Kol watched the end of the duel, the final bout between Gregory and Nine-flails. It lasted under three minutes, a flurry of blows so fast Kol could barely track the exchange.

But Kol was only half-paying attention. He still saw no sign of Duncan. Had Duncan fled the area? The transponder should work over a range of miles, especially in the relatively isolated desert environment. Unless something was disrupting the transponder signature…

Some energy fields did that. Kol looked away from the insane struggle of flails and fire. He ignored the muttering from Brielle’s crew.

“God damn this bastard is fast,” one of them was saying. “You can see why Corps Command takes him so seriously. This is unreal.”

“Adrian needs to switch it up,” Brielle said. “His first vertical strike hit Gregory. That’s the only time he hit him.”

Kol saw nothing around him but the empty landscape, the slight incline to the south, flat nothing stretching out toward Littlefield. Only the IHSA and Thunderworks had actual invisible-to-the-eye cloaking technology. Littlefield couldn’t have that, could they?

He’d watched the initial exchanges from the Partizan camera view. The airship was now positioned on the ground. The angle showed the fighters in profile and frequently lost Gregory as he jumped and flew out of range of the flails.

Kol didn’t know what he’d do if Duncan never surfaced or if the people of Littlefield never made a move. Would he go with the War Force into the town? He’d expected an attack. He’d expected to see Duncan’s signal. He’d expected a chance to leave.

“Shit,” Brielle said. “Buckets on, campers.”

Kol quickly clicked back to the feed of the battle, leaving the page that showed the transponder readout. He didn’t recognize that tone in her voice. He’d never heard that kind of apprehension in her words.

He saw why.

One-by-one, Gregory severed the nine flails. As they flew at him, he demolished the weapons. When two slammed together to crush him, Gregory dodged the strike and severed both, at once. When three more tried to catch him in a barrier of spinning spikes, Gregory cut their chains apart. When Orson Gregory landed on the ground, Nine-flails made another repeat mistake – he reared up his flails to crush Gregory. The Wayfarer flew beneath the strike and severed those weapons too.

When Nine-flails was down to one flail, he ran. He charged back toward the airship. Kol wondered whether he hoped another pit stop might help him or whether he was genuinely rushing for reinforcements. Kol never found out.

Orson Gregory caught Nine-flails. He landed in front of him and, with a casual flick of his sword, he sliced the last spiked-head from its chain.

“It’s done.” Gregory’s voice was still distorted by his microphone. “Surrender now. This is a citizen’s arrest. Yield and you will be granted safety as a prisoner of the Pacific Alliance.” He raised his burning blade outward. Nine-flails lowered his chains until they hung limp against the dirt.

“S-Teams, go now!” Brielle said. “All teams…”

“And disobey Sloan?” Another voice spoke on the channel. “Stand down, Major Rinlee. No. Sir Adrian made his bed. I’m not risking the Plummet Ledger by disobeying one of the Baron’s knights.”

“Sir Adrian’s about to die!” Brielle said. Kol watched as Orson approached the Knight, sword outward. They stood only paces apart. “He’s…”

Brielle stopped speaking when the Knight’s chains lashed out and wrapped around Gregory’s arms and torso and neck. They squeezed, tightening around and around the fabric of the Wayfarer’s armored coat.

Orson Gregory did not issue another warning. He flew forward. Kol didn’t know if the repulsor was stronger than the chains, if the armor resisted the squeezing metal, if Gregory was simply too fast.

He didn’t know how it happened, but Orson Gregory cut Sir Adrian Nine-flails from collar to crotch. The Knight fell to the dusty road in two, smoking pieces, chains limp and unmoving.

Shouts erupted through the War Force, cries of rage and surprise and fear. Kol heard yells from the datapad and through his rover’s windows, creating a bizarre, horrified echo.

The cries didn’t last long. Orson Gregory was true to his word. No other warning came. The War Force had no more time to prepare or counterattack.

The moment Nine-Flails died, the people of Littlefield launched their ambush. Finally, something happened the way Kol had expected, but he still wasn’t prepared.

He wasn’t prepared for the Aesir to appear from nowhere in the air above the War Force. He saw it through his windshield, up in the sky. It looked like a trick of the light, like a mirage, like something out of a bad video-editing job. It looked phony, fake, absurd. It was very real.

