An enemy that killed his own men just to clear a path was in fact a tactical asset as far as Sol was concerned.
Free kills were free kills.
Thankfully, Sol’s paranoia and modern tactical mindset had taken strict precautions before the battle lines were drawn.
To avoid any premature detection by the enemy, he had explicitly ordered the allied forces to hold back. The four to five hundred Veynar and the thousand Zharun were not positioned anywhere near the main pass entrance.
...
As the massive cloud of white dust slowly rolled back, the remaining three thousand warriors of the Coalition horde looked through the clearing space.
They saw the narrow, frustrating bottleneck completely erased, replaced by a wide, open ground where their massive numbers could finally spread out and fight.
A unified, terrifying roar erupted from thousands of enemy throats. The Marauders and Zerith stalkers began beating their heavy stone axes against their shields, their eyes bloodshot with a renewed fury.
The warriors cheered wildly, looking as if they had just been injected with fresh chicken blood.
Their morale, which had been dragged into the mud by Sol’s long slaughter, instantly shot straight through the sky.
They didn’t see a death chute anymore; they saw a wide field through which their sheer numbers could trample the Veynar monkeys to pieces.
The twenty-foot Grand Chieftain stood at the front of the new clearing, his gray body caked in fresh stone dust, his eyes fixed on Sol with a savage look.
On the other hand, the high ridges where the Veynar were hidden fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
Up on the distant slate shelves, the morale of the four hundred to five hundred Veynar veterans took a violent U-turn straight back to the ground.
Just a few minutes ago, their spirits had skyrocketed to the moon while watching Sol single-handedly pulping hundreds of enemies in the slot.
But now, looking down at the wide, open plain that had just been blasted into reality, their faces turned completely ashen.
Their perfect trap was gone.
The narrow throat that leveled the playing field had been shattered, and they were now forced to face a massive, screaming horde face-to-face on open ground.
...
After pulverizing the pass, the Maraduere chief didn’t move, he didn’t know if it was due to overexertion or maybe he just disdained to move further, he stood there like a mountain of fear and motioned for the Coalition army to go ahead.
The roar of the Coalition horde was deafening, a wall of pure noise that seemed to shake the very foundations of the shattered pass.
Kicking up an immense cloud of pulverized white dust, the three thousand remaining Marauders and Zerith stalkers flooded through the non-existent bottleneck, their heavy stone clubs and bone axes swinging wildly in the air.
They scrambled over the freshly blasted slate rubble like a pack of starving wolves, their bloodshot eyes locked onto the wide-open flats.
But their excitement was incredibly short-lived.
As the heavy dust cloud finally rolled back under the heat of the sun, what welcomed them wasn’t a pathetic line of fleeing children.
Instead, a solid, terrifying wall of bone shields and stone-headed axes blocked the entire horizon.
The four hundred to five hundred Veynar veterans had already abandoned their high ridge trails, their heavy leather boots sliding down the slate slopes with practiced speed to form a tight, multi-layered defensive block right across the open clay.
And directly behind their flanks, the one thousand leather-armored warriors of the Zharun stood in a massive, dense block, their long spear blades catching the harsh glare of the slowly dying sun.
Sol’s earlier slaughter inside the narrow corridor hadn’t exactly equaled the numbers between the two armies, but it had brought the massive discrepancy down to a somewhat manageable range.
The Coalition had started with four thousand fresh killers; now, after Sol’s relentless grinding, they were down to roughly three thousand.
Against them stood the combined force of fifteen hundred warriors... five hundred battle-hardened Veynar veterans and a thousand fresh Zharun fighters, excluding the three hundred kids who were holding the very rear line near the flat boulders.
Over the past few seasons, the Zharun had been developing aggressively in the dark.
They hadn’t just sat in their marshland; they had hunted and devoured quite a few smaller neighbor tribes inside the southern delta, absorbing their hunters and stripping their resources to build a strong, thousand-man army.
Fifteen hundred against three thousand on a wide, open ground was still a brutal, bloody calculation, but it was a hell of a lot better than five hundred broken Veynar fighting four thousand monsters alone.
For a brief, shining moment, after calming down from shock of seeing a mountain being pulverized, seeing the enemy numbers a wave of fierce hope rippled through the Veynar ranks.
The veterans tightened their grips on their spears, their chests heaving under their leather tunics as they realized they actually had a fighting chance to break the Coalition’s pride right here on the flats.
The sight of a thousand allied spears at their backs gave them a sudden surge of raw energy.
But that happiness was also short-lived.
...
The Veynar warriors were completely focused on the front, their shields locked shoulder-to-shoulder and their eyes fixed on the massive, roaring horde of Gray Marauders and Zerith rushing over the stone rubble.
Because of the deafening noise of the incoming enemy and the pounding of their own hearts, no one heard the sudden, rhythmic shifting of steps at their rear.
The Zharun warriors suddenly closed the distance Sol had explicitly ordered them to keep.
But, they didn’t seem to move to reinforce the flanking lines or step up to help absorb the incoming shock; instead, their thousand-man block slid forward like a quiet, oily snake, their long spear blades lowering to a horizontal angle as they stepped directly into the Veynar’s blind spots.
The first ones to bear the brunt of the sudden movement were the Veynar elders.
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