Goldilocks suddenly turned around, as if worrying about him was a rude thing to have done, and gave the onlookers a smile.
“Uh... Did you guys not hear what I said?” he said.
The group couldn’t reply. They stood up properly, and Goldilocks’s smile broadened as he swung his sword and let it rest upon his shoulder.
“S-Sorry... I just thought you were in danger!” Etan said.
“If I tell you I’ve got it handled, I do mean it, you know? Come on, believe in your leader!” Erich replied.
As he gave an awkward smile, suddenly a whistling sound cut through the air as a red pillar of light shot into the sky.
“That’s...!”
“Reinforcements for the cavalry?!”
Goldilocks clucked his tongue, realizing that backup had been placed on standby. It was a common ploy to draw out the main forces with disposable pieces and then to begin a fight with mobile forces while the enemy’s belly was exposed.
“I’m worried about Siegfried and the others in the west. Can you lot do another one or two jobs for me?”
The men nodded instantly.
“Great. And you can ride, right?”
Before long, some horses started to gather. Their reins were drawn by a seemingly invisible force. Despite their lingering fright from the battle, these horses seemed obedient enough.
“Let’s give them a heaping helping of revenge. Yeah?”
Goldilocks gave another big smile as he stroked the rugged armor-clad horses. It was only then that the men present realized they might have agreed to something they might later regret.
[Tips] Divinities made flesh appear in all manner of places. There are many legends about the children of such beings.
The situation was altogether too strange to call an ordinary battle.
While the sight of the encroaching army with their shields in a row and spears held out was no different from how it would have been on any other battlefield, something was missing. Anyone, anywhere else, would be raising furious war cries—whether to propel you to kill your enemy or simply to urge your body to live another minute more—but the undead horde advanced in silence upon the defenders of Mottenheim, who gave raucous cries to warn their allies and cover for one another. Although the skirmishers, clad in shoddy armor and chain mail, made steady progress in their march, no sound came from their lips, not even a breath. The only noise was the eerie cacophony of their scraping weapons and armor, which melded with their pounding footsteps.
The enemy’s vanguard was sparsely populated, and so the early stages of the battle appeared to be in the defending force’s favor. Their archers on the watchtowers rained arrows down on the skirmishers. It was almost a dull sight. The archers almost felt as if they were in the yard of the Snowy Silverwolf, striking at the practice dummies. However, although the job was just as easy, it had about the same efficacy as shooting at lifeless scarecrows too.
“Crap, they won’t stop coming!”
“There ain’t any point shooting their bodies! Aim for the heads!”
“There’s no way I can hit their limbs! I ain’t Big Sis!”
The zombie skirmishers kept up a steady march. Although the arrows they had taken would have felled a mortal enemy, these unfeeling horrors paid them no heed. Now that they had breached the sphere of protection granted by Kaya’s arrow ward, they had begun to fire back with their own slings and arrows while continuing the advance. Whether the arrows pierced their eyes and came out the back of their heads or took root in the hollows of their hearts, they would not stop.
The row of defenders blanched in the face of this unassailable march.
These zombies, brought back from the dead by means beyond reason, were nothing short of terrifying. This was something that the Fellows and people of Mottenheim had known beforehand, but seeing them for themselves, their mortal instincts screamed that such monsters should not exist.
Geists were, in a sense, a mere transmutation of the soul. Despite the fear that they might have evoked, it was a fact that they still existed as complete people, and so they were welcomed in by the Empire. Rhine was a welcoming and eclectic place—to a fault, some might argue—but even far afield, no one could deny that as strange as they were, geists were still ensouled people.
Zombies, on the other hand, were completely different. They were empty husks that should have been laid to rest out of respect for the dead and for the peace of mind for the bereaved, reappropriated into mere tools. For those people with souls who believed that death would be the end, they couldn’t help but feel disgust.
If there had been a geist or geists operating all this relinquished flesh with some measure of regard for the original owners, perhaps the reception would have been different, but these were shambling husks that had been set in motion by a living person’s incantations. It was too much.
“Raaah!”
While the hesitance of some of the defenders could be seen in their spears, a sudden roar cut through the air from the middle of the formation as one of the skirmishers collapsed backward. The sword that it had drawn to strike at the defenders’ shields fell away as the zombie lost its arm and tumbled to the ground.
“What’s with these pathetic spear strikes?! I told you to get your asses into gear!”
Siegfried raised his heavy spear high to rile up his allies. Zombies were sturdy monsters, so he whipped his allies into shape so that they wouldn’t lose morale as he repeated the knowledge that his partner had passed down to him about zombies: They were mass-produced soldiers that relied on their numbers, so it was best to cut away at the joints to neutralize and whittle them down.
“Get their numbers down while you can! Cut their shoulders and the tops of their legs! Aim and strike!”
“Y-Yeah!” came the reply.
“In formation and...STRIKE!”
“YEAH!”
Siegfried barked commands, and the unit struck with their spears, just as they had practiced.
They knew how hardy zombies were and had prepared accordingly. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the sort of ace in the hole which could neutralize their enemy in one fell swoop, but it was better than nothing—similar to pulling your hoodless coat over your head during a sudden downpour.
Their strategy was to team up in groups of two or three and strike at the same spot. The number of skirmishers had been whittled down thanks to the mines, and even though they came together, the narrow approach and their reduced number meant that the defenders outnumbered them at the crucial chokepoint. The terrain had given them the advantage, and so they were able to thrust two or three spears into a single zombie, pulverizing their joints and weak areas.
“Ngh... So tough...”
“When you’ve stabbed, twist and break! Destroy these bastards!”
A zombie without a weapon wasn’t all too scary anymore. Although a weakened zombie could still crawl and bite—more than enough to tear through human flesh—they didn’t have the sort of jaw strength to bite through armor or a decent set of boots. A zombie’s terror could be found in their tenacity and the strength of their terrible grip, which was more than sufficient to pull a living body apart like an expertly brined Thanksgiving turkey.
The defenders aimed to immobilize the zombies and reduce them into squirming heaps of flesh. Some of the zombies tried to mount a charge against the shield wall, but with their collective center of gravity kept low the defenders were easily able to absorb the blow and strike back.
“Stab and crush! Crush and stab! Don’t let them grab your shield—they’ll rip it off ya in a second!”
One by one the horde was diminished and the pile grew in front of the line of defenders. The defeated zombies tried to crawl out of the way to clear the path, but the defenders were relentless and crushed them until they fell still. Even the zombies recognized what was happening—the stack of corpses would serve as a wall, blocking the rest of the horde’s advance.
The sight of the skirmishers being speared and collapsing under the hail of arrows made it seem like the defenders of Mottenheim had the advantage, but Siegfried still thrummed with quiet dread. It was taking too much energy to defeat each zombie. Even if they weren’t performing particularly complicated moves, the endless cycle of stabbing and bracing for an enemy tackle was slowly but surely chipping away at their stamina.