Chương 188: Book Five, Chapter 91: Moonlit Charge

~Kimberly~ I felt like my heart was connected by live wires. The finale was moving forward so fast. As the day went by and the sun started to set, it was our last day. We had to survive, and I didn't even know if surviving through the night was enough or if we had to defeat all of the werewolves. Either way, if we didn't find a way to beat the pack leader, we would fail our rescue, and everyone who had died or been turned into a werewolf would stay that way. I had to fight back tears.

I wasn't the precious, beautiful starlet—I had to be a fighter. That's who my character was in her own way. But she never fought with guns; she fought with something else, something more tender, and she had lost. In this dire moment, why was it I could only think of this woman I had never met? I could feel her tears running down my cheeks, her breath in my lungs, her solemn warning to run, to flee… But not from the wolf. The She-Wolf gave her mind no unease at all.

I tried to lock those feelings away because they weren't useful to me, but I couldn't do that. Riley would have been able to. Antoine would have, too. Antoine could hide anything. But I couldn't, so I had to make them useful. I had to be the one to protect that scared young woman who was so mysteriously connected to me. And I would have to do it soon. Riley, as he often was, was right about what would happen next.

The fort was a large complex of old crumbling stone walls, but it was still just a large square with stone walls on all sides. There were lookout towers hastily bolted onto the walkways upon the walls so that we could get a good view of our surroundings as the night wore on. We waited hours without so much as a peep. The night grew darker and darker. But when the fight came, it came all at once. I gripped my rifle like it was part of me. We had practiced shooting.

Since we all had high Hustle, we were all crack shots. That made sense for our characters, and it helped us gain the respect of the remaining mercenaries. From the top of the tower, one of those mercenaries who had stayed behind started screaming. Everyone inside became alert, picking up their weapons. None of us were going outside the fort; the main entrance was closed off. The werewolves could jump over any wall, but that was part of Riley and Andrew's plan.

But the man on the top of the wall wasn't screaming about wolves. He screamed, "Survivors!" at the top of his lungs. The cold wind jerked a tear from his eyes, and his scream broke his voice. Riley was up the ladder onto the wall, and I followed. Breathe in. Breathe out. I had to be tough. We did have survivors, all right. In the distance, at the edge of the forest, I saw the blonde mercenary being hauled out by another mercenary. The second one was bald and had a large claw mark on his chest.

The blonde mercenary was limping like he'd been injured.

"Help!" the blonde mercenary screamed. They were approaching the fort as fast as they could. The blonde mercenary kept screaming, "We were attacked! It was an ambush. There are more survivors. You need to send help!" He kept repeating that in exasperated cries like it took every ounce of his will to keep screaming. His cries echoed over the hollow field, and they were all I could hear outside of my own heartbeat. I had to look suspicious of him. I was On-Screen, and this was my time.

The mercenary who had been on the wall with us, the one who had screamed, was calling for the others to go out and help them. But before anyone could follow along with that, I aimed my rifle and quickly pulled the trigger. My Hustle was high, so my aim was dead on. The silver bullet struck the kneecap of the blonde mercenary's supposedly injured leg. He roared in pain. Roared. The mercenary who had been on the wall with us heard that beastly cry and went suddenly silent.

He looked at me like I was a stone-cold killer—or maybe like I was psychic. I couldn't tell. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. We were On-Screen, so I decided to give Riley's explanation.

"That little drop of werewolf saliva transformed Antoine into a werewolf in a day and a half." I shook my head.

"I never believed it. It should have taken weeks. The only way someone transforms that fast is if they had help." Suddenly, I was Off-Screen again, and the blonde mercenary and his friend were back On-Screen. Riley was right. He was always right when it came to stuff like this, it seemed. After a few moments of trying to feign pain and confusion, the blonde mercenary began to laugh. And then the hair started to grow.

The claw marks on the bald mercenary who had been supporting him began to disappear, and he, too, transformed, one bit at a time. But they weren't alone. An army of wolves appeared from the forest beyond, and I didn't have to pretend to be choked up with fear because this was an amount we had never even considered.

"Dozens," Riley said.

