There were a lot of the fellows, so despite the slaughter, despite the bottlenecks, despite the cavalcade of spells, despite the butchering of their most powerful members/demons/mutants/beasts, they kept coming.
After all, where could they run to?
The sound of weapons hitting armor raised the noise level to pure din, but that was fine. Everyone was thrumming to a killing beat, and /tellepathy didn’t care about the noise level at all. The only noise everyone was making was singing or humming along to the music, despite the horns blowing, drums thrumming, inhuman screams, bellows of pain, shrieks of animals, demonic howls, and all the other crazy noise that would have drowned out any normal human voice in the chaos of the battlefield.
Regardless of what the Klaw fanatics were doing, shit got done.
I had four different thought streams on Warlord duty, coordinating, focusing, moving, guiding, warning, relaying. Information went from here to there to everywhere, tones and feelings of the whole battle obvious to everyone Marked as the killing continued.
Despite their numbers, there was no fear at all as the killing continued. The harmonic singing on our side was clearly unnerving them, too.
Someone spotted some siege engines rolling out of the Rift, and the moving lines of slaughter harvesting hundreds of their numbers bent to the new targets. Helices converged on one, two, circled around them, and the demon-carved Rune Cannons began to rupture as their crews and the slaved beasts hauling them fell apart in burning body parts. The Rune Cannons crashed to the ground, the most critical of the Runes carved through, and began to light off.
I sternly told them not to do that, as the Ballista boys could harvest that energy, too. Henceforth, their carriages were merely carved apart, leaving the monstrously heavy barrels lying there impotently on the ground amid the ruins of their crews, forming more impediments for the lines of men behind. Behind the Walls, the Autobow crews cackled and informed the other siege engineers of the stuff coming their way.
The tactic of stacking men up on the walls didn’t work too well when those corpses were burning away beneath them, unless it was a true lemming-like rush ignoring all losses... which usually attracted a Wall of Fire right beneath them, feasting on them faster than they could climb.
Their missile troops were having major problems with the greater range and superhuman accuracy on our end, so suppression fire wasn’t really a thing we had to worry about. Our close-range suppression was a fairly constant barrage of Reserve magic that just wasn’t going to let go of them.
======
Naturally, the situation on the savage races side wasn’t so favorable.
They had neither the unlimited ammunition nor the spell power to inflict harm that we did on ours. What they did have was a lot of ogres, trolls, and giants who could throw a lot of rocks, and, well, Stone Shaping up a whole lot of rocks wasn’t really that difficult.
So, they kept up a decent bombardment, trying to throw at clusters to maximize the effect of being hit by a 200-mph bowling ball. Still, without the Weapons and the range, the minions of Klaw made much better progress in their direction, even managing to bring forth siege ladders and things, and some big monsters that could be used to dig through, climb over, or simply breach the walls.
The savage races had their own beasts, and the Jotuns seemed to enjoy beating on the bigger stuff when it showed up. As for the orcs, goblins, kobolds, and various anthro races, they fought with bloodthirsty zeal, all the Shamans out there whipping them into a frenzy. If they died, they died violently, and if the savage races didn’t have quite the unending numbers of the Warped army, it wasn’t far behind... and they did have the walls.
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Over on our side, a thunderous Demon Weapon breached one of the low, narrow walls, and howling berserkers poured on through, waving their unwieldly Dire Weapons like toys, looking for targets to slaughter.
They came out onto a wide plaza, with a whole lot of armored knights with lances waiting Over There, and more low walls rising around to pin them in.
Hooting monkeys began to rain down iron spheres upon them, iron spheres which vanished into mists and reappeared back in their hands to be tossed down again, crushing down on the hapless armored brutes in the channel below just before the charging Knights hit, led by the mighty Sir Harbromm on his steed. Thunder went off, steel crunched, and overweight brutes went flying with many screams, or were pulped under the hooves of the horsemen.
The knights peeled back and disengaged so smoothly it was almost magical, almost flowing back and away. More fanatics streamed in through the opening endlessly, and then ran into the waiting wall of spears, as the cavalry rode away to get ready for another planned break nearby. The Rockborn pikers smiled nastily, noted that this particular band of oversized mutates was Bannerbound, and adjusted their tactics accordingly...
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There was fighting on the wall over on the savage side for some time, mostly being alleviated by Jotuns standing behind who swept the invaders off the wall with great crunching sweeps of their clubs and mauls, to be further crushed by waiting forces on the ground. Grinning savages waiting below were quick indeed to fall upon them and complete the bone-crushing and skull-breaking.
There were two loci which drew the attention of the Klaw forces. The first was an obvious Obelisk rising behind the center of our lines, wisping the same hue as the vivic fire that was eating away their dead, the black stone slowly and gradually turning white. It was promptly identified as Important in that I Need a Battlefield Objective kind of way, even if they couldn’t see the other two Obelisks set back and away near the Ring, which had been collecting vivus from the battlefields ever since this whole affair began. Filling up this last Obelisk would naturally complete what we wanted to do.
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The other was a huge orcish statue of whatever their god was, which they had set up in delighted crude fashion behind the lines. It looked almost comical with its oversized jaws and huge muscles and brutal expression, but the orcs were fighting in front of it like true barbarians. They could feel the presence of their god upon it, and it took care of their uncertain morale pretty damn well.
