“Fire,” Dimitry commanded.

Soot blotting his boyish face, a blacksmith’s apprentice tugged on a rope. The knot at the other end, strangling the trigger of an augmented rifle, jerked the lever over a bolted fulcrum, tilting an orange-glowing needlepoint into the flash pan. The black powder ignited in a hissing flash of light. A thunderous roar whipped across the test range, past dozens of observers, and across the snowy woods beyond.

Another cast iron ball slammed into the trunk of a leafless oak. Off-center like always, but this time with enough force to eject splinters and penetrate the pith. The deepest of the seven holes made that evening.

Saphiria gaped at the entry wound in the bark. “Now the weapon is as powerful as a voltech rifle.”

The court sorceress at the princess’s side had long lost her collected poise. Normally measured and proud, Leandra pulled back her yellow hood as if the flimsy cloth had warped her sight and leaned in for a closer look. “I no longer think a standard rifle can compare, Your Highness. The accuracy is poor, but the strength… it is something else.”

Elias glanced at the apprentice, whose trembling hand still held the rope. “And to think a kid could operate the weapon from twenty strides away.”

Katerina, Clewin, and a semicircle of smiths peeled their gazes from the rifle strapped to a central boulder. Mouths agape, they turned to Dimitry.

Though Dimitry wore an assured guise befitting the apostle, he was no less stunned. The former voltech rifle’s iron barrel was designed for sorceresses to shoot rounds with propelia and to bludgeon enemies that got too close, not to contain burning black powder. He feared the weapon would explode under the pressure of ballooning gases like a pipe bomb. Yet it didn’t. The gun worked. It was inaccurate as all hell, but it worked.

Eager to test the limits, Dimitry loaded the augmented rifle with progressively larger black powder charges. The ball didn’t reach the tree at first. Now, it pierced halfway through. How much further could he take it? “Elias, would you kindly?”

Snowflakes melting on his hairless head, the broad-shouldered giant jogged a dozen meters to the rifle. He pulled a blackened rag from his pocket, wrapped it around the tip of an iron pole, and plunged the makeshift ramrod into the barrel. The cotton grew darker with each stroke. Elias glanced inside. “Still no damage. Looks good!”

Clewin stepped forward next. With practiced precision, he locked the lever with a pin so the gun wouldn’t go off mid-load, then scooped a pre-weighed dose of black powder—heavier than the last—into the barrel. Elias sealed the charge with an iron ball, packed the shot with another shove of the ramrod, and Clewin poured a thin trail of powder onto the flash pan. The chemist looked over his work before removing the safety pin. “Ready!”

Both men rushed to their hiding spots behind a log wall.

With hopes for an even more forceful shot—one that could puncture the thick stone platings of carapaced devils—Dimitry inhaled a deep breath. “Fire.”

The apprentice tugged the rope, and like before, a bellowing roar left the observers speechless. But this silence was not born of awe. Iron fragments shot forth from the base of the barrel, which peeled into bent strips like the skin of a compressed banana. As Dimitry had warned it eventually would, the rifle gave way.

Watching sulfurous smoke waft from the iron corpse, a pudgy blacksmith removed his brown apron and lowered his head. He and the others paid their respects as if mourning a beloved child.

Dimitry had hoped for a few more firings before the barrel gave out. However, now that he had measured the integrity of this world’s guns, he could decide on a suitable black powder charge. “Let’s go with the load size from two shots ago. Should be more than safe enough for the troops to use.”

Clewin chalked alien but familiar digits onto a slate board.

Saphiria turned away from the rifle husk. “What does Zera intend for us to do next?” she asked in a cold and regal tone that also carried a hint of curiosity.

“Next, we mass-produce rifles to prepare for the Night of Repentance, Your Royal Highness.”

“But they are inaccurate.”

