Ryu leaned against the stone battlements with a sigh. The soldier's life had turned out more dull than he had thought, and he was growing restless. It was a good restlessness, the kind that came from an abundance of peace, but it was temporary. Ryu was not a patient man, if he was honest. The waiting seemed to grate on his nerves more than fighting ever had.

Only the weak wait for an attack they know coming, Ender sneered. You should strike now, while the damn Bugs are preparing.

Ryu ignored the irritable devil, choosing instead to look at the city across the bridge. It was a cloudy day, and he could just make out the odd domes of the Bug’s homes in the distance. Like the humans, the aliens had altered the buildings to better suit their needs. He wondered what they thought of his own people.

Probably not much, the weak bastards that you are. Ender seemed to grow angrier the longer he went without a fight, and after a week of guard duty, the demon was relentless. Still, Ryu dismissed him.

He imagined the Bugs were as frightened as his people had been when they were thrust in this world to compete. Unlike some of his fellows, Ryu did not believe the Bugs to be mindless killers. They resembled ants and other insects in appearance alone. Their way of fighting seemed to suggest a culture all their own.

What does it matter? If they survive, you and yours will die. Ryu could not tell if this last message was Ender or his own mind. The Bugs would have to die, and there was no sense in humanizing them now. Better to think them mindless insects…

He only hoped they could forgive his people. Genocide was a stain not easily washed away.

“Brooding, are we?” Chou said, leaning over the battlements beside him. His squadmate was in her armor today, the overlapping metal plates giving her a dangerous look.

“Suppose so.” It seemed that brooding was about the only thing a guard could do. Or perhaps Ryu took things too seriously.

Chou snorted. “And what’s got my squad leader moping about? It’s not good for morale you know.”

All the guards on the battlements were a good distance away, and Ryu was sure they had better things to do than think about what he was doing. “Nothing important, I guess.”

“A shame. Proper brooding is best done over something properly important.”

He looked around. “Where’s Inosuke and Genji?”

“Fiddling each other off in the baths still, I imagine.”

“Alright,” he said, turning to look back out at the bridge.

She hit his shoulder. Hard. “You’re really strung tight, aren’t you? That won’t do, boss. Not one bit.”

He started to respond to her, but a glimmer in the water of the river caught his eye. Before he could make sense of anything, dark figures had started to move across the bridge.

“Sound the alarm!” Ryu barked. Ender wanted to drop from the battlements and rush to fight off the Bugs, but the fort had a system for these things. It would be selfish to ignore it in favor of battle, and if he was honest, his earlier thoughts had quelled any urge he might have had to fight. Not that he had much of a choice.

His boots made hard knocks as they struck against the stone stairs towards Daisuke’s command room. The commander needed to know about what he had seen in the river, and then Ryu needed to grab the rest of his squad. Oh responsibilities, how he hadn’t missed them. A little discipline had never hurt anyone, he supposed.

Kaito’s brother Asahi opened the door to the command room. He gave Ryu a small nod. Soldiers had little patience for etiquette, and battle even less so.

“What is it?” Daisuke asked. The aged man was switching between the window that looked out at the bridge and the enchantment display at his table. A young woman sat in the back of the room listening to the enchanted communication stones. Gods, enchantments were everywhere. They could replicate just about any simple Skill for the simple price of Qi crystals.

“Bugs are doing something in the river. Can’t say what, but I saw a disturbance right before they took the bridge,” Ryu grunted.

Daisuke looked at him, his blue eyes searching Ryu’s face. “Alright,” he said with a nod. “Eri, tell Captain Onji to keep an eye on the river.”

Ryu bowed in dismissal and made his way to the barracks. He met Inosuke and Genji on the stairs, the two walking with a group of other soldiers.

“Fall in,” he said to his two squadmates. Chou was a ranged fighter and would be better suited to a spot up top. Ryu and the other two, however, would be claiming a place on the wall.

“My apologies,” Inosuke said, shaking his head as if to wake himself. “Seems I’m the only soldier who can still get a hangover.”

“A good fight will clear you up in no time, eh?” Genji said with a laugh.

