“Retake the walls!” he bellowed.

The legionaries charged en masse, leaving Cade and his friends behind. They didn’t need help anyway. The group of ants was soon swamped beneath a tumult of rising and falling swords.

“We’ve got ten minutes before the final wave hits,” Cade said. “Less, actually.”

“Marius!” Cade called.

The commander turned, his face spattered with black ichor, and sanity seemed to descend upon him in a sudden shock.

“The tunnels,” Cade called. “Hurry!”

He didn’t wait to see if Marius would follow, nor even his friends. Instead, he sprinted to where he had laid the gun, his mind blanking as he tried to plan his next move.

The gun was where he had left it, ugly as sin, bathed in the light of the other end of the tunnel. It was a long tunnel, and he was out of breath when he emerged from its darkness on the other side.

Luckily, the Romans had placed torches at intervals along the borehole, though Cade had not stopped to light them. As he turned to sight the gun, careful not to place his finger on the trigger, he could see the torches being lit by the exhausted legionaries, each frantically striking their gladius with flint.

In this tunnel, seven men could stand abreast, though the soldiers at the outer edges would have to stand awkwardly on the curve. Marius had around seventy soldiers left, by Cade’s estimation. It was enough to make a shield wall that was ten men deep. In that, the ant numbers would stand for very little.

Marius arrived first, leading his men with hoarse shouts of encouragement. He leaned on his knees, panting, but asked the same question Cade had been pondering.

“What now?”

Cade considered his options. The ants would come fast, and he could not be sure at which range to shoot the gun. Too soon and he’d waste his ammunition. Too late and they’d overwhelm him before his clip was spent. He looked at the timer.

00:33:45

00:33:44

00:33:43

“We need a wall,” Cade whispered. “A barrier to protect the gun.”

Marius lifted his head, looking at Cade as if he was mad.

“In three minutes?” he asked.

“They’ll take some time to realize where we’ve gone. I’ll make a shield wall for now. We can use the real wall you’ll build for when they begin to overwhelm us. Something to fall back to.”

He hoped they had time for that. Marius looked doubtful, but Cade couldn’t spare a moment to second-guess himself.

Instead, he pointed to the waterfall, some hundred feet away.

“Send half your men. Gather the boulders in the rock pool, dig up tree stumps if you have to, and create a semicircular barrier around the mouth of the cave. They’ll be blinded by the light and surrounded.”

“And the rest?” Marius asked.

“Task them to follow me and Quintus. I’ll fire into the tunnel.”

Marius nodded and gave the order.

“What can we do?” Scott asked.

The others were there. His friends … if he could still call them that. It was some relief to see that none were injured—it seemed the ants’ sacrificial attack had meant there had been little hand-to-hand fighting so far.