In the frozen belly of the Bleeding Gorge, the air was thick with the stench of ozone, pulverized stone, and dying metal.
The deafening clash of bronze against iron echoed relentlessly between the two-thousand-foot granite canyon walls.
Squad 25 stood back-to-back in a tight defensive triangle beneath a sloping granite overhang.
Their field cloaks were torn and caked in black alchemical grease, surrounded by a rising mound of broken enforcer armor and shattered pikes.
Kaka let out a guttural northern war grunt, swinging his primary war axe in a brutal horizontal arc that cleaved through three bronze breastplates. The sheer kinetic shockwave hurled the shattered enforcers ten paces into the icy creek bed.
His broad chest heaved beneath his battered cuirass, steam billowing from his nostrils into the sub-zero air. "They just keep crawling out of the shale like maggots!" Kaka roared, his secondary axe decapitating an advancing spearman.
