It started with a single person having their leg blown off by a landmine, only to topple over and die by yet another mine when he fell upon it. Not an auspicious start to a battle, but this was somewhat expected. Darksol and its vassals had a quite long period of time to dig in, and so a few hidden explosives were to be expected.

What was not expected, however, was the sheer randomness of their placing. Up until recently, landmines had always been panted in set patterns. If you knew what these patterns were, you could get through them while taking fire. Several battles had taught the Elves those patterns, and they had prepared for them, but this was an entirely different set of affairs.

There was no rhyme or reason to their placing, and the sheer volume of them made any attempt to cross a costly endeavor. There really was only one option to get forward, and that was to walk through the paths cleared by the bodies of your fallen brothers in arms. But all that would do is create even more dead as people funneled into killing fields. Other avenues had to be explored, but each one that was introduced new dangers to deal with.

It was expected that the tall grass would hide their advance along a certain approach, only for those grasses to hide thousands of metal traps that not only locked their victim in lace but shattered the bones in their leg when activated.

Those things were on a hair-trigger, and their teeth were covered in a hellish mixture of excrement and various contagions. It was a near-certain death sentence to anyone who got their leg caught in those traps, and each time one snapped shut it resulted in more ranged fire streaming in from the Darksolian positions.

As each approach was explored, more issues cropped up. On one seemingly safe path that provided lots of cover, the ground belched out hazardous gasses that sent trained and hardened warriors to the ground as they coughed up their own lungs. Another one saw the only viable path for cavalry see the riders thrown from their mounts as tiny metal spiked punctured hooves and paws while randomly placed yet quite deep pothole caused legs to snap under the strain.

One path went through a deeper trench that at first appeared to be unmanned yet was revealed to be a drainage line when water was released and drowned nearly everyone using the trench. There was no way to plan for any movement forward that did not potentially run into endless randomness and insanity, and the longer the battle dragged on the more the Elves began to wonder if there even was a way to win.

However, as soon as these thoughts began to swirl around in everyone’s heads, they dissipated as if they were never there to begin with. In their stead was a growing and absolutely insane belief that they were winning. Somehow, despite all the facts to the contrary, one by one every Elf there came to the conclusion that they were on the very cusp of victory. There was a growing sentiment that, if they just pushed that little bit harder and made just a few more sacrifices, they would be able to win and all that they had lost would be undone in a miracle unlike any other.

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Surely, they thought, if they won even the dead would return to the realm of the living not as undead but as the way they were in life! Surely, they thought, the Darksolian forces were about to break. Surely, they thought, they were just a few minutes away from absolute victory.

None of this was true, by the way, but anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge of magic would be able to tell you that the Elves were under the effects of what would normally be a very beneficial illusion. Boosting morale in such a way could make miracles come true, but in this case all it was doing was driving the Elves deeper into a meat grinder that they had no hope of breaking through.

Instead of an ordered force, the Elven lines were now becoming a massive tidal wave of bodies that both did not care for their own lives and also did not care for strategy or tactics. There was no orderly advance, no fine maneuvering, no flanking, and no regard for anyone or anything’s safety. All that there was right now was a mob with no regard for its own survival running full kilt into layers upon layers of traps and obstacles, and that was just what Darksol wanted.

The Elves abandoned their main camp in droves and rushed forwards to try their luck at crossing the no man’s land before them. Mines exploded, bear traps snapped shut, punji traps skewered legs and feet, poison gas destroyed organs and tissues, and all the while arrows, bolts, and bullets rained down upon those trying to brave the slaughter they willingly threw themselves into.

Eventually, though, the sheer weight of numbers was enough to break through the no man’s land and get among the undead that made up the first manned line of defense. The Skeletons had kept up the fire even as they were being cut down or ripped apart, never stopping in their duty until every last one of them was scattered across the ground or broken into shards.

This emboldened the Elves even further, and they rushed deeper into the Darksolian defenses until they came up against something that would have given saner men cause for concern. The Skeletons were nothing special and had not even attempted to defend themselves from the Elves, but what was now acting as a wall of bodies was something that would give the Elves a bit more of a challenge.

Though not nearly the equal of an adult Elf of any kind, the numberless hordes of the Zombies were more than enough to send the advance of the overly self-assured Elves to a screeching halt. Now before them was something that they would need to invest more time into dealing with, and while they were not aware of it yet, they were all essentially running on empty in terms of energy. It was a near certainty that they would make it past the Zombies, but after that they would almost certainly feel the boost that they had been given vanish like smoke.

And when that finally happened, they would quite possibly feel the same level of deathly exhaustion that they had forced their own kind to experience in the early days of the war. Maybe their hearts would not explode, but they would all almost certainly drop to the ground and quite possibly scream due to the strain they had put upon themselves.