The Legions screamed their defiance of the vord, and Ehren couldn’t keep himself from joining them, out of nothing but raw reflex and naked terror. On some level, he was fairly sure that not many of the vord would be intimidated by the way his voice cracked, but it wasn’t as though he could control that. Fear might not have been strangling him, precisely, but it had apparently caused his throat to revert to puberty.

Somewhere nearby, a centurion bellowed something that went completely unheard in all the noise. Fortunately, the legionares knew their work well enough without any such command. As the enemy closed, an Aleran-borne shadow passed over the ground before the wall, and more spears than a body could count in a week flew out to come sailing down into the front ranks of the vord. The spears weren’t particularly deadly, in and of themselves. They might have scored one kill in fifty, by Ehren’s estimation, one kill in thirty, tops—but every vord struck by one of the heavy weapons staggered in pain. Even if the wound was not fatal, the vord’s pace faltered, and it was swiftly trampled by the warriors rushing along behind.

The volley was devastating to enemy cohesion, and an old standard Legion tactic.

But, this being a battle plan Tavi had a hand in, it didn’t stop there.

The artisans of the Calderon Valley hadn’t been able to provide every single legionare on the wall with one of the modified javelins—only the most skilled man of each spear of eight had been given the new designs. More often than not, the spears that had killed a vord outright had been thrown by those men—and every single one of the new spears contained a small sphere of glass, nestled into the cup of the javelin’s iron head, where the wooden shaft joined it. Whether the javelins missed and struck the earth or hit home, thousands of tiny glass spheres shattered, unleashing the furies that had been bound within.

Ehren himself had field-tested the firestones, furycrafted devices developed from the coldstones used to keep food chilled in restaurants and wealthy households around the Realm—another innovation sprung from the tricky, twisty labyrinth Octavian had for a brain. The glass spheres could contain even more heat for their size than the first generation of stones could, and they were far easier to make.

Destruction was almost always easier to manage than something useful, Ehren reflected.