As I was taking my second step, the squad leader of the knights spoke to us, "Clear the boat." Before the message was over, three figures flashed by me. They plowed through the loosely packed beastkins, slashing out with swords and fists before sweeping downstream along the bridge of barges.

Bodies dropped to the wood in their wake, leaving only a handful of beastkins still alive after their quick passage for us ordinary legionaries to deal with. Honestly, clearing off most of the deck was more than I thought they would do, but I didn't think about the matter.

After two quick steps, I lunged forward, thrusting out both arms. The seconds it took to sprint over the deck was not much over the course of my life, but it was more than long enough for the beastkin I was aiming at to come out of his shock and burst into action.

My thrust was met with nothing but air as the wolf flashed his teeth at me and swayed to the side. Before I could pull my spear back and get into a defensive stance, the beastkin stepped forward and swung his club up from his right, aiming to shatter my ribs.

Pushing off my forward foot, I created distance by dancing to the right and leaning away. At the same time, I swung my spear up at the beastkin's face as he turned to keep pressing me. The worst my attack would do was cause a scratch on his cheek and perhaps puncture an eye if I was fortunate, but that was not the point. The beastkin jerked his head back, throwing off his follow-up downward swing and making the club tug at the loose folds of my tunic.

Whatever you wanted to say about how my fight was going, at the least, the beastkin was distracted by me. As such, the beastkin could not react properly as two cavalrymen rushed forward and buried their spears into the beastkin's side.

Roaring in pain, the beastkin tried to spin and face his enemies, swinging his elbow at the shafts of the spears as if he could snap them like twigs. Except the beastkin was foiled by his own people's skilled craftsmanship as the spear shaft absorbed the impact with ease, and his face twisted from the pain of the spearheads jostling around inside his gut.

But the strength of a weapon mattered little when the user didn't trust it. The leading horseman leaned back and partially released the spear as if expecting the thick shaft to snap. Because he was already off balance when the beastkin moved to hit the spear, the spear shifted to the side and knocked the legionary over.

Like fate decided to make the entire scenario a joke, the other held onto the spear, but it only caused his downfall. The beastkin made a sudden twist of his body in the other direction at the pain of his actions, and the shaft bumped into the man's gut, knocking him back a step he couldn't take as his partner's body was in the way.

"I'm not sure fish could make that more of a spectacle," I muttered as I stepped forward and thrust out my spear. When the tip of my spear buried itself into the beast's throat, its eyes jerked to me, locking with my own. Without breaking eye contact, I stepped back, twisting the shaft and whipping it to the side, making the wound gush blood as I tore open the side of his neck.

Turning to look around, I found the barge's deck clear of all but two living beastkins, but those two didn't matter, as Celeste and Gurth were finishing them off even now as they loomed over them and drove their spears down into their chests. I looked around the hundred-foot long and twenty-foot wide deck of the river barge, seeing the numerous bodies of beastkin. Most had gaping slashes hacked into their chests or broken bodies from when the knights dealt with them before heading downstream, but I thought we finished off the rest well enough.

I looked west, seeing the now fully visible lines of boats stretching up the river. The rear of our ship had thigh-thick ropes anchored at the edges of the deck by looping through holes drilled through four-foot-tall tree trunks acting as anchors at the back. But instead of a boat butting up against the rear of the one I was on with an identical setup just higher, all I saw were the ropes going right over the railing and straight into the water.

While I could not see what they were still attached to, I could see what was left of the ship they used to be connected to. The boat that was supposed to be in the link behind us looked like it was missing the front twenty feet, and the back was slowly settling as the hull filled with water.

Behind the ship were dozens more barges — with occasional gaps — packed with beastkins, watching us with looks of impotent rage. Ignoring the unimportant fur-balls, I turned around to look east. If you lined up countless bunches of grapes and then dropped a large and heavy wood plank on top of them, you would have an idea of what I saw.

The first and most obvious thing I noticed was the blood of the beastkins spreading, slowly spilling over the sides of the decks. There were only two barges between me and the tower barge, but seeing a line of death across both of them was… humbling.

The sides of the barges still had living beastkins, but the center of the barges only contained the dead and dying. Then, the thirty living beastkins on the next deck looked toward me, and my eyes widened in fear.

"Cut the damn lines!" Shouted Markus into the union. Lurching forward, I stumbled over the tens of scattered weapons on the deck, searching for a gladius. I guess hanging onto your axes and spears isn't important when smacked in the face with a log.

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I wasn't the only one who received the message, as all twelve of us who were conscious moved towards the ship's prow. A needed qualifier as Tirre was still alive, if unconscious, and the knights left him at the railing of our commandeered barge. The other eleven were wounded and exhausted to various degrees, but with the help of the knights, we all could rest for a few hours, regaining some much-needed energy and strength.

We won't be able to hold the line and fight all day, but we should be able to take this ship out of the beastkin's road and move it into the center of the river… Believe it or not, it would actually be a useful task, as we would give the knights somewhere to fall back to. Burning the mental energy to leap over the walls thousands of feet away or up to the bridges hundreds of feet above was a waste of mental energy they might not have after a fight. Having a boat floating nearby was useful.

