The roar of the Gore Hounds was no longer a distant threat; it was a guttural, terrifying scream vibrating in his teeth. He could smell their foul breath, thick with hunger and damp fur. A wave of muscled bodies, sharp teeth, and glowing, angry eyes slammed against the rickety West Gate barricades like a storm surge against a crumbling wall. He felt the splintering wood groan, heard the sickening crack of failing timbers, and the desperate grunts of the few soldiers trying to hold the line. Their worn armor clinked, their swords flashed—a stark contrast to his own light, unburdened clothes. The air, thick with dust, now tasted metallic with the sharp tang of fear and the cloying sweetness of fresh blood. Screams of wounded men mixed with the monsters' howls.
Despair was a cold, suffocating blanket, threatening to smother the tiny flame of defiance he had just lit. This was it, the inevitable end. The script, his cursed prophecy, had him dying here, lost in this chaos, a pathetic end. His gut screamed at him to run, to drop the rope he was now instinctively gripping and just flee. He was Alex Chen, a data analyst, not some muscle-bound hero. He wore no armor, carried no sword—just the simple tunic and pants of a minor noble caught in a war. The Lysander Thorne from the book would be weeping, begging for his life, or already trampled beneath a monstrous paw. He felt the cold, creeping touch of the body's inherited terror, a primal urge to bolt, but Alex Chen's mind clamped down on it, hard. Not again. Not like this. I refuse to be a statistic in someone else's story. This isn't how my story ends. Not in some forgotten medieval backwater.
This wasn't about brute strength alone; it was about brains meeting harsh necessity. It was about turning weaknesses into unexpected chances, about seeing the hidden moves on a chessboard where he was supposed to be just a pawn. A pawn, if played with bold brilliance and backed by unforeseen power, could become a king.
Even as the first barricade splintered, threatening to give way completely, he didn't just stand there. He forced his shaking hands to steady, his eyes, sharper than ever with the desperate clarity of survival, locked onto the chaos right in front of him. He saw the gaping holes forming, the raw panic in the soldiers' eyes. He remembered the small detail from the novel about the gate's weak points and the type of lumber nearby.
"Don't just stand there, you fools! Brace it! Brace it now!" he yelled, his voice raw but surprisingly strong through the din. He didn't wait. Grabbing the length of thick rope he'd spotted earlier, he snatched the heaviest piece of fallen timber near him—a cracked crossbeam from a guard post—and, with a burst of strength born of pure, desperate adrenaline, he jammed it diagonally against the collapsing wooden barricade. His muscles screamed with the effort, but he quickly looped the rope around it, tying it off to a sturdy stone pillar with a knot he barely remembered from a forgotten scout badge.
It was a crude, desperate fix, a makeshift bandage for a gaping wound. But it worked. The splintering barricade, which was moments from total collapse, held. It groaned, it creaked, but it didn't give way. The Gore Hounds, expecting to burst through, slammed into the suddenly reinforced barrier, yelping in frustrated confusion as their claws found no purchase. Their frustrated roars now held a baffled quality.
He didn't hesitate. "The gaps! Block the gaps with anything! Pile it up!" he yelled, kicking a broken cart wheel into a smaller breach. His actions were so immediate, so shockingly effective where others had been frozen by fear, that a few soldiers, their eyes wide with disbelief, automatically started copying him, grabbing loose stones, discarded shields, anything to fill the small openings that had appeared. They hadn't consciously decided to obey him; they were simply reacting to the only person showing any effective initiative.
Sir Reginald, fighting a monstrous hound himself, slammed his shield against a snarling snout. He glanced over, his scowl deepening as he saw him actually doing something useful, something that bought them precious seconds. He didn't like it, didn't like Thorne one bit, but he couldn't argue with the results. The momentary break in the assault was too valuable.
"Oil barrels!" he roared, his voice hoarse, remembering another small detail from the novel—a hidden reserve kept for torches and siege engines, usually overlooked. "There should be oil barrels near the supply shed! Find them! Now! Before the Trolls hit!"
The urgency in his voice, now backed by the undeniable proof of his quick thinking at the barricade, finally broke through the paralysis of a few more men. Private Joric, the young soldier from the novel, usually a quivering mess, instinctively broke away and dashed towards the indicated shed, desperation overriding his fear. Lysander hadn't told Joric to go for that specific lever; he'd sent him for oil. But in his desperate mind, seeing Joric move towards higher ground, he instantly changed his narrative, making it sound like a single, clear plan. It was a lie born of sheer, terrifying genius, spun on the fly.
