“D-Dekius!”
Marcus stumbled his way through the thick ash cloud that had enveloped the ratman forces, hearing the sounds of sporadic combat echo and weave through the battlefield.
“C-cough complete madness!” Skeever shrieked beside him. “MEN! IF YOU ARE HAVING EARS TO HEAR ME, BE FORMING DEFENSIVE RINGS AT YOUR POSITIONS NOW!”
His command was punctuated by the chilling shriek of two kobolds that came running at him from out of the mist, daggers glinting in their already bloody hands. With a single twist he turned and cut them both down with Gatskeek’s machete, wasting no time as he stepped over their corpses and guided Marcus out of this chaos.
“Deekius!” Marcus kept coughing. “Deek-“
“BE FEELING THE MIGHT OF THE UNCLEAN!” both men then heard – a statement that could only belong to the rat they sought in the death-fog that had engulfed them. “BURN, HERETICS!”
They watched as a gout of green flame snaked its way through the fog before them, seeing five Kobold warriors fall to the ground in fiery heaps.
Skeever swiftly ran to slit their throats and finish them off as Marcus finally set eyes upon his Gloomraava.
“Sire,” Deekius spat. “The situation is being dire, I – I am feeling the claw of the Unclean upon me.”
Marcus blinked through the death-haze and saw Deekius’ bleeding limbs as the rat shuffled up to him, slamming his staff into the ground to clear more of the fog and unveil where their enemies had begun gnawing away at their once-disciplined lines.
“We’re not done yet, my Gloomraava,” Marcus said, spitting the phlegm that was rising in his throat. “With you beside us, we stand a chance.”
Deekius barely croaked out his answer. “Be…be giving me your orders…Shai-Alud.”
“CONTACT!” Skeever screamed as another unit of six Kobolds appeared like wraiths through the grey world of the battlefield. He managed to slice through the leather armor of two of them before the other three leaped at Deekius, scimitar’s spinning wildly in their hands. The old rat only just managed to meet their assault with his staff and push them back into the waiting maw of Skeever.
But one of the Yips had resisted the strength of the Gloomraava. One of them managed to pin him down as his comrades flew to distract his brutish cousin with their feeble lives. The Kobold stared into the eyes of the Gloomraava and grimaced as he brought his blade up to finish him.
Then the little creature went flying from the body of the priest. His dagger left his hand, and he felt the weight of a very, very filthy human pinning him down.
Deekius watched with no small surprise as he saw Marcus bear down on the Kobold and start pummeling the little creature’s face with his bare fists.
“By the Unclean…” the priest whispered. “By – SKEEVER! Protect the Shai-Alud! Protec-“
His final wish was fulfilled almost at once – Marcus took up the fallen dagger of the little Yip and plunged it through the creature’s throat, watching its eyes bulge and its tiny limbs spasm and finally give up under him.
When he rose, he did so as a bloodied warrior, now.
“I – I told you, Deekius,” he said with a stammer. “You won’t be dying until I’m good…and done with you. That’s an order.”
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Deekius met the stare of his General with new eyes then – eyes renewed by the determination he saw in the man he had summoned so long ago to lead them against their enemies. Such a man would never simply give in. And neither would he.
So as Skeever slit the throat of their last assailant, the Gloomraava plunged his staff into the solid earth that still existed under them and chanted a prayer that he knew could be his last.
“ARK’RAHSALUUR!”
The fog and filthy air around them was pulled away like a curtain being opened to reveal the grim night beyond their ken. As the blanket of fog died, they looked out onto where the army had once stood and saw now a sea of corpses littering the grounds before Grindlefecht’s gatehouse, with pockets of ratmen fighting against increasingly desperate Kobolds.
It was almost impossible to tell which Kobolds belonged to Marcus’s side anymore – the mass of red death that had surged forth from the smoking remains of Grindlefecht had smashed into his army from all sides. It looked like they had massacred the Kobold auxiliaries first – Marcus could make out the forms of Yips screaming as they rubbed their blinded eyes and fled from the battlefield.
So much for choosing a new path in life, he thought. But, considering the madness this battle had devolved into, he couldn’t really blame them.
Grindlefect was now just a pillar of smoke and burnt rubble. Whatever explosives had been employed, they were of a kind far more sophisticated than Marcus had ever seen in the Underkingdom. Those detonations had not been random, had not been haphazard – they had been the result of a conscious effort to bring down the walls and cause this eruption of ash as a strategic move. Such strategy was not something he had forseen. How could he? Skegga had heretofar demonstrated nothing but the propensity for throwing larger and larger numbers of men at a problem and hoping they would make it go away. How could the wounded toad have come up with something like this?
Marcus continued to scan what he could of the environment and saw that the Spineripper units were missing. For all he knew, the detonation of the walls had taken them all. Three hundred good, strong men. What were to be the vanguard of their victory…
Damn it. Damn it all!
Skeever looked about him with nothing but unrestrained fury.
Don’t let them see you bleed, Marcus, Marcus told himself. Remember, this battle is far from over…
“I will be slaying them all myself!” he roared. “They will not be taking our day of glory from us!”
Marcus looked into the broken battlefield with an altogether different attitude, however. He looked at the tight clusters of Kobolds that swam before the spears of the ratguard infantry and saw the chance they presented.
“Patience, Skeever,” he said, still coughing through the residue of the ash blanket. “There’s not need to throw your life away. We aren’t done yet.”
The ratman turned to his commander with abject confusion.
“Sire!” he shouted over the din of clashing blades. “The army is being decimated! I must be joining the fight to –“
“You will order the troops to fall back towards the nearest outlying village,” he said. “Tell them to maintain as wide a formation as possible.”
Skeever’s eyes went wide as he realized his General’s contingency – something even he had forgotten about.
“What?” Marcus asked with a bloody grin. “You didn’t think I would bank everything on pure strength of manpower alone, did you? You know me better than that, Skeever Steelclaw.”
As his Talon-Commander smirked back at him, wiping the bloody chunks of his fallen foes from his chops, Marcus turned to Deekius and commanded him to amplify the voices of both himself and Skeever. Communication would be vital if they were going to turn this shitshow around.
“RATGUARD OF FLEAPIT!” Skeever bellowed, his voice cutting through the confusion as he charged towards the East flank of their dwindling spear column. “FALL BACK! WIDE-FORMATION! BE MOVING!”
The ratguard gave a jilted ‘HO-RAH!’ as they saw their commander sprint towards them. Then their spirits soared as they heard the Shai-Alud deliver his own command to their metal monsters that had been waiting in the shadows of their camp for their moment.
Deekius sent small burr of light into the air, a shimmering star that acted like a flare, signalling the twelve-pounder handlers that they were to ready their weapons.
And Marcus, looking into the screaming faces of the Kobold red-mass leaping after their retreating enemies, bellowed one simple command:
“FIRE!”
***
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