Brucker waved his hand, and the advance was on. That was all the signal given, and apparently all that was needed. The preceptors mounted the wall and fell into a march, shield wall towards the enemy. Following them came the Grenadiers, and the remaining irregulars. Aiming through the gaps that the Morrowans cunningly left them, they picked their targets and counted the paces.
For their part the enemy abandoned their attempted evasion as soon as the Ordic troops began their advance. They would not attempt to outrun this. Their own formation was a much looser thing, Steelhead halberdiers in front, riflemen in a much closer formation behind. The anchors of their line were their jacks, which took up frontal positions, as opposed to the Bad Cat which lingered behind Brucker in the rear middle of the array.
It felt odd to be advancing towards a living foe, Jardon had a sudden flash of his days fighting the Khadorans. It made him feel young again, young and afraid. Gunfire and the yells of battle took him back, and he roared a battle cry that the world had not heard in years.
"Aces High!" The men took up the cry as they closed with the foe.
The Ordic forces took the first shots, firing through their shield bearing partners, a feat made possibly only by the Morrowans superior training, they left halberdiers lying sprawled across the field. It was a punishing blast, but they hadn't the chance to aim, so it wasn't as devastating as it had been against the thralls.
The enemy's retaliation caught Jardon completely by surprise. He'd been expecting the enemy's riflemen to concentrate their fire, try and drop individual members of the shield wall, but instead the men in black, the enemy's mysterious commanders, played their hand. Moving through the mercenary ranks like sharks through bloody water they raised and fired cunningly wrought pistols, and the results were devastating.
Some of the shieldbearers were tossed bodily, other shots simply ripped brutally through the shields. The shield wall ceased to exist as the men lost cohesion, just in time for the steelhead's fire to rip through the suddenly vulnerable Morrowans like buckshot through a rotten sail. The gunmages, for such they unmistakably were, had unquestionably won the ranged war.
It was at moments like this that the tide turned, but Solomon Brucker was there to turn it back. He charged forward virtually alone, power field overboosted to the limit as he ran across the no man's land. One man untouchable, one man defying the battlefield mathematics that would see his foe triumphant, his cape fluttered in the breeze. It was madness, glorious madness.
The enemy had been poised to follow up their volley with a steelhead charge, but suddenly the front three found themselves in direct battle with a warcaster, and not just any warcaster. Brucker's skill with a blade was preeminent, had been so since these men's parents had been fighting. They tried a unified strike from three directions, but couldn't match his movements.
He couldn't stop the whole charge, of course, but he'd blunted it. The melee became general as the remnants of the mercenaries engaged with the irregulars and grenadiers, bayonette and halberd vastly unequal yet strangely similar in the tangled battlefield. Even the gunmages moved in and took their shots at close quarters, plainly trained in the art of close fighting by a past master of the excercise.
The Ordic officer corps could not remain uncomitted, and Jardon joined the second rank. From the corner of his eye he saw Sansa hew a leg from a Steelhead, her slender blade striking with a force all out of proportion to her stocky form. He saw Gaxxon sprout a third eye, running red, above his brow as he came out second in a duel with a gunmage. He had time to see no more as man half his age tried to bisect him with a halberd.
It was a long, arching blow. The kind that you'd lever against a tree or a particularly recalcitrant door. Fortunately for Jardon the Halberdier's blade had lost it's head in his last engagement, and it hadn't yet registered with his frenzied mind. The merc's pole thudded into the ground ahead of him as he stuck his short blade into the man, and twisted.
It had been a long time since he'd killed someone up close, but there was no time to ruminate. He pulled his steel free and faced the charge of a rifleman. He didn't have time to interpose his weapon, so he dropped down to his knees. It had sounded better in his mind, as the dying halberd wielder spitefully gripped his arms. They were pinned for a crucial moment as the bayonet came closer.
Brucker's spell went off just in the nick of time. Whatever peril he'd been in that prompted him to overboost his field was apparently over, and he once more bestowed his duelist's reflexes on his men, including one particular aging ex jailer. Jardon tensed and rolled left at just the appropriate instant, and dragged the arms that enveloped him into the path of the thrust, catching the point like a gleaming butterfly in a web of meat.
He had no answer, however, as the man sneered and discharged the weapon, blasting a shot through his comrade's carcass and into Jardon's shoulder. He swore aloud, but his enemy was already hastening after other prey, no doubt thinking him finished.
He wasn't far wrong, Jardon's arm hung by his side, and the blood gushed thick and red. He'd be done for if he wasn't healed, right enough, but just now he hadn't time to be lying about. He tottered too his feat, hoping no foe had his back, and found himself shoved back down into the muck by a pair of wrestling men. He rolled over onto them, and catching a glimpse of black flunk his good arm into the face of the one he took to be a gunmage. The enemy turned his head, angling to keep his eyes on the fight, but the criminal who was wrestling him stabbed him in the neck as he did so.
Together Jardon and the Ordic soldier rose once again, and for a brief second were free from the frenzied melee. Across the field Brucker's influence seemed to be turning the tide, the Ordic soldiers defending themselves like skilled gladiators, incongruously precise amidst the chaos of the battle. The jacks, however, were going to be trouble.
The charger was done, Jardon had no idea what had happened to it, but it lay on the field spurting strange energies. The Nomad was dueling with Bad Cat, blades flashing in a ponderous and multiton imitation of the battles going on around their feet. The Ironclad, however, was on a rampage, laying into the Ordic forces and giving a reprieve to the enemy where ever it stumbled. It was the last obstacle to their victory.
Jardon shoved his partner towards it, as there was no use speaking in such a clamor, and followed close on his heels. Across the field the Ordic forces seemed to have the same idea, those who had won their local struggles converging on the titanic war engine. It's hammer rose and fell as the first grenadiers came against it, their improvised explosive foiled by the prodigious impact.
Jardon and the second wave came upon it before it could raise the hammer again, smashing blades against it's knees and belly, searching for a seam or weakness. Jardon saw in his minds eye Sansa cutting the Cryxian jack in the Pit, and envied her the knowledge which enabled such effortless penetration of the layered iron. For his part his crippled arm made his blows clumsy and slow, and he felt like he was doing more damage to himself.
The man beside him, one of the Preceptors he thought, was suddenly gripped and wrenched up high by the enraged engine, its empty hand squeezing him, distorting him into a broken shape. The body was flung to earth with another boom, as the jack at last brought it's hammer into play. It smashed the ground, and all around it men fell, the very earth trembling beneath them.
Jardon was one of the few to keep his feat, Morrow knows how, and he saw the monster's furnace eyes glare at him. It lifted it's hammer again, and then, blessedly, he saw the eyes shatter, the beast struck suddenly blind by a pair of uncannily accurate rifle shots. It's suddenly unaimed hammer blow missed him by a hair, but shattered a halberd against a stone and flung the shrapnel a dozen yards.
With their last jack blinded, (Brucker had apparently aided the Bad Cat against the marshalled Nomad, he could see the enemy engine lying torn on the soil), the shout went up for surrender and clemency. Men who moments ago had been trying their damnedest to slay one another stood apart, panting and gasping, as all eyes searched hear and there, trying to see what would come next.
