Arming the Vanguard

Could five underpaid border guards in boiled leather hold a rotting gate against an iron battering ram? Brono shoved through the scum-choked water of the northern conduit, broadsword slung across his back, his fingers locked on the rusted rim of the cellar manhole. He needed boots on the courtyard stones before Rogov’s trenchers turned the watch house timbers into kindling, and he needed every scrap of crawler chitin in his haul converted into plate before the next assault breached the perimeter.

He drove his shoulder upward against the iron grate.

The plate yielded with a screech of rusted hinges. Brono hauled his frame out of the black bilge, rolling onto the damp flags of the Dreg-Ward armory cellar.

The moment his boots cleared the conduit rim and crossed beneath the border pylon threshold, the faint golden glow in the corners of his vision flickered out. The humming vitality of Level 2 Vanguard vanished. His limbs regained their dull mortal weight, his pulse thudded against his ribs with raw physical fatigue, and the cold cellar air smelled of wet stone, tallow grease, and sulfur rather than systemic ozone.

Above his head, heavy boots hammered the floorboards.

Brono drew his broadsword, took the wooden stairs three at a time, and kicked open the armory trapdoor.

The main hall was intact. Kostya stood by the courtyard door, a jagged split running down the shaft of his pike, his woolen tunic stained with fresh splinter dust. By the fireplace, young Terik was binding a strip of boiled linen around his forearms, while Brezinya stood behind the heavy oak trestle table, a discharged stirrup crossbow resting across two ledgers.

"You took seven minutes," Brezinya said without looking up from her inventory chalk. "The ram hit the outer crossbeam twice before Kostya dropped a barrel of pitch off the parapet."

"They broke?" Brono asked, letting the broadsword tip rest on the floorboards.

"They burned their mittens and dragged the timber back to the scrub," Kostya grunted, spitting a tooth into his palm. "Four trenchers in quilted jacks. They weren't regulars. Hired hands from the lower gulley, testing if anyone was home."

"They were testing the hinges," Brezinya corrected, tapping her ledger with a broken quill. "Rogov paid them thirty groschen just to knock. When they come back, they won't bring four men with a log. They'll bring twenty with iron shields."

Brono unslung his heavy salvage sack and dropped it onto the trestle. The table groaned under the weight.

He dumped the contents across the rough wood: eighteen silver groschen and fourteen captured steel quarrels from Vanechka’s purse, two sets of heavy arbalest lockings, and eight thick slabs of iridescent, blue-black chitin hacked from the two Level 2 carapace-crawlers in Sector 09. Beside the bench, the three bundles of confiscated Imperial copper conduit from the afternoon boundary seizure sat stacked against the wall where Kostya had hauled them.

Kostya leaned over the table, squinting at the chitin slabs. "That's deep-vault crawler shell. The stuff that snaps iron crowbars."

"Eight plates," Brono said. "Vanechka and his ambush crew are tied to an intake pipe forty paces below the sluice. His contract offered forty silver for my charter and twenty for my ears." He tossed Rogov’s signed warrant beside the coins.

Brezinya picked up the warrant, her eyes flicking across the wax wolf-head seal before she dropped it onto the pile of groschen. "Twenty silver for ears. Rogov always was a miser. Even his assassins are underpaid." She picked up one of the heavy chitin plates, rapping her knuckles against the ribbed center. "The scrap-mongers at the eastern pylon market will give forty-seven silver for the copper conduit and the captured arbalest frames. Add Vanechka’s eighteen groschen, and we have sixty-five silver clear."

"Sixty-five," Brono said. "We don't sell the chitin."

Brezinya raised an eyebrow. "Ruin armorers pay eight silver a slab for untreated carapace. Sell it, and we can buy three barrels of salted pork and four sacks of rye."

"Salted pork won't stop an iron bolt," Brono said. He stepped closer to the workbench, picking up an armorer's hammer and a rusted breastplate from the rack. "Look at the grain on the ventral edge. Crawlers don't take shock head-on. The carapace layers overlap at twenty-degree angles to shed kinetic force. We cold-rivet these plates across the chest and throat guards of five breastplates. Overlap the seams downward. Any bolt hitting the center deflects down toward the rim instead of punching the breastbone."

Kostya picked up a piece of the shell, sniffing the greasy rim with a grimace. "Smells like boiled swamp vinegar. My wife would throw me out of the ditch."

