“Pass it on, man.”

“Just a sec, man. Gotta take a puff of my own.”

“Duuuude, why not just take mine, y’know?”

“Woooaaah! This is some dank kush!”

A bunch of stoner elves were being gradually prodded and otherwise manhandled towards the army of unarmored skeletons that was marching just a scant few kilometers away. As they were being justled towards their certain doom, the ‘High’ Elves kept on smoking up a storm, completely oblivious to the lethal danger they were about to face.

They were more easily wrangled than you might think, but that was due to the fact that they had been promised an extreme amount of munchies and extremely rare ‘medicinal herbs’ if they did what they were told. However, it soon became apparent that these potheads were not on any normal variant of marijuana. The closer they got to the army of skeletons, the more rambunctious they got, eventually reaching a tipping point that saw them move forward of their own volition.

Now, while these ‘High’ Elves were armed with nothing but their hands and feet, they were still physically stronger than a mere chaff skeleton. And while they were baked as fuck, they showed at least some of the talent that most elves were known for, which quickly came into play as the altered hash took effect and drove them into a near-berserker rage.

Well, maybe ‘rage’ isn’t the best word to use. While they were acting as though they were filled with strength and fury, the fact of the matter was that they were still stoned to high heaven on absurd levels of enchanted pot. This, of course, had the effect of acting both as an ‘upper’ and as a ‘downer’ at the same time, replacing the sluggish and relaxed state of a normal pothead with the manic and bestial rage of someone tripping balls on a mix of Acid and Meth.

Worse still, this mix of altered herbs that they had been given in the day leading up to this also had the effect of making them utterly oblivious to any kind of pain or fear. What had previously been the most chill, friendly, loving, and tolerant group of elves in the entirety of Arcfira was now a force of mindless beasts that knew only how to fight and kill. If only they had been sober enough to see this coming in the days prior to this, they might have prevented their entire tribe from becoming sacrificial meat shields.

As the amped-up elves reached the skeletons, the elves leaped like ravenous beasts towards their foe. The length and height of their jumping attack were so immense that it likely could only have been done by those who were too high to even notice that their muscles were now screaming in agony, but as previously stated, they were now utterly cut off from such sensations. The skeletons tried to put up a decent defense, but they were not armored, nor were they well-armed. They were naked as could be and were equipped with only a small metal shiv for both defense and offense, meaning that they essentially had no real way to hold back the tide of druggies.

It wasn’t long before the entire army was reduced to scattered bones and bone fragments, leaving the surviving tweakers to rush off in any number of other directions, all so utterly consumed by the stuff that they had been smoking that they had only primitive and violent impulses on their minds. As this happened there, it also was something that transpired in multiple other places along the border. In some instances, the druggies sustained moderate or even heavy losses, but ultimately the first line of Darksol’s defense would always cave before violent and bestial malice of the poor manipulated stoners.

After the first line was reduced to nothing, the drugged elves eventually made it to a second lien and in some cases to a third. However, after reaching that third line, the drugs always ran out and the undead didn’t even need to do anything as the overtaxed forms of the ‘high’ elf tribesmen broke under the overwhelming strain that they had forced their bodies to endure. But in this new war, the ‘high’ elves were never intended to be anything more than a blunt instrument that would be used to break down the first few layers of defense, and although there was still a third, unbroken line, there were many other more sober elves (among other things) that were coming to fuck that shit up.

…

Kain watched from where he sat as the elves threw themselves against the flimsy undead like mere animals. He considered it to be rather insulting that they would send drugged-up madmen as a first wave, but he did understand and appreciate the rather sound reasoning behind it. Still, though, he could not accept the usage of those stoners in such a way. He was an evil emperor, but even he was not of the mind to send drug-addled, unarmed, and unarmored civilians into such a battle.

Likewise, he had a deepening hatred for the Arcfiran Confederate Tribes now that he had seen the depths they were willing to stoop to for the sake of a quick victory. Sending berserkers in as a way to break through front lines was one thing but using berserkers that were not only unarmored and unarmed but also normally pacifistic civilians was just wrong. Hell, he had half a mind to simply fly over there and wreck shop on his own after he saw the tweakers had mere children among their number.

In fact, he wasn’t sure whether they actually wanted to be there or not! It actually was beginning to look less like an intentional martyrdom and more like a semi-transparent attempt at ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Tribes themselves! Once the war began to take the battles deeper into Arcfira itself, he would have to check and make sure that the so-called ‘high’ elves had not just been erased by their own brothers for such painfully barbaric reasons.

As for what he had to do right now, however, that was a different thing entirely. The first two lines had broken a bit faster than he had anticipated, and as a result, risked having the elves discover that they were walking into a trap. Despite all of that, though, he had the casus belli that his people wanted, and now it was time to make that announcement that he was pretty sure they all wanted.

At the very least, he had given them what they wanted on both counts, and that would be enough for now.