The three jogged their way to the walls and met up with Kaito. The young noble was giving orders, his soldiers raining down projectiles over the wall in front of them. For all his worries, the man seemed an able commander. Ryu inclined his head.

“Where do you need us?” Ryu asked.

Kaito thought for a moment. “Stay below the wall with the reserves for now. When they power down the wall’s enchantments enough to start jumping over them, I’ll send you up to plug any gaps. Unless a powerful Bug shows up, but then, you know what to do.”

Ryu nodded. Waiting, then. It was the worst part of any fight. Not that any part was great, save for winning. A nice, quiet wait was enough to break some, and the ones who handled it well were either cold-blooded murderers or the dependable sort. He wasn’t sure which type he was, but he had to admit the waits had grown on him.

Settling into a chair from his inventory, he gazed at the wall. Well, walls. Constructed from Qi-infused stone, the walls between the fort and the bridge met an angle, forming a pointed corner for the enemy to break upon. Long wooden platforms stretched along the wall to give the soldiers a place to stand, and it was from there that many soldiers loosed bows and threw javelins.

Their opponents had a strange way of fighting battles. They operated in groups of eight, and one of the eight would be enlarged by a sort of racial Skill all Bugs seemed to share. These enlarged Bugs would then soak up damage for the rest, allowing the others to flank or attack from range. It was why ambushes worked so well against the Bugs; their Skill took time to activate.

Still, his people and the Bugs had been in constant war for two years. Strategy after strategy had been developed by both sides, and as he watched what he could see of the battle, it all just looked like a hellish trading of projectiles, his eyes unable to see all the small Skill deployments used to negate certain tactics.

“Ryu, where’s your sword?” Inosuke asked, breaking Ryu from his thoughts. The short warrior held a long spear, his sword in a sheath at his side.

“Not the best with it, if I’m honest,” he said. After sparring with Emiko, he had realized there was little sense in wearing the blade if he had no interest in fighting with it. It was important he became reacquainted with it in case of a duel, but in real battle, he would prefer a weapon he knew better.

“What will you use then?” Genji said.

Ryu summoned a large, two-handed battle axe from its storage. It was plain steel and enchanted only for enhanced durability and sharpness. The enchantment runes along the two blades glowed blue like the ones on his armor. He let it lean over his shoulder.

“How do you afford all this shit?” Inosuke asked with a laugh.

Ryu just shrugged. From the look of Inosuke’s spear, the man was not short on funds himself. Besides, rich gear would do little for a man with poor skill, so in the end, it mattered not.

“Enchantment just went down,” Kaito grunted. The Bugs had already started to swarm over the walls.

Ryu sighed. Fighting on a cramped wall with Skills seemed a chaotic mess, but the Bugs’ numbers had at least been whittled down by their ranged attacks. He stood to his feet, stretching.

“If you’re about to die, yell for me,” he said. “I’ll hear.”

Then Kaito pointed to a spot on the wall, and he was gone. A Bug looked like a black ant on two legs. In their version of a Master Class, their appearances would change and alter under their Evolutions, but the ones on the wall right now were the basic ones. His axe ripped through a chitin chest, shredded an arm, and created a canyon between a Bug’s biting mandibles.

An alien’s weapons, it turned out, were designed with the same basic principles as a human’s: be sharp enough or hard enough to cause damage. Some wielded strange spear-like weapons with serrated chitin blades, as if they’d used their neighbor to fashion the weapon. Others wielded alien hammers and something that looked like a mix of an axe and a sword. For all their differences in weapons, however, all the Bugs died the same way under his axe.

Ender urged him to hand over control to the devil. He refused. Ryu might have been reluctant, but he was a participant all the same. He was not a man to shy away from what had to be done.

A few more strikes cleared the area around him for reinforcements, but an enlarged spindly hand crested the wall, cracking the stone in its alien hand. Then he found himself looking into a pair of large bulbous eyes and snapping mandibles. Ugly bastard. It was sad, really. Ryu’s axe did little for the Bug’s looks.

