“Form up! Form up on me damnit!”

The words were lost to the clash of steel, the crunch of stone, the screams of dying Elan. Aleph could have screamed his lungs out, and never risen above the cacophony of battle.

Their orders had been clear and concise. The Warden Cavalry had pulled ahead of the main column in their attempt to run down the remains of Sune’s garrison, along with the civilians they were screening from attack. Relief forces from Bastion had been hidden in twin valleys just down the road from the expected route, ready to strike. The garrison forces would turn and put up a resistance, and the proper army would hammer into the side and rear of the cavalry, gutting them.

Then those clear and concise orders had marched them into a pure, unmitigated disaster.

His unit, the Fighting First, had been given the most uncertain mission, closing the trap by attacking blindly through a thatch of wood that concealed the tail end of the Warden forces from their observers. It could have gone easy with no forces at all to impede them. It could have gone hard with an engagement against Warden soldiers. Instead, it had gone catastrophic.

What awaited them when they exited the forest was not the lightly defended field that they’d expected, but an overstrength unit of officer-led Warden cavalry and light infantry. Outnumbering Aleph’s forces nearly 2:1, they had some difficulty wheeling to face a new threat and forming proper battle lines in the somewhat restrictive farmland, but that only turned the situation from a massacre to a bloodbath.

They didn’t have the stamina or the time to retreat, and even if they had, losing this chokepoint would break the encirclement. It would allow the Wardens to retreat the bulk of their mounted warriors back into their main force, eliminating the advantage of numbers and surprise. The attack would be ruined, and Aleph knew all too well that they simply could not afford to throw away opportunities such as this.

So they’d charged. The nearly two hundred men in his unit throwing everything they had into a full-frontal blitz, hoping against hope that though they could not break the stonehead morale, perhaps they could at least surprise them long enough to force them from the field. Long enough to pull in their reinforcements.

The carnage around him put the lie to that hope. If there were a quarter of them left, he’d be surprised. A handful of stragglers were stumbling from the field, shot at by slingers and archers, or sneaking away unnoticed from mounted warriors too busy finishing off their current opponents to bother. A small handful of them might survive, but the Wardens wouldn’t let them get far. They never did. Though they never showed an ounce of expression, Aleph had heard tales of how ruthless their pursuit could be.

Aleph himself was already wounded in half a dozen places, even as he hacked a terracotta head away from a now lifeless body. There would be no crawling away from this battlefield. No heroic death charging the officer in a vain attempt for glory or victory. He’d live until he died.

“Come on you brick-faced sons of mountains.” Aleph growled, flourishing his sword moments and advancing towards them moments before a thrown spear caught him in the neck and everything went black.

“Okay, so that could have gone better.” Cayden frowned.

“You think? Silver retorted, tapping at individual units on the War Frame to show just how bad it was. “Total loss. They even chased down the ones that escaped to make damn sure we weren’t left with anything. We’d be lucky if they just break the encirclement rather than running us all down at this point.”

Despite her tone, she didn’t look mad. At least, not at him. Her expression was a mixture of concern and frustration, deep brown eyes alternating between looking toward him and trying to make sense of the catastrophe on the table before them.

“Yeah, but at least, we know they have more reserves than we thought. And knowing-“

“Don’t.”

“-is half the battle.”

The woman groaned, fingers of her gloved hand tapping heavy ‘thunks’ along the hardwood edge of the frame as she studied it. “I’m not sure you can pull it off. Not with that big reserve force just sitting there holding their link to the column open.”

The map before her collapsed and reformed at Cayden’s command, the greyscale model ‘zooming out’ enough to show a full picture of the battlefield and the surrounding areas. It showed the main road, the valleys to either side of it, their own troops, and what they knew of the warden cavalry and the column behind it. The latter was some two turns away by foot, too far away to directly interfere, while the former was surrounded on almost all sides by Cayden’s forces. Only a single hex toward the rear remained free of their control, the one that the terrain had forced the Fighting First to blindly enter.