The issue she raised was one Dimitry had wrestled with. While he would have preferred a fix, only three days remained before the sorceress expedition returned to Malten and the heathens became his problem. The solution was volume. “Precision is important for your combat sorceresses because there are less than fifty of them, but my army numbers in the thousands. Accuracy doesn’t matter as much when hundreds of rifles fire towards the coast.”

Her indigo eyes widened, and twenty blacksmiths gawked at him as if he had violated the most unthinkable taboo.

“Your Holiness,” Elias uttered, “has Zera blessed you with trade secrets as well?”

“Trade secrets?”

“You want us to make hundreds of those things? Hundreds?”

The disbelief in Elias’ voice was the last thing Dimitry wanted to hear. “Assuming my smiths and the ones in your guild worked together nonstop, how many can we produce by the Night of Repentance?”

“With things as they are? Maybe twenty-five.”

Twenty-five? That was nothing. So few firearms wouldn’t even kill a carapaced devil let alone fire barrages voluminous enough to shoot down fliers. The reload times were too long, and accelall would make them even more inaccurate. Without a sturdy wall to toss bombs from and with mines under development, his followers wouldn’t survive the month. “You can’t do more?”

Elias massaged his head with a giant palm. “Well…”

Saphiria stepped forward and stood up for the blacksmith that towered a head over her. “Dimitry, for each voltech rifle that is made, wrought iron must be beaten into wide strips and hammered around a mandrel. Assuming one is fortunate and none of the produced rings have defects, it’ll take three to forge weld a single barrel. Then it must be bored and reamed. Even a master smith will labor a week to produce one such rifle, and that is without considering the stock or the propelia seal.”

Crap. Dimitry glanced at the mangled remains of the test rifle and the spiral grooves running down the undamaged portions of its barrel. “What if we skip the rifling?”

“Rifling is the side product of reaming. It is necessary to finish the interior. Instead, my smiths may elect not to file the outside. Perhaps then you will receive thirty barrels.”

“And if we convert the sorceresses’ other spares like we did with this one?”

“Even if I sent a knight to retrieve every extra in my city,” Saphiria said, "you will have sixty at the most. Mother sells the surplus to the southern kingdoms, and I do not think the guild will easily give away the voltech rifles stored in their armori—“

A piercing whistle cut the evening.

Three dozen gazes shot past the test range and endless tents to the unseen coast beyond. The whistling grew louder. Hundreds of distant shouts resounded under the curtain of evening, and the ground quaked as if two unimaginably massive weights had crashed onto shore.

Heart pounding in his ears and freezing winds slamming into his eyes, Dimitry rushed past fleeing Hospitallers. What were they running from? Carapaced devils? He barged forward, praying he could prevent a tragedy before one came to pass.

The screams grew louder. As the ground beneath Dimitry’s boots transitioned from dirt to sand, two hulking monstrosities came into view. They lay on the shore like beached whales. Blue circuits twisted and intersected from their rectangular trunks to their whipping, spiny tails. Blood poured from countless chinks in their stone hide.

Carrier devils.

They formed a narrow lane through which a conga line of crawlers marched from the ocean to the settlement, safe from the voltech rifles crackling on the flanking piers.

Dimitry held his breath. The crawlers were using the carriers as barricades. They had effortlessly breached the sorceresses’ firing line.

A formation of over a hundred Hospitallers stood against the six-legged invaders with Angelika leading the defense, but once the crawlers raised their front feet and snapped them like bladed pincers, the soldiers dropped their halberds.

“We can’t let them reach the interior,” Angelika shouted. “Pick your weapons back the fuck up!”

Her troops did not obey. They scattered as their three-meter-high nemeses neared.

“Morons!” Angelika reached for her vol pouch. “Hastia!” She fell into a sprint that would put Olympic athletes to shame, glancing back to shoot the crawlers hot on her trail. Each time she turned, the heathens closed more of the gap.

Several guild sorceresses motioned to reinforce Angelika, yet they froze when the flaps on the carriers’ backs popped open. Eight fliers poured into the sky from four spinal cavities, all but one dodging every iron ball before soaring into a sea of bleak clouds and disappearing from view. Blue shades streaked the sky.