Spotting a short sword among the weapons scattered over the deck, I slowed momentarily to reach down and grab its hilt as a line of fire ran over my upper back. A bit from the pain but mainly from the alarm blaring through the network focused on me, I let my legs collapse. Gruning as I hit the deck, I ignored the discomfort of landing on steel and immediately started rolling to my left.

I heard a thunk of metal into the wood behind me, adding a new level of urgency to my evasion. Finishing my second or third roll, I planted one hand and spun around the point a hundred-eighty degrees, my feet slamming into bodies and weapons along the way. Facing the direction I was attacked from, I raised my head as my other hand fumbled to grab the haft of a spear I saw to the side.

Three beastkins were at the southwestern railing of the river barge. One of them was climbing over the railing while the other two were recovering from throwing their spears. Rising to my feet and cocking my arm back, I threw my spear at the closest beastkin.

The thrown weapon had hardly made it out of my hand before the stick got cockeyed and started flipping through the air, and then the deck, tip over butt. I knew something was wrong when releasing the spear and suspected it when I first lifted it. It just didn't feel right in my hand. But I was already committed at that point and was hoping for the best. That's what I get for hoping. I Thought in mild despair at the failed attack.

As the spear made its first rotation, I saw the problem. A foot back from the tip, the shaft was partly broken at a fifty-degree angle. Without a straight shaft, I had no chance of wounding, let alone killing, anything. Not taking my eyes off the advancing beastkins, even while my spear tumbled, I moved to where I saw a flash of metal from the corner of my eye.

"Aargh!" Sounded a blood-chilling scream, causing my eyes to flick to the noise, finding the beastkin who had poked their head over the railing as they climbed over. It took a moment to process what happened, but it caused me to snort in amusement and my lips to twitch when I finally did. My thrown spear continued flipping over the deck until it came down on the last rotation at just the right angle for the skewed tip to stab into the left eye of a beastkin.

As the beastkin's hands reached for his head, his body fell backward off the ship, splashing into the water. Amusing as the sight was, it did not stop me from reaching down for the hand axe, but it did cause me to hesitate for an instant, and that was all that was needed.

One of the beastkins on deck had charged towards me, mouth slightly parted to show its fangs, clawed hands stretched out and grasping at the air. Dropping the handle I had just begun to grab, I rolled onto my back, kicking my right leg out. My attempt to plant my foot into the beastkin's chest and roll him over my head ended when my unstraightened leg connected with the full several hundred-pound weight of the charging beastkin.

Grunting in pain, my left leg was driven to my chest as the beastkin's splayed hands reached toward my face but ended up scraping over the deck during the tumble. The force of his fall caused us to turn to the side, and we ended up lying on the deck facing each other. Hands snapping up, I grabbed his closest wrist, my whole upper body straining as his claws inched forward despite my resistance.

Feet scrabbling on the deck, I spun my body until I could kick at his legs, knocking out his base and forcing all his weight onto his left arm. Arching my back, I threw my lower body up to wrap my legs around the beastkin's right arm and lock my ankles just above his shoulder. From there, I flexed my hips while my hands locked onto his wrist and twisted it outward.

The beastkin's hand shook as I forced it to turn as far as possible and kept it there, locking his arm in place. Turning my head, I looked at the wolfkin, smirking at him as I arched backward. It wasn't long before my body started to strain from the effort, and my smirk became brittle as the beastkin's eyes narrowed in irritation. It was like I was a child fighting my father again.

His arm pressed me into the ground for a moment as he repositioned himself before he lifted me into the air above his head with only his one arm. Grunting from the minor effort, the beastkin slammed my back into the deck. The air was driven out of my lungs from the impact, and I let out a low moan of pain, but I did not let go.

Letting go meant death… Then again, not letting go was the same, only slower and more painful. I thought, contemplating reality as I was slowly lifted into the air again. With all of my meager strength, I flexed, trying to snap his arm, but all that happened was a slight grunt of discomfort from below.

Eye twitching from a mental message, I lessoned my efforts to hyperextend the bastard's arm. When my back hit the deck for the fourth time, I released the arm with a cry of pain, my arms and legs flopping to the sides in supposed defeat. The beastkin's arm jerked upward slightly from the sudden lack of resistance before it lowered, his claws curling and digging into my chest.

The beastkin rose above me, his weight pressing me down as his left hand came for my throat, his lips pulled back as he grinned victoriously. Before he could reach me, two spears drove through his back and out his chest. In shock, the beastkin looked down at the bloody points, but I didn't care as I reached up and pushed the dying beastkin to the side.

As I moved, something caught my eye just to my right, and my eye twitched in more annoyance. Reaching over and grabbing the short sword a foot from me before getting to my feet, I looked at the two horsemen who managed to thrust correctly this time — if a few seconds slower than I would have wished — but I nodded in thanks nonetheless.

"You two support that side. Green, get your sword over here now," ordered Markus. I tilted my head toward the Western Fort, where I had no doubt more beastkins would be coming from soon enough, before ignoring what wasn't my immediate problem. Getting to my feet and moving toward the front of the boat, I quickly moved to assist the legionaries who were trying to cut the ropes while holding off those beastkins leaping up to ours from the downstream ship.

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