Vast drums beat on the air, thundering out, rolling out, the pounding blood in ears of someone running for their life, not quite fast enough. There must be dozens of them, a vile drumline counterpoint to the brassy tearing horns rising up from behind the walls of Wastet. Carried up by the horns was a choir, a miserable assemblage of suffering. Each note represents a separate violation and pain. Each voice a lifetime of tragedies. All brought together to sing the hymns of Ko’Ras.

  From out of the open gate charged wagons. Or animals. I don’t know if there was still a distinction to be made, the flesh seemingly melted onto and intertwined with the wood. It was connected someway to the beast pulling the cart, something that looked like one of the ordinary nighttime monsters was forcibly bred with a prize ox. Whether it was one organism, or two, or many, I don’t know. What I could see was that the wagon was filled with polyps of flesh, each suffering plinth topped with eyeless, earless, human heads. All singing in dreadful harmony.

  I don’t know where the drums were, or the horns. I was certain the drums were made of human skin. I didn’t have to see them to know that.

  Fear. Fear of what you could see, and what you couldn’t. Fear of what was to come. Fear that whatever made that would make something worse out of you. The simple horror of not knowing what something like that was for, because there was no way it was simply meant to scare people. Not something that complicated. There were only four wagons. They felt like a whole lot more.

  “Are they spilling something as they go? It looks like they are leaking something.”

  “Rats, my Lord. They are dumping rats!”

  “Pomoroi, hit those wagons if you can!”

  They were moving a lot faster than I imagine an ox cart could normally, but not so fast that Pomoroi couldn’t catch one or two of them. I hoped.

  “Pomoroi, by Imperial Decree!”

  There were two thunderous booms and one of the carts exploded into a heap of gore and swarming black shapes. It screamed. Some part of it could still scream, and the surviving heads turned its agony into a harmony, still in chorus with the still moving carts.

  “Hit the others if you can, pin them down.”

  The enemy infantry kept rushing forward. They were utterly undeterred by the screaming choir. If anything, they were moving faster.

  I looked over at the pike and crossbow formations. They were shifting in place. Looking edgy. I saw a lot of eyes going to the Ancients. I had wondered why the flag bearers were called that, and looking at them, they really were the old timers. Not elderly, but middle aged. Compared to how young the rest of the mercenaries were, ancient seemed fair. Old men in a profession where men died young.

  I have never, in a life of continuous humiliation and rejection from the normies, never seen a greater look of bored contempt than those ancients were giving the wagons. Not only were they not scared, they were sneering at the whole performance. One of them, the one in the golden ox costume, unashamedly scratched his balls, then spat.

  Hard to panic when the unarmed cosplayer is that unmoved. The nearby troops settled down. I kept my eyes moving, and spotted a problem- the muskets. They were too far from the ancients. I could see them starting to panic. “Othai, the matchlock troops-”

  She grunted. “Matchlocks, fall back. Work your way to the front line. Pikes, about face.”

  Now the formation would have two ranged units up front, with the infantry in the back. All of this was arrayed around Pomoroi, who was shooting through firing lanes left open by the units in front of her, or just shooting over their heads at the wall. It definitely encouraged people to stay well out of her way. It scared the hell out of me just watching it. But Othai was the expert, and this is how she arranged things.

  I scratched my head. Should I have brought the Three Handers? I hired them, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of a single useful thing they could manage on the battlefield. I left them in Verton as guards for Radz, along with a few other Awakened.

  Best not to backseat-drive. Another wagon exploded, but now they were too close for Pomoroi to target. Two down, two to figure out the hard way what they were for.

  The crossbows, and now muskets, were winnowing the charging pikes. It was a vicious reminder of why warfare in this era was always such a slow chess-match of formations. Line them up right, and you have a machine for murdering humans. Get it wrong, have units moving unsupported, and they were slaughtered. Archers on their own? Cavalry would get them. Infantry on its own? Archers will get them. Cavalry on its own? Actually pretty bloody dangerous, but so long as the infantry held formation, the cavalry would die.

  The Total War games got that right. Every type of soldier had its counter. I was watching it play out in real time. It started with the artillery. Cavalry would have been the right choice to counter it, but with pikes supporting the artillery, they were helpless. Archers would have butchered the pikes, assuming they could get past the artillery bombardment and our own archers. Instead, they were cut down by our cavalry and Versai.

  We had locked the enemy into a failure cascade, and they knew it. Whatever was going on with the wagons was an effort to snap out of the cycle.

  “Rat swarm. We don’t have a good way to counter the rat swarm. Combined with the fear effect, our formation will disintegrate.” I figured it out. Othai grunted an acknowledgement.