“Forget Angelika!” Greta pulled a young sorceress in by the wrist. “Watch your heads and kill the carriers before they birth more!”

“Yes, madam!” a feminine chorus replied.

Not intending to let a nineteen-year-old fight off five crawlers alone, Dimitry dashed towards Angelika. Instinct compelled him to deploy an untested spell—potentially lethal magic he had hoped to study in a controlled environment before putting it into use. He gripped a vol pellet and held out his palm. “Impedeall.”

The green metal drained into his palm and burned through his arm.

All five crawlers stopped mid-stride. As if Angelika had ceased to exist, they lowered their claws and skittered past her to terrorize the residential district beyond.

Relief then dread struck Dimitry. “Shit!” He had hoped for an invisible wall like protectia, or a temporal field that impeded the enemies’ movement as the spell implied, yet while he had saved the girl, the crawlers instead rushed forth to kill escaping Hospitallers. He fumbled for another pellet, this time to cast accelall, but stampeding hooves and a piercing voice gave him pause.

“Dimitry!” a voice called. Saphiria, six royal knights, and two court sorceresses rode closer atop armored horses. She held out a gauntleted arm. “Get on!”

He took Saphiria’s hand and vaulted onto Dorothy’s back.

Raven hair flowing from beneath her hastily equipped full helmet, Saphiria eyed the royal knights and court sorceress she had left to retrieve when the disaster had struck. “Asch, Luger, Schwarz, Anelace. Help the sorceresses with the carriers. The rest of you will slaughter the rampaging crawlers and fliers.”

“Yes, Your Highness!” Her troops parted as two streams.

One remained.

“My liege,” Leandra said, “allow me to assist the apostle on your behalf.”

“You have your orders.”

“Heathens are much unlike common thugs; you must stay back. I will not let the heiress endanger herself for some Zera’s Chosen!”

“They are not Zera’s chosen,” Saphiria said. “They are the countrymen that our kingdom has failed. We won’t fail them again. Now go.”

“Think things through for once! We are doomed if you—“

“I said go!”

Frowning, Leandra unholstered her voltech rifle and slammed an iron ball down the barrel. She charged at the nearest crawler. “Live long, my liege.”

“I intend to.” Saphiria glanced back at Dimitry, her voice devoid of the exalted enunciation from moments past. “What should we do?”

Dimitry took in the chaotic landscape around them. With royal knights rushing to Angelika’s aid, each winding back a gargantuan hammer to demolish the few scurrying crawlers, heathens were no longer the biggest threat.

People were.

Like panicked rodents, a crowd of two thousand pushed and shoved and trampled to escape the threat, the discipline they had learned in a week’s worth of army drills undone by survival instinct. Two women stomped across a man’s spine despite being a hundred yards from the nearest heathen. For each soldier that picked up their fellow man from the ground or called for order, a dozen more blindly scattered towards the forest, their fear far more hazardous than the handful of feathers falling from the sky.

Dimitry could treat burns made with heathen’s blood, but crush injuries weren’t so simple. Whether through organ damage or traumatic asphyxia, stampeding would leave many crippled or dead. He had to end the turmoil before the damage exceeded his medical resources. “Ride ahead of the deserters.”

With a nod, Saphiria leaned forward and pressed her thighs into Dorothy’s sides.

The white horse jerked into a gallop.

Wind ripped through Dimitry’s hair as he cupped his hands around his mouth like a microphone. He repeated a military term Angelika often yelled at her troops. “Close order formation!”

Aside from a few soldiers who were already trying to restore calm, not a single one broke their stride.

Dimitry grit his teeth. If a few heathens could throw his army into chaos, how would they fare on the Night of repentance? Not well. Though firearms would help, a bigger issue was the lacking chain of command. Angelika and Warnfrid couldn’t maintain order alone. As Dimitry got into position, he memorized the faces of those who stayed composed despite all hell breaking loose.

