“Is that what I think it is?” Pitkins asked.
“Absolutely. It’s a warning system that the Sodorfians set up. Lest you think Tristan’s forces have lost the element of surprise, you can rest assured he’s found some way to position his forces so that all the warning in the world will no longer do the Sodorfians any good. He always finds a way.”
Knowing that he had to speed up so that he could get Pitkins close enough to the action to be able to see what he himself would later be up against, Istus began flapping his wings harder and faster than ever, propelling him and Pitkins through the air at a very high velocity. Pitkins struggled to hang on. Within about ten minutes, Istus had managed to find a tree nearly five hundred feet tall, and he perched on it with Pitkins so that they could watch the battle unobserved.
“GET IN DEFENSIVE FORMATION!!!” shouted Captain Auschor, nearly jumping out of his skin as soon as he heard the ominous tolling of the warning bell.
“Where do you think the attack is coming from, Captain?” asked Lieutenant Usendurg.
“There’s no telling for sure . . . from the north I would expect, however. But, not a single scout has come and reported any enemy activity close to the border, much less within Sodorf. However, I’m very concerned about General Fuhdor still not having returned. You’d think that he’d have at least sent a messenger to us by now to let us know the status of things in Dachwald! I have a gnawing feeling that things went horribly wrong for him. It was obvious to everyone he was just itching for a battle, and I heard from many fellow officers that he was being rash and impulsive with his decision-making. Since we don’t yet know exactly what we’re up against, I want everyone to form a defensive square. Order your men! Now!”
“Yes, Captain!” Lieutenant Usendurg replied, and he immediately began forming his men into a square in the large field just outside of Seihdun. There had been nowhere near enough room in Seihdun for all ten thousand Sodorfian regulars, and, wanting to be able to supervise all of his troops, Captain Auschor had decided months ago to have all of his men camp in a field located less than a mile east of Seihdun.
Suddenly, running south, an expression of fear on his face so terrifying it alone nearly drained the morale right out of his fellow soldiers’ bodies, a messenger came running south screaming, “THE DACHWALDIANS ARE COMING!! THE DACHWALDIANS ARE COMINGGG!!”
And coming they most certainly were. General Sivingdon rode at the front of a large group of cavalry, and they were quickly closing the distance between them and the fleeing Sodorfians. All of his cavalry were equipped with fishing maces, and they were ready to use them. General Sivingdon drew first blood. A young Sodorfian regular, about thirty feet away, seemed like a good target to begin with. He flipped the switch on his fishing mace to allow some slack to be released, and then he brought his arm back behind him and then brought it forward violently.
SWOOOSHH . . . SMACKKK!! The steel ball went crashing into the back of the terrified Sodorfian’s head, sending bits of skull and brains flying everywhere, killing him nearly instantly. Having allowed their general the honor of drawing first blood, the other Vechengschaft cavalry now opened up with a murderous vengeance, their zeal eclipsing that of a group of starving wolves attacking a herd of antelope.
BAMM!! SMACKKK!! CRASH!! Many of the Sodorfians had been asleep when the Dachwaldians arrived, so they had not even had the chance to properly armor themselves. The Dachwaldians began thrashing the Sodorfians mercilessly and indiscriminately with their razor-sharp, spike-covered steel balls of death. Those that were running away presented particularly easy targets, as any hit that connected with the back of their head or spine either killed them instantly or caused them to fall down, whereafter they were brutally and mercilessly crushed by the hooves of the Vechengschaft’s horses.
The Sodorfians coming up against this ruthless assault were being absolutely massacred. The Dachwaldians were cutting through their ranks like a hot knife through butter. Very few of the Sodorfians were able to withstand even one hit from the fishing mace, due to its crushing power. The few that did without exception suffered numerous broken and crushed bones, only to receive a second, fatal strike seconds later.
“FALL BACK!! FALL BAACKKK!!” the officers shouted. It was like telling a drunkard to drink—the troops were already fleeing for their lives. Captain Auschor was furious, but also terrified, and his realization of just how badly his troops were being crushed caused his terror to slightly eclipse his anger, which was also great. He was angry because he realized that it was going to be next to impossible to form a solid defensive square with his men panicking so wildly and uncontrollably. He shouted at the top of his voice for his men to move into formation. A large number of his men tried to do so, but they quickly realized that if they held their position they were going to be trampled by their own men. Left with little choice, they turned to flee southward to avoid being crushed by their fellow soldiers. However, as bad as the situation seemed to Captain Auschor, and especially to the fleeing, panicking men, they didn’t realize the situation was far worse than they thought.
