“No matter how fanatical or brave, everybody has their limits. In battle, when such a limit was reached, that was when soldiers broke rank and fled for their lives. Where one began to run away, others would soon follow, as such craven behavior was always contagious.

Because of that, many often said that an army was only as strong as its weakest links, which was one reason why so many nations pushed to standardize and discipline their soldiers to the utmost. A panicked rout was rarely recoverable from, and almost always led to disaster.” - Markgraf Eugenia Stahlfaust, The Hammer of the East, circa 305 VA.

The battle was settled.

It still raged on, sure, but in Reinhardt’s mind, he was certain that the Crown Prince’s charge had pretty much settled the battle. Where the dwarves held a bloody stalemate at the frontlines before, trading one of their lives for four or five of their enemies, now they pushed hard, as they broke the enemy lines and struck them from inside their formations.

The cavalry and chariot charge wreaked havoc on the backlines of the zealot formation, to such an extent that not even the support of the trained soldiers interspersed in their formation could do a thing about it. Those foolish enough to try and stop the charge just found themselves ground beneath the steel-shod hooves and merciless metal wheels instead.

A couple times the chariots deliberately charged straight through the midst of the enemy formations. The trained rhinos pulling the metal chariots at speed paid no need to a spearwall formation, as the spearheads broke apart against their slabs of armor. The few that found flesh barely penetrated the dense, hard skin of the beasts, the tiny wounds barely an annoyance to them.

In turn, their horns gored whoever stood in their path, and they stomped down hard on those who fell beneath their hooves, as their weight combined with the force of the impact and caused those poor zealots to burst apart almost like an overripe fruit.

The dwarves atop the chariots themselves were drenched by the blood and gore they caused in their wake. Not one of them found it to be a nuisance, not even the crown prince blinked when bits of a man’s brain splattered onto his face, as he just wiped it off nonchalantly and commanded his chariot onward.

Both detachments of chariots and heavy cavalry ran rampant amongst the zealot formation, as they left slaughter in their wake, and the carnage finally did what the dwarves had not managed in battle before. They broke the zealots’ will to fight on.

Further back in the enemy formation, some frightened zealots began to turn and ran, at first one or two, then others joined them as they fled for their lives. At first, the soldiers tried to stop them with some success, but when elements of the enemy’s heavy cavalry fled past them as well, having been humbled by their dwarven counterparts, the rout increased in scale and broke the zealot formation.

The dwarves elected not to pursue the fleeing enemies, in favor of encircling those who fought on without realizing that part of their army, likely including their own lord, Reinhardt thought, had fled for their lives.

Encircled and without support, the dwarves systematically butchered the trapped zealots and soldiers caught within their formation. Reinhardt had his men support them, but had not pushed for an overly active participation in the slaughter.

There was little reason to risk injury after all, when the battle was all but won.

What was later known in the history books as the Battle of Jahra plains started early in the morning, and carried on until the sun began to set. The Holy Kingdom’s western defenses were shattered. An estimated two-thirds to three-fourths of their numbers lost, either to battle, or to desertion as some militiamen simply fled back to their own home villages.

At least thirty to forty thousand lost their lives to the dwarven army. Since the region was mostly uninhabited, the dwarves took their time and looted the corpses clean, before they were unceremoniously tossed into mass graves.

In the meantime, their scouts sought after the fleeing enemy’s whereabouts and discovered two things. One was that the enemy had fled not to Norouz, but to Fort Fendorf, west of the city proper. The second was that there seemed to be a revolt and infighting on the streets of Norouz itself.

Another thing they learned was that out of the three sons of the Count of Norouz, the younger two were killed in the battle. Elfriede had personally decapitated the youngest one - whose head fetched the mercenaries an extra fifty gold - while the second son of the count had been trampled to death by some of the heavy cavalry. It was honestly a miracle his head remained undamaged so he could still be recognized.

The count himself, along with his eldest son and heir, had been amongst those who fled to Fort Fendorf. Signs suggested that they had hunkered down and prepared themselves to resist from the walls of the fort, and that they had at least a good twenty thousand or so defending the place.

While the losses were not as high as projected, the dwarven army still took at least three to four thousand casualties in the battle, with over that number wounded, which lowered their number of able fighters to under thirty thousand. As a result, they chose to play it safe, and decided to have the cavalry keep watch over the fort from a distance, while the rest marched on towards Norouz itself.

Reinhardt’s troops were naturally amongst those headed towards the city. Elfriede’s ability to interpret better than anyone else for them was priceless, since if the rumors of infighting proved to be true, what awaited them at the city might not be a battle but more of a negotiation with the locals instead.

It was unexpected that their enemy would set themselves up to be defeated in detail like so, but the dwarves had not minded. They would first take care of the city, and the fort afterwards.