The city of Exelsior seemed doomed to fall.

  On the one hand, it seemed that way every night, and every sunrise, still it stood. On the other hand, even the best work could only do so much rebuilding before the sun set again. One could never know just when the day would finally come that it wasn’t enough, when the defenses would finally be left too weak to survive the onslaught the following night.

  From his watch post, Captain Lochlan surveyed the chaos of the latest demon attack. The tower that held the node for the west gate’s electron field was swarmed with demons, but his men were holding firm, and the node was still live, its spire throwing off a storm of lightning and magical energy that fed the shimmering barrier. An artilleryman manned the cannon that fired concentrated beams of the same into the thickest masses of attackers. The rank-and-file demons—dybbuks, they were called—may have looked like ghoulish, vulture-faced bat-apes, flapping their leathery wings, but as a group, they always moved like flocks of songbirds, in ever-shifting masses that would seem to dissolve in retreat only to reform to attack a new weak point.

  The soldiers on the node tower weren’t holding as firm as they had been. The dybbuks had amassed in a thick enough swarm to disrupt the protective field—not enough to make a full breach, but enough that several had gotten through and converged on a rampart where only one soldier had stood, keeping his distance to give his comrades cover fire. One of the bat-like demons put its gruesome talons around his helmet, crushing like a bird of prey, plunging the point of its barbed tail into his throat before he could shout, shoot...before he could have felt the pain and the fear, the captain hoped. It was too late when other soldiers killed the attacker with their laser rifles.

  Lochlan looked through the scope of his own rifle, brought the crosshairs somewhere in the middle of the swarming hellions, and pinned down the trigger with all the wrath his index finger could contain. The vengeful beam of blue light instantaneously severed wings, tails, talons, heads—it almost turned the amorphous flock into a hideous rain cloud of black blood and smoking otherworldly flesh—but it was hardly a few seconds when the creatures dispersed again. When he released the trigger and the laser faded, there they were again, still swarming the tower, the City Guard soldiers only marked by their own blue beams. Fewer and fewer were firing off as the demons swirled, as the unholy shrieks filling the air grew louder and louder.

  The artilleryman on the watch post fired at another swarm, with little more luck. He cursed quietly as he peered through the cannon’s sights before he turned to the captain beside him.

  “They’ve never gotten so close to the tower, sir,” he said. He fired another great blue beam into the cloud of demons. “If they’re able to take it down…”

  “I know,” Lochlan broke in. “Don’t worry, Corporal. All I expect from you is to keep firing wherever they swarm.” To make his point, he fired his rifle along the edge of a tight flock, with two of the dybbuks breaking off from it; without the protection of a tight swarm, bolts of lightning from the node found them, turning them to ash. “It’s only when they form tight masses that they’re safe from the nodes.”

  “Well...I’ve never seen so many of them, Captain. There’s been more every night this week.”

  The captain sighed. “I know, Corporal. Just keep firing.” One week earlier, they had noticed a worse-than-usual attack, and there was panic, shouting, urgency. An even worse attack the following night meant more panic, more shouting, more urgency. But the last couple nights, they only went about their duties as if they were drilling, unless they were actively being attacked. The day may have been coming soon that there wasn’t any more they could do.

  Lochlan and his men continued firing at the swarm around the node tower, and the other masses of dybbuks that had begun swooping in. The energy field that kept them out of the walls seemed to be faltering. Had the node fallen?

  The captain looked and saw that the node tower had so many dybbuks swarming around it that even though almost all of them were being eviscerated by some magical lightning storm, you could hardly see the light the node gave off. They were sacrificing themselves to smother it, and their brethren were taking advantage. Dybbuks began landing on the staircases leading down from the ramparts, lurching along on all fours only to rear up and slash at guardsmen trying to shoot at them or maintain the systems. Now there was cause for urgency.

  Lochlan pushed a button on his comms headset. “I need reinforcements to the west gatehouse! We have a breach on the upper ramparts! All available units, please respond!” He took shots from the walls as the invaders ran amok on the stairs below him, but there was little he could do, as he heard from the screams echoing over the din of the battle. He rushed back to the edge of the wall and looked out.

  A horde of demons at the city walls was never a pleasant thing to behold, but like all things, Lochlan had grown used to it in his years of service. But dybbuks had never landed inside the walls before, and he had never seen a horde quite like this. For the first time in his whole tenure as a captain, his blood ran cold.

  His hand went to his comms again. “Captain Lochlan to west gatehouse. What’s your status?”

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  “Not good, sir!” a voice crackled back. “We’re holding so far, but there’s too many of them! Our rifles are overheating before we can even take a good chunk out of these swarms! If this keeps up, the gatehouse will fall—repeat, the gatehouse will fall!”

  “Do not let that gatehouse fall! You haven’t seen what’s outside!” Lochlan roared back. “We won’t let it fall... West gate to all units, we need reinforcements! Everyone you can get!”

  He waited. Nothing. Silence.

  For all he knew, the other three gates had already fallen. He hadn’t heard the alarms, but then, maybe the signal towers that triggered the alarms had fallen, too.

