Blintsy takes a metal disk out of his inventory, inlaid with dozens of magically glowing runes. He examines the runes, selecting one in particular to activate. Magic flows out of the metal disk and through Blintsy, drawing him up into the air. He floats above Wyn, gesturing towards the north wall of Lethisburg.

  “Keep up! Wouldn’t want the goblins to eat you now, would we?”

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Wyn mumbles.

  Wyn, not to be outdone by the floating man, activates flickerstep and launches up onto the roof. Blintsy takes this as a challenge and begins flying through the air at great speed.

  Blintsy weaves lazily between chimneys and broken parapets, clearly enjoying himself, occasionally glancing back just to make sure Wyn is still there. Wyn responds by pushing Flickerstep harder than she probably should, blinking from rooftop to rooftop in rapid, aggressive bursts.

  Loose tiles explode under her boots. A flock of startled birds erupts into the air as she skids across a slanted roof and vaults a gap between two tall buildings. Blintsy laughs as he clips a banner pole, spinning around it once with a hearty laugh. Wyn grits her teeth and flickers again, refusing to fall behind.

  This is stupid. She knows it is stupid, but the thought of losing to him is worse.

  “Where the hell are we going anyway?” Wyn asks.

  “Currently, our trajectory will put us approximately—”

  “I wasn’t asking you, Psai.”

  “Is this the part where I say your question was excellent?” Blintsy says with a chuckle before continuing. “We are heading just southwest of the northern gate. In about two minutes, the north gate will collapse.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  Blintsy winks, dodging a stray fireball from the battle north of Lethisburg’s walls. “I can’t reveal all my secrets, can I?”

  The stench of battle grows as they approach. Sulfur and ash mix with the distinct smell of rot. Wyn barely suppresses a gag. Looking ahead, the sky over the north wall pulses with unstable light, flashes of magic blooming and dying behind the battlements like a storm trying to claw its way free.

  Metal and man both scream in pain as something strikes the wall. Wyn cannot see the gate itself, not through the smoke and the angle and the buildings in the way, but she can hear it. Hinges groan under the strain, and soldiers cry out.

  These aren’t cries of battle, but choked sobs of desperation. Gone are the valorous cries of determination of battle, replaced by the fear of death as NPCs and players alike try to escape the torment.

  “Oh dear, it seems they’re ahead of schedule. Let’s move,” says Blintsy.

  He selects a new rune on his metal disk, and he falls to the ground, no longer floating. In return, both he and Wyn get a massive rush of energy. Wyn has never experienced it herself, but she guesses that this is what a runner’s high feels like. She feels powerful, capable in a way she’s never been.

  The pair charge over the rooftops, no longer needing to use essentia to make their way. Their legs carry more than enough power to drive them forward (revise this line).

  Wham!

  Another impact against the north gate. She can see it now, and more clearly hear the desperate pleas of the soldiers on the other side. They call for the gate to be opened, only for their words to be cut short by horrid squelching sounds. Wyn swallows hard. This is getting worse by the minute.

  “Down here,” Blintsy calls, activating yet another rune on his disk.

  He leaps off the rooftop, gently gliding down to a back alley a few blocks away from the northern gate. Wyn follows in kind, feeling the air support her slowed fall.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Wait a moment. We’ll have guests shortly.”

  From their vantage point, Wyn can see southward, and it’s not pretty. Wyn catches glimpses between rooftops of green bodies flooding through city streets, spreading carnage with every few steps.

  The explosion of splintered wood and clanging metal draws Wyn’s attention away from the southern gate toward the now wide-open northern gate. The Boomfrog Matriarch heads the charge with a trio of figures sitting on its broad back. Behind and around the beast, soldiers pour out through the gate, half fleeing and half searching for defensible positions.

  “Men, with me!” A familiar voice calls.

  “Showtime!” Blintsy says, grinning.

  Neil comes around the corner at a run, bloody and battered, Mirana just behind him. Half a dozen armored soldiers follow close on their heels. They nearly trample Wyn and Blintsy before Blintsy snaps a rune into place.

  A translucent wall slams into existence. The soldiers crash to a halt.

  Neil is not as lucky. His nose collides with the barrier with a sickening crack.

  “What the hell!” Neil shouts, clutching his face.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Mirana says flatly.

  Wyn raises a hand in a small, awkward wave. “Uh. Hi. We need to get out of here.”

  Neil’s glare could cut steel. “We can’t let Lethisburg fall.”

