Kaiden dropped off the barricade with the greatsword already forming, and the market square gave him thirty meters of open flagstone to cross before the nearer pack reached the squad's line.
He crossed it in four strides. The first hound reached his hip and lost its head without slowing him down. The second he ran straight through, the blade going in behind the shoulder and coming out with enough of the thing still on it to knock a third off its legs.
Calypso came off the wall a breath after him and took the other pack's front rank in one horizontal.
When the last of them committed, the ranged fire stopped.
Behind the two of them the family stopped feeding the barricade and put all of it into the packs instead. The pack that had been thirty seconds from the medic stopped existing.
Kill notifications stacked down the edge of Kaiden's vision, a tidy column he had no time to read.
Behind all of it, unwatched, the wall took back nearly all ten minutes of digging.
