The next day’s afternoon’s formation class had been canceled, they were told they should take a nap instead. Hugo didn’t even try. He was too excited. Their class was taking a night shift up on the wall. They were helping the sentinels again. But this time was going to be different. Instead of a few hours on a slow day, they were going to take a six hour shift at the height of the monster surge. Monster attacks on the city walls had been building ever since the heartbeat, and tonight they would crest. The attacks would quickly slow down after tonight.

On an ideal night, Hugo would help supply the ballista and catapults with ammo, and gain a few ranks just by being on the walls while monsters were killed. It was a safe job, far out of reach from even the biggest monsters. But he hoped for a little danger instead. He had been successful with the focusing bracelet, and now he wanted to try and kill a monster with a mana dart.

It was really a stupid wish. If the monsters ever got inside his range, he would be in serious trouble. His life would be at risk. But still. He wanted to go out there, to kill the big monsters that threatened even the city.

It was probably for the best that he wasn’t going to get his wish.

Their formation class took a trip to the walls just before dusk. The sights and sounds of the city were familiar and foreign at the same time. They clacked along the cobblestones in the mana cart, hawkers yelling out on most street corners. Traffic announced itself with beeps and honks. It was the sounds he grew up with. But it felt strange somehow. The short time at Blue Lion Academy had gotten him used to quiet. Being thrust into the city again felt like he no longer belonged.

As they drove along, Hugo saw a few hedge mages on a street corner. Their outfits were distinctive, a blue sash mimicking the blue of the academy robes. The sash could be quickly removed if they needed to hide from the shimmer corps. A student in a different mana cart shot a mana dart out and knocked over their rickety stand. The hedgies yelled and shook their fists, but the mana carts were quickly beyond them.

Hugo frowned. He knew that the hedge mages were doing something illegal, with their shoddy products and putting people’s lives at risk with their substandard healing. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that his fellow student was in the wrong there, not the hedgies.

Perhaps that was a leftover feeling from being raised in the narrows. The authorities were rarely in the narrows to save someone, the shimmer corps came into the neighborhood to beat someone down. He was so used to siding with his neighbors, his sympathy was automatically drawn to the downtrodden, the underdog. He would have to get over that if he wanted to fit in among serious mages.

Hugo and Oskar were deployed to a different section of the walls this time. They were stationed on the south-west side, a few hundred feet away from each other. Hugo was just glad that he wasn’t stationed anywhere near his mom’s apartment. That would have been embarrassing to be manning the wall and look down to see his mother waving at him. He wanted to distance himself from his life in the narrows as much as possible.

They heard the sounds of heavy fighting as they climbed the steps. Sentinels yelling out orders, people running back and forth along the wall. They heard five ballista shots on the way up. The sounds of battle were actually welcome though. It kept Hugo’s mind off the fact that they were walking four stories up.

“Oh thank the gods,” an academy student said as she saw Hugo. “You must be my replacement. I need to get off these walls before they come crashing down.” She didn’t wait for a response, just scampering down the stairs.

A chuckle came from behind them, “Don’t believe them. The walls may wobble a bit but they have never come down. They are all heavily runed.”

They turned to see a sentinel. His uniform showed he was higher ranked, but Hugo couldn’t remember what his rank was called. “Hello, I guess we are their replacements? I am Hugo and this is Oskar.”

“Good to see you both. I am Commander Kalev. I am in charge of southwest 3, that’s the name of our section of the wall. I hope you are up for a long night. The beasts have been particularly thick this year. We haven’t had a break in the attacks in quite some time. Start by passing out drinks every sentinel on our section, then add fifty bolts to every ballista. Once you are done with that, you can report to the station they assigned you,” he said and turned and ran off the wall.

Kalev walked on air, hovering above the hoards of attacking monsters. He was heading towards one of the biggest ones, a suuruss. The enormous monster worm covered in tentacles had burst out of the ground a few hundred yards in front of the wall. It looked big enough to just crawl over the forty foot high walls. Probably why Kalev went out to attack it instead of waiting for the monster to get closer.

The sentinel commander covered himself in mana armor and dropped out of the sky. A blue sword appeared in his hand, and he stabbed it into the beast as he landed. The monster didn’t seem to notice. It was still slowly making its way towards the wall, using the wiggily tentacles like thousands of legs. With a flick of his wrist, Kalev dismissed the sword and created something new. It was a long thin blade of mana, slightly wider than the monster itself. He positioned the thin blade directly in front of the massive worm. The eyeless monster wiggled itself onto the blade. A long, deep cut opened up the monster, more than twenty feet long before it realized it had been cut. It reared up in pain, only tearing a bigger cut in itself. This caused it to thrash in pain even more, eventually doing enough damage to the barrier mage’s blade to dispel it.

