Chương 120: Chapter 119 – Wrong Colours

Sam cut three notches into the trunk of a broad-limbed oak a half mile short of the outer stretch, low enough that anyone tracking their line wouldn't need to search for it, and tied a strip of cloth beneath the marks for good measure.

"That's new," Vell said, watching him work.

"If we don't come back this way, whoever comes looking will know we made it this far and turned east from here." He straightened, checked the angle against the treeline once more, and started walking again.

"Leaving a trail takes nothing. Not leaving one could take everything we've got."

"You didn't do that at the last two sites."

"Didn't think I needed to at the last two sites." Sam kept his eyes on the trees ahead rather than on her.

"Feels different out here. Been feeling different since we crossed the last marker post, if I'm honest about it." Nobody argued it. Nobody had argued much of anything since the fires at their last camp, and Sam had started to notice that too — a unit that stopped questioning orders wasn't necessarily a unit that trusted its commander. Sometimes it was just a unit that had run out of energy to spend on anything that wasn't survival. He hoped it was the first one.

He suspected, watching the set of Vell's shoulders as she checked her blade one more time before they moved on, that it was mostly the second. They heard it before they saw it, the same way they had three days back — steel, shouting, the particular chaos of a fight already well underway by the time reinforcements arrived to join it.

Only this time the shouting carried words Sam recognized, names he'd heard called across Rushbrook's training yard a hundred times, and his stomach dropped somewhere well ahead of his understanding catching up to it.

"That's ours," Orlo said.

"That's Rushbrook." They broke into a run without anyone giving the order for it. The last quarter mile went by in the specific blur of a body outrunning its own good sense — branches whipping past too fast to properly register, breath tearing in Sam's chest, Candice a pale streak ahead of him already outpacing the rest of the line. Somewhere behind him Ressa was shouting something to Needle that got lost in the wind.

None of it mattered next to the sound growing louder with every stride: steel, screaming, and underneath both of them, unmistakable now, a voice Sam had heard call morning roll for six straight months.

The clearing they came out into was worse than the one three days back — a proper battle, not a probing skirmish, with bodies already down on both sides and the outer stretch patrol fighting in a collapsing formation against a mixed force that made no sense at first glance and then made a different, colder kind of sense the longer Sam looked at it. Kithren, first — heavier things than the shardbacks, dark-scaled and low to the ground, moving with the same drilled coordination Sam had come to recognize on sight now.

And people. A dozen of them at least, armed and armored, cutting into the outer patrol's flank with the kind of trained aggression that came from real combat experience, not desperation. Wearing purple and orange-red. Sam's whole body went cold and then very, very focused, the way it used to right before a fight he already knew he couldn't afford to lose. Purple and orange-red, phoenix stitched crude but unmistakable across more than one breastplate.

Oath of Defiance's own colours, on people Sam had never seen in his life, cutting down Oath of Defiance's own outer patrol like they had every right to be wearing them.

"Those aren't ours," Sam said, already moving, already drawing the lance.

"Look at the faces. I don't know one of them."

"Then why are they wearing—" Vell didn't finish the question. She didn't need to.

"Because it's not about who they are. It's about what the patrol sees for the half-second it takes to decide whether to fight back or hold fire." Sam's voice came out harder than he meant it to, edged with something that wasn't quite anger yet but was getting there fast.

"Somebody dressed their own attackers as us on purpose. Move — now, all of it, we're not standing here working out why." They hit the mixed force from the flank the enemy hadn't accounted for, and the clearing went from bad to genuinely chaotic within seconds.

Sam took the nearest of the false-coloured fighters with a hard lance thrust to the ribs before the man had registered a second force arriving, and Candice went past him for the throat of the dark-scaled Kithren pressing the outer patrol's line, ice spikes finding a joint before the creature had time to turn. Voss and Vell's people spread wide, fast, cutting into the enemy's flank in the same clean formation Sam's own drills had trained into all of them without a word needing to be said about it.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. One of the outer patrol's own — a woman Sam recognized from Rushbrook's roster, blood running from a cut above her eye — broke off just long enough to shout across the noise.

"They came in wearing our colours! We didn't know what we were looking at until the first one swung!"

"Not your fault," Sam called back.

"Keep fighting." She nodded once, wiped blood out of her eye with the back of a gauntlet, and turned back into the fight without another word wasted on it. The dark-scaled Kithren fought differently than the shardbacks had — faster, lower, less armored but harder to pin down, striking and retreating in tight coordinated pairs that made every kill twice as hard to land as it should have been.

