The arrows went at once.

Whoosh!

Not all of the archers shot, the four with the disorientation bundles didn’t, same as planned and same as Darion had told them.

The seven with the fire arrows released together, the sound of it a single collective whisper of strings, and then seven points of light arced through the pre-dawn dark toward the barracks wall.

Darion held his breath.

He hoped that the shots were good, he hoped the wind did not play a part in making it not good, he hoped that it landed.

Thoom!

The first arrow hit the upper timber section of the barracks wall and the accelerant did exactly what Vera had said it would do.

It was not the gradual catch of a normal fire arrow, instead it was instant and violent, a bloom of heat that spread outward from the impact point faster than fire had any right to spread.

The second hit beside it and the two blooms merged. The third went through a window and the light from inside the building changed immediately.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, all hitting within seconds of each other, the wall catching so fast, the building too. That by the time the last arrow landed the first impact point was already a column of fire climbing toward the roof.

The barracks went up.

There was a deep, rushing roar as the fire found the interior and the air feeding it.

Then the light, massive and orange, punching out through every gap in the structure, through windows and the spaces between boards, through the doorway as the door itself caught from the inside.

Then the screaming.

It came from everywhere at once, inside the building, men who had been asleep ten seconds ago waking into fire with no time to understand what had happened.

The guards at the entrance had been looking outward and now they were looking inward and they were shouting things at each other that weren’t coherent because coherence required a second to think and the building behind them was consuming seconds faster than they could form them.

People poured out through the main entrance. Some were burning. Some had weapons and none of them knew what to point them at. They came out in a mass, piling up in the open ground in front of the entrance, the instinct to get away from the fire fighting with the instinct to understand the threat and finding no resolution between the two.

That was the moment.

Seren’s hand came down from her tree.

"Now!"

The four archers with the disorientation bundles released. The bundles went higher and further than the fire arrows, arcing over the front of the barracks and coming down into the mass of men clustered at the entrance.

They hit the ground and the cloth burned and the compound spread on the morning air, colorless, moving with the light wind that was blowing exactly the right direction.

The effect was visible within thirty seconds.

The men who had been running, organizing and trying to form into something useful, stopped doing those things. Not falling down and not unconscious, just stopping, turning in wrong directions, bumping into each other, their hands going to their heads, disorientation of people whose spatial sense had just been switched off.

A man in full armor tried to run toward the fire to help someone and ran instead directly into the wall beside the entrance, hard. Another one drew his sword and stood there holding it with no apparent idea which direction to point it.

Darion was already moving.

He summoned all his undead knights immediately. And the wolves and Rops too.

Fifty undead came out of the inventory simultaneously.

They appeared in the treeline behind him, the green light of each revival brief and immediately gone, fifty knights materializing in the dark forest and already moving forward before the light had fully faded. The wolves beside them. The three Rops, which looked exactly as unsettling as they always looked, more so in the half-dark with firelight throwing shadows through the trees.

"Kill everything you see," Darion said. "Move."

They went through the treeline and across the open ground at the speed of things that didn’t tire and didn’t hesitate, hitting the outer edge of the barracks grounds before the men coming out of the building had recovered enough from the disorientation to understand what new thing was arriving.

The undead knights had no swords. He had decided that deliberately in a way — not like he had a choice, he couldn’t hand them swords here, unless he had summoned them earlier and given them all swords.

Inside a barracks that was on fire and full of dead and dying soldiers, there would be weapons everywhere.

The combat instinct would find them. In the meantime, fifty undead knights and two wolves and three Rops moving through a crowd of confused, injured, disorientated soldiers did not strictly need swords to be effective.

The Rops hit first, because the Rops moved differently from the undead knights, lower and faster, four-eyed and wide-mouthed.

The front line of men who had been trying to reorganize outside the entrance saw the Rops coming and the reorganization stopped entirely.

The wolves went for the flanks.

The undead knights went straight through the middle.

Darion turned away from it and ran.

Garren was at his shoulder, twenty knights behind them, moving fast along the outer fence of the barracks compound toward the eastern side. The stone building was visible, lower and darker than the burning barracks, no timber in its construction. There were lights inside and movement.

A dozen guards on the outer fence and the approaches to the stone building. Some of them had started moving toward the main barracks when the fire went up. Some of them were still at their posts, watching the chaos from a distance, trying to determine if the chaos was coming toward them.

It was.

Darion hit the fence running and didn’t slow down. He reached into inventory mid-stride and the original wolf appeared, already in motion, already understanding what was needed.

He grabbed its back as it came level with him, pulled himself up, and the wolf left the ground.

It cleared the fence in one motion and landed on the other side in the compound.

The guards closest to the landing point reacted fast, faster than the men at the main barracks had reacted, because these were the guards assigned to protect something very important and they were better at their job. Two of them came at the wolf immediately, swords up.

The wolf was faster.

It hit the first one before the sword came down, the collision driving the man backward off his feet. The second man’s sword found the wolf’s flank and the wolf turned its head toward him with the green eye and kept moving.

Behind Darion, at the fence, his twenty knights were climbing. Two of them had already found the gate latch and were pulling it open, Garren coming through with the main group.

The remaining guards outside the stone building had formed up. Eight of them, swords out, the door behind them closed.

Darion looked at the door.

Aldric was behind it.