A proper encirclement of the whole of the Warden’s Cavalry would be an incredible boon to them. Encircled units lost their Warmaster bonus, took considerable penalties, and had nowhere to run, meaning that they’d take extra damage to reflect being overrun. If they could close the pocket, it should be possible to liquidate the enemy and still retreat before the main enemy force could catch up to counter-attack. A ton of XP and a major enemy taken off the board. They had to take the chance, they had to make it work.

The only problem was that damn reserve force.

“Maybe we spread things a little thinner? Trap the reserves in without engaging them?” Silver suggested at last.

“Thought crossed my mind but that is what, four extra hexes? We thin them down enough to encircle them and the Wardens will just kick the barn door in and watch the house fall down.”

She looked his way, her expression one of befuddlement.

“What?”

“Just, some of your expressions. Is it like a rural thing? Or did you get dropped on your head as a baby…?”

“Look, let's burn that bridge when we come to it.” He ignored her frantic one-handed ‘oh come on’ gesture in his direction. “I’m usually more of a tricksy hobbitses type, but maybe this is one of those times we try overwhelming brute force?”

Even knowing what to expect in advance did not make it any easier to see the forces arrayed against them. A wall of Warden cavalry, supported by a small horde of light infantry in a loose formation. Even though the wardens were rather bloodied, it was the sort of intimidating force that made him wish he had been promoted as part of a ranged unit, rather than the commander of the Fighting First.

Pity that reality couldn’t bend to a person’s whim that way.

“Orders say that we’ve got their whole mounted force trapped and ready to be butchered. Everyone except them.” He shouted, gesturing toward the enemy army on the far side of the field. They ruined Islo. They sacked Sune. Are we going to let them take Bastion?!”

The response didn’t come in words but waves. A chant so strong, so full of courage that it made his heart sting. Not all of them were going to make it, perhaps not even most of them. The field was already littered with the broken and torn bodies of the last Elan attack. They’d be charging over the remains of their fellows in order to break the back of Warden mobility. In order for this to matter.

“No, they aren’t going to take Bastion. Today we take from them!”

Sadly, the battle that followed was nothing short of a meat grinder. They fought hard against the deadly combination of mounted soldiers and fast-moving skirmishers, but even with the Warden’s numbers already reduced, it was an almost impossible task. They advanced in tight formation with their shields raised to protect against thrown spears and slung stones, only to have that formation taken advantage of by flanking cavalry. As they pivoted to face the new foe, their shield wall faltered, causing more and more of them to fall to the slings and arrows of their foes.

Not that the Wardens faired much better when they finally ran out of ranged implements and room to run. They were little match to angry, well-drilled swords of the Elan infantry, their stiff bodies cleaved and cracked under thrust and slash until at last, the battlefield grew silent.

One in ten of them had survived. Aleph had to hope it would be worth it.

“Okay, so overwhelming brute force didn’t do the job.”

“I told you it wouldn’t.”

“You did tell me it wouldn’t.” Cayden sighed. “We got it by the skin of the teeth, but there is no way we can hold it through even an entrapped reprisal. They’re going to break out.”

“Maybe if we can dislodge them, rather than trying to wipe them out wholesale.” Silver mused, before shaking her head at her own suggestion. “No, because then they’d just break in next round and we’re back in the same place.”

“Yeah.”

“Thinking maybe we call it off? We don’t exactly have a lot of shots at this and it is costing us a lot to keep fiddling with something we can’t fix.”

He shook his head vehemently. “At least one more. I know there is a way” His hands clenched into fists as he leaned over the table, as though being closer to the action would somehow give him the insight he required.

“Blitz with one unit fails. A pincer gives us a pyrrhic victory. If we had a unit to spare this wouldn’t be an issue.” Cayden said, reasoning through it aloud as if that would somehow help. “Can’t push them out of position, can’t pull them far enough to make it count. If we had an archer or even some guys with spears.”