Coming up from the south, with a growl so low, so ominous, so terrifying that it sounded like it was being emitted from a group of large angry bears warning a predator away from a fresh kill, the Moscorians, in their most terrifying regalia and armor came swarming forward across the field like unfed wolves charging a pack of herbivorous, tasty animals. Their armor was pitch black, every square inch of it, except for the portion of the helmet that covered their face. This portion was a bright silver, and the carving on it was hideous and terrifying—it was the face of Veihgung, the god of war.
“RRRRRRRRRRHHHHHGGG!!!!” they growled savagely. Upon seeing these terrifying beasts—the Sodorfians weren’t completely sure they were even human—a good number of Sodorfians soiled themselves on the spot, and some even fainted from fright. One poor Sodorfian dropped dead from sheer terror, not knowing in that split second how kind fate had been to him. Although Tristan had wanted the Moscorians to learn how to use the fishing mace because he knew that it would give them a tremendous advantage in battle, he still knew that the weapon sacred to the Moscorians was the long sword, and so he had made a compromise with them that they could use their long swords in this battle, as long as they were winning. While the Sodorfians were still a good distance away, the Moscorians first decided to start whittling away at their opponents with their longbows.
WHOOSHH!! WHOOSHH!! WHOOSHH, WHOOSHH, WHOOSHH, WHOOSHH, WHOOSHH!! The arrows came flying into the panic-stricken masses of Sodorfians like angry bees out of a hive that has just been disturbed by a honey-seeking bear. Strong enough to pierce thick armor, the effects of these longbow arrows were so devastating against the Sodorfians’ unprotected flesh that many claimed three or more lives before finally burying themselves in the ground. After peppering the Sodorfians to their hearts’ content with arrows, they resumed closing the distance. As they did this, the Vechengschaft behind them continued sending volley after volley of thousands of longbow arrows into the Sodorfians. When the Moscorians got to within sixty feet of the Sodorfians, who at this point didn’t have anywhere to run—they were surrounded on all sides—they unleashed hell on the Sodorfians with their fishing maces.
WHACKK!! CRACKK!! SMASHH!! The assault was relentless and merciless, and even the bravest Sodorfians were quickly demoralized. Feiklen was having more fun than he had had in centuries. Perhaps ever.
Sensing that the Sodorfians probably did not have a whole lot of fight left in them, he barked the command, “READY YOUR SWOOOOORDSS!!!!” at the top of his lungs. A smile crept onto each Moscorian’s face behind his sinister helmet. They put their fishing maces into a tight sheath on their backs.
Brief silence.
SWWWIISH. The sound of nearly five hundred long swords being removed from their sheaths simultaneously was eerie indeed.
“CHAAAARRRRGE! TAKE NO PRISONERS!!” Feiklen shouted. Now at a frenzy of violence and murderous desire that rarely, if ever
, occurs amongst the human species, the Moscorians charged forward, long swords in hand. Although the death and destruction they had caused with their fishing maces and longbows had been fun, they were not going to be satisfied until they spilled blood with their sacred long swords—it had been centuries since they had wet them in combat. They were like hungry sharks attacking a group of injured seals. Captain Auschor, trying to inspire his men, unsheathed his sword and charged the oncoming Moscorians. Feiklen smiled behind his demonic-looking helmet. He approached Captain Auschor without fear and without any intention of giving quarter. Auschor tried hard not to look at Feiklen’s helmet—it sapped the strength right out of him—but at the same time it was terribly difficult not to look at it. It had strange, evil-looking shapes, and the helmet, right in the position where the wearer’s mouth was, was stretched back in a horrible scream of anger and aggression, with large, fang-like teeth descending therefrom. Forgetting every sword lesson he had ever received in his life, Auschor swung wildly at Feiklen in an overhead chop. Feiklen easily dodged the blow by moving to the side, and as he did so he brought his sword hard into Auschor’s stomach, immediately disemboweling him and causing blood to shoot everywhere. Stepping through with his left foot, Feiklen then spun around and with one clean slice cut Auschor’s head right off of his shoulders.