  Blintsy laughs, not a chuckle, but a full-bodied, booming laugh that echoes down the alley.

  “Oh, Captain,” he says, wiping at his eyes. “I’m afraid Lethisburg is already lost. Both the north and south gates have fallen. At this point, it’s simply a matter of how many people die before the city finishes collapsing.”

  Mirana’s eyes harden. “We don’t need your tricks. Not today.”

  A soldier rushes up, breathless and pale. “Sir! That giant frog thing is heading this way. We have to move!”

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  Neil spits blood onto the stones. “Shit.” He looks west. “We head for the west gate. It’s our best chance.”

  Without argument, the soldiers charge forward, their metal boots crashing to the ground with each footfall. Wyn follows close behind, struggling to keep up with the trained professionals.

  “You shouldn’t go that way; I wouldn’t.”

  Mirana glares at Blintsy, a clear warning in her eye. “We follow the Captain’s orders.”

  “It’s your funeral, dear. Lots of unfortunate things happen in that direction.”

  “Shut up and move!” Neil says, a globule of sickly necrotic ooze slamming into the pavement, nearly striking one of the soldiers.

  They run like hell. Goblins of all kinds give chase, firing dozens of arrows and spears in their direction. The Boomfrog Matriarch looms over them all, destroying a building with each swipe of its massive feet.

  Due to its size, the matriarch has to destroy buildings to keep up with the group. If they have any chance of surviving this, they have to outpace the boomfrog.

  The cobblestone streets turn to muck as they enter the Mage’s Quarter. Ahead, a group of goblins stands ready, spears out towards the group.

  Neil charges forward with his greatsword. He leaps over the front line of goblins, and slices through a trio of them before they can react. The others are quickly picked off with arrows and spells. Before Wyn can even cast a spell, all the goblins are taken care of.

  A few soldiers give each other high fives over a job well done.

  Their celebration is short-lived.

  A massive jet of flame erupts, instantly incinerating the backmost guard.

  “MOVE!” Neil orders.

  The Boomfrog Matriarch is a force to be reckoned with. With only tiny jets of explosive flame, it can instantly incinerate any of the soldiers. Wyn fears what might happen if it unleashed the full contents of its stomach.

  Blintsy sighs dramatically. “I suppose I’ll help.”

  He deactivates the previous rune, ending the burst of energy, and selects another. This time, a set of massive chains springs from the ground, wrapping themselves around the massive boomfrog as well as the leaders riding on its back.

  “Good work. Let’s put as much distance as possible between us and that thing,” Neil says.

  The group runs. They can’t stop. The second they do, that massive beast will swallow whatever is left of them. It struggles and presses against the chains while the figures on its back chant spells to try to break them.

  “Those chains won’t hold long,” Mirana shouts.

  “They were never meant to,” Blintsy replies, already sounding bored. “They’re meant to make it angry.”

  As if to prove the point, the Matriarch rears back and vents a concentrated jet of flame. It tears through the alley they just vacated, flash-boiling rainwater and reducing a stack of crates to slag. Heat rolls over the group like a physical blow.

  “West gate!” Neil roars. “Do not stop for anything!”

  They burst into the heart of the Mage’s Quarter, and it is utter chaos.

  The western districts were never meant to see this kind of fighting. These are old dilapidated lanes, civic avenues, and places designed for traffic and ceremony, not retreat under fire.

  Other soldiers who retreated here fight desperately for survival. Barricades have been thrown up in haste from wagons and shattered statuary. Bodies lie where they fell, some still smoldering, others crushed beneath rubble.

  “There, join the others!” Neil shouts, pointing towards a small grouping in the center of the plaza outside the Arcane Consortium hall.

  Pikes jut out between pieces of makeshift barricades, while bolts of electricity fly overhead, picking off goblins one by one.

  But the goblins have far greater numbers than the defenders. Goblins break against the formation in screaming waves, their bodies piling up so quickly that the goblins have to trample over corpses just to continue the assault.

  For a heartbeat, it looks like it might work, that the defenders’ line will hold firm against the endless waves of goblins as the attacks begin to slow.

  Then the dead goblins rise again.

  “Hold the line!” someone screams.

  Bodies slam together in a wet, shrieking tangle, limbs snapping at impossible angles as flesh fuses to flesh. Rusted armor plates grind and stitch themselves into the growing mass. Bones punch through skin and are swallowed again, rearranging with sickening cracks.

