Balbi the [Laundress]-[Witch] had a caustic personality and made no attempt to hide the fact that she didn’t like Brin at all, but even so she was surprisingly quick to see reason.

As a member of the town Council, she was the natural choice to talk to Kevim about their plans.

First thing in the morning, she approached him with the idea to have the familiars defend the gates, but he refused.

Without being able to explain that they were familiars, it was impossible to get him to believe that a pack of dogs, a bull, and “someone you don’t know” were going to be able to pull it off.So, without the aid of the familiars, the town mounted their defense.

When the undead broke through the first gate, Zilly’s dad blasted them with fire.

Rather than annihilating the charging foes like last time, he and the other Lantern-men only thinned them out, and then it was up to a group of townsfolk holding towershields and wearing the town’s best remaining armor to push them back.It was a slow, methodical fight.

Everyone that could hold a spear and a shield joined the relief force, choosing to spread the burden to as many people as possible rather than continue to only risk their strongest fighters.

The defenders only made a small ring around the gate as it was being defended, and no one was made to stay on the front line very long.

Two minutes, and then they were swapped out, whether they were injured or not.Zilly was on the front line.

Despite her young age, she’d been leveling a lot, and the fact that she was a so-called [Warrior] made Kevim agree to put her with Hammon’s Bog’s best.

Brin was relieved to see that she was also the very first person to leave the front lines.

She came through the gates looking dazed.

Her steel helm was dented, and she had a line of red running down her face.The nurses tended to her, and luckily it must not have been that bad, because she soon took her place at the back of the line with the reinforcements.Davi was at his place near the gates, playing his music.

The tune spoke of grit and resolve.

It was a song about the long war, about endurance, about fighting to the last.

It was depressing, and yet somehow energizing, because it felt real.

It was honest.Brin had more than three hundred fighters in front of him in line when he got to the gate, but it still moved much too quickly.

The sounds of fighting grew louder, orders being shouted, screams of rage, shouts of pain, and the ringing of steel against steel.As he got closer to the front, he saw that the mood of the undead had shifted as well.

They were adjusting to the quick swap-out times of the defenders by fighting like berserkers, trying to break them before they could be swapped out.Few on either side fell, but there was a decided defensiveness to the town’s side, where it was apparent that most had given up on killing any undead and were concentrating on simply staying alive.As he got closer, the sounds of war got louder, the stink of fear and blood got more intense, even the temperature seemed to rise.Then he was at the front.An undead with a black two-handed club was in his face with no time to prepare.

It battered at him wildly, desperate to take him down as quickly as it could.

The first blow against his shield numbed his arm, and every one after that threatened to wrest it out of his hands.He called a sheet of glass onto the surface of his shield, burning his Mana to make it appear quickly.

When the club struck it again, Brin wrapped the glass around it and made it stick to his shield.

He pulled back, and the undead lurched forward unsteadily.

Brin stabbed with his spear, piercing the undead’s neck.Then his hand was ringing as the spear was smacked away.

The undead to the right of the club-wielder had intervened.

It slashed out with a rapier, tracing a long cut along the arm piece of his leather armor before the defender to Brin’s right got a shield between them.The undead with the club stumbled back, and a new soldier replaced it, this one with a jagged black sword.Brin braced the shield with both hands, defending against the onslaught.

They didn’t have to kill the undead, they just had to hold them back long enough for the gates to get repaired.

Long enough to survive another day.Every strike from the undead bruised his arms, even through the shield, but he held on.

He pushed back when the undead tried to break through, bashed the shield forward when the undead tried to take advantage of his lack of weapon to harm his neighbor, but most of all, he held on.

He hung on to the shield like a life raft, and it protected him from the swings of blacksteel weapons that battered him like a storm.Then, he felt a tug at his shoulder.

He was done.He stepped back, and another defender took his place.

Alert!

You have defeated: Undead Soldier [25]

Greater experience rewarded to the combatant who dealt the killing blow.