  I looked back at the frog-centaur cavalry. We had cut them down to fifteen, but seeing what my few speedy scouts managed with less than half that number, I didn’t discount them. Besides, their sheer size, heavy armor and long glaives made them a certified, genuine article nightmare for our back line troops. Who were now on the front line. God damn it all. How did our siege of their city turn into us under siege?

  “Cannons- aim at the bottom of the city wall. Shoot flat along the ground as much as possible.” Othai’s voice was calm. I wondered what the hell she was playing at- then it clicked. Valid targets. She ordered the archers to split up and widen their lines a bit, to give the artillery more room to fire, then pointed at the exact spots she wanted Pomoroi to aim at. Spots with conspicuous amounts of swarming rats.

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  The cannonballs skipped and rolled along the ground, ripping through the swarms. The thing about a swarm is that it’s hard to kill all of it. On the other, glass-half-full-of-dead-rat hand, it was hard to not kill some of them. Every one we killed now was one we didn’t have to desperately try to shoot or stomp to death later. And it gave more time to shoot those hideous carts!

  The closer they got, the worse they looked. The monster pulling them was in pain. You could see them shaking their heads, bovine faces twisting and screaming as they went. The singing heads growing on the flesh polyps seemed like masks of suffering.

  Looking over at the exploded wagons, they seemed to be growing on top of some awful hive or warren. I think the polyps extended down into the heap. I think the rats were eating them, even as they sang the praises of their creators. A fear engine. It was scaring the hell out of me.

  Then an ancient, holding a tall banner and dressed like a jester got mugged by a poodle groomer, let out the most cataclysmic fart I have heard this side of discount nacho night. “Damned water around here gives me wind.” We all settled down. I had to agree. Soda is much easier on the stomach.

  It was a race, of a miserable sort. Our archers and matchlock troops were trying to kill their pikes and fear wagons before they could reach our lines. Whoever won, lived. The crackle of the matchlocks seemed to bounce against the pounding drums coming from Wastet. The cries of the fallen, the wounded and the dying, only added to the awful harmony from the wagons.

  This was a slaughter. We were winning one-sidedly. I wished I was anywhere else.

  Then the rats hit our archers. I saw them try to stomp the vermin to death, but there were too many. They dropped their crossbows and pulled out knives, hacking at the rats clawing and biting their way up their bodies. The fire on the rushing pikes and wagons slowed to a crawl. My men were screaming, and I didn’t have any way to save them.

  I didn’t have to look to know those wounds were infected. It would only be shocking if they weren’t. And the pikes were pressing in closer.

  “Musket troops, archers, focus fire on the two carts while falling back. Pikes, prepare to form a square.”

  It was turning into a siege. It really was turning into a damned siege! We outnumbered these scumbags and yet, somehow, we were the ones being pinned down! I couldn’t even use my cavalry to harass the enemy pikes, because the enemy pikes were now practically on top of the evil carts.

  Mobility. It was the damned, damned frog-centaurs. As long as they were around, any break in the formation was potentially fatal, and worse, they didn't let us concentrate our superior numbers. We always had to have the pikes on guard against them. Just by standing in the field, they negated our largest advantage, controlled our movements and damaged our morale.

  And I didn’t have a good counter for it. In theory, I could use faster light cavalry to pin down the heavy cavalry until the infantry could close. Alternatively, I could just ignore them until they tried to charge, then let them die on the pikes once more. But they wouldn’t be that dumb twice. They had already lost eighty five percent of their numbers. Human troops would have run away by now.

  There must be a point to break through. Some trick to turn the tide. If I couldn’t rely on the rocks-paper-scissors tactics of Total War, there must be something I could use. Final Fantasy Tactics. Fire Emblem. Could there be something there? At this point, I would take goddamn Dynasty Warriors. Something. There must be an idea somewhere-

  “That’s another cart down. Just one left, Tower Master.” I yanked my attention back around. The archers and matchlock soldiers, the ones that weren’t busy fighting a rat swarm, had managed to kill one of the oxen-things. The polyps on the back were still singing, but Pomoroi soon skipped a couple of rounds through it and that was that.

  The other cart was already being focused down. The monstrous ox could absorb a lot of punishment. An insane amount. Tens of rounds of muskets and crossbow bolts. But it wasn’t immortal. Eventually it collapsed too.

  “It’s attached to the wagon with those… fleshy connections. Might be blood and other things running through there. Maybe most of its crucial organs are actually buried inside the cart. It took so long to kill because all they were doing was destroying flesh and bone, not hitting anything vital. I bet it’s still not dead. It won’t die until the cart is torn apart.” I muttered. Versai nodded.

  “That does sound right, Tower Master.”

  “Fire at the wall right there, Pomoroi.”

  “Pomoroi, by Imperial Decree.” There was a cold satisfaction to Pomoroi’s usual bark. Could… could she be aware that she was using an exploit? I knew there was more in the One Stars than was immediately obvious, but this had to be like finding out your coworker was secretly Doremon. It must seem like actual magic, the rules of the world being suddenly subverted.