The suuruss had almost decapitated itself with its flailing, but it still wasn’t dead. It started regenerating before their eyes. Ballista bolts started firing. Some of them exploded in the monster and some of them ate away at it, like acid.

Oskar shook Hugo out of his reverie. They had to trust that sentinels could handle it. They needed to get to work. They jogged back down the stairs and grabbed mugs of weak mead. Then they walked back up the tall stairs, four mugs in each hand. Hugo wasn’t exactly tired from the running up and down yet, but he knew he would be by the end of the night. Now would be a good time for his bottles, then they wouldn’t have to run up and down so many times.

Thankfully the ballista bolts didn’t need to be hand carried. Hugo stood up top and cranked while Oskar loaded the stacks of bolts onto the pulley system. Hundreds of bolts were slowly pulled up the slanted wall.

This time, Hugo could tell that he was stronger. It wasn’t much, but he could tell that moving around the bundles of fifty bolts was easier than it would have been before he got soulmarked.

There were a total of ten ballista on their section of the wall, and after they had refilled them all, they went to their assignments. Oskar was assigned to help a mage man one of the ballista. Hugo was assigned to help a runic harvester on the battlements in between two of the ballista.

The walls shook as Hugo walked up to the harvester and he missed the man’s name as he stumbled.

“Whoa there, little man,” he said as he caught Hugo’s arm to steady him. “The walls have been doing that all day, don’t worry about it.”

Hugo did worry about it. But he wasn’t going to tell him that. Not after he called him ‘little man’ He pulled his arm away and said, “So, what am I supposed to do for you?”

“You see those?” he said and pointed to bags of small stones, “Those bits there are my ammo. You will get me the right kind when I ask for it.” He pointed to a bag as he named them off, “The biggest bag is Explosive, then there is Lightning, Scattershot, and Blank. Be careful with all of them, the damn stones aren’t cheap.”

The harvester picked up his weapon and turned back to look over the wall. He held a crossbow, but it looked very different. Instead of a bowstring, it had a much wider band attached. It had a handle hanging free below it. The rest of it seemed normal, he had the wooden stock pressed up against his shoulder and his hand was on the trigger.

Hugo stood near the bags of stones for a bit, but when nothing happened, he tried to look over the wall. The battlement was in the way, but he could still see through the gaps, out to the field below. The land was bare for several hundred feet all around the city. The walls were built on bedrock and that gave way to gravel and dirt farther out. Short grasses were even further out, and he could just barely make out the forest at the edge of his vision.

Almost all of it was crawling with monsters. Most of them weren’t nearly as large as the suuruss from earlier. The majority were about as tall as a man, with some smaller and a few larger. Trolls lumbered among dire wolves. Goliath beetles walked among acid ants. Slimes hopped over ichidel. Velociraptors weaved in between all of them. Each and every monster was making a bee-line for the city. Hugo didn’t understand why the sentinels weren’t panicking and firing nonstop.

The harvester shot out a stone and a distant pop sounded. He used the handle on the bottom of his crossbow to recock it and held out his hand to Hugo without looking. He said, “Explosive.”

Hugo handed one over and the man shot again. They repeated this twice more and then it was back to waiting. Hugo grabbed another explosive so he would be ready for the next round.

“It looks scary, but it is actually very organized,” the harvester said without looking back, “Everyone is assigned a section of the ground outside. The ballista take on the larger monsters, the ones taller than the markers. Anything shorter than that, we shoot after they pass the first round of markers.

Hugo leaned to the side to get a better look through the battlements. Out on the ground in front of the walls were several stone markers. They were about six feet high and each one had a small fire going on top. Hugo wondered how they kept that going all night. They couldn’t use mana, otherwise the monsters would be attracted to it.

Time passed and Hugo slowly got used to it up on the walls. A ding sounded in his ears. One rank down, one to go.

The constant roar of the monsters and attacks of the defenders slowly faded into the background. It didn’t feel as oppressive anymore. During lulls he took peeks out the battlements onto the killing fields below. He noticed that no monster got closer than a hundred feet to the walls. The sentinels had this under control.

The walls shook again.

With wide eyes, Hugo reached out and grabbed the wall to steady himself. They didn’t stop shaking. Hugo could hear something huge attacking the walls further south, but it was hidden by the wall. He grabbed on tighter.

“Don’t worry. The walls have been shaking all day, they aren’t going to fall now.”

