“To attack the enemy while encircled by their formation, would be the sort of audacious maneuver that went down the history books as examples of great success, or as examples of when hubris caused a complete military disaster. There were no other possibilities.” - - Laugge les Charl, prominent tactician from the Clangeddin-Knallzog conflict, circa 407 VA.

What Reinhardt ordered his Company to do was something that went against every shred of common military wisdom. His Company of a thousand mercenaries was deep within the Warforged formation, surrounded on all sides by at least six thousand of the slave soldiers. Rather than try to escape from the disadvantageous position, however, he commanded his troops to split up and attack the Warforged all around them.

There was a direction to the seemingly nonsensical move, however. The main thrust of the Free Lances’ offense was directed towards the rear of the Warforged formation that were engaged with Nestor and his First Legion on the frontlines. Reinhardt himself led the best shock troopers and killers amongst the Company in that direction with their goal being to collapse the enemy formation and open a way for them to rejoin their allies.

The mercenaries who struck at all the other directions were tasked to stall and buy time for him to do that. They engaged the other elements of the Warforged formation around them while slowly giving way, keeping the enemy tied up with them and thus preventing them from assisting the frontlines. The Company’s shieldbearers were assigned to these units to help bolster their defense for the mission.

Lars commanded the overall battle on that side, with Grünhildr and Salicia working alongside him. That the former Theodinaz tactician was placed in charge of that side was a great gesture of trust from Reinhardt, since Erycea and her unit was part of the troops assigned there. Indirectly, it also placed pressure on Lars to do his best as he relayed command to one unit after another as the situation demanded.

Grünhildr led her troops and held the western side with the help of some shieldbearers from Mischka’s troops, as it was where the Warforged assault was at its fiercest. The burly mixed-breed woman’s paired weapons cleaved through dozens of pike shafts and reduced them to long sticks, the sturdy wood no match against the void-coated blades of her weapon.

When an enemy Blademaster attempted to stop her from dismantling their pikes, the man found to his dismay that his weapon, while made of good steel, was no more resistant to void magic than the wooden shaft of the pikes. Grünhildr sliced the Blademaster’s weapon into three separate pieces before she did the same to its wielder.

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All that while, the normally coordinated responses of the Warforged on the north side – where Erycea’s unit was stationed – turned haphazard and messy. It was Salicia’s doing, as while the one-eyed archer remained near the center of the mercenary formation with Hannah walking by her side, she still contributed to the battle decisively.

The rest of Hannah’s fellow flying scouts were high above the battlefield, so high that an arrow would not be able to reach them. They scouted out the location of enemy unit commanders with their sharp eyes from high above and relayed the information to Hannah below with high-pitched shrieks that were only audible to their kind and a few other tribes of therians.

Hannah in turn relayed the location of those enemy commanders to Salicia, who would then step up onto a large, flat shield that would then be hoisted up into the air by two burly mercenaries. That allowed her to stand high above the fighting for a brief period of time before they lowered the shield back down to avoid retaliation from enemy archers.

Each time she was hoisted up, Salicia would have three arrows held tight between her fingers and a fourth already nocked on her bowstring. She would rapidly shoot them one after another at her chosen targets, loosing all four arrows in as many seconds, the last arrow often leaving her bow just as the mercenaries that supported her foothold lowered her down once more.

Every one of her arrows unerringly found its target, and either killed or incapacitated them. Since she focused on headhunting the Warforged commanders, their cohesion and chain of command was naturally impacted by her actions. In turn, that lessened the pressure faced by the Company’s troops by a good bit, and she repeated the feat each time Hannah relayed her more targets to snipe out.

As for the Company’s southern flank, the Warforged there were the worst off, as they not only had to deal with the massive gap in the formation – created when the mercenaries bullied their way through earlier – but also with a pincer attack from both the mercenaries to their rear and Griselda’s Second Legion from their front at the same time. They were far too busy fighting for their own survival to aid the rest of the compatriots.

At the north side, Erycea and her unit fought alongside Nicole’s scouts as they both formed a screen to keep the Warforged away from Alva and the Company’s archers behind them. That in turn allowed Alva and the other archers to support those at the frontlines by raining arrows at the warforged, each of the loosing their arrows from relatively close range and thus able to shoot for speed rather than having to aim too carefully.

The rain of arrows did not kill many of the Warforged, but the injuries they caused incapacitated quite a few, and more often than not caused a distraction that another of the mercenaries exploited to more serious results. To top it off, the archers were not the only nuisance they had to deal with either, as those who managed to get close to the mercenaries found out the hard way.

Erycea’s unit had several mages amongst their numbers, herself included, and they used their various affinities to further throw their enemies into disarray. Those Warforged who managed to get close to them found themselves under assault by flames, spears of ice, globs of mud, and shards of glass, all of which were aimed straight at their faces, often right at their vulnerable eyes.

While they were thus distracted, they naturally become easy prey for the young mercenaries they face, and were swiftly dispatched, causing those behind them to grow warier.