The Rakshas entered the palace district’s main avenue at the sixth hour.

The avenue was the broadest street in the capital’s grid: sixty feet wide, lined with the administrative buildings and the noble residences whose architecture reflected the wealth that proximity to the palace represented. The avenue ran from the market district’s northern edge to the palace compound’s southern gate, the straight line of stone-paved road that the city’s original planners had designed as the ceremonial approach that processions and parades and royal movements used.

The avenue was now the killing ground that two thousand Rakshas warriors and four thousand barbarian warriors contested.

The barbarian warriors had assembled at the avenue’s northern end in the time that the Horde’s advance through the eastern and market districts had provided. The assembly was not the organized, formation-based assembly that a disciplined army produced in response to a threat’s detection. The assembly was the gathering that a celebration-impaired army produced when the gathering’s urgency exceeded the army’s ability to organize the gathering into the formations that the army’s doctrine prescribed. Warriors arrived at the avenue’s northern end from the buildings and streets where the celebration had deposited them, their armor hastily donned, their boomsticks loaded with the fumbling that wine-impaired fine motor coordination produced, their formation the formation that individual warriors’ convergence on a common position produced rather than the formation that command authority’s direction created.

Four thousand warriors in an unformed mass at the avenue’s northern end. Their boomsticks fired in the ragged volleys that undisciplined fire produced: individual shots at individual cadences, the balls crossing the avenue’s six-hundred-pace length at the trajectories that individual aiming produced, the balls’ distribution across the avenue’s width the distribution that individual shooters’ aim produced rather than the concentrated pattern that volley fire’s synchronized targeting created.

At the avenue’s southern end, the 1st and 2nd Warbands deployed.

The Rakshas. Two thousand warriors in the spear wall that had ground the Threian military’s formations into the earth across four months of continuous engagement. The long spears extended forward in the bristling forest of points that the formation produced. The great round shields locked in the overlapping pattern that created the wall’s structural integrity. The formation’s width filled the avenue’s sixty-foot breadth. The formation’s depth was twelve ranks.

The boomstick balls struck the spear wall’s shield faces. The balls hit the round shields’ iron surfaces and the iron absorbed the balls’ impact at the specific points where the balls’ trajectories intersected the shields’ faces. The balls embedded in the shields or deflected from the shields’ curvature or struck the shields’ rims and ricocheted into the avenue’s stone pavement. The spear wall’s shield faces, designed to resist the Threian military’s melee weapons’ impacts, resisted the boomstick balls’ impacts at the six-hundred-pace range where the balls’ velocity had been reduced by the distance’s aerodynamic drag and where the balls’ remaining kinetic energy was the energy that the shields’ construction’s margin of safety accommodated.

Some balls penetrated. The boomstick balls at closer range, fired by the barbarian warriors at the mass’s front who were within three hundred paces of the spear wall, struck the shields with the velocity that the closer range preserved, the velocity sufficient to penetrate the shields’ iron faces at the specific points where the iron’s thickness was thinnest and where the ball’s trajectory struck the iron at the perpendicular angle that maximized penetration. Warriors behind penetrated shields fell. The warriors beside the fallen warriors closed the gap that the falling created. The spear wall’s integrity maintained itself through the gap-closing discipline that four months of continuous combat had instilled.

"DRAK’UL VOSH!" The 1st Warband’s defiance cry erupted from behind the shield wall. Death before surrender. "VOL DUUM MOK! ZUG ZUG MAG!"

The spear wall advanced.

* * * * *

The advance down the avenue was the advance that the Rakshas produced when the Rakshas advanced against a force whose weapons’ advantage was neutralized by the engagement’s range and whose numerical advantage was neutralized by the avenue’s width: the steady, grinding, measured advance that converted the space between the two forces into the killing ground that the long spears’ reach created.

