General Ulric Stone's jaw was clenched so tight his teeth ached, the only outward sign of the dread coiling in his gut. As the arcane meteors rained down, he watched his vanguard hold the line, forcing himself to maintain the rigid, unflinching composure his men needed to see.
Shields shattered. Formations dissolved into meat and slag under the Elven artillery. Ulric's knuckles turned white on his reins as he kept his gaze locked on the blackened crater between the two armies. Any second now. Just reach the center, Fenn.
Then, the battlefield inverted.
But not in the center of the valley. Twenty yards short. Directly beneath the boots of his own vanguard.
For one terrible heartbeat, the earth swelled upward into a massive, silent blister. Then, the crust shattered.
A pillar of crimson light and vaporized bedrock punched into the sky. The sound wasn't noise it was a physical blow. Ulric's warhorse screamed, rearing wildly as the shockwave slammed into the command post, shredding canvas tents and throwing aides face-first into the mud.
Ulric fought his mount under control, his ears popping from the sudden pressure drop. He looked for his frontline.
It was gone.
Thousands of his own men, erased. Swallowed in a roaring typhoon of fire and pulverized bedrock. Ulric closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, the grief hitting him like a hammer blow. He mourned them in the only heartbeat he could afford to spare before the commander in him had to take over. Opening his eyes, he tracked the fault lines ripping outward from the crater's edge. The seismic tremor sprinted forward, tearing through the scorched earth and undercutting the Elven positions.
He watched the bedrock beneath Carric's hundred high-mages simply dissolve.
Their arcane vortex collapsed instantly as they lost their footing. Dozens of Elven spellcasters slid screaming into the expanding abyss. Ulric wiped a streak of wet grit from his cheek, a hollow, sick feeling settling in his stomach. It wasn't a misfire. Captain Fenn had intentionally blown the charges early.
Eighty feet below the slaughter, there was only darkness and the taste of copper.
Ten minutes ago, Captain Fenn had pressed his bare, trembling hand against the tunnel ceiling. The bedrock was vibrating, humming with a sickening, high-frequency energy. The Elven high-mages directly above them were drawing an unfathomable amount of mana from the earth to cast a vortex that would wipe out the human rear guard.
Fenn hadn't just done the math; he had felt it crushing the breath out of him. If he took the twenty minutes required to dig to the center of the valley as ordered, General Ulric's army would be ash before they got there.
The only problem was that his own countrymen were positioned right on top of them.
Fenn had looked at his fifty sappers in the dim light of the lanterns. "Wire the scrolls to the main support beam," he had rasped, his voice catching in his throat. "Right here."
"Captain, we're twenty yards short!" a rookie had panicked, tears cutting tracks through the soot on his young face. "Our boys are right above us!"
"I know," Fenn had whispered, his hand shaking violently as he gripped his detonator. He looked up at the ceiling, thinking of the boots standing just above the rock. "May the earth forgive us."
He had pulled the pin.
Now, Fenn opened his eyes to absolute pitch black. His ears felt completely hollowed out. He tried to take a breath, but his lungs hitched against the thick dust. Because the explosive scrolls were designed to direct the kinetic force upward, the blast had blown the roof off the world, shielding the deepest trenches in a pocket of compressed earth.
"Sound off," Fenn rasped, the sound more of a sob than a command.
Out of the fifty sappers he had taken into the deep, Fenn counted maybe a dozen coughing voices.
Fenn unhooked the Trench-Biter from his belt, his arms feeling like lead. "The blast went up. The earth above us is loose slag. Dig, boys. We have to see the sky."
For twenty agonizing minutes, the surviving Moles clawed their way upward. Finally, Fenn's pick struck nothing but air. He shoved his thick shoulders through the gap, hauling himself out of the smoking rubble.
Instantly, Fenn's chest tightened. He wasn't in a tunnel anymore. Above him stretched the vast, infinite, gray sky. His agoraphobia hit him, but it was nothing compared to the sheer, paralyzing horror of his surroundings.
He was standing on the jagged lip of a massive, smoking canyon. To his left and right lay the charred, unrecognizable remains of nineteen thousand human infantrymen.
He fell to his knees in the ash, a dry heave racking his chest. He stayed there for a long moment, struggling to breathe, before finally gripping his war pick and forcing himself to his feet.
He stumbled through the chaotic remnants of the human lines, deaf to the medics rushing past him. He was covered head-to-toe in soot and blood, a broken ghost returning from the abyss. He didn't stop until he reached the command post.
General Ulric Stone sat atop his warhorse, staring out at the new canyon.
Two of Ulric's elite guards drew their swords as the hulking, sobbing sapper approached, but Ulric raised a single, gloved finger. The guards stepped back. Slowly, Ulric dismounted, his boots sinking into the mud. He didn't want to look down at the captain. He wanted to look him in the eye.
Fenn walked right up to the General. He looked at his commander, his soot-stained face trembling.
"I blew it twenty yards short," Fenn choked out, his voice cracking under the weight of his guilt. "The Elven mages were peaking. I felt the bedrock vibrating. Five more minutes, and their vortex would have turned the rest of the army to glass. I,I had to."
For a long, tense moment, the only sound was the wind howling over the dead.
Slowly, the rigid, aristocratic posture of General Ulric Stone softened, and for a moment, he just looked like a tired, aging man. He stepped forward and placed a heavy, grounding hand on the sapper's shoulder.
"You saved the army, Vane," Ulric said softly, his voice thick with sorrow. "You traded nineteen thousand of our brothers to save the rest of us."
Fenn stared at the commander. He had expected anger. He had expected a court-martial, or an execution, or even cold, tactical praise. But looking at Ulric, Fenn saw a man whose eyes mirrored his own haunted grief. Ulric wasn't dismissing the horror of the choice; he was stepping up to share the burden of it.
Fenn slowly lowered the Trench-Biter, letting it hang loosely at his side. He wiped the sweat and soot from his eyes.
"They were good men, General," Fenn whispered.
"The best," Ulric agreed, giving Fenn's shoulder a firm squeeze before turning his gaze back to the smoking battlefield. "Now. Come help me make sure their sacrifice meant something."