The Fallen World

Fort Battleaxe - Part 5

     Gallit paused as he and his company reached the outer gates. The enemy had been pushed back by the sudden emergence of the defenders, giving them a temporary breathing space, but he could see them gathering now in their tens of thousands, with more arriving from the other side of the city as it became clear that the defenders were only emerging from one of the city’s gates.

     “Over there!” he commanded, pointing to the north along the city’s wall, and he ran, followed by his men. Another company was already there, on a stretch of flat ground, arraying themselves in a defensive formation, and they parted ranks to allow the new arrivals to join them. Gallit looked up at the wall behind them. It didn’t look as though the enemy had occupied it. Why would they? The Sergeant nodded in satisfaction. They wouldn’t have to worry about being attacked from above. Not at first, anyway…

     Zombies in their thousands closed in on them, but against disciplined troops they were nothing more than sides of beef to be carved up, and as the dismembered remains piled up they gave the defenders cover to hide behind. The zombherds blew commands on their bone flutes, therefore, and the undead horrors withdrew, parting to left and right to clear a space in front of the defenders.

     The defenders tensed to fight off an attack by living swordsmen, but curses filled the air as they saw the nature of the troops assembling before them. “Archers!” roared Gallit. “Ready shields!”

     They stood their shields upright on the ground, overlapping them to form a solid wall and crouched down behind them, just in time as the sky was darkened by a cloud of arrows. Cheston felt them hammering into his shield and dodged his head to the side as a lucky strike punched all the way through the thick slennhide, its ironwood tip stopping just where his eye had been. “This is fun!” he muttered.

     “I think I’m going to throw up,” said Grey, looking green.

     “There’s a helmet over there. You can save it and eat it again later.”

     Grey gave him a dark look, then jumped in alarm as an arrow punched clean through his shield, the point stopping less than an inch from his face. “Join the army, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.”

     More flights of arrows followed and the defenders waited it out, but then the assault stopped and the soldiers looked cautiously out to see the archers withdrawing to be replaced by shologs, the first of which were already charging, too fired up with bloodlust to wait for their unit to be properly assembled. “Stand!” shouted Gallit, but his men were already doing so and were drawing their swords. “Form ranks! Stand your ground!” His men tensed up to receive the attack, and a moment later the first of the shologs hit them.

☆ ☆ ☆

     Resalintas dispatched the last of the ogres and then ran towards the nearest sound of battle, where a group of engineers were trapped in a ruined tannery by a large squad of human Shadowsoldiers. The priest ran to their aid, and human blood joined the ogre blood staining his robes and dripping from his sword. With his help the engineers fought their way clear and Resalintas led them towards the outer wall, joining up with other small groups of Ilandians as they went. By the time they reached the outer gate there were a hundred of them, and the priest directed them to a large force of defenders standing with their backs to the wall, in battle with a huge force of shologs.

     As the engineers threw themselves at the shaggy haired monsters Resalintas went back in through the gate and ran into the northern guard tower, then up the stone steps to the watchtower. As he looked around he saw several small clumps of defenders, both inside the wall and outside, under heavy attack from Shadowsoldiers, their numbers gradually diminishing as the invaders took their toll. Good men, being butchered like sheep in an abattoir.