"If you call yourself a professional mercenary, then often, Victory or Death are the acceptable results. Defeat for a mercenary could at times be even worse than death, as it may well spell the end of everything you've built all your life. The loss of reputation alone might well cripple your company's business going forward.

So, Victory or Death.

Either is fine." - Ral-Ast-Noor of the Bloodthorn clan, retired mercenary commander.

When the dawn of the next day arrived, the remaining horde of zealots marched only to find themselves greeted with empty walls and open gates. Not a single defender was in sight near the walls.

All the remaining dwarves and mercenaries had gathered by the hill around the chapel in the middle of the fort, now ringed by several layers of makeshift fortifications.

The hardened earthen walls that made up the makeshift fortifications were short, barely two meters in height, a height that a healthy adult could climb with reasonable ease. They hid many short, stout dwarves behind them, however, completely concealed from sight by the earthen walls.

Reinhardt and his remaining troops - barely a hundred and fifty of them still capable of fighting, nearly a third of which were Mischka's people - were stationed by the chapel. Their role was as a reaction force, to reinforce where needed should the walls be broken.

After all, many of them were too tall to hide behind the walls like the dwarves did.

Salicia and her remaining sixty or so archers were still on their perch atop the chapel's roofs. Since the fighting was mostly confined to the walls and gates, not many shots were fired back at them over the past week.

They all knew that would likely change that day.

With roars and yells, the horde of zealots streamed into Fort Ascher, while the archers amongst them went up to the walls to secure a higher vantage point. They had not bothered to check the badly damaged, abandoned walls at all.

So when the fort's walls crumbled apart and collapsed, it caught them by surprise.

The collapse itself was not a complete one. The walls crumbled but still formed a makeshift barricade as a nearly three meter high pile of rubble. Many of the archers who had climbed the wall fell and injured themselves, though few died.

More unfortunate were those who happened to be within the gates when the walls crumbled, as they found themselves buried alive under the rubble.

The zealots who already made it through only paused for a moment before they continued their charge, exhorted by a couple of priests in their midst. Those who were still outside cautiously climbed the rubble on their way in. It slowed their advance for a while to say the least.

A few zealots barged into the abandoned buildings on their way to the chapel, but soon exited as they found nothing of value and nobody left inside. Meanwhile, the first few zealots had reached the first of the makeshift earthen walls and began to climb up.

Those that climbed to the top of the wall soon fell back down as a burly arm cleaved them apart with axes, or pulverized their bones with a mace. The dwarves hidden behind the walls were in a perfect position to strike at those that had climbed the walls.

Sometimes a zealot would react fast enough to stab downwards with a spear or a sword before they were felled, but the dwarves rarely took serious injuries from such haphazard strikes. They were regular soldiers of Knallzog, and wore proper armor, unlike the zealot militia who often didn't even have any armor on them.

Even so, many of the dwarves bore injuries from their previous battles, and there were five, maybe six zealots for every one of them. When more of the maniacal horde swarmed in, they began to face difficulties holding the line.

In terms of skill and discipline, arms and armor, training and valor, the dwarves definitely overwhelmed the zealots. However, all the training in the world had not accounted for madmen who'd still grab and bite at you even after you've skewered them on your weapon.

Many dwarves fell on the backfoot when multiple zealots swarmed them, some of which literally traded their lives just to get a blow in, or to grab onto their enemy before they perished, to hinder them even in death.

One dwarf fell when a woman he had cleaved almost in half somehow retained the strength to grab his weapon with her hands and allowed herself to fall. That almost wrenched the dwarf's weapon off his hand, and distracted him for a moment.

By the time he had wrestled his axe free from the corpse, another zealot had jumped down at him, with a knife plunging down. The dwarf hacked at the man in mid-air, a blow so mighty he severed the man into two at the waist.

The dwarf had not expected the man's upper half to still plunge the knife into his chest as he fell, and grabbed his arm with his other hand and latched on with a dead man's grip. The wound was shallow, the knife failing to pierce far through his armor, but the added weight and distraction of the dying man latching on his arm cost the dwarf.

Another zealot - a young teenager, probably one that's not even considered an adult yet - that looked quite similar to the man and woman he had just slain followed behind them with a spear in hand. He ignored the axe swung at him as he plunged his short spear into the dwarf's left eye, where the weapon pierced through the eyeball, the socket bone, and went further into the brain.

The boy paid for it with his life, for even as the dwarven soldier died, his axe bit deep into the boy's shoulder, cleaved through his chest, and split his heart in twain.

Similar scenes replayed itself all over the makeshift fortifications. The zealots would like two, three, even four or more of their own for every dwarven soldier they take down, but there was always more of them behind.

The dwarves had no such backup, and before a couple of hours had passed, they had organized a fighting retreat from the first defense lines to the second, under the rain of arrows from the zealots. The remaining archers amongst the zealots had advanced close enough to fire at the fortifications around the chapel, and many also fired back at the mercenary archers at the rooftops.

The second line was abandoned shortly after noon, and the defenders rallied by the third line, a short distance up the foot of the hill. There they stood their ground once more, and lives were sacrificed on both sides, as the battle raged on.