It was cause for celebration when Old Ironsides arrived at the gates of the Ironheart Kingdom, towering over the very race he was created to protect like the being out of myth that he was. With the unstoppable engine of pure destruction that was Old Ironsides now protecting them, many of the citizens in the Ironheart Kingdom now believed that they could weather the storm to come. It was only after the several dozen Dwarves were found mutilated in their own homes, their faces removed and their homes stripped of any worldly possessions that the brief calm brought by Old Ironsides ended.
Never before had the Rats managed to get behind the stalwart lines of defense that the Children of the Stone were known for. How they were able to sneak past the walls, the gates, the numerous patrols and more to make such heinous attacks was a true mystery. Of course, if they had managed to actually do a thorough inspection of their own labyrinth of mining tunnels, sewers and air vents they would have easily come across the myriad entry points that the Rattan had used for centuries to engage in observation, sabotage and more. If the Dwarves had only known that the accidents that had occasionally resulted in master smiths and engineers dying were far from being accidents, they might have realized that the lack of innovation in the Dwarven Kingdoms was due not just to their stubbornness, but also due to literal acts of industrial sabotage.
What made the whole matter worse was that not all of those who lived in the homes that had been attacked had been found dead, or rather they had not been found at all. It was widely speculated that the ones who were missing were taken by the Rats for nefarious purposes, a theory that was far truer than they could have ever realized. Now that the Rattan had a strong, yet undeserved, vendetta against the Dwarves, their acts of wanton hatred and brutality against their foe had escalated to a previously unseen level. ‘Night’ after ‘night’ would pass for the Children of the Stone, with the masses slowly coming to terms with the fact that their patrols, walls and other fortifications could seemingly do nothing to stop the rising fatality and kidnapping rate in the Ironheart Kingdom.
All the while, their king tried in vain to gain even a modicum of extra support for the war that was soon to come. Even when the other nobles of the Kingdom petitioned their brethren and the citizens sent letters calling for their distant kin to assist them, very little was done despite many speeches taking place. The Dwarves from the other Under-Kingdoms had long lived without fear of any threat, and even when their last true line of defense was about to be attacked by a greater force than they could deal with they still languished in their childishly ignorant fantasies of their own unassailability.
It was merely a few months after the surge of murderous intent had swept across the Under-Kingdoms that the Vermintide’s first assault began. The Dwarves of the Ironheart Kingdom had long since cut their teeth on what they had believed were the best that the Rats had to offer, but what came to their doorstep was far worse than they could meaningfully deal with. With the sounds of bells being rung as alarms, the defenders rushed to their positions and aimed their weapons into the distance. At first they could see nothing but darkness sweeping out across the underground horizon, but it soon became clear that the darkness was moving towards them, and the very ground so far away was undulating like a rippling lake of matted fur and snapping jaws.
Rats that were as large as or even larger than wolves barreled towards the first line of defense, a series of pitfall traps with spikes at the bottom. Not even bothering to avoid the traps, the Wolf Rats just kept coming until the traps were filled to the brim with dead bodies, despite being over five meters deep. Those that made it past the pitfall traps were then met by the second line, a minefield, but even this was not enough to truly thin out their numbers and over ten thousand Wolf Rats lost their lives as they were blown to bloody chunks by the explosives. Even when the Dwarven Artillery opened up on them, they still rushed onwards in what seemed to be an endless flood of bodies.
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The third line of defense was a massive maze of barbed wire that was designed to force a foe to either funnel them down a single choke point or risk the long way by navigating the twisting maze of deadly wire. Neither of these choices were what the endless tide of Wolf Rats chose, as they threw themselves at the barbed wire to make a pathway made of bodies for those behind them to cross. Initially this had stunned the Dwarven Defenders into inaction, but they soon began to open fire with crossbows and rifles directly into the ever encroaching mass of rodents of unusual size. The only light at the end of the tunnel was that the number of Wolf Rats seemed to be steadily dropping and at las there seemed to be an end to the tide of oversized vermin.
The Wolf Rats managed to create a blanket of bodies over a good portion of the barbed wire maze before they ran out of bodies, which would be dangerous to let remain if…
A bell rang out across no man’s land. It was not one of the warning bells that had been mounted along the wall, but something deeper and far more sinister. The chiming of that sonorous bell echoed through the tunnels, and even could be heard beyond the walls and gates that reached up to the roof of the cavern. Beyond the final wall that separated the dangerous outside from the (relatively) safe inside, the gong-like noise filled the citizens of the Ironheart Kingdom with a primal dread. If Vaile had been there, he would have said it sounded like the bells salvaged from the ruins of Notre Dame after the Third World War, just deeper and more intimidating.
*BONG* *BONG* *BONG* *BONG* *BONG*
The bell chimed five times in total, with each time it tolled instilling more fear and apprehension in the normally fearless defenders of Dwarf-kind. Then, immediately after the bell chimed its last, the sounds of other, smaller bells began to ring out across the cavern. The cacophonous noise that emanated from beyond the line of sight indicated that the bells that chimed this time were more numerous and varied greatly in size and makeup. Any Dwarf could tell that some of these haunting bells were made with standards but many were not, likely made using sub-par materials and/or had metal distributed unevenly through the entire chime. This noise sounded something like a perverse mockery of the ringing of hundreds of church bells from the Human Kingdoms, only driving home the point that this attack was nothing like what had previously been endured.
A flash of emerald light appeared to illuminate the darkness beyond the last Runefire Braziers before the light began to rocket towards a section of the walls. As the ball of green, burning and sparking spell grew closer, the Dwarves on that section of the defenses scrambled to leave as the glob of destructive magic the size of a Steam Tank slammed into it at an ungodly speed. Chunks of metal and stone went flying as a massive hole was gouged out from the base of the wall. The blob of mana had taken a sharp dive merely a few moments before it would have hit the defense positions, and had instead directed itself into what the Dwarves considered a worse position.
Another flash of green light came from the darkness, followed by another and another after that. All of the blasts of eldritch energy were seemingly aimed at the occupied positions, but all veered off course at the last moment and carved ever larger holes into the wall’s base. More than twenty of these blasts struck the wall at its lowest point, but still that section held firm. It was only after the thirty-first impact that the walls started to strain themselves in their effort to keep from crumbling, and shortly after another five shots hit the wall the ramparts could not hold itself up and crashed to the ground.
*BONG* *BONG* *BONG* *BONG* *BONG*
The big bell chimed again, followed shortly thereafter by the hundreds of other smaller bells ringing out from beyond sight. A rumbling from the darkness drew the attention of the defenders away from the collapsed wall section and back out towards the shadows, where the glow of over a hundred Rattan siege weapons barely illuminated the silhouette of the onrushing tide of over eighty million Rat-People.