“We will win and advance to what comes next! You shall return to your beloved families with pride! In the days after, we will say that although our battlegrounds may be different, we fought against the Demon army right alongside the Hero! Victory is on our side!”
Werner sent up a silent apology to Mazel for using him as a front, but when his men’s voices rose in a ferocious battle cry, Werner raised his fist alongside them. Then, he alighted from the podium and gathered the battle’s commanders to explain their orders in detail.
After Holzdeppe and Goecke left with nerves clearly strained, it was only Neurath and Schünzel who noticed that Werner seemed to be weathering a stomachache.
✦ ✦ ✦
Led by their Demon Commander, the Demon army rushed into battle as soon as they saw the fence above the hill and the flag of House Zehrfeld flying above it. For humans, it would be near impossible to run hundreds of meters and join the battle without even a moment’s rest. For monsters, it was a walk in the park.
Once the soldiers on the hill saw the monsters’ approach, they launched a counterattack. The land worked in their favor, the fortress’s elevation extending the range of their missiles, though the distance impeded their aim. Some of the Lycanthropes deflected the spherical shots with their arms, but this only made them break and splatter on their faces. The creatures then fell to the ground screaming in agony.
Several other Lycanthropes stopped in their tracks, stunned by the sudden turn of events. Others, however, continued their rush toward the fortress. As some advanced and others held back, their forces split, and their formation came apart.
These projectiles were ceramic vessels filled with poisonous grasses and spices that acted as a blinding agent. Rafed had used his knowledge of poisonous plants to create them, and the Anheim soldiers would lob the resulting projectiles with slings. They were proving quite effective.
Each of the Demons kept going at their own pace, some running and others writhing in pain, and this had gradually spread their forces. Then, something else rained down on the Demon army from the fortress with a low hum. They were spears, and their size and weight lent them significant force. They pierced the hide and fur of the monsters, causing blood to spurt into the air alongside their screams. Sometimes, they looked right down at the heads of the spears. Even the ones which missed the Demon army stuck deep into the earth, hampering their advance.
Atlatl were not sophisticated tools. Conversely, they appeared quite simple. But by utilizing the principles behind levers, they allowed even untrained users to launch spears over a hundred meters away with several times the strength of their arm. Some reports state that depending on the thickness of the spear, they could have as much as four times the force of an arrow. Depending on the circumstances, they could be much more effective than having a novice shoot a bow.
However, they were slow to launch and required several spears to be readied in advance, which made them rather impractical. Werner had only used them himself because he had heard that one of the basic tactics of the Roman army was throwing javelins, and once he made his first orders to launch the spears, he immediately instructed his men to switch to weapons more suited for hand-to-hand combat. Still, the heavy spears were lethal, and some Lycanthropes who had been hit head-on by the javelins had already been stilled by fatal wounds.
“Here they come! Do not engage them alone!”
The soldiers let out a roar. The Demon army’s formation had been spread thin, and so they ascended the hill in staggered groups. Meanwhile, Werner and Holzdeppe had their soldiers form up into small squads. Cheers and screams reverberated in the air, along with the clamor of metal and the hiss of spraying blood. But before long, the voices of both humans and beasts drowned out all other noise with their screams of hatred and wrath.
Werner used the lance he was most accustomed to as he pierced through one of the Demons, letting Neurath and one of his orderlies land the finishing blow. Then, a large shadow obstructed the sun that shined above Werner.
“Disperse!”
After barking orders to the nearest soldiers, he too jumped back. The next moment, a large body slammed onto the ground, and a massive arm swooped down as if trying to scoop Werner into the air. He dodged the blow calmly and regained his stance. The look on his face suggested he knew this was coming.
He looked up and met the lion visage of his towering foe with an apparently confident grin. “So you’re Gezarius.”
“Indeed. You have proven quite the obstacle, you brat.”
“I couldn’t just stay quiet and let you do as you please,” he said, shrugging his shoulders with a sneer. Werner knew why the Demon Commander was here personally. He readied his spear and said in a sarcastic tone, “Just as I expected. Once you meet Mazel, it’d be best if you did so with my face.”