One step per heartbeat. The boots striking the cobblestones in synchronization. Two thousand boots hitting stone at the same moment, the impact’s sound the percussion that the advance’s rhythm required, the percussion that the barbarian warriors at the avenue’s northern end heard through the boomstick fire’s noise and through the shouting and through the specific chaos that the unformed mass’s disorganized response produced.

The boomstick fire intensified as the range decreased. At four hundred paces, the balls’ penetration of the shields increased. More warriors fell behind the shields. The gap-closing accelerated. At three hundred paces, the penetration’s rate increased further. The spear wall’s front rank began to thin as the shields’ iron was overcome by the balls’ velocity at the closer range.

"GRASH’TOHR’TERRA!" Arka’garr’s command rippled through the formation. The Rakshas’ round shields shifted from the vertical wall configuration to the angled spiked Tohr’terra configuration: shields tilted forward at thirty degrees, the angle that deflected the boomstick balls’ trajectories upward rather than absorbing the balls’ impact directly. The deflection reduced the penetration rate by approximately sixty percent. The balls that struck the angled shields ricocheted upward into the air above the formation rather than embedding in the shields’ faces.

The advance continued under the Tohr’terra’s deflective coverage. At two hundred paces, the barbarian mass’s boomstick fire was the fire that two hundred paces’ range produced: accurate, lethal at the impact points that the coverage’s gaps exposed, the specific fire that caused casualties in the advancing formation at the rate that two hundred paces’ accuracy and four thousand boomsticks’ volume combined to produce.

The Roarers answered.

The Horde’s Roarers, positioned in the buildings flanking the avenue’s midpoint, opened fire into the barbarian mass’s flanks at the range that the buildings’ windows and doorways provided. The rolling volleys swept across the mass’s unprotected sides with the enfilade fire’s devastating geometry, the balls striking the barbarian warriors from the direction that the warriors’ forward-facing boomstick orientation left undefended.

The barbarian mass’s flanks collapsed. Warriors at the mass’s edges fell under the Roarer fire’s concentrated impact. The mass compressed inward, away from the flanking fire, the compression reducing the mass’s width and increasing the mass’s depth, the compression converting the mass from the broad formation that the avenue’s width allowed into the narrow formation that the flanking fire’s avoidance demanded.

The narrow formation was the formation that the spear wall’s advance was designed to engage.

The spear wall hit the compressed barbarian mass at the one-hundred-pace mark. The long spears’ points struck the mass’s front at the range where the spears’ length exceeded the hand axes’ reach and where the boomsticks’ close-range firing was complicated by the compressed mass’s density because the mass’s compression placed barbarian warriors in the firing lines that the boomsticks’ barrels described.

The grinding began.

The specific, mechanical, systematic killing that the Rakshas’ spear wall produced when the spear wall met a formation whose depth provided the forward pressure that the spears converted into casualties. The spears found flesh. The flesh fell. The next rank pressed forward. The spears found that flesh too. The cycle repeated.

A Rakshas warrior in the first rank drove his spear through a barbarian’s shield and into the arm behind it, the spear’s point entering the forearm at the angle that the shield’s grip position exposed. The barbarian’s grip on the shield failed. The shield dropped. The warrior beside the spear-wielder drove his spear into the gap that the dropped shield created, the point finding the exposed chest at the range that the shield’s absence provided.

Two kills in the sequence that the spear wall’s coordinated technique produced: the first spear disabling the shield, the second spear exploiting the disabled shield’s gap. The technique was the technique that four months of continuous spear wall combat had refined from the training drill’s theoretical exercise into the battlefield’s practical application, the application whose efficiency was the efficiency that repetition produced when the repetition’s frequency was the frequency that four months of daily combat provided.

