The worst part about the Imperial Army wasn't the dying. It was the waiting.
Philischus stood in the third rank of the 4th Auxiliary Infantry, the mud sucking at his boots. It was raining—a cold, miserable drizzle that turned the Western Reach into a grey soup. Around him, other men were shivering, praying, or vomiting from sheer terror.
Philischus was just bored.
He shifted his weight, and the leather straps of his breastplate groaned in protest. The Quartermaster had given him the largest size available—"Ogre-Fit," he'd called it—but it still felt like wearing a corset made of iron bands. His shoulders, massive mounds of muscle that had never known a day of true strain, felt cramped.
"Hold the line!" the Centurion screamed, pacing behind them. He was a small, angry man who smelled of cheap wine. "The Iron Torrent approaches! Die well for the Emperor, and your families will be compensated with three sacks of grain!"
"Three sacks," Philischus mumbled, staring at the grey horizon. "Hardly seems worth the paperwork."
The man next to him, a scrawny tanner's son named Jory, looked up with wide, wet eyes. "How can you be so calm? They have Alchemists. They have Bombardiers."
"I'm not calm, Jory," Philischus sighed, scratching an itch on his neck that required him to dislocate the shoulder strap of his armor. "I'm sleepy. This helmet is squeezing my temples."
Then, the sky turned green.
It began with a whistle, a high-pitched shriek that cut through the rain. The veterans screamed "Incoming!" but it was too late. The Iron Torrent didn't march; they erased.
A canister of alchemical fire slammed into the front rank. Green flames roared outward, liquid and hungry. Men didn't scream; they just evaporated. The shockwave hit the third rank like a physical wall.
Philischus didn't brace himself. He was too slow, too heavy. He was lifted off his feet—a rare sensation—and thrown backward.
He slammed into the wooden palisade behind them. The wood splintered. Before he could slide down, a shadow eclipsed the green fire. A cavalry horse, dead mid-gallop and blown apart by the blast, came hurtling through the smoke.
It hit Philischus with the force of a falling house.
The impact drove him through the shattered palisade and into the soft, wet earth of the trench wall behind it. The trench collapsed.
Darkness.
Silence.
Philischus lay buried. He calculated, in a detached sort of way, that there was roughly four tons of wet soil, timber, and dead horse on top of him.
Well, he thought. That's that. Nap time.
He tried to inhale. He couldn't. The soil was packed tight against his face. The weight pressed down on his chest, squeezing his ribs.
Usually, this was the part where he would wait. Back in Oakhaven, if a tree fell on him, he'd just wait for someone to bring a team of oxen to pull it off, or wait until he got hungry enough to shove it aside. Effort was the enemy. Effort was sweaty and uncomfortable.
But he couldn't wait. The air in his lungs was gone.
His heart gave a painful thud against his ribs. Thump.
Pain. Real pain. His sternum bent. His spine ground against itself.
Thump-thump.
For twenty years, Philischus's body had been a cage for a beast that was too big for the world. Every movement had to be checked, every grip loosened so he wouldn't break the cups, the tools, the people. He lived in a world made of glass.
But now? Now the world was trying to crush him. The world was finally pushing back.
A strange sensation sparked at the base of his skull. It wasn't fear. It wasn't panic.
It was... relief.
Thump-THUMP.
His heart rate spiked. Not to the frantic flutter of a dying man, but to the slow, rhythmic booming of a war drum. Adrenaline, thick and hot, flooded his veins. It felt like drinking lighting.
Under the crushing dark, Philischus's lips pulled back. The soil shifted as his jaw opened.
He grinned.
"Okay," he whispered into the dirt. "Okay."
He planted his hands against the bedrock beneath him. He flexed his back. For the first time in his life, he didn't hold back. He didn't worry about breaking anything. He pushed.
Above ground, the battle was a massacre. The Iron Torrent's shock troops—men in pneumatic brass suits swinging steam-powered hammers—were wading through the Imperial survivors.
An Iron Trooper raised his piston-driven maul over a cowering Centurion. "For the Revolution!" he roared.
The ground beneath the Centurion exploded.
It wasn't a geyser of mud; it was an eruption. A plume of earth, timber, and the carcass of a warhorse was launched twenty feet into the air as if a volcano had birthed it.
The Iron Trooper stumbled back, his sensors whirring. "Artillery?"
From the center of the crater, a hand emerged.
It was large, caked in mud, and shaking. Not from weakness, but from tension. It gripped the edge of the crater. The fingers dug into the solid clay, turning it to powder.
Philischus pulled himself up.
He looked nothing like the sleepy conscript from five minutes ago. His armor was gone, shredded by the expansion of his own muscles. His tunic hung in rags around his waist. His skin was steaming—literally steaming—as the rain hit his overheating body.
He stood up, his spine cracking with a sound like a whip crack. He took a deep breath, inhaling the smoke, the blood, the ozone. It tasted like fine wine.
The Iron Trooper recovered. He saw an unarmed, half-naked savage standing in a hole. An easy kill.
"Die, Imperial dog!" The Trooper swung the steam-hammer. The weapon weighed three hundred pounds and was accelerated by hydraulic pistons. It could crack a castle gate.
Philischus didn't dodge. He didn't even blink.
He caught the hammer head with one hand.
CLANG.
The sound rang out across the battlefield, drowning out the screams. The shockwave blew the rain away in a perfect circle around them.
The Iron Trooper froze. His hydraulic suit whined, the gears grinding as they tried to push the hammer forward. It wouldn't move. It was stopped dead against the palm of a man who looked like he was greeting an old friend.
Philischus looked at the hammer. Then he looked at the Trooper. His eyes were wide, dilated, and terrifyingly bright.
"Is that it?" Philischus asked. His voice was deep, vibrating in the Trooper's own chest cavity. "Is that all the heavy you have?"
"What... what are you?" the Trooper stammered, triggering the hammer's emergency release.
Philischus tightened his grip. The head of the steam-hammer—forged from hardened dwarven alloy—groaned. Then, with a screech of tortured metal, it crumpled. Philischus crushed the solid steel like it was a ball of wet paper.
He yanked the weapon from the Trooper's grip, reversed it, and swung the ruined hunk of metal like a club.
He didn't aim for the Trooper. He aimed for the air in front of him.
The sheer wind pressure of the swing hit the Trooper like a cannonball, blasting the brass-suited man backward off his feet and sending him tumbling through the mud for thirty yards.
Philischus stood alone in the crater. He looked at his hands. They were trembling with energy. He looked at the chaos around him—the screaming men, the burning sky, the giants of iron and magic tearing the world apart.
It was loud. It was dangerous. It was catastrophic.
Philischus laughed. It was a low, rumble of a laugh that built into a roar.
He turned toward the main line of the enemy army, tossed the crumpled hammer aside, and cracked his knuckles.
"Finally," he said, stepping out of the hole. "A playground."