Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

The biggest guns around weren’t putting her in the ground.

But they were weakening her. Slowing her.

This was our chance.

“Get her!” I screamed.

On the other side of the field, Marcone shouted something to his people that probably sounded cooler than me and meant, “Get her.” They came forward aggressively, and Marcone led the way, drawing pistols and firing them one at a time, in alternating hands—and where they struck, they smashed through shields and armor and flesh alike.

Butters and Sanya rushed forward on either side of me. Sanya was bellowing laughter like a madman. Butters shrieked the battle cry of maybe something like a leatherback turtle—but there was a long swath of ground he had taken from the enemy in his wake. Behind them, our volunteers shouted exhausted, terrified cries and came forward.

I used to wonder how people could run forward into things like that. I think it’s about the environment. There’s just too much confusion, too much fear, too much pain, to think rationally. It’s not a rational place. When death is all around, forward can get to looking like a pretty good way out. And humans can only bear tension, fear, and worry for so long. We aren’t built to sit quietly under such burdens. We’re built to go out and deal with whatever is causing them.

We aren’t built to sit and take it. We were made to take action.

Eventually, too much pressure will bring a willing fight out of anybody. Even in a nightmare hellscape. Or especially in a nightmare hellscape. Eventually, it’s better to go forward into it and have things settled than to huddle in terror for one second longer.

I think we’d all had as much as we could take.

It was time to settle it. One way or another.

So I charged in and felt others following me, the light of the Swords casting an implacable, inexorable glare ahead of us.

I had a couple of seconds to see everything, absolutely everything about the charge. Time slowed, as it does sometimes in such circumstances. I could see the interplay of the plates of armor worn by the enemy, the skill with which they had been made. I could see individual droplets of mud flying, almost floating, through the air. I could smell mud and blood and viscera as clearly and vividly as a fresh, steaming pizza put on your table. I could see dead eyes and broken bodies, shifting as they were walked upon, giving the illusion of animation.

And then we crashed into the foe, and everything was flying weapons and screams and balance and trying to get enough air into my lungs. There was no music now—few clicks, few calls. Just panting breaths and grunts and cries of pain. Weapons hitting one another. Curses. Bodies slipping, falling into the mud, visibility of no more than a few feet.

Absolute chaos.

But we had the Knights of the Sword and the enemy didn’t.

The light of the Swords blinded the enemy to everything else. If there were missiles flung, it was at the Knights. A froggy minor sorcerer tried his hand at them, to no success, his magic blocked by the light of the Sword of Faith. The Swords filled our foes with fear—as long as the Knights were coming at them, they had little thought for the most intelligent response and reacted to their fear instead.

We cut our way toward the weakened Titan, step by step.

I saw things. Ebenezar set a squad of octokongs on fire with an absent word and a flick of one hand. Cristos began making fists and just yanking the enemy down into the earth, right down past the tops of their heads, killing and burying them all at once, very efficient. Ramirez hustled over to the Archive, melting bad guys along the way, and covered Ivy while she kept ripping at the earth beneath the Titan’s feet in an effort to keep her stumbling and off-balance.

And Marcone walked straight into the melee, firing flintlocks and dropping them as if he had an unlimited supply. Gard and Hendricks fought on either side of him, and his people covered his rear as they all pushed forward together, closing to range too short for even pistols to be practical. A lot of people were down in the mud, fighting and biting and gouging. Bad idea, to wrestle Neanderthals. We didn’t get the best of those fights, and once they realized it, the enemy threw themselves forward with berserk abandon, and if you didn’t have a friend to shoot the berserk trooper off you, you got slammed against the ground until you died.

The champions got to the Titan at about the same time.

Gard went in first.

The Valkyrie spun full circle with her axe to build momentum, called something in a voice almost like a note of music, and the head of the axe blazed with runic power. She struck Ethniu in the ankle. In the back of the ankle.

In her Achilles tendon.

And for the first time in millennia, mortals heard a Titan scream in pain.

It was like a psychic bomb went off. A wave of agony hit my nervous system with the clarity and intensity of dental pain, pure and unfiltered. The world staggered to one side. I’d have fallen if Sanya hadn’t caught my arm.

Ethniu lurched, her foot not bleeding, but brutally broken and no longer supporting her weight—and Hendricks hit her at the hips like the linebacker he’d once been. Titan and professional bruiser went down together—and without an instant’s hesitation, Marcone drew his last and largest pistol, shoved the barrel into the Titan’s natural eye, and pulled the trigger.

There was a howl of sound, a flash of purple light that seared my retinas, and Ethniu’s head jerked back and to one side.

Again, without hesitation, Marcone dropped the pistol, drew a knife, and knelt to drive it into the same eye.

Ethniu kicked. There was the sound of multiple wet sticks snapping. Hendricks gasped. Gard raised her axe again, but the Titan simply seized her leg around the knee and twisted. Bones and ligaments snapped. Gard went down screaming.

Hands shot to Marcone, supernaturally swift, but the Baron of Chicago hadn’t waited around to see them coming and was already in a roll over one shoulder and away before she could seize him.

The Titan sat up. There was a ring of powder burn around her natural eye, a little redness, and otherwise not a mark on her. She kicked Marcone’s legs out from under him as he began to rise, sending him sprawling to one side.

Ethniu lifted the spear.

“No!” I shouted. I triggered the last couple of blasts of kinetic force from my staff, emptying it, but the press was too close, and armored troopers soaked up the blasts before they could get to Ethniu.

The spear came down.

Hendricks took it.

The big man, the gangster’s long-term bodyguard, threw himself in the way of the spear.

It struck home, hard and clean. It transfixed Hendricks diagonally, going in above his collarbone, coming out around his kidneys. The resistance of his body guided the head of the spear off course. It struck into the earth beside Marcone’s head.

Hendricks glowered up at the Titan. And spat.