Reginald's jaw clenched. He looked from the rapidly approaching, unstoppable troll to the impossibly ancient, dangerous counterweights. His military mind screamed against such a reckless, suicidal move, but Thorne's utter conviction, his strange knowledge of the gate's hidden parts, and the undeniable success of his previous, desperate fixes forced Reginald to consider the impossible. They were already dead without a miracle. Lysander was offering a desperate, bloody one.
"Gods help us all," Reginald muttered, then roared, "Clear the arch! Joric! For the glory of Oakhaven, release those weights!" He was committing, throwing his fate in with the madman who was somehow keeping them alive.
Time stretched, agonizingly slow. The distant clang of Joric's desperate struggle with the rusted lever echoed faintly from above. He continued to brace the last remaining planks, his muscles screaming, the raw pain a grounding force. The stench of troll breath was overpowering now, hot and fetid. He could see the gleam in its small, malevolent eyes, the crude intelligence, as it prepared to deliver the final, shattering blow against the last bit of the gate. Lysander knew this gamble was the true turning point. If it worked, he wouldn't just survive; he'd have taken his first, monumental step on the path of reclaiming his life, not as an extra, but as a player who defied destiny. This was his first step into truly controlling the story, rather than just reacting to it.
Then, with a deafening groan that dwarfed the roars of the trolls, the air above the gate shifted. A grinding, metallic shriek tore through the battlefield. Chain links, thick as a man's arm and heavy with centuries of rust, vibrated violently. The Brute Trolls paused, their basic instincts sensing something profoundly wrong.
And then, with a thunderous CRACK, the massive stone counterweights, long dormant, plunged downwards.
They fell with the weight of centuries, smashing into the main gate arch with unbelievable, catastrophic force. Stone exploded outwards, sending sharp, grey pieces of stone flying through the air. The ancient arch, already weakened by time and the troll's relentless attack, buckled, fractured, and then, with an earth-shattering roar, began to collapse entirely.
The Brute Trolls caught directly beneath the falling rubble shrieked in a terrifying chorus of agony and furious rage. Some were instantly flattened, reduced to mangled heaps of flesh and bone. Others were grotesquely impaled, trapped beneath tons of crushing stone. The Gore Hounds, caught in the wider blast, were disoriented, yelping and scattering in terrified confusion, their bloodlust temporarily forgotten.
Lysander, thrown violently backward by the sheer force of the explosion, landed hard, pain blossoming like fire across his entire body. Dust choked him, filling his mouth with grit, and for a terrifying moment, he thought he was buried alive, his desperate gamble having failed, merely trading one death for another. He felt the cold, clammy hand of the original Lysander Thorne's despair try to drag him down, but Alex's will surged. No. I made it. I lived. He coughed, a ragged, hacking sound, clearing his throat. He pushed himself up, every muscle protesting, and looked through the settling debris. His hands still raw where they'd gripped the rope, now buried beneath the rubble.
The West Gate was utterly gone. In its place was a mountain of jagged rubble, a chaotic graveyard of shattered stone, splintered wood, and mangled monster parts. The main assault, the one that was supposed to claim his life and break the fortress, had been utterly devastated, turned into a scene of carnage by his desperate, brilliant, and utterly reckless act.
A stunned, eerie silence fell over the immediate battlefield, broken only by the distant sounds of fighting from other gates and the whimpers of the few injured soldiers who had survived the collapse. Sir Reginald stood there, his jaw slack, his eyes wide with a mix of raw horror and utter, bewildered awe. "By the gods..." he whispered, staring at him as if seeing a ghost, or perhaps, something far more dangerous and unpredictable.
He slowly pushed himself to his feet, his entire body aching, his ears ringing from the concussive blast. He was alive. He had defied the script. He had not only survived his fated death, but he had single-handedly, with nothing but his quick wits and a piece of forgotten lore, turned the tide of the entire assault at the West Gate.
He looked at his trembling hands. They were scraped and bleeding, covered in dust and grit, but they were his. He wasn't just an extra anymore. He was a variable, a force for chaos in a predetermined narrative. His first, desperate, and undeniably successful gambit had been executed. But what would be the true consequences for twisting such a crucial plot point? And how would the hero, Kaelen, react to this utterly unexpected turn of events, when he was supposed to be inspired by his death? He had a chilling feeling his troubles had only just begun. The path of a re-written destiny was rarely smooth, and every step taken away from fate was a step into unknown, dangerous territory. The whispers of the battlefield wouldn't be about a cowardly noble's death, but about a terrifying, unexpected intervention. He'd done more than survive; he'd made a statement. And the echoes of that statement would surely ripple through this world. He almost expected to hear the faint ping of a new notification, a system update, as if some cosmic server had just registered his defiance. But there was only the wind and the distant cries of battle.