Seeing their captain defeated so quickly and effortlessly terrified the Sodorfians. Feiklen charged alone into a large mass of them. Though vastly outnumbered, he wasn’t even the slightest bit concerned about his safety. With his six-foot-long, razor-sharp sword with which he had practiced and fought for centuries and which he could wield as easily as if it were a stick, he began slicing through one Sodorfian after another. The combination of force and sharpness behind each blow allowed no second chances for anyone unfortunate enough to be in his sword’s path, not even those wearing moderately thick armor. It was more like he was cutting down small shrubs than fighting soldiers. The Dachwaldians on the northern side of the slaughter continued to pummel the Sodorfians with their fishing maces.
Kihlgun was having a particularly good time. But not with a long sword. With his battle hammer. Those Moscorians standing close to him quickly created distance between themselves and Kihlgun, not wanting their long-awaited moment of homicidal frenzy to be destroyed by Kihlgun’s hammer accidentally crushing every rib in their body if it were to accidentally strike one of them when he brought it backwards. As for bones he hit on purpose, he didn’t just break them.
No, he turned them into dust.
With single blows he sent men flying four, five, sometimes eight feet up into the air. Those hit horizontally went flying backwards into their fellow soldiers as if shot out of a catapault, some being impaled by their comrades’ swords in the process and many times knocking dozens of them over. Those unlucky enough to fall down while still alive were not spared either. Kihlgun took a particularly devilish delight in delivering his most powerful blows to non-vital parts of the body. Amongst these, his most favorite was the knee. Many a Sodorfian who fell to the ground, either because he was knocked down by a fellow soldier or from sheer terror, tried in vain to squirm away while Kihlgun delivered a crushing blow to his knee, turning the bones into a fine powder. The thickest armor crumpled underneath the ghastly power of the hammer head making its acquaintance as if it were made of papier-mâché and merely painted to look like real armor. The screams of these poor souls could make a wolf feel pity—but not Kihlgun. It only increased his enjoyment, his resolve to cause more damage and mayhem. He giggled crazily, nearly quivering with joy.
Many Sodorfians were confused as to whose side he was on as they noticed Dachwaldians keeping their distance from him as if he were as much their foe as the Sodorfians’. This caused some of them to gawk when survival would have been better achieved by running like a surefooted deer who has just caught sight of a hunter but knows better than to stop and marvel at the man’s bow. In addition to their confusion caused by the scattering of Dachwaldians away from him, a few were fatally mesmerized at the way he effortlessly wielded the grotesquely large battle hammer around his body, often with just one hand at a time, and they found themselves wondering if they could even lift such a beastly weapon, let alone use it.
One Sodorfian, named Itger, got so caught up in watching the dazzling demonstration that his brain must have failed to realize Kihlgun was seeking volunteers, but not necessarily by choice. As Kihlgun’s hammer rose impossibly high into the sky, his mad eyes burning holes into the soul of Itger the entire time yet somehow hypnotizing him as much as frightening him, Itger never appeared to budge an inch. As Kihlgun’s hammer crashed down on top of his head it did so with so much force that, had Itger been made of steel, he would have found himself a second later buried up to his chin in the ground like a nail that has just been snugly hammered into a piece of wood. Alas, due to the more fleshly composition of the target of the battle hammer, albeit with some steel armor thereon, the hammer head exploded Itger’s head like a watermelon dropped off a thousand-foot cliff. Blood went spraying ten feet on all sides and nearly blinded Kihlgun himself for a moment, not that any of the petrified people who had just witnessed this awesome act considered even for a moment taking advantage of the opportunity to attack Kihlgun.
Instead, they decided they had seen enough of the show and didn’t want to be the next volunteers. They ran madly in all directions, trampling many of their fellow soldiers underfoot. Kihlgun’s battle hammer had met little of anything that might be properly called resistance as it crashed into Itger’s skull and continued without interruption all the way to the ground, flattening him out on the bottom portion of his hammer like a pancake on a skillet, and when Kihlgun lifted it back up into the air to bring it crashing against a huddle of scampering Sodorfians Kihlgun would not have found it the least bit unwholesome to use what remained of Itger’s body as a cudgel to batter the hapless group, but fate was kind to Itger, and his body flew off the hammer, landed onto the ground, and thus was saved this final indignity.