Just like on our side, those savages who had survived the endless daily battles had grown stronger. They had burned Demon Weapons to empower their own, they had patched together armor in their own unique way, they had added skulls to their accoutrements, and they had felt the hands of the gods upon them making them stronger.
Their main problem was that far more of them died during the fights then did so on our side. They didn’t have enough Casters to spot heal, and they didn’t have the higher spell power to bring back the dead quick and save their elites easily. They had decent Warlords, but they tended to rely on intermittent frenzy effects rather than constant bonuses. The higobs had decent Drummers who took their jobs seriously, trying to keep the battlefield together and thoughts focused, but the lack of overall healing really hurt.
We let them ‘borrow’ some Healing Traps. With only 1/day/being usage, they weren’t ground-breaking, but they could immediately save someone who was wounded, and restore them to walking status, at least. The trick was getting there to use them, as the idea of carrying comrades to a healer wasn’t a high priority for most of the races there.
Tremble had also taken control of an urgob, and was running here and there around the field, dishing out the spot healing, and effectively turning into a grim, yet shining angel of mercy as she did so. With the Interdiction up she couldn’t fly around, so she needed a bearer, none of whom we wanted to risk over there. There was no way the willpower of one of the lesser savages could measure up to her, so she just grabbed one of them, turning the hapless urgob into her thrall, and wandered around playing healer for them, often relaying information telepathically to commanders, chieftains, and shamans for them to act on, and really helping their overall situation thereby.
She saved hundreds from actual death over the course of the battle, healed thousands of them, and wasn’t afraid to jump in with her thrall and hack into the enemy if the situation called for it. In a relatively short period of time, she was relaying messages back and forth over the battlefield, and had attracted her own motley band of savages chasing her around as she healed, pitching in as she Sang and the savages around her became howling killing machines.
Of course, she wasn’t really Curing them of anything, as there would be limits on that. She was Transferring Wounds to Sama, sometimes massive amounts at a time. Horrible injuries would appear on Sama, and be Healing Edge’d away by Quaver in the next few seconds, a constant wash of pain coming and going that she basically relegated to background static.
The ogres, trolls, and giants loved Tremble. She passed by, and all the many injuries they accumulated vanished and went away. A Mass Transfer could mend up a dozen or more savages at once, returning a tottering, bloodied unit straight to fighting trim.
It didn’t stop the forces of Klaw from breaking through, but it definitely slowed them down... and knowing that there was so much healing behind them, the morale of the savage lines didn’t falter.
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It was near nightfall when the flow of the armies of Klaw began to slow and trail off. With that guttering stop of the reinforcements, a ripple went through the Warped still fighting, as they realized there were no more reserves, and that we had somehow slaughtered down hundreds of thousands of their fellows... and were going to finish up with them.
Even a fanatic would realize that attacking now was useless. The breaks they’d made on our side were just more traps, while the ones made on the savage side just led them into tens of thousands of eager reserves.
They had given it their frenzied, battle-crazed best, and we had reaped them.
They started to pull back, and we sent in the Lion and Wolf forces to give chase, while the Brothers, Briggs, and I found no more targets in the back lines, and began to work towards the front lines with terrifying speed.
Yeah, a bunch of roaring barbarians ripping through them like chaff was a backbreaker... only there was nowhere to run, only piles of corroded gear steaming with vivus and empty of the bodies within, or even still burning with the numbers stacked up there.
The Brothers closed in on the savage’s walls, breached in multiple places, and it was strange indeed for the various savages to cheer, seeing the Helices coming and reaping lives on the ground they had fought over for so long. The remaining Warped could only stare at the swirls of color that had harvested so many of them, leaving the back of the battlefield blazing unwhite with the sacrifices to the Land, before the Helices came for them, metal screamed, flesh burned, souls wailed, and the Land Fed.
----------------
The night was busy.
Despite sixteen hours of nearly nonstop battle, there was shit to do. Very importantly, there was a lot of wealth out there, waiting to be Burned and turned into magic of our own.
Potions of Vitality had proliferated long before this, plenty of regenerating monsters around to provide the blood and liver that was the essential component. This was the last fight, and exhaustion just wasn’t something my people wanted to deal with. Vitality Potions weren’t that hard to make, and when you have several Kingdoms working on putting them together with the wealth and comps coming off this battlefield, getting together a massive supply of them over a few months wasn’t actually all that hard.
Cost a lot of money, sure, but since the Warped were paying for it, what the hell.
As a result, none of our main troops were actually tired, which was momentous from a combat standpoint. Everyone had Karma harvests, and everybody was out here gathering loot that the Casters were scanning for, stacking it on Disks, being careful not to touch seething Weapons that would be wailing and cursing as they Burned.
This battlefield was worth millions, and lights glowed and flashed as we harvested it.
“How’s Tremble?” Briggs asked, as we pushed through a pile of thousands of pieces of armor to pull out the magical ones within it, bringing them out and tossing them to workers waiting behind.
“Cure-bombing the savages mostly, since I can’t accept bunches of Transfers now,” I told him. “It’s fine, she should have everyone done who needs it before Renewal. She probably cut their casualties by fifty percent or more, and certainly their recovery. Unless they are missing a limb, everyone wounded over there is going to be ready to fight tomorrow.”
“Forging a better raider in the future,” Briggs grimaced.
“The sacrifices we make to make alien gods pay,” I agreed with a sigh, crushing a skull out of an overly done Helm that radiated a Fear effect and tossing it back to the waiting Rockborn...