The walls disagreed. They chose that moment to collapse. About a hundred yards from where Hugo stood, the top of the city wall fell into the city. The heavy masonry crushed the storage building below. Two ballista followed, their operators screaming as they fell.

The monster wasn’t done yet, an enormous head rammed up against the wall again. More of the wall fell. The southern section was half as tall as it once was now, and even more of the top edge had fallen. Enough of the heavy stone blocks had fallen that they destroyed an apartment building that abutted the wall.

Hugo stood transfixed, unable to process that the wall really had fallen. Then the monster’s enormous head poked through the gap in the wall and roared. The ground shook with the vibrations, and he realized he had to get off the wall. It wasn’t safe anymore.

He turned and started running for the stairs.

“Stop!” the harvester said, “We need to hold off the monsters. Besides, it isn’t safe down there. Stay here.” He pointed down to the lowest part of the gap.

Although the wall was still over fifteen feet tall, some monsters could jump that high. Velociraptors and acid ants were just barely able to make it through, scrambling up and over.

“Feed me explosives and don’t let up,” he said and cocked his crossbow and fired. He held out a hand to Hugo.

Steeling himself, Hugo reached into the bag and grabbed a handful of runed stones. He handed them over as quick as he could. The harvester ignored the huge beast and focused on the little ones streaming through the gap. In moments, twenty shots were fired and fifteen beasts killed. But still more monsters came.

“This isn’t going to work,” the runist said to himself. Then he turned to Hugo, “Gimme five blanks.”

Hugo raced over and grabbed the blank stones. The runist took a moment to inscribe them with his magic. While he worked, Hugo looked around.

The monster was a lizard type with a huge spine on its back. It had been distracted from the wall by now, a few barrier sentinels harrying it. But the two legged lizard looked like it was winning, it kept knocking the soulmarked men out of the sky. Ballista bolts kept hitting the monster, slowly adding damage.

The harvester was ready now, handing Hugo the other four runed stones. Then in quick succession, he fired all five stones at the bottom of the gap in the wall. Shortly after the impact, the stones swelled up to cover the gap in foam that quickly hardened. Altogether it was enough to add another five feet to the wall.

That extra height was enough to spoil the jumps of the velociraptors. A few lightning stones knocked the acid ants off the wall before they could dissolve the foam.

An ethereal wind accompanied a flash of blue. Hugo glanced up to see that the giant lizard had been killed. He turned back to his task, continuing to feed him ammo.

He felt almost useless, his entire job was to save the harvester a few steps and make it so he didn’t have to look away. But still, those seconds saved added up. The runist was able to make quick work of the monsters on this side of the wall. At least the ones that were still nearby. Screams in the city indicated that there were monsters out of sight.

Light blue sparkles announced the appearance of a squad of shimmer corps. They flew in using the intercity tracks, and floated to the ground near the breach. The sentinel commander sent them off into the city to chase down the monsters that had made it through. Hugo turned his attention back to the wall.

The ants didn’t stay down for long, they were already climbing back up. And to make matters worse, the hoard of monsters saw a weakness and all headed towards it. One of the goliath beetles reached the wall, and started slamming its enormous horn into it. The wall shook with each impact. Ballista bolts glanced off its carapace.

As the beetle hit the wall the fourth time, two things happened. It knocked a bigger section of the wall down. Now it was only ten feet tall at the lowest part. And at the same time, an acid potion hit the beetle and quickly killed it.

In the bigger gap that the beetle made poured another group of monsters. Some ants and velociraptors came through, accompanied by a pack of dire wolves. The wolves peeled off to the side, with the ants and velociraptors heading straight into the city.

They didn’t get far before they were stopped. The shimmer corps had returned and set up a defensive bulwark that blocked off the street directly in front of the breach. Most of the monsters ran straight at them, only to be torn to shreds by shimmer casters. They could have gone around, but they were drawn by their instincts to attack the people right in front of them.

The harvester shot down as fast as he could, killing a monster with every shot. He focused on the monsters on the edges, herding the rest towards the shimmer corps. Some of the other people on the walls had turned inside and were helping thin the numbers as well.

A scraping sound made Hugo turn around and look down. Dire wolves were heading up the stairs towards the defenders on the wall. “Monsters are coming up the walls,” he yelled.

“Take care of it yourself, I am busy,” the runist yelled as he continued to shoot.

Complaining wouldn’t do any good, so he walked to the stairs and looked down. The wolves were halfway up the walls now. He looked down at his hand. This is what that bracelet was for, to make it easier for him to shoot mana darts.