Saphiria jerked the reins, and Dorothy cut ahead of the crowd. She rode the wave of fleeing Hospitallers.

“Zera’s faithful!” Dimitry raised an arm to Celeste and yelled at the top of his lungs. “If you are calm and listen, the corruption cannot hurt you!”

A nearby man—whose patched boots plodded through snow—looked up at the apostle and the princess. He stopped, and like ripples on the ocean, the sentiment spread until over a thousand Hospitallers slowed to a halt. The clamor fell to scattered shrieks.

Dimitry pointed to the brave soldiers who had risked injury to promote peace or help those left behind. “You are my officers now. Rally into order formations with those nearest you.”

Though their dilated pupils tracked the pale blue silhouettes of heathens streaking beyond the clouds, his troops lined up. Some groups had fewer people than the fingers of one hand, others more than a packed train car.

“Logs, planks, tables,” Dimitry said. “Anything you can find. Lift them and hold them over your heads as a team. I want the injured in the center of each formation.”

A straggler hoisted a bench over his head, joined a squad of twenty, and pulled in a limping woman to safety.

Fliers swooped down, stone feathers loosening from their trapezoidal wings.

“Hold!” Dimitry’s voice echoed across a field of tents and white.

Soldiers obeyed even as projectiles plunked into their overhead barricades. Blood poured from the shafts of feathers and seared through wood. The defenses wouldn’t last.

Where were the reinforcements? Breaths shaky, Dimitry looked to the coast, where two unmoving carrier devils bled from the innumerous craters in their trunks and lay on moist, blue sand. The sorceresses and knights that slaughtered them had also killed every crawler and were now approaching to finish the job.

“Just a little longer!” he yelled.

Boards melted into fragments. People squeezed together to avoid standing under leaking corrosives. And then, an iron ball severed a flier’s torso, each of the two halves crashing into a hillock, splattering blue guts and stone across the snow.

Cheers erupted across the battlefield, and with each heathen that plunged to its death, they grew louder. When the sorceresses had neutralized the threat, people tossed aside their impromptu shields. Victory chants and ecstatic prayers filled the night.

Relief coursed through Dimitry. The feeling lasted but a moment.

In the distance, a blue-striped silhouette hovered over the ocean. Wingspan ten times that of a flying devil, it didn’t attack. Nor did it approach. The super-sized condor stared at them from above the water’s surface, and once the last flier had died, its blue silhouette vanished into the horizon.

Saphiria leaned in. Her stilted breath was warm on his neck. "Did you see that?”

“Yeah,” Dimitry said. “I think it was watching us.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She paused. “My feeling is not a good one. That beast, the organization they have shown tonight: we must focus solely on surviving the month.”

His gaze fell to Dorothy’s braided tail. Saphiria was right. After what he had seen, the coming Night of Repentance was unlikely to be the cakewalk Dimitry hoped for. He would have to mobilize every resource, explore every avenue, prepare for every attack. Whatever it took to survive.

Just one week.

If Dimitry could make it through the week, the following lull in heathens would give his soldiers ample time to settle into the land. A city could be born. But for that, he would need weapons. “You told me you can get me sixty rifles.”

“I will get them. No matter the cost.”

“Thank you.”

Saphiria pensively combed Dorothy’s silken mane with a gauntleted hand. “But if even a sorceress expedition couldn’t hold the coast, do you think sixty will be enough?”

“We’ll make it enough. I also have bombs and mines and magic.”

“Neither bombs, mines, nor magic can reach an airborne monstrosity.”

“We’ll see.” Dimitry glanced up at soldiers being loaded onto stretchers. He raised a leg and motioned to dismount the horse. “I have to go take care of the patients. Tell me when you—“

“Wait.”

“Yeah?”

Her big indigo eyes probed into his. Her gaze was steady, overflowing with resolve. “I do not yet know their efficacy, but there may be a way to produce enough rifles for your men in time. Come find me when you are finished tending to your patients. I will await you at the smithy.”