Collapsing the Barracks

The stone steps leading up from the subterranean tunnels were slick with centuries of condensation and fresh blood, but Thara Iron-Lung did not slip. Her bare feet, calloused and wide, gripped the uneven masonry with the certainty of a mountain predator. She ascended from the dark, a six-foot-four engine of corded muscle and jagged scars, dragging a sixty-pound iron war-hammer behind her. The head of the weapon scraped against the stone, carving a sparks-spitting groove in her wake.

Her body was a canvas of fresh trauma. Deep lacerations from the arena floor wept freely down her flanks. A jagged puncture wound in her left thigh from a rusted trident should have severed her femoral artery, or at least crippled her gait. Yet, she felt nothing of the meat and bone tearing. The Red Mist had taken her, wrapping her consciousness in a suffocating, glorious embrace.

The pain was entirely gone, replaced by a numbing heat that radiated from the center of her chest, baking her from the inside out. It was a phantom furnace, cauterizing her nerve endings, turning her mortal agony into high-octane fuel. In her ears, the sounds of the subterranean drips and her own heavy footfalls were drowned out by a constant, dull roar—like an ocean of blood rushing through narrow canyons, a primal frequency that muted the world’s distractions. And with every breath, the damp, mildewed air of the tunnels was stripped away, replaced by the sharp, metallic stench of ozone. It tasted like the electric stillness just before a lightning strike.

At the top of the stairwell stood a pair of massive double doors, banded in iron and bolted from the other side. Beyond them lay the main guard barracks. Thara did not slow her pace. She did not brace for impact. She merely shifted her grip on the leather-wrapped haft of the war-hammer, pivoting her hips as she took the final three steps, and swung the iron behemoth with the force of a siege engine.

The impact was deafening. The iron bands sheared off their rivets. The thick oak planks exploded inward in a concussive blast of kinetic fury, sending foot-long jagged splinters whistling through the air like shrapnel.

The heavy doors blew off their hinges, crashing down into the middle of the barracks. Thara stepped through the threshold, the dust of the shattered archway billowing around her.

The barracks was a sprawling, cavernous hall of quarried stone and heavy ironwood support pillars. It reeked of stale ale, unwashed bodies, cheap boot wax, and boiled cabbage. Nearly fifty of Warlord Kaelen’s soldiers occupied the space. Most were off-duty. Men were lounging on rows of tiered bunk beds, gathered around wooden tables playing dice, or polishing breastplates with dirty rags. Many wore only their linen undertunics and trousers, their heavy chainmail and plate armor resting on wooden racks along the walls.

For one agonizing second, time suspended in the hall. Dice stopped rolling. Tankards hovered halfway to open mouths. Fifty pairs of eyes turned toward the ruined doorway, staring in absolute, uncomprehending shock at the nightmare that had just breached their sanctuary.

Thara stood in the swirling dust. Her breath plumed from her flared nostrils. Her milky eyes glowed with a terrifying, crimson luminescence, completely devoid of pupil or iris. The chipped tusk jutting from her lower jaw was slick with the gore of the men she had already butchered below.

"Gods above," a sergeant whispered, a pair of wooden dice slipping from his fingers to clatter loudly against the floorboards. "It’s the Anvil."

The dull roar in Thara’s skull flared, a roaring command to annihilate.

The panic broke. "Weapons! Get to your weapons!" a lieutenant screamed, his voice cracking. Men scrambled over tables, kicking over benches as they desperately lunged for the armory racks along the perimeter.

Thara did not give them the chance.

She did not charge wildly; the Red Mist was not a blind, flailing frenzy. It was a state of singular, hyper-focused tactical destruction. Her mind processed the geometry of the room, the trajectory of the guards, the placement of the furniture, and the architecture of the ceiling in a fraction of a second.

She stepped into the nearest cluster of men before they could even draw their belt knives. The war-hammer came around in a devastating, horizontal arc. It caught the first guard in the ribcage. The sickening crunch of shattering bone echoed through the hall as his chest caved in, the sheer kinetic force lifting him off his feet and hurling him into three of his comrades like a human bowling pin.

A guard to her left lunged with a half-drawn shortsword. Thara didn't even look at him. She merely let the momentum of her initial swing carry the hammer behind her back, pivoting on her heel, and drove her elbow backward into his face. His nose collapsed into his skull with a wet snap. As he crumpled, Thara brought the heavy iron head of the hammer down in an overhead vertical strike, instantly pulping the helmeted head of a third soldier who had rushed her with a spear.