He pointed his hand at the monsters scrambling up the stairs and willed a chunk of mana to make its way to his hand. It was working but it felt like forever. As his mana passed the bracelet on his wrist, it suddenly sped up and started twisting. It exited his hand with a small puff of blue, and turned into a visible ball of mana. That raced down the wall, colliding with the face of the lead dire wolf. It hit just as the group of wolves were halfway up the wall.

The monster yipped and jumped back, knocking itself off the wall. It fell two stories to the ground. Then it picked itself back up and ran to join the other wolves. It didn’t even seem injured.

Hugo willed a larger chunk of mana up his arm and pointed his hand at the new lead wolf. Although the resulting mana dart was larger this time, it was less effective. The shot hit the monster on its shoulder and it was able to ignore the strike and continued climbing the stairs. He tried again, desperate.

This time the shot hit the monster on the snout and shocked it to falling off the stairs, plummeting three stories this time. The fall didn’t kill the wolf, but it didn’t get back up either. Hugo smiled. If he could just do that a few more times, he would have the stairs clear.

A bit of math proved that wouldn’t work.

The more powerful mana darts took four points of mana, and he had already used ten points so far and only injured one wolf out of about seven of them. He was left with sixteen points of mana and six monsters. He had to try something different.

He looked down at his other hand. He still had a few explosion runes in his grip. He took one out and inspected it. Could he activate it even if he didn’t have the rune domain? Only one way to find out.

He slipped off the mana bracelet and put a runed stone in his dominant hand. He assumed that there was a small delay before it exploded, but he knew he had to throw it away as soon as it activated. With an effort of will, he pushed a small amount of mana into his hands and then into the stone.

It was sailing through the air before he was even sure if he had activated it. The runed stone hit the lead monster and exploded with a flash of light. Three monsters tumbled off the stairs. Hugo barked out a laugh as two dings sounded in his ears. The explosion was so big that it even took out some of the stairs.

A different sentinel ran up and looked down at the approaching monsters, “What are you doing? Don’t destroy the stairs.” He pointed his hands at the approaching monsters and double fisted a volley of mana darts. In seconds all of the monsters were dead.

“Ok, but where were you earlier?” Hugo said indignant, “I had to do something, otherwise they would have killed us.”

“Whatever. Don’t destroy the wall anymore than it already is,” he said and ran off without waiting for an answer.

Hugo walked back to his assigned harvester and said, “Wolves are dead.”

“I heard,” he said with a wry voice.

They focused on the gap in the wall for another five minutes before a pair of domain sentinels arrived. They stationed themselves on opposite ends of the breach and poured their mana into a barrier. Their combined efforts created a multi layered blue wall across the missing section.

Things slowed down after that. Monsters still attacked, but they didn’t try to breach the glowing blue section. Every hour or so, the barrier sentinels had to be replaced.

Shortly after the first shift change, Hugo was reassigned. They needed him and many of the other students to do some grunt work. There were still people alive in the collapsed apartment building and the students were tasked with unburying them.

It was backbreaking work. Their soulburnt status hadn’t had time to augment their bodies much, so they struggled. Hugo could lift about twenty percent more than he used to be able to, but that still wasn’t much. He used most of his remaining mana to create an aluminum crowbar. Which bent the second time he used it.

They worked long into the night. Light Mages directed their work, leading them to those still trapped. Once they saved one person, a life mage swung by, healed, and went back up to the wall. The work resumed.

Shortly before dawn, Hugo sat down on a piece of rubble. Oskar had gone back to the dorms, but Hugo stayed longer to help find people. Now he was beyond exhausted. When the sentinel commanders met fifteen feet away from him, he knew he should get up. But he was just too tired. He listened in as they talked.

“What kind of spinosaur was that? I have never seen one that could break down a wall. At least we get a portion of the mana core it dropped. I wonder if the city will claim it to help rebuild the wall.”

“No, I saw what it dropped, it didn’t have an aspect. And it was a grandcryst, not a mana core.”

“Really? That means it had to be lower than rank sixty-four. How did that get through our walls?”

“The walls had to be faulty, it’s the only answer. I just can’t believe the inspectors would be this lax. I mean even during the summer they are usually so meticulous. Let alone right before a monster surge.”

“No, that isn’t it. This wasn’t a faulty rune. I accompanied the inspectors on their rounds last week. These runes were fine. No chipping, no nothing. And then a few days ago, Marc went missing. He was one of the inspectors. I just thought he got a new job and didn’t want to tell us. That plus the walls mysteriously failing points to one thing.”

“Sabotage.”

As if saying the word aloud made them realize where they were, the three of them looked around and decided to continue their conversion elsewhere.