“Can they make something impromptu in the forest? It's basically just a sharpened stick after all.” Silver suggested.

Hope welled up in Cayden, only to be dashed after a handful of tests with the War Frame and a call to Valserys who was supervising operations in the field. “We can order them to pick up sticks, but that won’t meaningfully impact their performance.”

“Can’t send players in without testing to make sure the loop doesn’t have a really bad side effect. Not that we have anyone nearby anyways.” Silver remarked. A moment later a chirp in her ear alerted her of an incoming call. “Speak of the devil. Go ahead, Celia.”

“It went that well?” The girl’s voice was strained. Cayden could practically hear her wincing as he joined in the call. “Are we going again or not. Because if we are not, I would very much like to go take about a dozen aspirin. And then maybe shoot myself.”

“We only have enough magic for two more times around either way. Let’s save-scum one last time and see if we can salvage this. If not, then we’ll just revert to the start of the turn, scrap the whole plan, and try something else. Then you can go lay down.”

“Thank god.” The relief in her voice was palpable as she began to chant the incantation for the fifth time that morning.

Cayden cut the call and smiled in Silver’s direction. This little bit of reality-bending had been her idea. They’d known since Islo that they could link up to their Elan casters, Roberta and Victoria. By using Bastion’s supply of magic energy and their unique class abilities they could create powerful new effects. Cayden had been mostly focused on logistical possibilities, teleportation of the sort they’d used to escape the doomed city, as well as good old-fashioned evocation.

It was Silver who’d recommended linking Celia and Victoria. Time-magic and teleportation. A bit of trial and error, and they’d found that they could revert some or even all of their turn to a previous state. Given enough magical energy, of course. It was, as he’d dubbed it, basically save-scumming. Don’t like the outcome? Reload to a previous save state and try again until things were just right. Billy Mitchell style.

“One last shot.” He said to Silver.

“Let’s make it count.” She paused, a thought occurring so vividly across her face that it might as well have been visualized by a lightbulb popping up above her head. “Actually, pull up the combat log again. I think I may have a brilliant idea.”

The command staff had gone insane.

Nothing about this deployment had made any sense. An enemy was holding open a breach in their encirclement of the Wardens, his orders had told him. How they knew that when there was not a single scouting report with that sort of information was anyone’s guess. Probably magic, knowing the players.

He was not to attack that hidden enemy, however. On the contrary. They were to lay in ambush, to take up positions in the forest. To wait and watch for an attack from the considerable enemy force. As if they would ever make such a foolhardy move. They had to know just how much danger they were in, there was no way all of those soldiers would stay still and give the Elan army time to maneuver properly, let alone blindly attack into the forest.

When the order came to split the unit, to spin off a single scout as his own ‘formation’ and tell him to walk headfirst into the enemy army, Aleph nearly rebelled. They knew the detachment was there, why would they need to send a scout?

Not his place to argue.

Seven soldiers volunteered for the dangerous task, then drew straws to determine who the ‘lucky’ soldier would be. Eliza took the honor and soon left at a light job. Then… nothing.

Minutes passed. Nothing. Minutes more. Nothing. Then at last footsteps. No, hoofbeats. The sound rose in intensity, soon accompanied by the crack of branches as mounted stone warriors rode unimpeded through the foliage.

Eliza appeared through the dense greenery, sprinting for all she was worth toward their hidden positions. The Wardens were quick on her tail, a few loosing haphazardly aimed projectiles in a futile attempt to tag her amidst all the verdant nature.

It wasn’t a battle. It wasn’t even a slaughter, for that implied something altogether biological, meaty. This was a dismantling. The wardens were caught totally unprepared, in bad terrain and split from their lagging infantry against a foe that was waiting in ambush. They took half of them in under a minute, the other half in about twice as long. By the time the straggling skirmishers arrived on the scene, the Fighting First had formed to meet them in an exchange that was somehow even more one-sided than the previous.

The command staff had gone insane, but damn if Aleph didn’t like this special form of insanity.