This was new. After over a season of siege warfare, Arlette had assumed that the Ubrans had run out of tricks, but she'd been wrong. In all her years of experience on the battlefield, Arlette had never seen projectiles of this magnitude. Boulders the size of mansions. Fireballs like miniature suns. Massive balls of ice that ruptured into smaller sharp fragments upon impact. Each area of the wall seemed to have its own flavor of giant missile headed their way. Her area was currently being slammed by the stone variety, each enormous rock slowly building in size far off towards the back of the Ubran camp before eventually reaching the desired size and launching towards the wall.

Nobody knew what had changed. The sites where the boulders and such came from were too far away for her or anybody else around to see clearly. All they knew was that yesterday things had been normal, or at least as normal as a siege can be, and that today everything was utter chaos. But none of that really mattered now. What mattered was not getting turned into paste.

With one final leap, she threw herself forward, bouncing and spinning across the hard floor and nearly bowling into a nearby skirmish. Some fellow fighters tumbled beside or in front of her. Others weren't so fortunate. The massive boulder, wide as five houses, crashed into the wall behind her, crushing the slow or poorly positioned like a lizard beneath a garoph's hoof. If she hadn't already been on her ground, the tremor that shook the wall would have sent her to her knees.

The force of the impact was too much for either party to handle. A crack as wide as a man was tall formed on the seemingly impervious wall, which had stood unblemished for generations. Meanwhile the massive projectile shattered into many smaller pieces, sending shrapnel ranging from the size of Arlette's arm to the size of a wagon hurtling outward in all directions. Arlette twisted as a chunk of rock twice her size flew towards her, but her already awkward position prevented her from fully avoiding the tumbling stone missile. Despite her best efforts, a piece of it clipped her on her right upper arm, sending a sharp pain lancing through it.

A litany of profanity bubbled up in her mind as she recognized the feeling deep in her arm immediately, having felt it several times before after being on the receiving end of a particularly heavy strike from a blunt weapon. A bone in her arm had cracked. Fortunately, she could still move it so it wasn't completely broken, but every motion brought a surge of pain, especially twisting. Unfortunately, her longsword was a weapon best held in both hands. Given that she was left-handed, she could still manage to swing to some degree, but her strikes would be clumsier and weaker, perhaps dangerously so.

The explosion of the giant boulder brought a moment of pause to the battle going on around her, but it lasted only a fraction of a moment—long enough for her to realize what had happened to her arm, but not long enough for her to think of what to do about it. Arlette stepped back as the fighting resumed, hoping to stay out of the fray at least momentarily, but two Ubrans spotted her immediately and charged.

The man on the left carried a longsword much like hers, though he wore much thicker and sturdier armor than she did. He even wore a helmet that protected all of his head and face except for two large eye holes. The armor seemed largely unused, lacking the sort of dents and scratches one would expect from a suit that had seen many days of battle. On the chestplate, Arlette saw a crest of some sort, one which tickled something in the back of her mind.

The woman on the right lacked the fancy equipment of her comrade, instead donning thinner leather armor more akin to Arlette's own, but her wicked-looking spear with a head curved like a waning moon marked her as likely the more dangerous of the two. Spear wielders were always a pain if they knew what they were doing. She had few ways of taking them down even when at full strength if they were good enough to stay out of her range, and now this one had backup.