The ozone smell thickened, suffocating the scent of ale and sweat, burning pleasantly in her lungs. The numbing heat surged through her veins, a localized sun radiating from her heart, propelling her forward.

"Encircle her! Pikes, get the pikes!" shouted the lieutenant, desperately trying to establish a formation amidst the chaos.

Six men who had managed to grab long ash-wood pikes from the racks formed a hasty half-circle, lowering the iron-tipped points toward her. Beyond them, a handful of crossbowmen were cranking their weapons with shaking, frantic hands.

Thara analyzed the choke point. She could not dodge six pikes simultaneously in the narrow aisle between the bunks. So, she altered the battlefield.

She slammed the head of her hammer into the underside of a heavy oak dining table. With a guttural roar, she flipped the massive piece of furniture up into the air. It tumbled forward, crashing down onto the extended pikes, snapping three of the ash poles instantly and pinning the guards' weapons to the floor.

Before the wood even settled, Thara vaulted over the overturned table. She landed amidst the pikemen like a rabid wolf in a sheep pen. She grabbed the nearest guard by the throat, her massive fingers effortlessly crushing his windpipe, and used his body as a fleshy shield just as three crossbow bolts twanged through the air. Two bolts buried themselves deep into her human shield’s back; the third grazed Thara’s bare shoulder, tearing through the meat. She didn't flinch. The numbing heat instantly swallowed the pain, searing the wound closed in her mind.

She tossed the dead man aside and swung the hammer in a tight, brutal figure-eight. She crushed a knee, shattered a pelvis, and caved in a sternum in three rapid, sequential impacts. Blood sprayed across her chest and face in hot, crimson ribbons. The men screamed, but to Thara, their agony was nothing but a distant, muffled whisper beneath the dull roar of the oceanic tide raging in her skull.

More guards were pouring from the adjacent washrooms and back sleeping quarters. They were donning armor now—hastily buckled breastplates and iron half-helms. They were terrified, but their sheer numbers were beginning to show. A heavy iron mace clipped Thara’s hip, the impact enough to shatter a normal person's pelvis. Thara merely stumbled half a step, the numbing heat flaring to absorb the shock. She backhanded the attacker with her heavy, scarred knuckles, sending his teeth flying across the room, then crushed his chest with a downward stomp of her heel.

There were too many. Killing them one by one would take too long. The Warlord's elite guard would be moving soon.

Her glowing crimson eyes scanned the room, lifting away from the fragile, squishy bodies of the men, and locked onto the architecture of the barracks itself.

The ceiling was a heavy vault of quarried stone blocks, supported by a network of massive ironwood beams. The entire weight of the ceiling was distributed among four colossal central pillars, each as thick as a large oak tree, anchored into the stone floor and stretching up to the vaulted roof.

The Red Mist provided the calculation. Remove the supports; crush the ants.

Thara began her long charge. She ignored the guards immediately in front of her, bull-rushing forward. A soldier thrust a broadsword at her abdomen. Thara simply leaned into it, letting the blade slide harmlessly through the thick slab of muscle at her side, grabbing the man’s wrists, and ripping the weapon from his hands with a violent twist that dislocated both his shoulders. She shoved him away and sprinted toward the nearest central pillar.

"She’s going for the armory doors! Stop her!" a sergeant yelled, fundamentally misunderstanding her trajectory.

Dozens of men converged on her, a desperate swarm of steel and flesh. Thara reached the first pillar. She planted her feet wide, rooted to the stone floor, and swung the war-hammer with everything she had.

CRACK.

The sixty-pound iron head struck the ironwood pillar. The shockwave vibrated through the floorboards. Wood splintered, a deep gouge appearing in the ancient timber. Above them, the ceiling groaned—a low, terrifying grinding of stone on stone.

The guards froze, looking upward as fine dust began to sift down from the vaulted ceiling.

"Have the gods gone mad?" a man whispered. "She’s bringing down the roof!"

"Kill her! Kill the bitch now!"

They swarmed her. A heavy halberd sliced down, biting deeply into the meat of Thara’s back. A shortsword found her bicep. A heavy iron boot kicked her in the back of the knee. The barrage of strikes would have felled a draft horse.

