Chapter 21: Decision
Lucas found Lora in the middle of the chaos, dagger still slick with blood, chest heaving.
"They’re natural enemies!" he shouted over the noise, grabbing her arm before she could turn away. "Bora and Avalion...they hate each other more than they hate us. I need you to get to Colt, tell him to hold his position and let survivors squeeze in, but I’m going to try to force the rest of them into each other!"
Lora’s eyes widened as understanding arrived fast. "How—"
"I’m the bait, remember?" He cut her off forcing a dry grin. "Go tell him. I’ll pull the ones still scattered."
She didn’t waste time arguing. She turned and sprinted for Colt’s position and Lucas turned the other way, toward the open ground still crawling with beasts that hadn’t yet been drawn into anyone’s crossfire.
[Skill: Ignition has been activated]
The flame came, igniting over his knuckles and forearms, roaring bright around both fists as he broke into a sprint across open ground.
It worked instantly just as he hoped.... Every beast within sight turned toward the light — Bora uncoiling from wherever they’d been circling wounded survivors, Avallion twisting hard in midair to change course.
Lucas ran, not away from the horde now but through the open ground between two clusters of them, forcing their paths to cross.
The first collision happened almost by accident... a Bora, driven by pure predatory instinct toward the burning shape sprinting past, crashed directly into an Avallion’s flight path, and both creatures reacted in the same instant, mindless fury Lucas had seen once already.
He didn’t stop to watch.... He kept running, weaving a path that dragged more of them into each other’s way, using his own body as the single variable that could force two populations of predators who otherwise avoided each other into a collision course neither species seemed able to resist.
Behind him, the sound of battle began to change....
It wasn’t just the ring of Colt’s hammer or Iris’ arrows anymore. It was a different kind of violence now. Shrieks and roars turned on each other, Bora tails lashing into Avallion wings, Avalion talons raking into armored Bora hides, the two classes of beast tearing into one another with a savagery that made the earlier chaos look almost restrained by comparison.
Lucas kept moving, kept running, kept bleeding from a dozen shallow wounds that stacked up faster than he could react until the open ground around him had become less a battlefield and more a slaughter of monsters killing each other.
Lora reached Colt’s position at a dead sprint, and what she found there stopped her cold.
Colt was still standing.... Still swinging. But his stance had gone wrong somewhere in the last minutes — leaning hard to one side, one arm clamped against a wound at his ribs that soaked the front of his shirt black, each swing of Warlord’s Grip landing a half-second slower than the one before it.
"Colt—" She caught his attention between swings, breathless. "Lucas has a plan. He’s turning the beasts on each other, hold position, let the survivors keep coming in—"
"Already..." Colt’s voice came out ragged and wet in a way that made her stomach drop. "Already doing that. Just...keep them coming."
He swung the hammer again, catching a Bora mid-charge and sending it crashing sideways into the melee still tearing itself apart across the open ground and Lora saw, in the brief moment his stance opened up, the full extent of the wound at his side. Deep, dark, clearly torn by something with more force behind it than a graze.
"You’re hurt."
"I’m aware... Not the first time. Won’t be the last, assuming there is one." He planted his feet again, swung again, blood spattering fresh across the mud with the motion. "Go. Keep the line moving.... I’ll hold."
She didn’t want to leave him like that but she left anyway, because the fighters still streaming in from every direction needed direction more than Colt needed company, and behind her the hammer kept swinging, slower every time, buying seconds that were costing him.
***
It took what felt like hours, though Lucas would never be able to say for certain, before the beasts stopped being an army and became simply scattered, dying things — Bora and Avallion alike, torn apart by each other far more than by anything the survivors had managed to do directly, the last handful finished off by the exhausted fighters who’d survived long enough.
Silence fell across the camp, one dying growl at a time, until there was nothing left moving on the battlefield except people.
[Ding!]
[You have survived the horde]
[Survival probability recalibrated: 44%]
Lucas found Colt on his knees near the center, hammer finally gone from his hands, both arms wrapped around a wound that had soaked through everything down to his boots.
"No—no, no, hold on!" Lucas dropped to the ground beside him, hands hovering uselessly over the wound, searching for anything, anything at all that might buy time he wasn’t sure existed to buy. "Callum! Callum, I need you over here—"
"Won’t help." Colt’s cut him off, the voice had gone quiet, stripped of the authority it had carried through every conversation Lucas had with him until now. "The boy’s already tried he too tired right now. Wound’s too deep anyway."
"Then we find something else. there has to be..." Lucas’s hands were shaking, pressing uselessly against a wound that kept bleeding through no matter how hard he pressed. "Shit! You can’t just die here. People need you! Nobody else can hold this camp together, nobody else has the ability, to—"
"Kid." Colt’s hand closed weakly around his wrist, stopping the frantic motion. "Look at me."
Lucas looked at him.
"I’ve known men who died believing they were irreplaceable," Colt said, each word costing him visibly more than the last. "Every single one of them was wrong. This camp doesn’t need me anymore. It needs someone. Right now, that someone’s you."
"I don’t know how to run a Faction. Hell, I don’t even know these people—"
"Neither did I, once." Came a faint, pained smile. "You kept two us alive tonight with but a skill and a plan nobody else would have thought of. That’s more than most Leadera manage on their best day."
"Colt—"
"Keep them safe." His grip tightened, one last time. "That’s all I’m asking. Whatever you decide to do next keep.... Them... Safe."
Lucas didn’t answer immediately, throat too tight to allow any words through and by the time he found something to say, Colt’s hand had already gone slack against his wrist, eyes fixed on something past Lucas’s shoulder that wasn’t there.
[The Lord of the Faction Zone has died.]
He stood up, silent as Lora came running.
"Lucas, are you—"
"Head count... get me a head count. How many of us are left."
She stayed silent for a brief moment, nodded once and left.
Twenty four people stood scattered across a battlefield still littered with the dead, human and monster alikewhen Lucas finally rose to face them.
He hadn’t asked for this. He hadn’t wanted it. But every face turned toward him now carried the same exhausted, desperate need for someone to say something, anything.
"Colt’s dead," Lucas said. He let the words sit in the silence they deserved before continuing. "I’m not going to pretend I can replace him. I can’t and I don’t plan to. But he asked me before he died to keep the people who made it through today safe. I intend to do that."
Nobody spoke. Twenty four exhausted, grieving faces watched him, waiting.
"I heard something a while back, from someone in this camp." His eyes found Lora among the survivors...
"A Faction, further east. Bigger than this one and growing fast. Led by two people strong enough that nobody’s challenged them yet." He paused then made himself say the rest honestly instead of dressing it up....
"I won’t lie to you....It might be nothing. A rumor that doesn’t hold up once we actually get there. I have personal reasons for wanting to find out, and I won’t pretend otherwise."
A murmur rippled through the survivors, uncertain and wary.
"But if it’s real," Lucas continued, "it’s the best lead any of us have toward somewhere safer than an open field with a wall that already failed once. I’m not ordering anyone to come. After everything, I don’t think anyone here owes obedience to a stranger wearing a dead man’s authority."
Another pause...
"But I’m going. And anyone who wants to come with me is welcome to...."
The silence that followed st
retched for a long moment...
Lucas swept his eyes across the field and spoke again...
"We move by morning..."
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