The bleeding Shaman looked exactly where I'd made him look, and he hated what he saw.
While I put the dot an inch off his skull.
Close enough to kiss him, far enough to let him live with it.
His attention was mine now, sealed clean as any contract.
-Thard!
The rifle bucked, and the round ripped past the Shaman's head by a hair.
Air itself snapped as it went in a sound like the sky tearing.
His greasy braids whipped sideways while his ear split open from the pressure alone, as hot blood sprayed down his shoulder.
He froze, wide-eyed, breath stuttering like he'd felt the hand of god brush his cheek.
Behind him, the bullet didn't slow; it carved its trench through a line of bodies.
A harpy burst mid-air into feathers and red fog, two goblins were shorn in half at the waist, and a tree split open like a rotten bone, spilling sap as thick as blood.
And still the bullet went on.
The Shaman staggered, his good hand clawing at the air, his face twisted in raw animal terror.
And then-
-ROARR!
The Shaman's throat split the night with a roar that wasn't just sound.
It was terror curdled into a command.
And the world… stopped.
Claws that were mid-arc froze in the air, inches from knightly shields.
A Kobold's jaws, dripping spit and blood, froze open before it could clamp down on a screaming adventurer's throat.
A troll's club, already swinging down, halted just above a battle-mage's head with the rush of wind dying into stillness.
The entire battlefield shuddered into silence.
No growls.
No shrieks.
Only the ragged breath of men and women who had braced for claws and gnashers and found it inexplicably delayed.
Even the knights faltered with their shields locked and eyes darting in panic.
One muttered a broken prayer.
Another whispered, "Why… why did they stop?"
Astoria's grip on her blade tightened until her knuckles turned white.
Serenya's lips parted in shock, her prayer breaking mid-word.
Faris half-raised his halberd, eyes flicking between the frozen tide and me.
Then, slow as the creak of a turning gallows, every monster's head shifted.
Necks cracking, all at once.
And thousands of eyes - red, gold, and void-black - rolled toward me.
Toward the fool on the church tower with a rifle still smoking in his hands.
[Here we go...]
And then the silence shattered.
Every beast, every shriek, every pounding claw or wing - all of it surged in one direction.
Toward me.
They sprinted in the maddest rush imaginable.
Not a charge, or a push - this was frenzy given legs.
Trolls trampled goblins, Orcs clawed over Kobolds, and harpies dove headlong just to get closer.
Airborne or not, they all flung themselves at the church tower like a flood of flesh and rage, slamming together like waves crashing against a cliff.
It looked like the world's most obscene avalanche as monsters crawled over monsters, piling higher, climbing on backs and heads, snapping jaws at each other just to reach me.
I swapped the mag with a fresh click, then pulled out the Shorty-40, its stubby frame already drinking in my mana.
"Iṣṭva," I whispered, feeling the word shiver through my teeth.
Fifty percent of my reserves I shoved into it, reinforcing it with half a kilo of VM
Not much, nothing compared to the captains or mages.
Just a goblin's worth of magic crammed into a grenade the size of my fist.
But it was more than enough...
The horde was now upon the church with bodies stacking high against the church walls, talons raking stone while claws tore shingles.
The tower trembled under their collective weight as they clawed and climbed over one another in a frenzied ladder of flesh.
I leaned over the edge, grin wide enough to near insanity.
And aimed the Shorty straight down into the boiling pit.
And squeezed.
-Thuk.
The Shorty answered with a single deep thunk.
And then -
-BOOM!
A massive concussive wave swept out.
And the massed horde at the base didn't so much fall as disintegrate under the first slap of force.
As 8.2 megajoules let loose in the span of a blink, the closest ranks were blown outward into a red wet fog that rolled across the church's front yard and splashed the next wave in gore.
Then the fragments arrived.
Fifty shrapnel, each one no longer a polite 3.2g but a nastier 10.47, screaming out in a perfect expanding crown.
They didn't vaporize anything.
They didn't have to.
They drilled.
They ripped long, ugly lines through bodies stacked behind each other.
A Kobold's jaw vanished, yet the line kept going through the orc behind him and the goblin behind that.
Ribs turned to splinters.
Thighs opened like ripped canvas.
Eyes popped wetly.
The pattern kept widening.
At roughly ninety to a hundred meters, the storm still had bite, punching thumb-wide holes through anything that moved and plenty that didn't.
Harpies fell out of the air in ragged showers.
Troll flesh flapped in ribbons.
The street beyond filled in an instant with heaps of meat that had been charging a heartbeat earlier.
The church did not get a miracle either.
The front wall freckled under the hail, pocks and punctures shredded through its stone and door alike.
Shingles ripped open.
Even the point where I was standing before was now a shredded mess.
And a beat later, the church and its bell tower collapsed in a crash of dust.
While... I was already gone.
Blue sparks bled me across the rooftops, dumping me on top of the building Lyra had tagged with the throw of my sword.
[No way in hell I was standing anywhere near that blast... Not unless I wanted to find out how it felt to be diced into confetti.]
The church ahead still rattled with the echoes of the Shorty's song as smoke clawed at the sky where the horde had stacked itself into a living avalanche.
Now came phase two.