The thundering rapport of the Hellbinger Cannon discharging made the air itself shake and Mansreg’s ears bleed. The clamor of battle receded for a few seconds as his ears simply failed to register anything other than a high pitched whine. He had tried to save some of his dark vision by closing his eyes in time but Sorcerer Kleudor hard pushed the engine well past it’s design tolerances and the flash had affected him even though closed eyelids. His Hold’s Warriors had borne the brunt of the enemy Hold’s counter assault as Kleudor charged up its obliterating blast.
It had been a near thing, but with the enemy formation shattered by the blast they could finally press forward even though outnumbered. Cries of dismay rose amongst friend and foe alike as blinding brightness rendered them blind for a few seconds.
More than enough time.
Mansreg stepped forward and shoved his shoulder into the back of his shield, forcing his opponent back a step. Claiming the half step he had forced for himself he blindly swung his blade wide, ignoring his unbalanced foe to strike at his uncovered companion. His blade landed with a dull thud, his ringing ears ignoring the sound of shearing metal as his heavy blow struck the opponent’s shield, forcing it out of position. Reversing the swing, he caught his enemy high on his breastplate, but his blade travelled across the heavy metal to lodge itself in his neck with a meaty thud. His eyes recovered just in time to see his opponent’s horrified look as he wrenched the blade free and turned his attention back to the original opponent who had recovered, too quickly, and now closed with an overhand blow.
Surprised by the speed of his recovery Mansreg tried to move past his blow, but found the enemy’s tight formation recovering, again, too damn fast, denying him the space he needed to step under the blow. His Aghm standing allowed him access to reinforced armor, and to that he entrusted his life. Tucking his chin, he pushed forward and took the blow on the reinforced crown of his helm. It held.
Wasting no time he attacked again. They had to seize the initiative before the enemy closed ranks and recovered from the Hellbringer blast. Now inside his opponents guard he pinned his enemies shield and wrenched downwards, allowing him to viciously stab him in the ribs, where the armor bindings were the weakest. One, two, three frenzied strikes was all it took for his blade to find a chink and force a gap, scraping across bone before it slid home shearing muscle, lungs and god knows what else. A strangled gasp and his foe stepped back, his strength fleeing as blood gushed down his wounded side.
Two men down, a gap should be formin… He didn’t have time to complete his thought. Immediately another warrior stepped forward, the enemy closing in on him and forcing him back into the safety of his formation… It was unthinkable. Their enemy had simply ignored the blast and closed ranks.
He heard Old Koleg swear beside him, ‘Damn that arrogant piss pot! We are getting murdered out here. Close ranks, CLOSE RANKS!’
Blinking quickly to clear the last of his blindness away, Mansreg took stock of the battlefield… and immediately understood Koleg’s foul outburst. Kleudor’s blast had not been aimed at the enemy at all! The fool had wasted a full strength blast on the bloody Hold gates, that now yawed empty… 300 yards behind the last defender whose deeper formation remained intact and and now closed with a murderous glint in their eyes.
—
His arms were leaden and his breath ragged. Koleg had fallen not 10 minutes past, a lucky blow catching a seam in his helmet, wrenching it across his eyes and leaving him open to a killing blow he never saw. Mansreg glanced to his right where Kleudor struggled in atop his draegh, too busy dodging the long spears of the enemy initiates to manage the complex machinery of the Hellbringer cannon, especially now that one of his operators lay sprawled across his post, blood trickling from the brutal wound to his chest.
Turning his attention back to the fight, he spied a sturdy shield on the ground and replaced his own mangled one as he prepared to step forward onto the shield line once more, exhausted and hopeless. His Warriors held, but it was only a matter of time. The enemy Clan had given up trying to shatter their formation through brute force, and were slowly edging around their line, stretching them further and further. The time had come. They had to accept the inevitable.
Taking a deep breath as he took another blow on his shield, he cried out, ‘Teugtronos! Ulkemos! Close the circle! Here we stand! Here we fall!’
“Here we fall!’ An answering shout rose from his warriors. Not quite the roar they could have managed had they been healthy and rested, but it brought a bloody grin to his face. As he watched, Teugtrtronos and Ulkemos edged inward and backwards, surrendering the flanks and turning their wide frontage into a circle.
There was little to do now but to claim as much Aghm as they could before they died. To his right Kleudor had abandoned his perch and stood now across the back of his draegh while it wheeled and lashed out at the spears that stung it, slowly losing the battle against the inevitable.