"Hundreds. How is this possible?" Was he pretending, or was he afraid, too? Sometimes, it was hard to tell with him. I knew that part of him was excited for the reveal, as if he had been playing a game of chess with Carousel and finally figured out what it was up to. That part of him scared me, but it was also the part we needed to win. The werewolves charged.

"Shots only!" Riley called as he directed me back down the ladder.

"Pick them off as they come," he said to the mercenary who remained. And the mercenary did. He was a good shot, and these NPCs were built for battle. He must have killed five werewolves—or at least hit five—before the first one jumped the height of the wall and tackled him into the courtyard below. The werewolf had the man pinned to the ground right beneath us as we descended the ladder.

The werewolf raised its sharp claws against the man, but as we climbed down, Riley drew out a long silver knife, almost long enough to be a sword. It had a trope attached—something about blades. It was the silver serving spoon. Riley must have had it melted down and reforged. He then fell off the ladder—maybe on purpose—onto the back of the werewolf, skewering it and quickly bringing forward his small sidearm to pop it in the head.

As he drew his knife out, he looked up at me as if he wasn't quite sure he had actually managed to kill one. I wasn't sure it was on purpose. We were On-Screen for that, but it worked for his character too. We didn't have time to celebrate—more wolves were coming. We needed to get to the back wall, where the palisade walls were the highest, and the wolves would have the hardest time getting to us.

If we could just get to the top, where a nice perch had been set up, and Andrew was waiting for us, we would be on our marks for the plan. The mercenaries that remained—however few there were—followed the exact orders that Andrew and Riley had given them, taking out any wolf that tried to jump over the walls. Then, the phases of the battle started to march like clockwork, exactly as they had been planned, more or less. All I could do was get a few shots in and wait for my moment.

Because as soon as the waves of wolves thinned out, the real fight would begin. ~Andrew~ Phase One: Firearms We were not conducting a battle against an experienced general. We never believed the werewolves would use advanced siege tactics. Their attack would be simple. A powerful full-frontal assault was expected, with a few twists to keep things interesting. Yet, when we designed our defenses, we did feel as if we were planning against a siege because Carousel was our true enemy.

We had to cater our defense to its sensibilities. Riley was proficient at this part of the planning. Together, we developed a plan of battle that would give Carousel premium footage and hopefully result in an optimal outcome for us. When the assault started, we did not immediately activate the advanced rolling silver (A. R. S.). Riley suggested we start with old-fashioned silver bullets. The wolves attacked from all sides.

The back wall, where we had set up our stand amongst the destroyed remains of some old lookout tower, was right up against a steep drop-off, providing extra security for us as the wolves could not clear the wall and the embankment. The wolves would pop up over the front and side walls one or two at a time, at speeds I could hardly fathom, and we would shoot them back. At first, it worked.

"Just keep on firing," Riley said.

"Knock 'em down." Except, of course, that couldn't work forever. Battle must ebb and flow, and soon, the enemy began to overwhelm us as the wolves started to pour over the side walls and into the courtyard below. We lost most of our remaining mercenaries one at a time. They fought bravely and managed to get several clean kills in their time. They proved quite useful. They, however, were not going to win this fight for us.

I steeled my nerves and simply shot enemy after enemy until it seemed my shots began to lose their effectiveness. I couldn't describe why they were failing. I thought I was hitting my targets, but after the first handful, strikes became less effective. The werewolves could only be killed in climactic ways, and getting shot out of the air while jumping over the palisade walls satisfied this for a moment, but it couldn't last. The wolves were now gathering en masse on the side walls to enter.

Riley predicted that silver bullets would be most effective at the beginning of the battle, but only as a prelude to our chemical concoction, so we needed to get as many hits in with them as possible before the audience saw what we had prepared. We were surprisingly successful with this method. I estimated we killed nearly ten percent of the wolves this way before their trope started to protect them from it. No matter how many trick shots you made, a simple barrage of bullets could not remain climactic.

I aimed my pistol a final time at a wolf that had leaped over the front wall of the palisade, and though I was certain I had hit it, reality begged to differ. They were practically immune to that attack now. We needed to escalate.

"There are too many!" I screamed.

"We can't get them all!" Riley and I looked at each other. He was fighting harder to hold back a smile than he was to kill the wolves. It was time for Phase Two. Even I had to suppress a nervous smile for that.