Sam took a glancing cut across the forearm from one that got past his guard, shallow but bleeding freely, and didn't stop moving long enough to feel it properly. Candice caught the same creature a half-second later, and it went down hard. Unlike the shardbacks, it didn't get back up. This one fought to the end. So did the next one Sam and Candice brought down together, and the one after that, snarling and clawing right up until the last breath left it.

These aren't holding back, Candice said, mid-fight, ice already forming along her spine for the next strike. Nothing like the last two times. No. Sam drove the lance through a joint and felt it connect properly this time, bone giving under the point. Whoever's running this wants a real kill count today.

The false-coloured fighters were worse in a different way — trained, disciplined, fighting in pairs that covered each other's blind sides with the kind of drilled precision that told Sam exactly how much thought had gone into building this ambush.

One of them nearly took Orlo's head off with a backhand cut that would have connected clean if Denna hadn't put her own blade between them at the last possible instant, the two blades screaming off each other in a shower of sparks that lit both their faces stark white for half a second. Vell fought like a woman who'd already decided she wasn't losing anyone else today, cutting through the enemy line with a controlled fury that left two of the false-coloured fighters down before anyone else's count had reached one.

Sam took the pair working the outer patrol's broken flank himself, Candice matching him step for step, and this fight taught him something the last two hadn't — these people knew exactly how a lance was meant to be countered, stepping inside the reach the moment he committed to a thrust instead of backing away from it like an untrained fighter would.

He caught the first one's counter on the shaft rather than his own ribs, barely, and answered it by driving the butt-end into the man's throat hard enough to end the argument outright. The second broke off rather than press an advantage that no longer existed, and Candice took the opening, a spike catching the man's leg out from under him before he'd gone three strides.

"How many more of them," Vell shouted, mid-swing, to nobody in particular. Sam didn't have a count. He had a growing certainty instead, cold and specific, that whatever they'd walked into here was bigger and better prepared than anything he'd priced into the last five days of small wrongnesses stacking on top of each other — and that the fight in front of them right now, brutal as it already was, wasn't the whole of what had been sent to meet them.

He caught Voss's eye across the clearing for half a second, long enough to see she'd reached the same conclusion without either of them needing to say it out loud. She nodded once, sharp, and turned back to the fight in front of her rather than the one that hadn't started yet. Somewhere to Sam's left, Vell was already repositioning her own people without waiting to be told, reading the shift in the enemy's posture the same way he had. He was right.

The tree line at the clearing's far edge was already moving, figures gathering in the shadow of it that hadn't committed to the fight yet, patient in a way that told Sam this had only just started proving how bad it was going to get.

"Fall back to the rocks!" Sam's voice carried over the noise the same way it had three days back, and this time nobody hesitated on it — Voss and Vell's people peeling off the enemy line in practiced pairs, dragging the outer patrol's wounded with them, while the ones still able to fight covered the retreat the way eleven strangers had somehow learned to in less than two days of knowing each other.

"Tight formation, backs to stone, nobody stands alone out here!" The outer patrol's lead — a broad-shouldered man Sam recognized dimly from a training session months back, name lost somewhere under the noise and the blood on the man's face — fell in beside him as the group consolidated, breathing hard, one arm hanging wrong at his side.

"Started with fourteen," the man said.

"Down to nine, not counting your people. Whatever's coming out of those trees, we can't throw fourteen at it anymore, only what's still standing."

"That's nine of yours and eleven of mine. Call it twenty." Sam didn't look away from the treeline as he said it.

"That'll have to be enough, because retreating any further just means fighting the same fight somewhere with worse ground under our feet." Ressa dropped in beside him a moment later, Needle bloodied along one flank but steady on her feet, and wound a strip of cloth around the cut on his forearm before he'd fully registered her doing it.

"Won't hold forever," she said, already turning to the next person who needed the same.

"Nothing out here's holding forever, by the look of things."

"No," Sam said.

"It isn't." Behind her, Orlo was helping one of the outer patrol's wounded into the shelter of the rocks, talking low and fast the way he always did, no stories left in him this time, just steady, practiced reassurance that had nowhere near enough behind it to make good on itself. The man didn't argue. Nobody argued anything anymore, not with the numbers this thin and the ground this exposed.

Just twenty people who were about to do exactly what Sam told them to, because the alternative was worse than trusting a stranger. The false-coloured fighters still standing pulled back to regroup at the treeline's edge rather than press the advantage, falling in alongside whatever was gathering in the shadow behind them, and for one long, held breath the whole clearing went quiet enough that Sam could hear his own pulse over the ringing in his ears.

Then the trees parted, and the first of the new arrivals stepped into the light, and Sam understood with total, immediate clarity that everything before this moment had only ever been the opening move.