Perhaps the huddle of Sodorfians would have preferred it not be so as Kihlgun’s hammer head—not softened by the padding of Itger’s body—mercilessly crashed into them breaking bones, crushing organs, and knocking dozens over at a time. Kihlgun set to bashing the bones of the still living with all the self-righteous enthusiasm of a man ridding his house of a particularly severe insect infestation. Those who were still so foolish as to stop and take in the sight of this abominable creature at work—rather than running swiftly and not looking back—were struck by the fact that he seemed both completely overtaken by the worst case of the giggles they had ever seen yet simultaneously moved around in such swift, mercilessly powerful movements that his body appeared as sober as a runner on race day. It was almost as if his giggling really wasn’t giggling at all but rather some bizarre vocal cord defect that caused his mere breathing in and out to mistakenly sound like the silly laugh of an eight-year-old who has just watched his victim sit in a pile of nasty gum.
Rutkins, one of the Sodorfians making this fatal error, remembered that the only time in his life he had giggled as hard as he was witnessing this monster do, was the time in second grade that his archrival, Flyker, had slipped face-first into a pile of fresh dog poop at the very moment he had been getting ready to depants Rutkins right in front of Agatha, a girl he’d had a crush on the size of a small building. He’d married Agatha fifteen years later, and he had often wondered whether that would have been so had that no-good bully Flyker managed to leave him in his undies in front of the girl he was hoping to impress. Because of Flyker’s misstep, Rutkins had laughed so loud and so hard that he was doubled over on the ground, writhing about, twitching uncontrollably, tears pouring from his eyes like water from an overflowing stream, howls coming from his mouth like an insane wolf.
Fortunately, Agatha had seen exactly what Flyker was getting ready to do at the moment “do” became doo-doo, and she had only laughed a hair lighter than Rutkins and had herself dou
bled over with laughter. Flyker took a hiatus from bullying and was reputed not to have resumed it until he moved to a school far enough away that the Great Doggy Incident was not hanging over his shoulders like a bucket of water ready to be dumped on top of him in front of everyone if he even dared try to make someone else the butt of a joke.
Anyway, Rutkins remembered that for at least three minutes he had been so incapacitated with laughter that he would probably not have been able to move if a viper had slithered right up next to him and licked his nose with its long forked tongue. He never quite knew how he found the strength not to leave a gallon of urine inside his pants, but he figured it was probably the realization that doing so would have changed the most fortuitous moment of his entire life into one so embarrassing he would have to change his name, change schools, and perhaps leave the country.
So, as Rutkins recalled his paralyzed, albeit ecstatic state of cataplexy during those three minutes of seizure-like laughter, he incredulously watched the apotheosis of contradictions as this nearly seven-foot tall, muscle-bound monster with large blue eyes—that seemed to Rutkins nearly the size of saucers—giggle like a schoolboy while simultaneously swinging around a tree-sized hammer as if it were his garden hoe and sending well-trained, well-armored men flying into the air with blood exploding from their crushed bodies.
Kihlgun spotted the Sodorfian staring at him with the stupefied look of a child seeing an elephant for the first time. This induced an unprecedented pause in Kihlgun’s bloodbath, as he stopped for several seconds to look at the Sodorfian. Kihlgun’s eyes seemed, to Rutkins at least, to momentarily go from the size of saucers to the size of normal eyes—at least to the size of eyes normal for a man nearly seven feet tall. It was almost as if Kihlgun were shamed by Rutkins’ glance. It was not that Rutkins was totally without fear. His heart was racing like a horse fleeing a burning barn whose gate has finally been opened. But Kihlgun observed, accurately, that that was not the primary expression. Instead, he realized he was being looked at as though he were some kind of zoo animal by a visitor who is not sure whether he is more disgusted than he is awestruck. This thought brought great fury to his mind, and Rutkins’ careful analysis was cut short when Kihlgun struck him sideways, gripping his hammer tightly with both hands in contrast to his normal one-handed grip, striking him harder than anyone or anything he had hit in his entire life.
Rise of Dachwald (Boxed Set, Books 1 through 2) Page 33