The afterlight burned the colosseum like an open wound.
Bodies smoked where they lay with fur and feather crisping black.
Some twitched once, twice, then stilled forever as the knights and adventurers skewered them with arrows and bolts.
While others were already still, their mouths open in a final, silent scream.
The smell of charred flesh rode the heat up through the arena, thick and metallic, making every breath taste like burnt flesh.
Around the runes, the mages sagged.
Dozens of them simply folded to their knees, robes sodden with sweat and splattered with ash, eyes rolling as the last of their chants bled away.
A few of the stronger conjurers staggered but kept their knees locked in place, knuckles whitening on staves in sheer stubbornness.
One old master, his beard singed, spat blood and laughed a broken, wet laugh. "We gave them hell," he rasped.
Up on the tiers, knights and adventurers stood trembling, arrows and bolts locked in numb hands.
A young archer pressed his bow to his lips and let a single, useless prayer go into the smoke.
A veteran crossbowman wiped his face with the back of his hand, eyes wide as he muttered, "If anything moves again, we shoot till our arms fall off."
Astoria's voice cut across the colluseum dragging the ragged defenders back to something like order. "Healers tend to the mages. Archers, at ease. Crossbowmen, keep your aim steady. "
She moved like a woman who had stood on too many battle-edges to let panic crawl back in.
But only on the outside, as she tried her best not to let the spiral in her mind slip out.
Lyra stayed close by her side, hands still ringed with shimmer where she'd been pouring extras into the trap's outer threads.
She wiped at her mouth with a grimy sleeve and glanced up at the burning floor.
Faris leaned against the rail, breathing like a bellows, halberd hooked across his forearm.
He looked at Astoria and then at the field below and, for once, let something like awe leak into his voice.
"We actually did it," he said. "No, this isn't over yet-" His words failed him; his hands tightened on the haft until the leather squealed.
They were talking around it, patching the seams of the victory - triaging, praising, but none of it reached the man in red cloak.
Odin knelt along the rail, cheek to stock, eyes to the scope.
He was apart from the chatter, not because he wanted to be, but because he knew – this was just a little victory.
The war was still very much alive.
And deep down, the captains knew that too.
Around him the world was smoke and dying light, but through his sight the scene narrowed to one single mad figure.
The shaman.
Standing beside the grown cold carcass of his drake, the orc's face was a ruin of fury.
He'd been stripped of one hand, while the other that remained clutched Lyra's staff like a talisman, with nails digging into the wood.
His throat worked with a roar that was half fury and half resignation.
Behind him, the horde still surged, but even he knew what awaited if he let them loose.
Odin watched the madness shape his features: the flare of nostrils, the rolling whites of eyes, a thin, animal understanding that he had held no advantage.
The shaman's rage now burned slower, his mind skipping through options and finding only one idea to fixate on now.
Then he saw the flash.
A faint light flickered out from the smoke where a pile of burnt bodies still bled steam.
Then a bullet... no, not a bullet in the ordinary sense, but a VM-enhanced round that tore through the haze so close to the shaman that air itself seemed to snap.
It zipped past the orc's shoulder, carved a red line.
The round then ripped through everything behind him, as it always did.
The shaman's head jerked. For a second, he didn't know which way to look.
Odin pulled another trigger.
-Thard!
And with a flash of the muzzle, another round zipped past the shaman.
The sound wasn't loud under the roar, but brutal in its intimacy.
[Come on. You're smarter than this. Don't stand there like a dumb idiot.]
-Thard!
The shaman's jaw tightened, tusks grinding as the truth cut through the haze of rage.
Madness and reason waged a war inside the shaman's head.
And reason won.
Even if he let them loose, every last beast behind him would just end up meat on the pyre.
It didn't matter whether he hurled them at the red cloak perched in the distance or at the colosseum packed with defenders—either way, they'd only be fodder for that glowing trap.
And the red cloak himself… his cursed weapon had already cut him from across the battlefield, again and again.
Magic, steel, call it whatever - he could feel it tearing through him.
No path to victory.
The orc's chest heaved, fury boiling in his throat until it cracked into the air as a roar.
Fury, resignation, despair, all tangled into one sound that rattled the stones underfoot.
And as it rolled out, the horde shifted.
The claws and fangs that had been pressing at his back hesitated, then turned.
One by one, the beasts retreated, lumbering, snarling, wingbeats fading into the night.
Back into the dark holes they had crawled from.
The shaman lingered a moment longer, teeth gnashing with hatred locked on that speck of red across the battlefield.
The man who had cost him everything.
Then he turned too, shoulders slumping as he too vanished into shadows.
Odin watched him go through the lens.
[At the end of the day, a monster is just that… a dumb monster.]
If the bastard had been human, he might have thought differently.
He might have realized a trap like this left the mages dry and brittle as glass after hours of holding the city together.
He might have realized the man in red wasn't missing his shots at all.
That every near-hit was deliberate.
But orcs weren't human.
Odin let out the breath he'd been holding.
And it came ragged, almost a laugh.
The rifle lowered, scope sliding out of his vision as he turned his head, just enough to catch the stunned faces of the captains.
Their jaws slack, their eyes wide, they couldn't quite believe the horde was retreating.
"And that right there, kids…" Odin rasped, lips splitting into a grin through the dried blood, "…is the art of war."
The grin lasted only a heartbeat.
Lyra's hand had just raised for high-five…
The golden shimmer peeled from his skin, unravelling into the night until nothing was left.
And his knees buckled.
"Liora…?"
Before consciousness fell away like a curtain.
The world turned black to the sound of sharp, panicked voices of the captains calling his name.
And through the void, Liora's voice carried clear.
"Together we truly are invincible…"