Chapter 112. Show These Fuckers Why They Shouldn’t Have Messed With Us
William’s mind didn’t just focus; it froze. The raw, bleeding panic that had threatened to consume him was instantly cauterized by something older, something forged in the hellfire of countless battlefields.
The commander in him took the reins, shoving the grieving man aside to make room for the soldier. He couldn’t afford to be a protector right now; he had to be a wall.
’Think, William...’
’Triage... Threat assessment... Force distribution...’ The tactical calculations ran through his mind like lightning strikes.
He couldn’t defend Catherine while fighting a swarm, and he couldn’t retreat, not with the academy’s outer patrols and innocent students standing directly in the path of this approaching slaughter. If he ran now, he wasn’t saving Catherine; he was simply choosing which civilians would die next.
"FORMATION UP!"
His voice didn’t just carry across the clearing; it detonated. It was the unmistakable roar of a man who had commanded legions through blood and ash, a voice that demanded obedience from the very air itself.
"EVERYONE, ON ME, NOW!"
The academy patrol members, who had been scrambling toward the eastern gate in confused panic, froze at the sound of that authority. The chaos stuttered.
Instinct took over. They began to scramble into rough positions, their eyes darting between the writhing dimensional rifts and the man standing like an immovable pillar in the center of the storm.
William’s eyes scanned the arriving reinforcements, and for a split second, his heart gave a desperate leap of relief. His students had come.
They had disobeyed his orders to stay back, but as he saw Kaela and Lia bracing themselves at the front, and Ember and Tide settling into their elemental stances with grim, focused readiness, he knew he couldn’t punish them.
Not today.
"Lia, Kaela, hold the center at all costs!" William barked, his eyes already tracking the first of the chitinous horrors as they scuttled closer, their mandibles clicking in hungry anticipation.
"Ellie, Clara, work the flanks together!"
"Tight interlocking barriers, same as the drills!"
"Don’t give them an inch to exploit!"
He could see Clara’s sharp eyes already dissecting the swarm’s movement, her mind working to find the weak points in the alien formation. Behind them, the other patrol members began to form a desperate human chain, weapons drawn, knuckles white.
"Everyone else, form a secondary line behind them!" William shouted over the rising screech of the monsters. "Hold the formation!"
"If one breaks, we all die!"
"Do not let anything through that line!"
With movements that were precise despite the adrenaline coursing through his veins, William scooped Catherine up. She felt terrifyingly light in his arms, her head lolling against his chest like a broken doll.
The sight of her pale, unconscious face stirred a murderous rage in his gut, but he shoved it down. He needed cold blood now.
He needed steel.
He sprinted toward the rear of the forming defensive line, where a young patrol officer stood, face ashen and eyes wide with terror.
"Take her," William commanded, thrusting Catherine into the officer’s arms with a force that left no room for hesitation. "Get her to the inner sanctum."
"Shield her with everything you have!"
"If she so much as flinches, you tell me immediately."
"Y-yes sir!" the officer stammered, his voice cracking as he steadied the unconscious girl against his armor.
William spun back toward the nightmare, his boots skidding through the blood-slicked dirt as the first wave of horrors crashed into the academy’s makeshift line. The air was instantly filled with the nauseating stench of sulfur and rotting meat, punctuated by the wet, tearing sounds of claws meeting flesh.
The fight erupted in a chaos that was somehow both terrifying and strangely familiar. It was a brutal, grinding rhythm: the sound of steel biting through chitin, the wet slap of viscera hitting stone, and the guttural screams of students pushed beyond their breaking points.
At the center of the storm stood Lia and Kaela. For weeks, their relationship had been defined by sharp barbs, competitive glares, and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that either one of them needed the other.
Now, faced with a tide of obsidian-skinned death, that rivalry was being tested in the most violent crucible imaginable.
"Left flank!" Lia screamed, her voice cracking as she sidestepped a creature that lunged at her with three serrated limbs.
She dropped into a Tide Stance, her movements fluid and deceptively calm, like water flowing around a rock. "Kaela, you idiot, you’re leaving your elbow exposed!"
"Shut up and worry about your own stupid feet, Lia!" Kaela roared back, her sword whistling through the air as she attempted a devastating overhead cleave.
But in her fury, she overextended, her foot slipping on a patch of green ichor that sprayed from a dying monster. "Whoa! Shit!"
