BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
In one final rush, the two thick wooden beams that had held the gate in place, they cracked, followed by a great whooshing of flame.
"SHIELD WALL! FORM THE SHIELDS!" A man had the sense to shout – but they weren't ready. None of them were ready yet. They didn't expect to fight on the icy cobbles of their streets.
As others stepped back, Vol stepped forward. He was sweating already, and he had not even swung his axe.
Anticipation ran through him, anticipation and rage. The world was of different colours now. Ever since Oliver's eyes had laid upon him, it had been so. Everything drifted towards red and towards black, and he felt within him the rage.
Vol stepped his way to the very front of the line. He didn't have a shield. Shields were expensive, and his mother had told him that being a warrior was a fool's profession – the axe was something that he'd had to work for.
He sidled up the largest man in town. A brute by the name of Larm. The man spared him an appraising glance as he came close, the scars on his cheek rippling. He'd never even deemed Vol worthy of a look before now, but now he grunted in approval.
"Lock your feet to the ground, boy," Larm said, "we aren't going to be dining in Varsharn's halls until we kill ten a piece."
"Ten?" Vol asked, his voice tight and ready. "We want that bastard's head. Ten isn't going to be enough."
Vol didn't catch Larm's reply, for with a mighty kick, the captain of Oliver's infantry sent the broken gates flying open. The wood of it was already burning, its flames spreading to the outer city wall.
And then the rest of them came streaming in, like an army of silver executioners.
Their army was immaculate, but it was their eyes… Their damnable eyes. Never had such morale been seen before. It had been said that there was something different about Oliver's troops. That he got twice more out of a man than the man would have been capable of elsewhere. Facing them head-on, Vol found those rumours to undersell it.
These were normal men, by his eyes, and yet each of them carried the aura of a battlefield hero. He could almost see the golden glow that came off them. This here was the army that swept through the path of everything that it touched. The army named the Sweeping Wave.
Again, Vol stepped forward, the slightest gesture, in the most important moment of his life.
A full step – just enough to break rank with Larm next to him, and with all the men that had been gathering with their shields behind them. A foolish gesture, it could certainly be condemned to be so. But the Yarmdon did not favour the meticulous battle strategies as the Stormfront. They favoured strength. And in putting himself at the head of the army, if only by a full step, it was almost as if he was leading them.
The illusion lent Vol strength.
"FOOL, BOY!" Larm shouted next to him, as Vol stepped up to face the wave of charging Stormfront men by himself – and fool he might have been, but the illusion that he had created for himself lent him strength, and as he swung his axe, all might have seen the first glimmers of greatness radiating out from the box.
SMACK!
He crushed a skull immediately. His blade crashed down, deforming a helmet, and splattering brains and viscera all over Vol's face and chest. With a single strike – his first strike of true battle – the boy had managed to shatter the strength of one of Oliver's soldiers, soldiers that were by now the fame of the continent.
It was his first kill. The first time he'd ever drawn a man's blood with anything other than his fists. The head of his axe got stuck, for a moment, as Oliver's soldiers charged past him, slamming into the men that were beyond him.
He heard the screams of men dying, and felt more blood fall on him, as his people were cut to pieces.
His first kill, his first battle – and they were losing. His heart should have creaked with the effort to process the new stimuli. The weight of what he'd done. The fading light in the enemy's blue eyes. But he felt none of that. He only felt the thrill.
He felt that millennia-old heat of his ancestors. The lust for battle. The dominance of the bear. The first for blood.
'IS THIS IT, BROTHER?' His thoughts thundered inside his head. 'IS THIS THE GLORY YOU PROMISED ME?'
With a boot, he kicked the corpse free of his axe, without mercy, without remorse. Such an emotion was foreign to the Yarmdon. This was the fundamental structure of their economy, to take from the weak, and bring their gold back home. It had been his nature even before he'd touched an axe.
He looked to his left, his face stained in blood.
Larm was dead. His head had left its body. He was meant to be the strongest warrior in the town. He was meant to be something of a leader, and yet he'd died in the first charge. Vol saw that the head of his axe was dry – he hadn't even managed to counterattack.
A look to his right confirmed that such a thing was a truth there as well. The men were being slaughtered, punched through like a paper wall. The shield wall that they'd tried to set up had been smashed through as easily as they'd smashed through the gate. The scent of death had already announced itself, asserting a crippling weight.