"A proper fortification is a nightmare to deal with, often a meat grinder where you send in men and receive nothing but dead bodies back. Poorly designed makeshift fortifications on the other hand… often have flaws that were very exploitable." - Carlotta Inloszen, famed general from the Posuin Kingdom, from her treatise "On Warfare".
Fort Ascher was as forts go, a shitty fort. Its walls, while wide enough for two dwarves to walk side by side, were too short. At only three and a half meters tall it was a height many therians could effortlessly leap to, Reinhardt included. Some larger breeds like Mischka only needed to raise their arm to reach the top of the wall, even.
Similarly, the crenellations were too low, and too wide, less than ideal for archers. To be fair, the fort's walls used to be city walls, as the fort was raised atop the remains of a long dead city. The Holy Kingdom had merely fixed the walls, and erected a few buildings to accommodate troops within.
At least the walls were long enough to accomodate a good six hundred dwarves to a side, in two staggered lines, with more waiting by the stairs and in the four towers at the corners, atop which their best marksmen were situated.
When the zealot militia finally clawed their way atop the wall, they found themselves face to face with a shield wall of dwarven heavy infantry, as the soldiers brought their shields in line.
A greeting of heavy axes, maces, and warhammers, ones too heavy for a human to use properly, greeted the first zealots to crest the wall. Their dead bodies fell back down with crushed or missing heads.
Arrows were exchanged by both sides, more from the enemy now than from their side, but the dwarves atop the walls were well-protected by their massive shields. Salicia and her archers, in their raised position, remained safe from the enemy archers and fired back with impunity.
Finally, magic working started to be thrown around. A bolt of lightning seared through a dwarven soldier atop the northern wall. No second bolt arrived however, as a moment later Salicia sent one of her arrows at the mage in question.
A ball of fire exploded against the shield wall atop the western wall, and once again the one-eyed woman turned to shoot an arrow at the offending mage. She had not expected that it was a decoy instead.
The earthen wall that barricaded the eastern gate shook, then crumbled, as an earth mage from the enemy side wore it down. The way thus opened, a throng of zealots charged through the open gate, right towards where Reinhardt's people waited.
There was no need to give the command. All the people who had guarded the gate with him the past four days had rehearsed their reaction well for when a breach happened.
Twenty skirmishers from Mischka's family hurled full-sized spears at the incoming throng of zealots with all their might. The spears easily penetrated two, three, even four people before they stopped, yet the zealots charged in undeterred.
Just as they were about to enter the fort proper, Reinhardt led the fighters with him to stop them. Elfriede ran by his left side, while Mischka herself was to his right, leading her family by example.
Reinhardt deflected an incoming spear to the side with his polemace's shaft, smashing the militiaman's head apart with a swift swing right after. Another came at his right behind the dead man, hatchet raised high.
Reinhardt just shoved his polemace's head into the man's gut forcefully, before he pulled to withdraw his weapon. His leg then came up and kicked the shaft of the descending weapon and he used the force to revert to an upward swing which took the man's jaw off and snapped his neck at the same time.
He risked a glance to his sides to survey the situation, as the dead man's corpse happened to fall on the woman behind him and delayed her for a moment. By the far sides, the few zealots who immediately turned once they entered the fort were handled safely.
To his left, Elfriede danced between the onrushing zealots, her two blades claiming lives as easily as if she was reaping wheat. She understood the situation at hand all too well, and went for immediately fatal wounds in her attacks, ones where her victims ceased being a threat right away.
On his other side, Reinhardt immediately realized that he had thought too much, and the therian matron had no need for his worries. Mischka wielded an unusual polearm, easily three meters long, half of which was the blade.
Said rectangular blade - without a tapered point - was as wide as one of her meaty paws, and as thick as a human finger, the tapering edges it has almost a mere courtesy. Its equally long handle was thick and solid metal, a blunt ovoid in cross section to fit her paws better.
The whole thing must have weight at least a good twenty kilos, if not more, with that slab of metal for a blade, yet the therian matron wielded it as lightly as Elfriede wielded her blades.
Human bodies had no chance whatsoever before such a blade, driven as it was by the muscles of a three-meter tall bear therian weighing well over half a ton. The blades weren't that sharp, and Mischka's victims were torn apart rather than cut in half.
Mere moments were all it took for the therian matron to slaughter all the enemies before her, as she made the process look easy. They all fought on together to stem the tide of zealots trying to force their way in, trading places with others to rest themselves after an hour had passed.
Three teams of fighters kept the rotation up until sunset, when the enemies finally withdrew once more. All of them were slick with sweat from the intense fighting, and between them all, they counted at least four, maybe five hundred enemies slain by their hands.
It was not without cost. Twenty-two of their own perished in the fighting, and nearly twice as much were injured. Their best fighters made it out unscathed, but amongst the less skilled ones, the casualties were quite plentiful.
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