He watched the dust rise, an inexorable tide prepared to swallow the world. Great mushrooms of grey sprouted from the earth, reaching for the heavens as if to choke the very light of the day. They stood ready to claim everything and everyone in their path, just like the bottomless hunger of thier masters.

Alpheo stood frozen, watching the horizon as if trapped in a fever dream.

This cannot be, he reasoned, his mind racing against the cold geometry of the field. He looked around and saw that even the Oizenian infantry had taken heed.

There was no joy in their faces, only a sudden, frantic terror.

The reason?

They were in the way.

The lances, the hooves, and the blind momentum of a heavy charge would not distinguish between theirs and the enemies in the mud. Like the sea parting before a vengeful god, the enemy footmen began to scatter, clawing at each other to escape the path of their own salvation.

They threw down their spears, their shields, everything to get themselves a headstart, pushing those on the way back onto the mud.

No loyalty, no brotherhood could hope to survive in front of certain death.

Alpheo watched the lines he hoped for so long to scatter without joy.

His fingers clamped onto the hilt of his sword until the steel bit into his palm. He had underestimated the bastard of Oizen. He hadn’t thought Sorza had the stomach for such a butcher’s bill, to trample his own men into the mire just to reach the Fox’s throat.

Dread dawned on him, cold and heavy. He looked at his own lines.

The pikes that had shattered the first wave were gone, either lost in the sucking black muck or splintered into useless shards, embedded in the chests of dead horses like the thorns of a ruined bush.

Hundreds of Oizenian infantry would die in this charge, but in exchange, Sorza would claim victory over thousands of Yarzat’s finest. The math was simple.

It was his fault. He had underestimated how deep into the dark Sorza was willing to descend.

"FORMATION!"

A voice erupted from the rear, cracking through the haze of Alpheo’s dread. Even in this moment of impending annihilation, he could only marvel at his men. Their training kicked in like a punch to the liver, instinctive, brutal, and precise.

"Square up! Square up!" Centurions barked, their voices raw from hours of shouting. "Interlock! Close those gaps! I want no air between those shields!"

The Legions began to shift, a chaotic swarm of iron suddenly crystallizing into solid blocks of defiance. Men slammed their shields together, the heavy rim-to-rim clack echoing across the field. Those in the rear ranks reached for whatever remained the few javelins they had held in reserve.

"Pass me a pilum! Someone get me a fucking stick!" a soldier screamed, his hand outstretched.

"Get closer, Robett! I can see daylight through your shoulder, move in!"

"Brace the man in front! Shoulders to backs! Don’t let the bastards push you an inch!"

Alpheo felt himself being swept up in the movement. The white-cloaked guards, Vrosk at their head, shoved him back into the center of a square. They forced him into the heart of the formation, surrounding him with a wall of muscle and dented plate.

He knew, with a scholar’s detachment, that it would likely fail. The lances the knights bore were longer than any javelin or makeshift spear his men held. The Oizenians would win by reach alone, skewering the front ranks before a single Yarzat blade could taste horseflesh.

But as he looked at the set jaws of the men around him, Alpheo found he could not speak that darkness aloud.

"Plant your heels!" A subcenturio roared, his voice a anchor admist the storm. "Let them break their teeth on our iron! We are Yarzat! We do not move!"

The rumble grew into a roar. The dust cloud was now a wall of thunder. Alpheo gripped his sword, standing in the center of his men, a Prince of shadows waiting for the storm to break.

Alpheo watched the retreating rabble, Oizenians, Evanians, and the rest, men who had fought for hours only to be discarded like chaff. They ran, but no man can outrun the heartbeat of a galloping horse.

The knights slammed into their own retreating infantry as if they were nothing but air. The nobility afforded their own men a singular mercy: they kept their lances high, refusing to blunt the wood on peasant bone, leaving the butchery to the horses. It was a tide of pure, unadulterated muscle. Thousands of kilograms of destrier smashed into the running men, sending them sprawling into the muck.

Limbs snapped like dry kindling under iron-shod hooves; those unlucky enough to fall were grounded deeper into the silt. The terror he felt reflected in their eyes.

Alpheo saw, with a clarity that made his stomach heave, a human head collapse under a horse’s weight, bursting with the sickening, wet pop of a ripened melon under a boot.

The charge achieved what the Legions could not: it routed the enemy infantry. But there was no victory in it. The rabble had been the main course, cooked and roasted in the mud; now, the knights were coming for dessert.

Fear took hold of Alpheo like a well-worn shoe, pinching and suffocating beneath the gaps in his armor, as his world narrowed to a horizon of open nostrils and dust. As the heavy horse closed the distance, the destriers ceased to look like animals and began to look like the nightmares man had crafted them to be.

Their heads appeared deformed and elongated, hot mist erupting from their mouths in rhythmic, angry bursts. The steel chamfrons and the spear-head of lances, shone like the singular horns of some prehistoric, predatory unicorn.

Standing atop a throne and commanding from the rear makes a man forget the sheer, physics-defying horror of what a beast can do to a man. Alpheo was reminded of it in a shattering instant.

"BRACE!" Someone shouted, his voice being lost in the hell they brought.

Javelins hissed from the rear of the Yarzat squares, seeking out the soft bellies of the charging horses. The few caltrops remaining in the muck reaped their toll, sending horses cartwheeling into the dirt in a tangle of screaming meat and clattering plate.

But it was like trying to stop a landslide by throwing pebbles. For every horse that fell, ten more used its carcass as a ramp, hurtling themselves into the Yarzat iron.Uncaring of danger and casualties.

The two lines plunged into one.With a thunderclap that echoed through the sky.

Just as Alpheo had feared, the long ash lances of the knights dictated the terms of the engagement. A rain of wooden splinters showered the sky as the lances found their marks, shattering against shields or punching through plate. Alpheo saw a lance-point strike one of his guards directly in the visor; the wood didn’t break, but the man’s head did. The knight’s momentum drove the ash shaft through the helmet and out the back of the gorget.

Friends and comrades would never recognize the wet heap that fell into the mud.

Even as the friction of bodies began to slow the charge, the knights drove deep into the ranks.

It was a meat-grinder of momentum.

Hooves flattened skulls with the dull thud of a hammer on a wet rug. Men who tried to crawl away from the stampede were pulverized by the next rank of horses, and the rank after that, until they were nothing but a red smear in the black mud.

Gore, thick and hot, sprayed across Alpheo’s obsidian armor, splattering on his face. It was a chaos of flying brain-matter, wood, and the high-pitched, almost human shrieking of wounded horses.

The air turned into a warm, copper-tasting fog. Men screamed for mothers they hadn’t seen in years, and horses neighed as their legs snapped in the press. Only mankind, Alpheo thought as he ducked a swinging mace, possessed the imagination to drag Hell onto the green grass of the earth.

The tide of the charge finally slowed, the sheer momentum of the knights foundering upon the mountain of flesh they had reaped. The stampede choked on its own success, the horses brought to a halt by the density of the dead and the stubborn, interlocking shields of the living.

Now, the knights were no longer thunder; they were merely men on tall saddles, trapped in a sea of vengeful iron.

The legionaries, who had just watched their brothers pulverized into the silt, did not break. Their training had hammered their feet into the earth until they were as rooted as the mountains. To them, the presence of the Crown in their midst made the very notion of flight an unthinkable sin apart from it being impossible, but logic would not have held in front of hell, so the presence of the prince admist them, provided the kick they needed.

With the thunder silenced and the horses pinned in the press, the silence of the shock was replaced by the frantic, wet work of the counter-attack.

The Legions finally reached up and with righteous fury began to balance the scales at last.