Kol wasn’t prepared for the ship to rocket down toward the road, sending fire and death from its roof cannon, blasting both tanks. He could see them both consumed by light and fire. He saw the shrapnel fly across the view from the Partizan’s feed.

Seconds after its appearance, the Aesir crew had killed Governor Sloan, burning the War Force’s leader to atoms, without fanfare or further threat.

Kol wasn’t prepared for the high-energy concentrated blasts to tear from the empty desert at either side of the road.

Two blasts burned from nowhere. One took the Eye-in-the-sky. The energy burrowed through the airship’s shield, through its hull and machinery and crew. The airship began to list in an odd circle as its surviving pilots struggled to stay airborn. Gouts of smoke billowed from the surgical hole in its side and from its rear thrusters.

The other blast flew directly over Kol’s rover. Something far behind him exploded – the railgun! The second artillery cornerstone was the only target behind Kol, and from the sound of it, the mighty weapon had been destroyed without firing a shot.

Littlefield did not fire their energy cannons again, but Kol knew those sounds. He knew the robotic twang of an IHSA ultra-cannon, the same weapon that, in the hands of Thunderworks, had turned the world’s governments and militaries and cities to ash. Littlefield had Thunderworks weapons!

Kol wasn’t prepared for the noise, the screams and yells, the cries of fear, the explosions, the gunfire appearing from nowhere. Eye-in-the-sky finally lost its battle to regain control. It exploded, sending flaming metal down on the road. The remainder of the twenty-meter craft plummeted down on the War Force, spreading explosions, screams, death, and a shockwave that jarred Kol in his seat, hundreds of feet away. Everything was too loud to comprehend, as the Aesir took a full sweep low over the War Force, strafing the troops on the ground with its repeating front cannons.

Kol wasn’t prepared for blindness. A fog descended on the Liberty Corps. It began as a thin vapor after the first round of explosions, drifting across the roadway. But the cloud cover thickened. It became like a total eclipse, a shroud that blocked out almost all light, blocked out the sun. The shroud closed in, drifted across the road and drew everything into itself, until nothing could be seen, until the view out Kol’s windshield offered nothing but utter blackness, the deepest depths of starless night.

Kol wasn’t prepared to see Orson Gregory decimate Liberty Corps forces. He glanced at the feed from the Partizan, hoping for some sign of Brielle. Instead, he saw death. He saw Orson Gregory, Captain of the Aesir, Wayfarer One, hero of Norlenheim. He saw a man who’d fought the force that killed the old world. He saw the skill, the swordsmanship that had defeated the Supreme Commander of Thunderworks.

After the fog descended, the forces at the front of the line – Shapers, Rifle Corps, and Blades Corps alike, had rushed out of the cloud at Gregory, sending bullets and spears and iron raining down on him. Some of the best warriors were in the front, the trained fighters, the true soldiers. They were survivors of combat, survivors of war.

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough. Because, while these were the best fighters in the War Force, Orson Gregory was a legend. About that much, Kol had been entirely correct.

What training could compare to a decade on the Wayfarers Highway? What battle experience could compare to single combat against the World-ender’s General or against any of the many foes Gregory had faced? The rifles and spears failed to pierce his armor. The Shaper’s iron burned and melted away when it met the sword of fire.

When the Liberty Corps forces charged Orson Gregory, they died. He fought with inevitability. He fought with the inevitable truth that, while they were mighty, their might was only another surmounted obstacle, another achievement in his story. They were great fighters, for their time, but he was a myth of the era.

Kol realized then why Orson’s blue-eyed visor was so familiar, why the sight of the mask sent a wave of anxiety through him.

Orson Gregory wore the head of a Thunderworks automaton, maybe the same head he’d held in one of Sloan’s videos. The man-sized automatons, bodyguards to the Supreme Commander, had sacked the League of Nations, in New York, and the capitals of a dozen countries. Orson Gregory wore one of their heads as a trophy, another souvenir for his arsenal.

Watching the carnage reminded Kol of folktale and fantasy, the heroic storybooks Max had read to him when he was a boy. The Liberty Corps troops that rushed Orson Gregory were like the Army of Troy against the Myrmidons, like the hordes of Isengard breaking at Helm’s Deep, like the dragon that heard the call of Sigurd’s horn.

They were doomed.