Matilda slashed downward, and she separated another man's head from his shoulders in a single bloody instant.

Beautiful, she thought. Delicious moment.

She and the elite knights accompanying her cut a swath of bodies through the Demon Empire's front lines.

Already, she could see her sword had blood on top of caked on dried blood, gore spattered her hair and her horses's hair, and she could see the fear in each demon soldier's eyes as they met hers in the moment before death.

Yet still, despite everything, wave upon wave of demon charged up to the knights riding rampant, and like the ocean striking a stony cliff, they broke upon the hard steel that rose to meet them.

Matilda loved every moment of it.

This is how I should have spent my whole life.

She barely kept the volume down on a chuckle as her horse trampled an enemy underfoot. It was fine, the men around her were probably all enjoying themselves as much as she was, but then, there was the tiny possibility that they had heard the rumor that the deposed Duchess was just slightly mad. She didn't want to do anything, make any sound, that undermined her ability to lead this force effectively.

If Matilda had her way, this would go on forever.

And it seemed to be.

They had been trying to ride around the walls and cut a path to the next gate, to stop the battering underway over there. Unfortunately—or fortunately, from the perspective of Matilda's sheer hedonistic enjoyment—the tide of armed men kept forcing the knights to pause or even pushing them back. The sheer quantity of men and materiel the enemy were sending their way had almost fully nullified one of the primary advantages of cavalry: speed.

Matilda slightly regretted that she had not demanded more support from behind the walls.

She had been so eager to join in the fighting, in any fighting, that she had perhaps not fully thought this through. Though the occasional arrow, crossbow bolt, or slingstone made its way from above, the support was sporadic and not particularly helpful.

A knight fell, and Matilda swallowed. What was the strange tension she felt at a well-trained nobleman's body collapsing, tumbling from his horses's back, and getting torn apart by the ravenous demons all around them?

It had been so long since she'd been on a battlefield, she wasn't sure if seeing her allies die filled her with fear or excitement.

Either way, best to try and enjoy it.

She chopped through another enemy soldier and, against her will, she found her eyes drawn up the battlefield, to where the line of enemy tents stood in quiet defiance of any Claustrian counter offensive.

A handful of male demons with particularly large and impressive horns stood in front of those tents, watching the front lines suffer and struggle.

They still hold their elite in reserve, Matilda thought, unable to restrain her annoyance.

This tactic of using their footsoldiers to wear the Claustrian knights down would probably be effective in the end. But it smacked of cowardice to her.

Matilda was also annoyed that she was not getting the opportunity to fight the strongest warriors the enemy had brought to the engagement.

A few minutes ago, in a gesture that was ultimately futile and premature, one of her knights had hurled a mana-infused javelin in the direction of the handful of demons just as the small group had assembled in front of the tents.

One of the demons simply raised a hand, and a wall of darkness roughly the size of a rowboat had risen in front of him. The javelin struck and disappeared, seemingly popping out of existence.

Shadow magic, the Demon Empire's answer to the Goddess's pure and good light magic.

The method of defense had not surprised her.

But in the moment when the warrior did that, Matilda felt the surge of mana from him and thought she was able to gauge his underlying power with her honed warrior senses. What she felt told her that he was at least strong enough to rival her and perhaps stronger. He might even be as strong or stronger than Alistair, though that was doubtful.

That made it all the more galling that she was down by the walls mired in a sea of mediocrity. The good fighters were right there, where she could see them.

That settles it, she thought as she caved in a skull with one mailed fist, her weapon still half buried in another enemy soldier. My goal has changed. I will force them to send at least one of their elites to deal with me.

The Royal Family was probably out by now, anyway. Any other military achievements she might make were mere icing on the cake of her legacy.

Behind her, there was suddenly a loud thud.

Matilda turned her head almost involuntarily.

What in the world?

The enemy had produced three more battering rams made of that strange black stone, and one of them had just been used to slam the gate. Bizarrely, the enemy were walking the others up to the walls. As she watched, they set the stone rams against the walls, just touching the surface, not striking it or trying to break through.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

For a moment, she was less interested in the intent of that strange decision and more focused on the mere fact that the Demon Army had multiple rams in stock to replace the one they had lost. It seemed to nullify the entire military purpose of her and the knights sallying forth.

If no one spread the word that their little offensive had been a key distraction as the Royal Family escaped unseen, it could almost seem pointless.

Her eyes widened.

The walls had been glowing gently with the flow of mana from the mages working within the city walls, reinforcing the city against any possible assault on the protective structure. Even as Matilda and the knights dismantled the puny force that had been responsible for ramming the gate behind them, there was still an—albeit slightly smaller, since some of them had emerged to join her group of elite knights—assortment of mages behind the walls using mana to reinforce them.