  The abomination hauls itself upright on mismatched limbs, steel ribs jutting through pulsing meat. Acidic sludge pours from seams where bodies have not sealed together correctly. The stench hits a heartbeat later. Rot, bile, and burning metal sting everyone’s eyes.

  “Attack!” Neil calls, only for his soldiers to hesitate.

  It lurches forward and slams into the defenders’ shields.

  Wood blackens instantly. Metal screams and sloughs away under the corrosive slime, dripping in thick, smoking ropes. The soldiers barely have time to register the heat eating through their grips before the weight comes down, crushing them before they even get the chance to scream.

  The surviving soldiers do not run.

  They stand frozen, eyes wide and shining, breath caught somewhere between lungs and throat, staring up at the impossible mass of flesh and steel looming over them, already dripping forward for another blow.

  Neil does not hesitate.

  He slams his shoulder into a fleeing soldier, knocking him back into the line, and charges. His greatsword comes down in a brutal, two-handed arc, biting deep into a section of the creature that is more flesh than steel. The blade sinks, sprays blackened gore, and then sticks, trapped as muscle spasms and clamps around it.

  Mirana is already moving. Magic spills from her in layered waves. Wards snap into place. Pain dulls. Neil’s wounds knit back into place as the acid attempts to chew through him.

  Wyn refuses to hang back. She hurls everything she has. She launches bolt after bolt at it. Each slams into the abomination hard enough to stagger it half a step. Bits of fused goblin flesh shear off and slap wetly against the ground.

  It is not enough.

  The creature swings a hammer formed from layered shields, skulls, and fused blades into the front line. The impact flattens three soldiers instantly, driving them into the stone so hard the plaza cracks beneath them. Acid sprays outward, sizzling as it eats through armor and flesh alike.

  Neil rips his sword free and rolls aside just as the thing brings its bulk down again. The ground shudders. Wyn is thrown off her feet, skidding across scorched stone until Mirana yanks her upright.

  “You’re not allowed to die yet,” Mirana growls.

  One thing is clear. They are losing this fight.

  In the distance, the trio of necromancers atop the boomfrog chant, driving the horrible beast forward on its bloodbath. Wyn’s desperate gaze fixed on Blintsy, silently begging for him to intervene. But all she sees is a man enjoying a show with mild amusement.

  The beast renews its attack as wounds seal with wet, grinding noises as bodies crawl across the stones and become a part of it. Every fallen defender makes it stronger.

  Neil shouts orders, though Wyn doesn’t hear them. Hope is fading fast, and Wyn sees no way out of this fight.

  Then the air changes.

  A pressure builds, smelling of metal and ozone, raising the hair on Wyn’s arms.

  The creature glances around, searching for the source of this new magic.

  Lightning lances down from above, not striking the abomination, but the surrounding ground, carving a perfect circle of scorched stone. Electricity races along the boundary, creating an elaborate magic circle out of bolts of electricity.

  In a rush, the sigil activates, sending its caster careening into the air.

  Lothran has joined the fight.

  He floats several feet above the ground, cloak snapping wildly, staff held loosely at his side. Blood runs freely from his temple. His breathing is labored. But his eyes burn with cold, focused fury.

  “This ends,” he says.

  The lightning twists upward, dragging debris, bodies, and chunks of stone into a roaring column. The abomination is lifted off the ground, its mismatched limbs flailing as electricity tears through every seam holding it together. Bits of dead goblins detach, each body part still twitching with life, desperate to stitch itself back together.

  Lothran doesn’t let it. The twister tightens as Lothran raises his staff. The column of lightning compresses into a single seam of light connecting the ground to the sky.

  And then…. BOOM!

  The sky snaps in two as the abomination explodes. Each remaining piece of the reanimated flesh monster expands outward before careening toward the central pillar of lightning, incinerating every last hope it had of reforming.

  What little remains falls to the ground in smoking fragments. Bits of slagged metal, ash and scattered limbs that crumble to dust the moment they land.

  Silence crashes down over the plaza as the remaining goblins scurry away, not daring to test the unveiled strength of the Hall Master.

  Lothran, his job done, plummets through the air. Neil catches him before he hits the ground. Lothran reaches standing, leaning on his staff.

  “Holy shit! That was amazing!” One of the soldiers says.

  “Don’t celebrate yet,” Neil warns. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  As if on cue, the group hears chains shattering in the distance. Their heads turn to see the Boomfrog Matriarch, free of its chains, and roaring with anger. It looks directly at Blintsy, the man who dared confine it, and charges.