Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

Cyder, kissed her good-bye, then again for luck, and again because he enjoyed it, and disappeared out the nearest window, up the wall, and onto the roofs, his white thermal suit blending seamlessly into the snow and fog. He had no way of knowing he would never return to the Blackthorn Inn again.
    High above the world, floating in its massive tank. Legion grew stronger and flexed its mental muscles. Its powers stretched across the city of Mistport, dark and potent, messing with men's minds. Men and women fell to the ground, frothing at the mouth, driven into madness to escape the awful presence that peered out at them from within their own minds. Espers went catatonic, or mute, or writhed helplessly on their beds as their power discharged on the air around them, out of their control. Legion was abroad in the night, walking up and down in human minds and spreading horror. It was vast and powerful, and nothing could stand against it. It was Legion, and it was many in one.
    John Silver fought with the others at the break in the southwest boundary wall, under Legion's continuing scream. He'd fought in so many campaigns in his previous life as a pirate, against odds of all kinds, but never anything like this. There seemed no end to the Imperial troopers as they came streaming through the huge gaps in the wall opened up by the Empire war wagons. Time had blurred into a rush of blood and pain and clashing steel, and though he stood his ground amidst the rubble of the wall and would not yield, he knew he didn't stand a chance.

    After the Hob hounds' invasion of the city during the Typhoid Mary disaster, the city Council had given orders for the twenty-foot stone walls to be raised to thirty feet. Thirty feet of solid stone, four feet thick. It hadn't slowed the Empire forces down for a moment. The huge battle wagons, fifty feet tall and twenty wide, had smashed through the wall as though it was made of paper. Their toughened steel hulls could withstand anything short of a disrupter, and what few energy guns the defenders had weren't enough to stop them.
    And so the war wagons crashed through the wall in a dozen places, and the Imperial troops came swarming in over the rubble, firing as they came. The city's defenders went to meet them with bare steel and grim determination, leaping over their fallen fellows to meet the invaders head-to-head, and there the invasion slowed and stopped, as fighting clogged the entrances. It was vicious fighting, with no quarter asked or given. There was no room in any of them for anything but hatred and murder, a blood madness fueled by the rebels'
    outrage, the troops' battle drugs, and the never-ending scream above.
    The battle wagons were largely useless once they'd broached the boundary walls.
    They were too big and too clumsy to operate in the narrow streets and alleyways of Mistport, and they couldn't use their disrupter cannon on the city defenders for fear of taking out their own troops, too. So as always it came down to man against man, and the flash of cold steel. Men fell dead and dying on all sides, but though the tides of battle surged this way and that, somehow still the defenders held.
    John Silver had taken a deep cut across his forehead somewhen early in the proceedings, and had to keep jerking his head to keep the blood out of his eyes.
    Typical Silver luck. All bad. He'd taken other wounds, and there was more blood
    on his clothes, but he tried not to think about that. It would only depress him.
    The buzz from his last shot of Blood had worn off long ago, and now all that kept him going was duty and adrenaline. His sword rose and fell, most often crashing uselessly back from parrying steel or force shield, and his sword arm ached mercilessly. There was no room in the crush of bodies for fancy swordplay or footwork. You stood toe-to-toe with your opponent and hammered it out, with victory going to the strongest or the quickest. And when one man fell, there was always another to take his place.
    Silver would have liked to cut and run, but there was nowhere to run to. If Mistport fell and the Empire took over, they'd hang him anyway, on general principles. And besides, as so many times before, duty held him where courage would not. He owed a lot to Mistport, and Silver believed in paying his debts.
    His side surged suddenly forward a few feet, seizing some momentary advantage, and Silver had to watch his footing. There were bodies everywhere, underfoot. He recognized some of the