CHAPTER 430: 430: ONE SPEAR, MANY TEETH PART ONE

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A known sound rang in Kai’s mind. It was his most trusted ally.

[Ding! System notifications- Gain a total of 900 experience points from his drones kill.]

Kai asked, "So, I can gain experience from their kill?"

[Ding! The host will gain 50% experience from drones kill. System explanation: If the host kills a four star host will get 40 experience points. When host blood kills a four star host will get 20 experience points from that kill.]

Kai thought, "That’s interesting. Now I don’t have to kill each low level enemy to level up. My army can kill on my behalf. It’s a slow process. But it’s good. They can deal with weakling. It is a bonus."

Kai says, "System, turn off the notification. Just inform me on level ups."

[Ding! Order taken and implemented.]

A few moments later...

The second round began before the heat had a chance to thicken. A smear of dust on the far flats told the story Skyweaver’s thin cry confirmed: the single-prong spear had reset its breath and was coming again. It was faster, tighter, more meaner.

Kai stood on the high shelf with the women, his gaze flat as the horizon. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

"Form the line," he said. "No more cups — one wide mouth. All cohorts forward."

Silvershadow was already moving when the words left Kai’s lips. Shadeclaw flicked his palms once and the scrapes he’d left half-asleep woke with a whisper. Shale rolled his shoulders and set his hammer head on his thigh, feeling for the weight he’d need. Vexor bounced once on the balls of his feet, spring legs coiled.

Flint and Needle checked the last of Lirien’s quick grips, the leather biting snug into drone hands with that small, reassuring pull. Wolf took his hundred to the shadowed rib on the left and made the sand there remember whose side it preferred.

Kai turned to Luna, to Akayoroi, to Naaro and Lirien and Azhara and the others. He put a hand to the stone and the stone put its hum back into his bones. Then he looked at Alka, black against blue so high she was almost an idea.

"I go for the leaders’ heads," he said. "Alka—on me."

A hush took the ledge; it wasn’t fear. It was the stillness that precedes a blade leaving the sheath.

Luna reached for his wrist — a touch, a promise, not a chain. "Bring yourself back unharmed," she said simply.

He nodded once. To the line below: "Kill everyone who comes. No pursuit. No songs. If they break, you let them run until I say close."

Then he stepped off the shelf and ran, a white mark along the slope, Alka peeling out of the sky to slide her shadow over him like a cloak. They left without dust, and in a handful of breaths they were small and then not seen at all, angling like a hawk and its thought toward the wedge’s spine where three vice generals moved like stones that thought they were rivers.

Shadeclaw’s scrapes grabbed the wedge’s forward feet the way polite hands grab a thief’s wrist: without fuss and without letting go. The enemy came roofed and disciplined — Yavri at the nose with her lacquered pale ranks, cadence cool and exact; Skall’s causeway men laying floor with brutal competence; Oru’s veil clamped tight along the flanks, ordinary as heat haze until your lungs noticed.

This time they sent their best first. The lacquer on those shields had seen more moonlight than dust. The spear points had that quiet gleam that means the oil is clean and the men who keep it clean are alive to do it every night.

Shale did not wait for glory. He waited for weight, and when the enemy’s nose leaned, he and his army stepped into it like a door that prefers to be a wall. Hammers down. Not fast. Not beautiful. Merciless.

Vexor broke the seam on the right with a spring that looked like laughter and felt like murder. He didn’t dive into the mouth. He bit the lip —shields’ left edges— hands low, heels high.

Behind him, Flint and Needle’s cohorts hissed darts past his hips into places men hate to be surprised: the soft behind a knee, the meat over an ankle bone, the inside elbow where a shield’s kiss leaves you weak. Drone ants moved like they’d been built in this shape. In a way, they had.

Oru’s veil tried to make the air into a lie again. Skyweaver made the lie stutter. She skimmed the seam, a silver line, and shoved a thin gust sideways just as the first net arced. Iron-dusted knots met air that pushed back; they slumped, meaning turned useless for an instant that cost a toe line four men and a net team their nerves.

"Shields," Yavri snapped, steady as ever, and the lids came down. No brave chins. She saved her front at the price of spending her second rank’s breath early.

Skall’s causeways did their honest work, mats rocking on Shadeclaw’s teeth with a rude little lilt that swallowed confidence in spoonfuls. Skall felt it under his soles —he was the kind of man who hears ground with his shins— and he grunted once and signaled wider anchors. His men obeyed without looking up, hearts in their hands and their hands on rope and reed in the way that saves lives when walls are far.

Silvershadow’s cut-lines had been laid to catch exactly that moment. They weren’t traps you’d tell a song about; they were the sort you only cursed if you lived through them. The forward left tripped at ankle height and made a wave through the roof that forced Yavri to spend yet again.

"Reset ten," she ordered, and her voice did not shake, and her captains did not argue. The wedge slid back and found its feet. It was a textbook strategy. It was also a breath the drones did not waste.