He dropped down from the wall to walk back to Kaito. Before he got there, the noble was already pointing again. It was going to be a long day.

Ryu handled seven more breaches before an enemy elite showed up to face him. A Bug armored in plated white carapace. Its plates curved gently past its joints, and it carried an intimidating glaive. The soldiers around them backed away, sensing the titanous auras of the two.

Take his soul, Ender said.

Ryu suppressed a sigh. Real motivating, his demonic twin. His Skill [Shadow of One’s Self] limited him to a newly turned Master Class without a Technique, so he ran his options through his mind, the Bug advancing on him with heavy steps.

[Whisper Step] closed the distance between them. Ryu’s axe flashed once, twice, and a third time, but the glaive met it at every turn. On the fourth time the weapons locked up, Ryu’s boot stomped on the white plate above the Bug’s knee, cracking it. His efforts were rewarded with a blow to the head. Fuck. The damn Bug had broken his nose.

He smashed into his opponent with another [Whisper Step]. The glaive slashed in a downward chop. Ryu grunted. It was rare to win without some sort of sacrifice, after all. The Bug’s weapon chopped into his shoulder and the thick muscle of his chest, leaving one of his arms dangling by his side. He caught the axe with his opposite hand, and its edge started to glow crimson with the power of [Cripple].

Ryu hopped off the bridge with gritted teeth. The Bug’s headless corpse fell behind him. Aye, Ryu was no stranger to war.

“Ryu.” Kaito greeted him with a nod. “Raids about down, so I figure I’ll join in. Try to make sure I don’t die, eh? Healers have a station set up in the mess hall.”

“Okay,” Ryu said. Damn glaive had cleaved right through his collarbone. Of course, Ryu’s axe had cleaved through its head in turn, but then, the dead were not ones to complain about pain. Hardy folk, the dead.

Shaking his head, Ryu marched past his cousin and into the large mess hall building next to the fort. A man in glasses and a white coat greeted him, leading him to a stiff white bed. The white-haired man looked him over.

“Take the armor off, son,” he said with a kind smile.

Ryu grunted and did as he was asked. Damn armor would have to be repaired anyways. “My apologies, sir.”

He smiled again, looking over Ryu’s shoulder with a discerning eye. “Dense bones, boy. Dense muscle tissue, too. Master Class?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “After this, I’m probably going to be a slobbering fool. Lead me to one of the nurses when I’m done.” A soft, golden glow coated his hands, and Ryu closed his eyes to the pain of his healing wound. Gods protect good healers and the foolish men and women who need them, he thought to himself. Funny how wounds can make a man religious.

Minutes later, Ryu’s bone was mended, his nerves were restored, and most of his skin was healed. After leading the healer to one of the nurses outside, Ryu walked back out to a diminishing battle. Kaito had abandoned his impromptu command post, heading to fight, but someone else, it seemed, had taken his place.

“Lady Emiko,” Ryu said with a small smile. Though they knew they were siblings, everybody else did not. For the time being, it was best to act no different than usual.

“Ryu.” She was spattered in yellow ichor from the Bugs, and if Ryu had to guess, her blades had seen their fair share of battle throughout the attack.

He sat in the chair he had left earlier. “So you and Kaito traded duties?”

“Sort of. Though I have my own command, I must confess my style of leadership is best suited to the front lines. Kaito indulges me, picking up the slack. It’s only fair I do the same for him occasionally.”

Her mention of command made him remember Inosuke and the others. “By the way, do you know where my squad members are?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said with a giggle. “They went with Kaito to the front. I’m guessing you left them little opportunity to test their mettle?”

“Something like that.” He rubbed his sore shoulder. “Do you know any good armor smiths? Seems I’ll need mine repaired.”

“The fort employs a few, all Craftsmen of the highest order. Have Inosuke show you after,” she said. “How did-”

“Alert! Bugs have sprung up from the west canal. Lady Emiko, take a group of men and defend the walls there,” the voice of Daisuke’s commander said, rattling the small Communication Stone in her pocket.

Ryu grunted. “Get your people. I’ll go ahead.”