—
A thunderous crash to his right announced the inevitable as the draegh succumbed to the relentless assault of the initiate spears around its neck and head. Arrogant fool that he was, Kleudor summoned his flames and cast them about him with reckless abandon, but his efforts were too little, too late. Mansreg blocked a blow, shoved his opponent back and deftly stepped back, his place taken but one of his dwindling Warriors and turned to witness his end out of respect, not for the Dweghom, but for what he represented. Kleudor met his end well, a crazed grin plastered on his face as scarcely glanced at where he cast his bolts, his gaze fixed on the Hold’s shattered gate as flames slowly died down around its shattered form. A look of elation stole across Kleudor’s face a second before the spear took him beneath his left shoulder blade, lifted him and cast him from the draegh.
Resigned to his own fate, Mansreg turned one last look at the gate they would never reach… and frowned. What was that? A deep glow had appeared in the depths of the Hold’s Hall and slowly moved forward, dispelling the shadows around it as it came closer. And there, from the billowing smoke that hid the shattered gate strode forth a massive shape, a Dweghom, but… more. Its monstrously distended form was massive, easily massing as much as four of his warriors, allowing him to see in distressing detail the rippling muscle barely contained by their taut skin. Heavy metal and grafts adorned its upper body, venting its Earth essence even as the fire of the brazier cast lurid shadows across its bronze mask.
Without pausing to assess the battlefield, the figure… one of the Lost, it could be nothing else, broke into a pounding run, its impersonal bronze mask seeming to light with malicious glee as the fire on its back roared ever higher. A dozen other figures streamed behind it, half of them breaking into a run but the other half lumbering forward. The second set, even larger and bulkier than the first, if that were possible bore a strange organ-like mechanism upon their back, a tubular design that glowed with the barely contained elemental fury that reminded him of the Hellbringer Cannons…
Eyes widening in alarm he called out, ‘Incoming fire! Brace!’ As he saw his warriors hesitate in the face of enemy aggression he roared once more, ‘BRACE!’ before dropping to his knees and lifting his shield over his head, committing himself and the rest of the man as a gap formed in the shield wall. Discipline and trust formed over countless battlefields won over the confusion and his men followed his suicidal command, trusting his command but leaving themselves open to the surrounding warriors who closed upon them with glee.
His last vision before the world became a storm of fire and shrapnel was the sight of those distant figures adopting a curious, squat like pose that allowed the cannons they bore across their back to unleash their explosive payload in a shallow arch directly upon the backs of their unsuspecting foe.
Thunderous explosions tore across the enemy formation and turned the world into a cataclysm of broken stone and raging fire as wet, warm parts showered him and his men, who braced, and low, managed to endure the barrage much better than the opponent.
Much better did not mean unscathed though as a number of men had fallen to the attacks of the foe before the barrage landed, and a few more had fallen to the flying shrapnel. He himself had taken a savage blow to his shield that had broken through and cut into his arm. Unwilling to risk further attacks, he gird himself and launched upwards forcing his foe back through sheer effort and desperation. A wild eyed look allowed him to take on the battlefield as he squared off against his opponent, as men on both sides of the field slowly picked themselves up. He barely managed to exchange more than a few half hatred blows with his foe before the thundering Lost crashed into the rear of the enemy lines… Although calling them lines at this point was a misnomer with more than a quarter of the foe down and the remainder still trying to blink the dirt and blood from their eyes, with the ringing in their ears making them oblivious to the doom that rushed towards them.
The effect was brutal. The Lost barely slowed when meeting the first warriors, only a portion of whom had turned to meet the new threat with no semblance of order or cohesion to their desperate attempts at a shield line. Piston like muscles and sinews one could almost hear contracting powered them across the broken formation of their foe, flinging full grown and armored Dweghom warriors back and powering through.
The charge carried them so deep Mansreg could see the terrible detail of their muscles bunching and straining beneath the skin as they delivered brutal blows pummeling blows that deformed armor and shields while pulping the flesh beneath it. His eyes widened to see their flesh ripple and turn craggy and stone like where enemies struck them, not perfectly but providing them with much greater toughness than bare skin, no matter how tough, ever could.
As the lurid glow of the Lost’s brazier, Mansreg forgot his fatigue. A half dozen brutes now engaged over a hundred of his foe, and he and his men could help turn the tide. He forgot his despair and denied his injuries. The Ancestor was free! All they had to do was join forces with his guardians and the day was theirs.
‘MOAGHM DOR!”, roared as he charged his foe.
‘MOAGHM DOR!’, his Warriors answered in a full-throated roar and hurled themselves into battle and glory.