“Why care for the sneers of fools,

When soon you’d make their blood pool,

Beneath their soon to be cold cadaver,

Where they’d be laid to rest forever,

While you went on to the next battle,

In which you’d be testing your mettle,

Till the day comes at last when death,

Caught and took claim of your last breath.” - Ode to the Warriors, Antique poem believed to originate from eastern Ur-Teros, from the prehistoric period.

“Boss, the dwarves are in position and started to push out,” reported Nicole as she came from the direction of the stairs. A quick glance that way confirmed the report for Reinhardt, since he could see the fighting moving away from the stairs and its surroundings.

“Good,” he replied as he parried a zealot’s spear with the shaft of his weapon and directed the spearhead up and away from his body, before he slid his own weapon down the shaft and bashed the man’s head in with his polemace. “What about the others?”

“They’re coming right this way, boss. Hard to miss you all to be honest,” replied Nicole as she deftly pushed aside another zealot’s axe, then used the butt end of her weapon to hit it away while she carried through the motion and tore his neck wide open with the curved blade of the weapon.

What she said was indeed the case, as in a battlefield where one side was humans and the other dwarves, Reinhardt and especially Mischka’s group of large-breed therians were particularly conspicuous due to their height. All it took him was a quick glance around to notice that Mischka’s shieldbearers had already reformed their formation to the flanks of the chaotic melee where his group was.

Reinhardt quickly grabbed a small flute from his storage, and brought it to his mouth, before he blew hard into it in a two-three-two pattern. The shrill noise the flute made was noticeable even above the din of the battlefield, and within minutes, the first group that had jumped down with him had gathered around his location, as shieldbearers covered their flanks. A multitude of corpses was left in their wake.

“Everyone here? Good. We’re heading for the inner citadel before our dwarven friends can beat us to the bounty,” said Reinhardt once the unit leaders gathered around him. “Push hard and fast, but keep your lives a priority. Bounty would do you no good when you’re pushing daisies.”

Those around him gave a chorus of “Yes, boss” and “Understood” as they returned to their respective groups. Reinhardt kept Elfriede’s group with him, as he had Mischka and Grünhildr each lead part of the company to strike hard from their flanks, while his own group charged through the middle.

The defenders of Fort Fendorf - a mix of militiamen and soldiers, with more soldiers in the mix - tried to halt their advance, but they were distracted, their attentions divided by the ongoing dwarven offensive in several other directions at the same time, and their commanders gave contradictory commands in the tumult.

Reinhardt and his mercenaries abused the chance before them and pushed straight through the enemy lines arrayed before them, as they abused their individual superiority and used the chaos to ensure that their enemies never managed to reform the semblance of a formation and was instead picked off in a chaotic melee.

With their own shieldbearers keeping their flanks secure, the three strike forces in the middle of the Free Lances formation were freed to go wild on the enemy soldiers before them. A junior officer on the Holy Kingdom side tried to arrange for a defensive formation to stop their charge, but instead found his defenses breached almost immediately on the flanks and Mischka and Grünhildr did what they did best.

Then Reinhardt broke straight through the wavering center of the formation with his own strike team, and Elfriede sneaked away only to return a minute later with the officer’s head hanging from her belt, as she had slain the man in the chaos that followed their breakthrough.

They faced stiffer resistance as they pushed closer to the citadel in the middle of the fort, and where the defenders they fought previously were a mix of militia and soldiers, they gave way to knights closer to the citadel. A group of knights in plate armor, at least fifty in number, though dismounted, barred their path just before the citadel itself.

Reinhardt was not having it

Even as the knights fought desperately to bar their way, he had the best killers of his troops go forward to take them on. Mischka and Grünhildr almost immediately removed a couple of knights each from the battle in their opening strikes, and Elfriede took another down as she pierced one of her blades deep into the knight’s armpit gap.

Two of them struck together at Reinhardt with their swords, and he blocked it with the metal shaft of his weapon. Just as their weapons clashed, however, an oversized arrow suddenly flew past his head and right into the eye hole on one knight’s helm, striking hard enough that the knight’s head was thrown back by the impact.

Reinhardt did not waste the chance Salicia gave him, pushed away the sword of the other knight, and struck with his polemace as his opponent was forced to step back. The knight managed to block the blow with his shield, which took a large dent for the effort, but he had not expected Reinhardt to use the recoil and allowed his weapon to flow into a spin instead.

The spiked back end of the polemace parried away the knight’s sword as he tried another strike, while the macehead spun nearly a full circle and struck from below in an upward swing, right between the knight’s legs, with enough force to crunch up and bend the armor plates in the region. The impact even lifted the knight off their feet for a bit.

Needless to saw, the knight gave a warbled screech of extreme pain as they fell to their knees, clutching the struck area, while Reinhardt swung his polemace back another full circle, and the mace made a satisfying thwack as it connected with the knight’s helmet and bent it into their head.

With blood flowing from the openings of the helmet, the knight collapsed to his side, and after a couple twitches, stirred no more.