  He would have to go down to save his men himself.

  Lochlan wasn’t sure whether to be thankful that the dybbuks seemed to be ignoring him as they swarmed the staircases leading down to the gatehouse. If nothing else, it gave him a chance to steel himself for the insane thing he was about to attempt. He wasn’t old, but he had seen more action than most officers lived to see. Things were beginning to ache and stiffen. He slung his rifle over his shoulder.

  As a young man, he had thought it was a relief to be an officer—it was the rank-and-file of the City Guard who were the cannon fodder, the ones who always fell to the dybbuks. But the demons seemed to take great pleasure in picking off officers first, most of the time. It broke morale. They enjoyed that. He picked up another rifle and slung it over his other shoulder, silently praying for the dead man he took it from.

  Yes, he had once thought the demons were mindless beasts, like wasps, locusts, sharks. But he had only ever seen dybbuks as a young man, when he would watch out the window with night-vision goggles stolen from his father’s supplies, seeing them swarm at the edge of the outermost walls. The demons were smart—some of them, terrifyingly so. Magic, light, and whatever mysterious power the priests commanded caused them pain, and the fear and suffering of human beings caused them pleasure. Lochlan shuddered and said another silent prayer for a mangled mass that may have once been two soldiers as he picked up two more laser rifles.

  Not all demons flew, either. He had been less scared of those at first, until he saw them. Brutes, trolls, shamblers, gate-crashers—they were all terrifying…not so much as whatever the other things were he had only seen tonight and never heard of. It was resolve that had always kept him alive, but that was faltering now.

  Captain Lochlan stood at the inside edge of the ramparts now, a rifle in each hand and another slung over each shoulder, watching the dybbuks swooping down the winding stairways down to the fortified gatehouse like a cyclone from...well, they were from Hell, in fact. His toes were just to the edge. If he leaned forward, he would fall straight down—a long way, probably to his death. He backed up.

  Then, with a running start, he leapt.

  He hadn’t been sure he would be so lucky, if one could call it lucky, but he collided with a flying dybbuk in mid-air, wrapping one arm around its neck as it flapped wildly, rolling over its shoulder to cling to its back, firing with both rifles to keep other dybbuks off of him. Then he lined up the rifle from his free hand, the one not held in an arm around a dybbuk’s throat shooting wildly over its shoulder, with the back of said dybbuk’s head. There was a high-pitched sound and a blue light, the tell tale signs of laser fire, and the creature went limp, a smoking hole through its head.

  It wasn’t Lochlan’s smartest plan, but it was his bravest, his most desperate, and so far, his most insane.

  The dybbuk fell, armor-clad guard captain still clinging to its neck and firing indiscriminately. Lochlan wrestled with the dead demon until a breeze suddenly caught in its limp wings. Lochlan couldn’t steer it, but at least it was falling less directly now, and many of the swarming demons still hadn’t grasped what exactly he was doing. Some were even crashing into walls and stairways, and being either vaporized or shot to pieces.

  He cursed as the dybbuk began veering off course, then again as another swooped in to try to rip him apart mid-air. He shot the still-living demon’s left wing off and watched as it spiraled down, much more predictably than his dead one was falling. Lochlan shot the left wing off that one, too.

  Being that everything from his leap to that point had been about eight seconds, he hadn’t considered yet that his added weight would change the way the thing would fall.

  The dead dybbuk began spiraling, then unexpectedly twisted into a corkscrew, head first. It was all Lochlan could do to hold onto dear life. Living demons converged on him, not managing to get a hold of him, but it may not have mattered as fast as his head was approaching the ground. Then one did get a hold of him, talons gripping the shoulders of his powered armor, trying to pull him up. Then he really did hit the ground.

  Lochlan dropped the rifle in each hand, still clinging to the neck of the broken corpse of a demon, and with his free hands, pulled at the stock of one of the rifles over his shoulders. When that stock was pointing straight down, he pulled the trigger. He felt most of the weight of his unwanted rescuer go backward and saw the scorched severed head fall in front of him.

  Blue beams zipped over his head, and his wits returned. He grabbed the two fallen rifles and sprinted, turning to fire them in every direction except forward, throwing himself through an open door of the gatehouse.

  “Captain, how did you survive hitting the ground that hard?” one of the guardsmen shouted over the ever-present shrieks. “I didn’t think the fall compensation in powered armor worked that well.”

  “It doesn’t,” he replied, panting with relief. “But apparently, a hungry dybbuk trying to lift you makes up the difference.” He tossed down his extra three rifles on a table. “Everyone start rotating their weapons. When a rifle is getting ready to overheat, toss it back and use your pistol until someone passes you another one. Anyone injured, that’s your job—the passing. We want a constant stream of fire.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the echoed responses. In short order, the men had the system worked out so that the niche of the city’s battlements where the gatehouse was tucked was virtually aglow with blue laser fire. The swarm of demons seemed to be abating. It almost looked like, if things kept up, they might survive the six hours until sunrise.

  Until a warning notification came onto the visor of Lochlan’s helmet.

  “West Gate Shield Node DISABLED.”