"Mok’rok vol," a Rakshas warrior whispered between the spear thrusts’ rhythm. Ancestors, witness us. The whisper was the whisper that warriors produced when the fighting was the fighting and the whisper’s addressee was the addressee that the warrior’s tradition provided for the moments when the fighting’s intensity demanded the acknowledgment that the intensity’s production required. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

The barbarian mass pushed back. The push was the push that four thousand warriors’ collective weight produced when the four thousand warriors pressed forward against the thing in front of them because the warriors behind them were pressing forward and the pressing’s force propagated through the mass from the rear to the front. The push compressed the mass against the spear wall. The compression produced the casualties that compression against spears produced: the front rank’s warriors driven onto the spear points by the rear rank’s pressure, the front rank’s deaths involuntary because the deaths’ cause was the pressure from behind rather than the warriors’ advance into the spears.

The barbarian warriors at the mass’s front screamed. Not war cries. Screams. The screams of warriors being pushed onto spear points by the warriors behind them, the screams that the specific helplessness of being killed by friendly pressure rather than enemy action produced in warriors whose deaths were the deaths that their own army’s mass created.

The spear wall did not stop. The spear wall had never stopped. The spear wall was the 1st and 2nd Warbands, the Rakshas, the finest formation the Horde had ever produced, and the Rakshas ground the barbarian mass the way the Rakshas had ground every formation the Rakshas had faced since the campaign’s first engagement.

The avenue’s cobblestones ran red. The blood flowed in the gutters that the avenue’s drainage design provided, the gutters whose original purpose was the conveyance of rainwater and whose current function was the conveyance of the specific fluid that the spear wall’s sustained grinding produced in the volume that four thousand barbarian warriors’ casualties generated.

"VOL DUUM MOK!" The chant continued. No surrender, the dead watch. "DRAK’UL VOSH! ZUG ZUG MAG!"

The grinding continued. The avenue became the killing ground that the Rakshas’ advance converted every open space into: the ground where the long spears’ reach exceeded the defenders’ weapons’ reach and where the defenders’ numerical advantage was converted into the defenders’ compression’s disadvantage and where the compression’s disadvantage was converted into the casualties that the compression produced.

The barbarian mass broke at the eighth hour. The breaking was not the organized withdrawal that professional armies produced. The breaking was the dissolution that an unformed mass produced when the mass’s front had been ground away by a formation that did not stop grinding and the mass’s rear had received the front’s dissolution’s emotional contagion and the mass’s collective will to maintain the forward pressure had been exceeded by the mass’s collective recognition that the forward pressure’s product was the front’s destruction.

Warriors ran. Warriors dropped their boomsticks and ran northward through the avenue toward the palace district where the barbarian command’s concentration provided the specific destination that running warriors sought: the destination where the running’s cause might be addressed by the command authority that the running’s urgency demanded.

The Rakshas advanced through the space that the running warriors vacated. The spear wall occupied the avenue’s full length by the ninth hour, the formation’s advance having covered the six hundred paces that separated the avenue’s southern end from the avenue’s northern end in three hours of sustained grinding, the three hours’ product visible on the avenue’s cobblestones in the bodies and the blood and the dropped weapons that the grinding had deposited.

"Grombash krul," Arka’garr said. The strong have earned this. The words were spoken in the flat tone that the 1st Warband’s master used for every statement, the tone that did not distinguish between the statement’s content’s significance and the tone’s delivery’s restraint because the restraint was the tone and the tone was the 1st Warband’s master and the master’s restrained delivery was the specific communication that said the thing that was done was done and the doing’s acknowledgment did not require the acknowledgment’s volume to match the doing’s magnitude.

The Snarling Wolf advanced down the avenue behind the spear wall. The banner, unfurled at the sixth hour’s dawn, caught the morning light that the avenue’s eastern buildings’ gaps permitted. The wolf’s snarl was the snarl that the avenue’s length displayed to whatever stood at the avenue’s far end, the snarl that said the thing that had entered the city at the fifth hour was the thing that was coming through the city’s streets and the thing was not stopping.

The palace district was ahead. The barbarian command was in the palace district. The grinding would continue until the grinding reached the palace district and the grinding’s target was the target that the grinding existed to reach.

The wolf advanced. The Rakshas advanced. The capital’s streets ran red.

Forward. Always forward.