  Her long guns roared, and silenced the despicable choir of the monsters. The rats scattered. The change was almost instant- the second the music stopped, they ran. The enemy pikes were close, now, but it wouldn’t matter.

  “That wall right there, Pomoroi.” And the extremely pissed off ranged troops jumped in as well. The pike formation was exterminated in minutes. The cavalry feinted a few times, but Othai didn’t bite. The crossbow and musket troops were close enough that the pikes could intercept a real charge. She wouldn’t miss this opportunity.

  It was a sobering lesson. You don’t need brilliant strategies. You just need numbers, and a willingness to take losses. So long as your tactics were sensible, you could grind through. We had lost some crossbows and some matchlock troops. I’d owe Truso a small fortune. But that was it. Our real losses were… negligible. There were dead men on the battlefield, and more would die from their wounds, but it amounted to less then ten percent of our ranged units. Not even enough to slow us down.

  I let out a shuddering exhale. Mika was okay. I had spotted her leading her squad in using their big shields to crush multiple rats in one blow. I could stand losing her countrymen, but I couldn’t lose her.

  “Any ideas on how to get rid of that damned cavalry, Othai?”

  “Not at present, my Lord. They have retreated out of range, and they will scatter as soon as Pomoroi turns in their direction.”

  “I wish I didn’t agree with you. Next stop, Wastet.”

  “Yes, my Lord. With your permission, I will reorganize the troops and let Pomoroi finish crushing that gate house before advancing. In accordance with your orders to manage the troops following established military practices.”

  “Do it.”

  Othai didn’t turn a hair over the losses either. Didn’t even frown. She had been protective of them the entire time we had been campaigning in this relic site, but now, with victory in reach, she showed her edge. These were mercenaries. They traded their blood for coin. They took our runed bones. Time to pay up.

  We marched towards the open gates, giving the ruined corpses of those vile wagons a wide birth. Our own wagons bounced merrily along, hauling our artillery to wherever we needed them to be. In this case, closer. For no other reason than protecting them from the never-sufficiently-damned cavalry trailing behind us. Fifteen! Just fifteen of them! That was all it took to affect a five hundred person deployment.

  I’ll say this for the monsters of Wastet, they were fantastic teachers. For the N’th time, I swore I would find a way to acquire more cavalry.

  There were still soldiers up on the wall, but they were in a tough spot. There wasn’t much in the way of buttresses on this wall. Some, but not a lot. Once the gate and gatehouses were blown up, the effective firing angles they had were limited, as were the number of troops they could position on them. Besides, we didn’t have to worry about ammunition. I had the muskets firing constantly, keeping everyone’s heads down.

  First one to stick their head above the parapet was the first one to get shot in the face. No need to take a ticket, just form an orderly queue. The weight of numbers was overwhelming at this point.

  “Boss monster.”

  “Pardon, my Lord?”

  “Boss monster coming up. In each relic site, there seems to be a Dyn Hunlief. Whatever the Mayor was, he wasn’t one of them. Ko’Ras has some creepy sounding priests. Expect to see them soon. Listen- the drums are changing.”

  They were, too. Picking up the pace. Not as fast as a snare drummer could manage, but fast. The horns took on a dreadful edge too- like they were calling for something. Calling someone.

  Before we could get to the gate, something came rushing out. Six of the oxen-monsters hauled an enormous wagon out of the city at a maddened run. Flat and wide, like a barge on land. I could see the drums now. I had been wrong. Not kettle drums at all, but the beating of some strange organs. The thin stretched thin and tight, vibrating and shuddering at the whim of the hideous thing in the middle of the wagon.

  “POMOROI SHOOT THAT THING RIGHT GODDAMN NOW!”

  My artillery could deploy on the wagon. We learned that running around Verton. The troops got out of the way sharpish, as she deployed and fired. We didn’t have much time to shoot. It was moving faster than anything that big should be able to. I could see long tubes jutting from the edges, surrounding the wagon. Must be the horns.

  And, naturally- no, there was nothing natural about any of this. Especially not the Dyn Hunlief seemingly merged into the wagon itself. It’s bestial face had something of the wolf about it, and something of the tiger and the bat. Six arms, each with a heavy mace on the end, waved madly in the air. It roared, and swung two of them. They batted the cannonballs out of the air.

  “Not enough, not enough! Bwahahaha! Not nearly enough! Aaah! So many games and little tricks drove you to a last, desperate battle, and this is all you can muster. It’s not enough! You aren’t enough! You can barely fill the gaps in my teeth!”

  “Not quite the high level mind game I’m used to from your kind, but I guess you are more into props.” I looked over at Othai. “Kill it.”