Hand Over Fist

Dark Tide

With a shudder, the encircling line around the human position took several staggering steps to the west, the movement enough to rupture it in several places. 

"Hold your positions," van Joss barked. "We need to keep the enemy's focus Here so the captain and the rest of our company can break through to safety!" 

The rest about preparing for the hopelessness of Their position as the rear guard he didn't have to say. It was the reason he had the captain send him volunteers. They already knew what fate awaited them. They would do their jobs and sell each pace the enemy gained for blood and pain. 

Grimly the line dug in, preparing for the onslaught they knew was coming. But van Joss didn't want to take the chance that they could lose the enemy's attention. Normally he would've ordered his archers to randomly pepper the enemy lines on either side of their position to get their attention. But he had left the archers with the captain; that option wasn't available. 

Instead he found some more throwing knives, apparently a favorite weapon of pike men. 

"Mind if I use these?" he asked in a low voice as he pulled several free from the holster from the pike man in front of him was wearing. 

"Not at all, sir," the man said through gritted teeth as he strained to hold his position. "Me hands are a bit busy at the moment anyway." 

Van Joss gave him a quick slap on the back in thanks before twisting and throwing, a move he quickly repeated in the other direction. The knives darted through space to scythe down several Primiad that were crowding the shield wall's flanks. The result was a muted growl from the remaining enemy soldiers and reinforcements began to arrive in droves in an effort to fold the ends of the wall in on itself. 

Seeing that, van Joss was grimly satisfied. They were managing to keep the horde's attention focused on them. Judging by how the encirclement was breaking down behind them, the captain would soon break through. He pulled more throwing knives free from a different pike man's holster and began picking his targets. Just a little longer, ... 

"A shield wall?" Uthon said with a frown as a lull in the crush around their escort gave him a chance to look down and see how the surviving Gideonites were faring. 

"I've seen Kanid legionnaires employ a similar tactic," Blacklock said, the big Lupus on the other side of their escort group, pacing Kata's personal guard. "We were able to defeat it with some effort, but those bloody monkeys don't seem to possess the skill or strength to do the same. It appears the humans are actually defending well." 

Uthon frowned but said nothing. The Orders despised such defensive tactics despite their usefulness. They preferred to take the fight to the enemy before an attack pinned them down. It gave them more mobility on the battlefield. 

That being said, whoever was in command down there seemed to know what they were doing. The Lupus hadn't seen it due to a lack of experience with such tactics but he had. The shield wall was allowing a rear guard action to take place. The Gideon commander obviously wanted the monkeys to focus their attention on the rear guard, throwing up the shield wall to dig in and present a target the monkey commanders were finding impossible to ignore. 

The question was why? What did the commander want to draw the Primiad's attention from? 

A quick scan along the Gideon position quickly yielded the answer: a pike and archer push against the encircling line in an effort to break through. Seeing that brought a small smile to the gruff master of the Order of Grim. 

Not so defensive after all. Pinning the Primiad down at one end of the formation so they could more effectively push against the other? He wouldn't have thought any of Gideon's current crop of officers capable of such a move. Especially one that, an hour before, had sent their cavalry in on a blind charge, let them get cut to pieces then refuse to retreat once the attack had faltered, letting the company get surrounded and cut off. It was almost as if there were two separate officers in charge down there. The first failed in their ill-advised charge, losing a significant number of troops and trapping the rest. And so was replaced by a second that was decisively trying to free them. The question was who? Who amongst the Gideonites actually had the stones to pull an extraction like this off?