Now the glow of mana from the area of the wall around the gate began to dim. The stone rams that had simply been set against the walls was pulling mana from the city's defenders and absorbing it into itself.

I saw something like that before, but I almost ignored it.

With this sight, it had become too obviously relevant to ignore.

Far from her, Matilda heard a thunderous boom. The ram that had been striking the next gate over, the one they had been riding toward as best they could, had struck again. It was far away, but the noise was still intense.

The quality of the sound had changed, and it took her a moment to realize how and why.

There was a crunch of something breaking. What broke? Was it the ram, or…?

She swallowed.

Shit. We might have been too late to relieve that gate from the attack.

There would still be defenders there. The city's able-bodied fighters would flock to any breach in the defenses like a hive of ants swarming an invading foot. They might even repel the demons for long enough to work up some sort of a patchwork repair on the gate.

But that could only work if that was the only breach in the walls. The more gates fell, the more thinly stretched their defenses would be.

Fine, Matilda decided. I will not worry about provoking the elite demons to attack me.

She wheeled her horse around and raised her voice.

"Men, attack the lowly dogs trying to breach the gate! It seems they did not learn their lesson the first time!"

The chaos of battle almost fully drowned her voice out, but she accompanied her shouting with hand gestures, and most of the knights took her meaning.

They began riding back toward the gate. Matilda sensed that behind her, a few of the knights who had been a little slower to catch her signals had been surrounded and were probably about to be killed, but she could not afford to care very much. They were all going to be killed if things went according to her current plan, the question was when and where.

And who, she added in her own mind. She could not afford to look up at the elite demon warriors, but she hoped they were looking at her as her horse waded into the crowd of soldiers who defended the rams.

"Die," she hissed as she swung her sword down. "Die."

She drew the blade back once more, only to notice—very belatedly, almost comically slowly, it seemed to her in the moment—that the tip of the weapon had snapped off. The edge had grown slowly, steadily less sharp over the course of the battle, even reinforced with mana. It was hard to be perfectly consistent in applying that energy to the weapon.

She savagely planted it in another demon's shoulder, then reached for the axe that should be secured to the side of her horse.

Her fingers came down on… nothing.

Matilda's blood ran cold.

Where did it go?

The weapon must have been ripped free from her horse in the chaos of the melee.

She had broken her lance earlier and lost her sword just now.

She withdrew her hand from the horse's side and pulled it around to her waist to grab a dagger, but in that moment, she felt hands on her feet. More than one pair. She tried to kick them away, and then she felt a push from the other side.

She had slowed down too much, trying to force her way through this crowd.

Now Matilda tumbled to the side, and she went under a mass of leering demonic faces.

The dagger leaped from its sheath. She slashed a single, bloody smile across the sea of faces that confronted her and separated her from the sun.

The bloody mass of enemies parted, and Matilda rose to her feet, one hand on the saddle, dagger brandished, looking wildly from side to side.

Then she saw him.

A horned knight wearing jet black armor. One of those elites she had been hoping to meet.

She smiled for a moment. Then she felt the crunch of her armor, a sensation that traveled through her body as quickly as the sound reached her ears. She hadn't seen the war hammer in motion. Perhaps she had been too shocked by the sight of the man's face to notice that he was already poised to strike her down at the moment she rose up.

There was a terrible shattering sound from without that drowned out the sound of her armor smashed under his weapon. The wall on the edge of her vision began to shake.

She realized she was tumbling sideways, then dimly that she was on the ground. The pain in her ribs was intense. She tasted blood.

This… no, this was not how this was supposed to go.

The horned figure pulled the war hammer out of the crater in her armor.

Matilda willed herself to rise, then realized she could not feel her legs.

"This one is done so quickly," the knight muttered. "Disappointing. She looked feisty from a distance. Ah, well. On to the next."

He turned his back and moved off.

No, you do not… you do not turn your back on me!

The wall that had been shaking suddenly began to tumble. The world no longer made sense. Matilda had lost a fight, and the walls of Wayn were crashing down.

But the agonizing pain that spread through her body, along with the sickly sticky ooze of blood seeping from her ruptured ribs throughout the interior of her armor, brought home that it was all terribly real.

It felt in some ways like a mercy, seeing the huge chunk of masonry falling toward her head. The world had ceased to function properly.

Matilda made a last, feeble effort to push against the ground with her hands, but for the first time in her life, there was no strength in her arms. In her mind's eye, she saw Alistair. He was smiling, happy, he was with his first wife, the woman he had chosen over her, he—the masonry took over her entire field of vision, how had it fallen so fast, was this the end, had these been her last thoughts?

No, this cannot be the—

The world cut off permanently.

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