"You don't have a wife, Kostya," Brezinya said smoothly. "And you smell worse than vinegar right now." She turned back to Brono, her eyes calculating the cost. "Cold-riveting takes coal, iron rivets, and four hours of hammering. I'll take fifteen silver to hire the ditch-smith and buy the rivets. That leaves fifty."

Brono separated the coins into five neat stacks of ten silver on the wood, dividing the fourteen captured steel quarrels beside them—three heavy bolts each for Kostya and Terik, and eight bundled for the other three pickets. He pushed one stack and three bolts toward Kostya, one stack and three bolts toward Terik, and left the rest on the edge of the trestle.

"Ten silver each for the five men on the watch line," Brono said. "Hazard bonus for holding the gate. Three heavy bolts apiece to span in your bows, and the rest goes to the north palisade."

Kostya stared at the ten heavy silver groschen. He didn't reach for them immediately; his rough, calloused fingers hovered over the edge of the table. In three years on the border, the district had never paid a watchman ten silver in a single day.

"Captain," Kostya rasped, his voice dropping an octave. "You paid the back-wages at noon. You don't owe us bonus coin for dropping pitch on trenchers."

"I don't owe you a bonus for holding the gate," Brono said evenly. "I'm paying you to stand behind an iron shield when Rogov brings the rest of his post across the border. If you take the silver, you don't break formation. You don't drop your pikes. You hold the pylon fringe until I give the order to fall back."

Kostya looked at the coin, then at Brono's face. He swept the ten groschen into his woolen pouch with a decisive scrape against the wood. "We hold."

Terik took his stack with a quick nod, tucking it inside his tunic. The tension that had choked the guardroom since morning seemed to settle into a hard, disciplined weight. They were no longer starved deserters waiting for the post to collapse; they were an armed vanguard with silver in their belts and custom plate taking shape on the anvil.

"There is one detail your chitin won't deflect," Brezinya said, leaning her palms against the table.

Brono looked at her. "The ram?"

"Not the ram," she replied, her voice dropping. "My courier from Styag-Post came through the scrub an hour ago. Rogov didn't just contract mercenaries. Last month, his raiders broke open an Imperial ordnance crypt in Sector 02. They hauled out a mobile siege arbalest. Torsion-wound, twin bronze limbs, firing five-foot steel lances. A direct hit will shatter our oak gate and split the guardhouse chimney in two."

Brono fell silent. Five breastplates reinforced with crawler chitin could turn handheld quarrels, but an Imperial torsion engine would punch through stone and flesh alike.

"Where is it now?" Brono asked.

"Mounted on an iron-rimmed carriage at Styag-Post's boundary redoubt," Brezinya said. "They're waiting for dusk to roll it into the northern gully."

Brono picked up his heavy crossbow, slinging his quiver of iron quarrels over his shoulder. "Keep the smith hammering. Fit the five breastplates and distribute the steel bolts before the sun dips below the ridge."

He turned and strode out through the courtyard gate, his boots crunching against the gravel of the perimeter track.

Twenty paces past the rotting wooden palisade, the rusted iron border pylons loomed out of the grey scrub. As Brono stepped between the fluted pillars, the familiar, sharp hum of the System grid surged through his nerves. The heavy mortal drag left his muscles, replaced by the taut, sharpened pulse of Level 2 Vanguard.

A gravelly cough echoed from the dry ditch beside the trail.

Yevzkov sat on an overturned ammunition crate beneath a stunted birch, a strip of dried mutton in his teeth. His right arm was wrapped in greasy burlap, but his left hand rested atop a heavy, cylindrical object on the ground—a rusted Imperial core housing, its bronze surface etched with glowing amber circuit traces that thrummed with erratic, static discharge.

"You took your time handing out pocket money, Captain," Yevzkov said, spitting a shred of gristle into the dust.

"Rogov has a siege engine," Brono said, stopping two paces away. "Imperial torsion arbalest. It'll crack the guardhouse from three hundred paces."

Yevzkov looked down at the humming bronze housing between his boots and offered a dry, toothless grin.

"That's why I brought this," the old hound said, tapping the casing with his boot-heel. "Sector 02 power regulator. The grid inside is fractured. If you know how to bridge the conduit with an essence pulse, it won't fire a lance. It'll spit a localized resonance shockwave that fries every torsion spring and iron latch in forty paces."

Yevzkov tilted his chin up, his pale, scarred eyes fixing on Brono. "The question is whether your Level 2 Vanguard pool can handle the backlash before the casing blows your hands off."