Thara merely breathed in the crackling ozone. The numbing heat flared so intensely it felt like she was made of molten iron. The dull roar in her ears crescendoed into a deafening symphony of pure, unadulterated violence.

She spun, sweeping the heavy hammer in a low circle. It connected with the legs of three attackers, sweeping them off their feet in a tangle of shattered shins and screaming meat. She stepped over their writhing bodies, raised the hammer high above her head, and brought it down on the exact same spot on the pillar.

The ironwood exploded.

The pillar sheared perfectly in half, the top section kicking outward. Without its primary support, the massive wooden crossbeam above bowed violently.

SNAP.

The sound was like a thunderclap. A twenty-foot section of the stone ceiling suddenly collapsed. Massive slabs of quarried granite, weighing tons, plummeted into the center of the barracks.

The impact shook the entire fortress. A dozen guards were instantly crushed beneath the falling masonry, their screams cut mercifully short as they were flattened into paste beneath the immense weight. A thick cloud of choking, pulverized mortar and bone dust exploded outward, reducing visibility in the great hall to near zero.

Panic turned into absolute, mindless terror. The guards abandoned their weapons, abandoning their duty, and scrambled for the exits, trampling one another in the dark, choking dust.

Thara did not run. She thrived in the ruin.

Through the dense, grey fog, her milky crimson eyes pierced the gloom like twin dying suns. She moved with a terrifying, predator's grace through the falling debris. When a chunk of stone fell toward her, she stepped precisely out of its way, calculating the trajectory by the sound of the tearing air.

She reached the second load-bearing pillar. Two men were cowering behind it, weeping, their hands over their heads. Thara did not spare them a glance. She brought the hammer around. The head smashed right through the torso of the first man, the sheer force carrying his ruined body into the pillar, padding the impact, but transferring the kinetic shockwave perfectly into the wood.

She struck it again, splintering the massive trunk. Then a third time.

The second pillar gave way.

The structural integrity of the barracks suffered a catastrophic failure. A domino effect of groaning wood and shrieking stone echoed through the hall. The entire eastern half of the ceiling tore away from the walls.

"No! No, please—!"

The remainder of the roof came down in a deafening avalanche of destruction. Desks, bunk beds, weapon racks, and the screaming bodies of Warlord Kaelen’s soldiers were pulverized beneath a deluge of mountain stone. The floor gave way in sections, sending men plummeting back down into the subterranean levels, buried alive in a tomb of rubble.

Thara sprinted through the apocalyptic collapse. The air was a tempest of flying debris. A piece of jagged stone the size of a fist clipped the side of her head, tearing away half of her pointed ear and leaving a trail of hot blood down her neck. The numbing heat swallowed it. She felt invincible. She felt inevitable.

She bulldozed her way toward the far wall, where the arched gateway leading out of the barracks stood. Just as the ceiling directly above her began to cave in, she lunged forward, sliding across the stone floor on her knees, the heavy hammer dragging at her side.

Tons of granite smashed into the floor exactly where she had been a fraction of a second prior, the shockwave of the impact propelling her through the archway and out into the connecting corridor.

She slid to a halt, slowly rising to her feet amidst the billowing clouds of grey dust.

Behind her, the main guard barracks was completely gone. In its place was an impassable, mountainous pile of shattered stone, splintered ironwood, and the crushed, bleeding remains of over forty men. A heavy silence settled over the rubble, broken only by the shifting of loose stones and the wet, weak coughing of the dying trapped beneath the weight.

Thara stood in the corridor, her chest heaving, the blood from her torn ear mingling with the gore of her enemies. She stared at the wreckage. Her expression was utterly blank, devoid of pity, devoid of exhaustion.

The dull roar in her ears hummed with steady, rhythmic approval. The air still tasted heavily of ozone. The numbing heat inside her chest burned brighter than ever, a furnace demanding more fuel.

She rolled her massive shoulders, gripping the war-hammer tightly in her right hand. The weapon was dented, coated in brain matter and pulverized stone, but it remained whole.

Slowly, deliberately, Thara Iron-Lung turned her back on the collapsed barracks and faced the heavy iron doors at the end of the corridor. Beyond them lay the armory, and beyond that, the Warlord's elite guard.

The Red Mist pulled her forward. She did not walk; she marched, an unstoppable juggernaut of fury, descending upon the next obstacle in her path.