“In a fight for your life, you kill or die,

Which fate you get, all on a roll of die,

All for a handful of coins, as fortune gives,

So that one might strive and carry on to live.” - Mercenary’s ditty, from the Times of Turmoil, supposedly first sung by a member of Horst’s Hellraisers.

With a cacophony of roars, screams, yells, and the clash of metal on metal, the foremost dwarven infantrymen leapt the final stretch between the end of the ramp and the fort’s walls. Some of them were struck down in mid-air by the concentrated efforts of the defenders, to fall to the moat below, their lives or deaths unknown, but more made it through the barrage, and landed right on top of the defenders.

Most of them landed with a heavy crunch as their armored boots stepped on the hard stone of the fort’s walls, their bodies crouched to absorb the impact of their landing, while a few landed with wet, disgusting squelches as they fell directly on top of a defender who was too slow to make way, and directly pulverized the poor sod under their fully armored weight.

These brave dwarves remained where they were, braced on their knees with both hands on their shields, and after a moment, raised their shields above their heads in unison, slightly angled forward, and took the weight of the next batch of dwarves to leap over with strained muscles before they heaved and pushed those standing on their shields towards the enemies before them.

Even as the second wave of dwarves struck the defenders with a tumultuous clang of metal colliding against each other, the first wave used the recoil to rush backwards towards the edge of the wall, and use their tower shields - each as tall or taller than they themselves were at a meter and a half of length - to bridge the meter-wide gap between the end of the ramp and the top of the walls.

Moments after the last shield was laid in position, armored boots stepped on the shields and rushed past them as more dwarves charged into the fort’s eastern wall, where they rapidly overwhelmed the surprised defenders and quickly formed a breach that covered most of the eastern wall.

Dwarven heavy infantrymen were elites, men and women trained for years to fight for long durations all while wearing armor that would have rendered many other races immobile just from the weight alone. Due to this very same armor that they build their repute on however, they were not the most mobile, and while suitable for breaching a line and establishing a beachhead, they fare poorly when forced to go around all over the place.

That was why shortly after the beachhead on the eastern wall was established, the light infantry - Reinhardt and his Free Lances amongst them - rushed in from behind them and charged down the stairs while the heavies carried on a slow push on the walls of the fort, making their way through the northern and southern walls one step at a time.

The fort’s stairs were designed with a couple U-turns along the way, so that invaders who had reached the wall could not run straight down towards the bottom. Reinhardt and his group partly ignored the design however, as the therian and more skilled members of the group leapt down from halfway down the stairs, a good four meters up, and landed safely on their feet even while the rest continued down the stairs the safer way.

A small group of dwarven heavies held a semi-circle as they held the bottom of the stairs against the crowding defenders. Reinhardt and his men landed a bit off the side from that fight, and they immediately went to work on the surprised defenders they literally fell onto.

Niko and Yuri, along with Varilya and Bjørn and a dozen other members of Mischka’s team, charged straight towards the dwarven heavies, as they simply used the most of their bulk to barrel through all opposition and quickly set themselves up to reinforce the heavies in their defense of the stairs.

The others carved their way through the defenders of the fort, with the intent to clear out their immediate surroundings first. Reinhardt knew all too well that charging into the fort in search for the Count was folly this early on. That said, nothing says his company couldn’t be at the forefront of that hunt, once they had enough men on the ground.

Mischka carved a path through the enemy soldiers almost by herself, the massive therian matron relying on her new armor to simply take the hits she deemed not dangerous while she countered with her massive blade. Bodies were strewn around with every swing of hers, either in crudely torn off halves or folded over themselves in a very unnatural angle.

Salicia - along with the other archers in the Free Lances - stayed on the walls, spread out to the sides of the stairs, as they gave support fire from above to those fighting below. A couple times Reinhardt caught sight of one of the woman’s distinctive oversized arrows impaling a defender who was just about to land a hit on one of the Lances.

Grünhildr carved her own path of carnage almost as impressive as Mischka’s - Reinhardt suspected the discrepancy was mostly out of their size difference, especially in arm and weapon length - as her own pair of void-clad axes simply cleaved through all in its path, be they weapons, armor, or flesh, with equal ease and the defenders before her kept falling into neatly severed pieces of flesh.

Elfriede and Ylisera danced amidst the chaos, their blades reaping lives where they passed. The two women seemed wholly at their element in the chaotic melee the battle had quickly devolved into, and made the most out of it as they carved their own paths of slaughter through their opponents.

Reinhardt himself struck with wide, forceful swings instead of the shorter, measured strikes he usually employed, as he had no worries of friendlies too close to him at the moment, and freely used his own strength to the fullest as he crushed and pulverized the enemies before him.

The Free Lances were capable of fighting well in formation, but at their heart, they were irregulars. A chaotic melee like what currently unfolded, was their preferred environment.