Mikel swallowed painfully, exhaustion and dust forcing him to take dry and choking gasps. He hadn’t any water left, and there was none left in their supply—even those boys had taken arms to fill the gaps in their cracking battle line. His arms felt like leaden weights, chest burning under his dented breastplate, and he was bleeding from numerous cuts as he took what respite he could. Mikel panted like a dog, swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth with each ragged gasp. He had heard of soldiers putting a pebble in their mouth to keep it wet—though he hadn’t the inclination or energy to look for one while the battle roared around him and army of Ricter Kastenburg, Margrave of Stetten died. Fat flies had already arrived to feast on his fallen comrades, one buzzing and tickling against his wettened cauliflower ear before floating through the sea of broiling men to feast on the offal behind the steadily advancing Cursemarked Legion.
Scattered arrows thumped around Mikel and into and his fellow soldiers—the Legion apparently did not bother with weapons that couldn’t survive soaking in blood, rather these came from the fur-clad horsemen which they’d been trying to bring to field for days. He shied as a heavy black arrow thumped through the leg of a man next to him, and he wished he still had his shield, shattered and shorn away by a Legionary’s hideously curved sword on his last stint. He rubbed his bruised left arm where the blade had left a beading crimson slash in the mail. Nothing around to use—thankfully, no one had fled, not yet at least. Same end either way, Mikel forlornly thought.
A sharp cracking drew his eyes up as their few onagers fired again over their line into the Cursemarked, shot half the size of his head tearing limbs and punching through thick iron plates into taut flesh. The sickening black-blood river torn through the Cursemarked Legion simply closed; ignoring their losses, the Cursemarked crunched over their own dead and maimed, the corpses already dissolving into ash in the stagnant air. Before this battle, Mikel hadn’t taken to heart any of the campfire stories of undying marked men, much less an enslaved legion of the accursed beings—their muster was supposed to be against the marauding horsemen, not a professional company. No one had prepared them for this kind of slaughter—even still, the mettle of men held, if shakily.
The shrill whistle sounded once more, a despairing tone it seemed now, and the bellowed orders from Sergeant Tilman to rotate the line sounded all too soon. Mere moments it seemed, barely enough for the soldiers to even catch their breath. The man to Mikel’s left—Renard, he remembered—glanced knowingly at his shieldless and bleeding arm as the ranks of his comrades sawed into the frontline. Both of them would be vulnerable now.
At every rotation the Cursemarked relentlessly pressed their advantage; in their untiring stamina and suicidal stoicism each Legionary simply fought to the death before being replaced by one behind. Much unlike frothing berserkers their insanity may imply they would be however, the Cursemarked Legion fought near-silently in practiced and inhuman fury, the shouted oaths and beating shields of Ricter’s army crashing against an eerie wall of creaking leather and scraping mail. The morgue-quiet Legion was only broken by the short barks of officer’s commands and the intermittent undulating cries from the incessant horsemen who buzzed about sending stinging shafts into the Margrave’s ranks.
With grunts and screams for support their center was suddenly hammered in the middle of their rotation. The Cursemarked Legion used the brute force of their bodies in an attempt to buckle the Margrave’s line—it was a mad press to split the army in two! In the space of a few seconds a grouping of soldiers were cut down like wheat before a scythe and their frontline was sundered, Legionaries surging through the breach hacking and stabbing at all around them. If not stopped, the Margrave’s army would be torn apart and reduced to islands of men swallowed by the sea of iron.
Sergeant Tilman furiously swearing and crying out, Mikel and his fellows raced to stem the tide, battered and exhausted men desperately holding the Cursemarked Legion from cleaving their army in two. Renard was killed almost instantly as their line collided, neck torn open at the side, a scarlet rift opening half his neck from a hacking blow from a Cursemarked saber. His mouth opened and closed wordlessly as he collapsed, bloody froth flecking his lips. Their sergeant fell as well soon after, steaming guts spilling out of him, yellow and coiled, from a great axe wound opening him from groin to stomach as his bellicose orders turned to agonized wails in this throat.
Mikel’s own opponent was a lithe beast, ash-blackened and blooded armour crunching as it snapped forward like a snake forcing an instinctive, arm-numbing parry. Mikel was pushed back as the Marked repeatedly shook his guard, counting on the typical soldier’s reliance on their shield and Mikel’s exhaustion to weaken his left. Mikel fell back onto his fencing training from a lifetime ago, taking a long guard to try and keep his distance, trying to rely on the length of his sword to hold the Legionary off. On a human opponent this may have had an effect, but the Cursemarked relentlessly hammered at him with thrusts and wild slashes, its dark blood pouring from punishing wounds as it pressed Mikel into the rank behind him. In a brief opening Mikel released a lightning thrust and slid his sword like a needle through the exposed neck of the Cursemarked—a cruelly efficient blow—even as the Legionary’s wicked sword came up on his left once more and through his gauntleted hand, causing an explosion of pain as it pierced his palm. The dried flesh of the daemon pulled into a rictus grin as it pressed onwards through his strike, bubbling black blood seeping from its neck as it speared itself and Mikel. Howling in agony, Mikel was pulled to his knees with the sword of the suicidal Cursemarked pinning him before a cruelly spiked kneecap cracked his nose and he fell bleeding to the dirt.
Mikel could not see the sky, only a haze of dust swirling in the air above the clashing men. The crashing of metal on metal, shouts, moans of pain; the din of battle all became faraway. He thought of no one and nothing, dazed, his burning chest barely moving to give him air. Faces danced in the dust overhead, of those he knew and those he was not sure he recognized anymore. Another lightning shot of pain and he briefly realized a sword was sunken deep in his chest. An armoured boot crushed him as a Cursemarked impassively wrenched the blade from him—distantly he was aware of more blades, but no more pain.
Mikel Warin felt no more as he died.