Kaela stumbled forward, her blade missing its mark and embedding itself uselessly in the stone. The creature, she had been aiming for a hulking thing with mandibles dripping with acidic saliva, seized the moment to lunge at her exposed ribs.
"Move, you moron!" Lia yelled.
Instead of a graceful redirect, Lia threw herself forward in a desperate, uncoordinated tackle. She didn’t so much ’redirect’ the monster as she did accidentally shoulder-check it sideways.
The impact was clumsy and undignified, but it worked; the monster’s momentum was broken, sending it tumbling sideways directly into Kaela’s path.
Kaela, still scrambling to regain her footing, found herself face-to-face with the stumbling beast.
"Oh, you want some of this now?!" she spat, adrenaline overriding her embarrassment.
With a primal snarl, she swung her sword in a desperate arc. The blade caught the creature mid-tumble, the steel shrieking as it split the chitinous plating clean down the center.
A fountain of black, pressurized blood erupted from the wound, spraying across Kaela’s face.
"Gross! Did you see that? That’s on my uniform now!" Kaela shrieked, wiping a glob of gore from her eye while simultaneously stepping backward to avoid another lunge.
"Less complaining, more killing!" Lia shouted, though she couldn’t help the hysterical laugh that bubbled up in her throat. "Try not to die before I get to prove I’m better than you!"
"In your dreams, prodigy girl!" Kaela fired back.
Despite the insults and the near-disastrous lack of formal technique, something miraculous was happening beneath the surface of their bickering. The clumsiness was transforming into something raw and instinctive.
When Lia misjudged a parry, Kaela was already there to cover the gap with a brutal, bone-creeping slash. When Kaela got cornered, Lia’s elemental magic would explode outward, creating a momentary barrier that gave Kaela the second she needed to breathe.
They weren’t fighting like disciplined soldiers; they were fighting like two halves of a single, furious organism.
Lia ducked under a claw that would have taken her head off, spinning on her heel to deliver a precise strike to a monster’s joint. The chitin snapped with the sound of breaking dry wood, sending the creature shrieking to the ground.
"Nice shot, Lia!" Kaela yelled, immediately following up with a vicious kick that sent another creature sprawling into Lia’s waiting blade.
"Don’t get used to it!" Lia panted, blood trickling down her forehead where a claw had grazed her. "That was pure luck!"
"Sure it was, and don’t be so humble now!" Kaela grinned wickedly through the blood spatter, her eyes blazing with a newfound ferocity. "Let’s show these fuckers why they shouldn’t have messed with our academy!"
The clearing had become a slaughterhouse of black ichor and shattered chitin. The air was thick enough to taste metallic, acidic, and heavy with the copper tang of blood.
Lia and Kaela were no longer just two students fighting for survival; they were two engines of destruction fueled by adrenaline and sheer spite.
SKREEEE CRUNCH.
A creature with elongated, needle-like limbs lunged at Lia’s throat. She didn’t retreat; she leaned into it.
"Too slow, bug brain!" she hissed, twisting her torso with the grace of a dancer.
The needle limb whistled past her ear, close enough to slice a strand of hair. In one fluid motion, she swept her leg low, catching the monster behind its knee joints.
The sound of the joint snapping was like a dry branch breaking in winter CRACK and as the creature buckled, Lia drove her palm upward, channeling a burst of pressurized water that exploded through its mandible, spraying brain matter across the cobblestones.
"Nice follow through, Lia, but you’re still breathing too loud!" Kaela shouted, already mid-leap.
Kaela wasn’t dancing; she was a hurricane. She came down from a stone wall like a falling meteor, her sword wreathed in desperate energy.
She brought the blade down on a cluster of two creatures that were attempting to flank Lia.
THWACK SHLICK.
The blade sheared through one’s carapace and buried itself halfway through the second’s torso. Blood sprayed upward in a hot, crimson arc, painting Kaela’s cheeks.
"My breathing? My breathing is fine! You’re the one who’s swinging that sword like a drunken blacksmith!" Lia countered, spinning to parry a claw that raked across her ribs.
The pain was sharp, a hot sear that made her vision swim for a heartbeat. "Ow, shit! That one actually got me!"
"Oh, boo-hoo, cry me a river!" Kaela yelled, though her eyes darted sideways with genuine concern. "Save the whining for after we kill everything in this godforsaken clearing!"
"Cover me!"