“Today you are not men of Aushloss, Krakaan, Veschkow, or Mriss! You are not orphans of twenty years of bloody oppression. You are not fathers to slaved daughters, brothers to stolen sisters, sons of slaughtered mothers! You are not soldiers! You are a reckoning!”
Another roar, shapeless and deafening.
“Blood for the Imperatritsa! Blood for the Goddess!”
“Blood!” they roared. “Blood!”
“Chaaaaaarge!”
The men surged forward, a wall of iron and rage. Troop towers collided with the keep walls and his men barreled up the walkways, Blood-blessed swinging their great two-handed mallets at the samurai who charged to meet them. Aleksandar stalked through the streets, lightning cannon momentarily blinding him, eyes narrowed as he shouted orders to the column commanders over the rising sound of slaughter.
The Iron Samurai were fighting like demons; the unholy strength from their mechanical armor was a sight to behold. Aleksandar saw one slaver—a commander by the look—leap off the battlements and land on a rotor-thopter’s snout. The man punched through the windshield and dragged the pilot out through the shattered glass, hurling him onto the ground below. The ’thopter wrenched hard left, plummeting after its master as the commander leapt back toward the fortress and scrabbled onto the battlements.
Aleksandar charged up a tower walkway, toward the castle walls. The Blood-blessed were on the battlements now, drunk with murder. A thicket of Iron Samurai waited with chainblades drawn, a wall of flesh seething into them, heedless of their growling swords. The ramparts were littered with corpses fried to cinders by lightning canon. A few shuriken-throwers were still operational, bathing Aleksandar’s troops in steel.
The Kapitán waded into the melee, roaring like an ice devil. His lightning hammer was a hymn in his hand, each impact into some slaver’s skull making his heart sing. He waded among the berserks, smashing chainswords from hands, heads from shoulders. Blood on his gauntlets. On his face. On his tongue.
A rotor-thopter wobbled in the sky above, an Iron Samurai leaping from the wall to plunge both chainswords through the windshield. The machine listed and dropped like a stone, the samurai calling out a prayer as the craft collided with a troop tower. Arcs of lightning spilled from sundered tanks, electrocuting the soldiers amassed inside. Raw current dancing on iron and flesh. Faces split in rictus grins. Smell of burning meat.
Aleksandar heard a loud voice, the song of chainblades. He saw a familiar figure—the slaver commander who’d torn the ’thopter out of the sky. He was shearing his way through dozens of soldiers, fighting like a demon possessed. A flag waved from atop the power unit of his armor, blue as real sky, a white dragon coiled upon it. Around and above, Aleksandar could hear songs of slaughter—chainblades roaring, mallets crunching, groans of the wounded and screams of the dying. Battle stench coiled in his nostrils. Burning fuel and burning meat, the reek of split bellies and shit, blood’s metallic tang hanging so thick he could have waved his hand through the air and had it come away red.
He waded through the throng, smashed some slaver’s head from his neck—just a boy, no more than eighteen summers old. His eyes were on the slaver commander, now badly outnumbered, his men falling all around him. But still the man fought on, seemingly fearless. A Blood-blessed charged with mallet raised high, and the samurai sidestepped, cleaving through the berserker’s abdomen, entrails spilling out in long, rolling coils of red and purple. The Blood-blessed roared as the samurai commander spun on his heel, taking the berserker’s leg off at the knee, skipping back as the man fell howling in a puddle of his own insides.
Three soldiers fell on him, a warhammer crashing down on his power unit. Fuel spilled down the back of his legs, thick and blood-red as he took out one soldier’s throat, caved in another’s face with his fist. But they were all around him now, a swarm with no craft—just a seething mass of iron and the skins of flayed beasts.
“Wait!” Aleksandar roared. “He’s mine!”
The men stilled around him, pulled back half a dozen steps. Aleksandar hefted his shield, leveled his lightning hammer at the slaver’s head. The man seemed to understand, his men parting around him. He reached up to his power unit, snapped his clan banner free. He thrust the flag deep into the bodies around him, the once brilliant blue now stained muddy gray. The Dragon sigil fluttered in the freezing wind, the rain seemed a final defiant hiss at the army come to avenge twenty years of slaughter. But not without a fight. Not on his knees.
The men around Aleksandar began chanting, a rhythmic shout like a pulse, a single word. “Blood, blood, blood.” And to his shock, the Iron Samurai held his sword aloft and spoke in the Morcheban tongue.