Ezra took his men to the frontline, squeezing past soldiers when necessary. The sounds of battle neared and they stopped for a moment. They each grabbed the rock wall and closed their eyes, a strange yellow glow enveloped the men and their skin started to change.

It wasn’t noticeable at first, but after half a minute or so their skin looked like stone, even their eyes had taken on the color and texture of stone. Lucifer who was following them out of curiosity was rather surprised.

He was further surprised when the group of stoneskin men shoved themselves into the thickest part of the battle. Some of them swung thing picks to devastating effect, anything that got in their way whether it was skeleton ant or rock was pulverized on contact.

With just the 6 of them alone they were able to hold the line easily. Soldiers behind them cheered as they were resting.

One of the men's pick suddenly broke in two, the wooden handle exploded into splinters from excessive force. The man next to him laughed, “it's not a mace dumbass”

“shut up” he replied and started punching and kicking his enemies with little loss to effectiveness. Moments later the man who had just jeered him swung his pick down onto a skeleton skull and his pick cracked along the shaft.

“ha, who’s using it like a mace now”

“that undead was harder than usual” he complained as he hit another skeleton completely shattering the handle. “fuck”, he cursed before throwing the pieces into the crowd of enemies.

It didn’t take long before all 6 of them had destroyed their picks. They simply weren't used to their stone forms so they used too much force with what can be considered a fragile weapon in their hands.

Now they were reduced to hand to hand combat their slip-ups happened more often, one of them forcefully kicked a skeleton, but the resistance he expected to be there wasn’t so he lost balance and stumbled forward.

His comrades noticed immediately and burst forward with vicious punches elbows and kicks to move the line forward. Ezra jumped back from next to the tunnel wall and patted the shoulder of the man that was fighting next to him, he grunted and took a half step to the left to cover both their positions.

Ezra saw the enemy's start swarming even harder and one of his men was on the ground. His torso was lying in front of the line as his men tried to push the enemies back while his legs were sprawled behind the line.

He could tell that even while lying down the man was still punching enemies while trying to use his legs to get purchase to pull him back, however, his stone body made him heavy and he couldn’t slide himself back or stop attacking for long enough to put his hands down and get up.

Ezra rushed forward and grabbed the mans legs and pulled, they both moved back a couple inches before stopping and Ezra could feel the man fighting harder against something. Ezra pulled harder, but the man slid forward so his thighs were almost past the fighting line, “shit!”.

They suddenly stopped moving forward and Ezra could see that the man's knee had melded with the stone below creating an anchor.

Ezra jumped up and directly stood over the man and started desperately thrashing into the sea of monsters. The man's body suddenly tugged forward creating cracks on the ground where his knee was connected then slackened, screaming quickly followed and Ezra and his men forgot about defense and just focused on becoming gods of slaughter.

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Each swing of a limb would crush something, sometimes they weren't sure what they crushed but that didn’t matter they needed to move forward, however, the monsters were doing the same. The ants were even climbing over the heads fo the other monsters in a frenzy to get at their enemies.

Ezra got an occasional glimpse between the moving body parts and saw that the man was missing an arm and was even more desperately trying to defend himself. He swung around his head crazily and even in this awkward position he managed to pulverize ant skulls and limbs.

The soldiers that were watching charged forward and used their spears long reach between the frontline men, they weren’t worried about hitting their own because their spears wouldn’t do anything to their rock bodies anyway except blunt their spears.

One of the rock soldiers slammed his elbow down onto an ants skull and issued a crisp crack, BOOM!, the ant's skull vaporized along with half the rock man's torso and knocked over the rest of them.

Large boulders fell from the ceiling and crushed dozens of soldiers and monsters, however, the rocks that were going to fall on the stone men seemed to be made of soft clay as when they made contact with them the boulders simply disintegrated into dirt.

Ezra pulled himself to his feet using a wall that was suddenly next to him steady himself. Another 3 stone men stood up with him with only a few minor cracks from the explosion. As his senses came back to him he once again dashed forward intent on saving his men, however, when he could see clearly he noticed several ants were latched onto the downed mans remaining arm.

The ants were used to crushing stone with their pincers, but the steel armor on the man was another story. They pulled at the limb and more cracks formed around the man's knee. Ezra dashed forward with his men half a step behind him.

Suddenly the ground underneath the man's knee gave way leaving a disk of rock attached to his knee, the man was pulled forward so suddenly some of the ants fell over and let go. Ezra jumped forward and simply used his body to plow through the swarm and grabbed at the man.

However, he was too slow. Before he could get a good grip the man was pulled into the swarm. Ezra was surrounded and smashed everything around him until something gripped his shoulder and pulled him out of the swarm. Two powerful hands from two stone warriors managed to pull him out before he was dragged to the ground, whether this was by sheer luck or his greater combat abilities which kept himself from being grabbed he didn’t know.

The tunnel was filled with screams as the ants struggled to find weak points in the one-armed man's armor. He struggled fiercely kicking and punching, but the ants latched onto his limbs making it impossible to hit anything properly. Soon the ants found straps holding his plate on and easily cut them off and his armor was quickly stripped from him. His screams intensified as the ants took chunks from his hard stone body. In his terror-stricken state he forgot to return to human form, a stone man didn’t really have organs to give out so it wasn’t a quick death.

Soldiers heard the screams and were rushing forward to fill the gap and only 2 stone men were holding the line with a few remaining soldiers while steadily moving back. The other stone man grabbed Ezra by the shoulders and was opening his mouth wide and closing it rapidly.

Ezra realized his hearing was shot and made a few gestures to the stone man, “fallback” was essentially the meaning, the stone man nodded and replaced a few soldiers on the front-line as it continued steadily moving backward.

Ezra grabbed a health potion from a reinforced pouch on his belt and downed the liquid, as he did so he also turned back to a normal human. Health potions don’t heal stone very well.

The line was moving steadily back towards and soon they will have no more room to go when they meet the tail and of the army. Ezra had to think of something. There were a few of the dummy tunnels but that's it, he was out of room out of means of effectively fighting back and out of ideas.

He ground his teeth and turned back into his stone form. If there weren’t any plans there was only the brute force method.

Meanwhile above ground on the citadel walls facing the digger army, a soldier asked, “what's that”, and pointed it out to a nearby mage. The mage infused mana into his eyes enhancing his vision. Several hundred meters from the walls there were black things coming from the ground, he looked closer and found out they were giant ants, “that can’t be right” he murmured.

A commanding officer heard the commotion and asked the mage what was happening, he was rather nervous about the diggers doing nothing yet but also relieved.

“there are giant ants on the surface sir” replied the mage.

“none of the duchies can tame giant ants so what's happening”

the mage responded, “your guess is as good as mine sir, but it looks like they are waiting” he squinted his eyes and felt his eyes strain as he focused harder, “it seems some of them are carrying something”

“what,” asked the commanding officer.

The mage frowned, “I don’t know sir, its too far away to tell, the only reason I can tell its there at all is the light is glinting off of it”

Several minutes later in the middle of where the ants were waiting the ground shook and the topsoil crumbled and fell into a newly formed hole. Cheers were heard from the hole and someone stuck their head above ground.

He didn’t have time to react before an ant pincer wrapped around his head and squeezed it until it exploded into a gory mess, the corpse was dropped down onto someone saying, “hey go u--”

A slightly larger ant with quite intricate patterns on his exoskeleton moved over the hole with a vial in its pincers which were slightly melted. Crack, the vial broke and the liquid rained down the hole and screams of pain quickly followed.

The ants then moved to the hole and dropped the vials down the hole then retreated. The screams died down and a green gas started wafting out of the hole.