Through aetherwave comms, loudly-shouted commands, and even words exchanged between defenders, the knowledge spread that the Clay Soldiers’ cores could be discerned from the outside, and thanks to their possession of direct aetherwave, it was the tankmen who knew first, with the artillery-men being second. This information had come from several individuals with the sight to discern such things, Zefaris among them.

Indeed, Zefaris had noticed, and one after the other, she put clay men on the ground permanently, causing their forms to dissolve into puddles of clay, as, upon the destruction of the pure Terra-aligned core, the rebound of Aqua within their constituent clay caused them to briefly assume a liquid form. Pentacle’s standards loads were still plenty powerful enough to rip through multiple Clay Soldiers if she aimed right, their cores showering shards upon the earth. When Pentacle had been run dry and set to reload, Tempesta’s buckshot sufficed to dismember and bifurcate, the sheer amount of mass it was able to displace making up for its lack of solid penetrative power. Clay Soldiers spilled forth from the treeline an unending swarm, filling thousands of square meters with hostile bodies, making up for lack of tactics or effective armament with mass and inhuman physicality surpassing even the Locust-Men, for these things truly could not be bled out or made to fear.

Slowly, as ammunition ran out and reloading downtime created windows of opportunity to the enemy, more and more Clay Soldiers managed to near the battle-line, unrelentingly advancing even if they were reduced down to nothing. The human skeletons inside them provided structure and enabled them to move like people, but their cores were what kept them moving, and as their skeletons were broken up, the Clay Soldiers still moved, tending more towards amalgamation the more damaged the skeleton was. Some had been pulverized so utterly without losing their core that they were little more than clay blobs, while others reminded Zelsys of the malformed Failures, possessing only one or two working limbs. Even a Five-core Composite could be little more than a moving obstacle, if it lacked a congruent internal skeleton.

Those that managed to reach melee range were oft Composites, busying those in the line and creating more windows of opportunity for those behind them in a clear effort to use mass tactics. A Gestalt monstrosity resembling a terrible centipede of hundreds of human legs and arms even managed to make its way all the way to the tip of the spear, the gigantic armored lizard rearing up to stomp on it, biting away its limbs while the Guardian of the Wall leaned down and precisely slashed through its cores one after the other, as the Gestalt’s narrow structure left little space for randomized placement and its flat top made the signs of a core obvious to the statue’s deceptively good sight.

However, soon enough, most of the Barrage Guns were spent and handed back to those behind the tankmen, long after the ammunition of others had run dry and been replenished once, twice, in some cases thrice.

As these seven-barreled behemoths fell silent one by one, a group of Aer-aligned magic users prepared to clear away the smoke once more.

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Among the impromptu Aer Caster Group that had formed to collectively try and keep the sightlines clear, there was a bearded, bespectacled young man in modern clothes that clashed with his gold-embroidered green robe and emerald-topped cane. He raised the aforementioned walking aid, chanting words that few understood and summoning up the stored-up power within the gem, alongside several Eagle-men and three magic-users. This hobbyist mage who studied wind magic for fun had now gotten the opportunity to do his grandfather proud in clearing the sightlines and buffeting the Clay Soldiers with galeforce winds, having underestimated the sheer power contained within the family heirloom in his hand as, instead of a miniature twister to carry away one, perhaps two clay men, his impassioned incantation summoned up a short-lived Howling Wind God - a tornado’s form, granted three blazing-green eyes and a nightmarish number of twister-tendrils. Before he - or anyone else - realized what he had just done, the Howling Wind God ripped a canal across the field, pulling up dirt, rocks, and clay without discrimination, at last clashing with a fifteen-meter Clay Gestalt which it enveloped and utterly shredded down to nothing before finally dissipating.

The Hobbyist Wind Mage collapsed from the strain a moment later, but his newfound comrades were there to pick him back up and feed him Vitae Elixir to keep him on his feet.

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Even beneath the withering firepower that had been set loose against them the Clay Soldiers managed to advance, and as they did, gunfire gave way to grenades and short-range incendiary mortars. Thousands and thousands of stick grenades alongside mundane and magickal explosives of all sorts, tearing up the landscape and the clay men with it, sheer concussive power uncaring for the arbitrary placements of their cores. Many Gestalts had been toppled, many Clay Soldiers littered the fields as they struggled to reform or combine with others like themselves, and many still marched out of the treeline.

“NOW IS THE TIME! SPEARHEAD, HORNS, CHARGE!”

The first to react, even before Zelsys, was the largest of the statues, the Guardian of the Wall. It leapt from its perch atop the giant, armored lizard, sprinting headlong towards the nearest Clay Gestalt, nearly dropping onto all fours, rabidly and hatefully smashing and crushing and cleaving apart, plunging its arms into the massed clay and with apparent prescience ripping out their cores, crushing them in hand.

In its wake, a proportionately small battalion of statues ambled forward, some seemingly having taken the initiative in using statues in the forms of beasts as mounts. Though lacking in grace and speed, the vast bulk of the Stone Watchers rendered them all but invincible to the Clay Soldiers’ onslaught, their imperious strength able to break through even if they were entirely swallowed up by the clay. Onward they marched, unceasingly chipping away at the enemy and spreading out into a wedged line to create a safer wake for the humans behind them. Indeed they were not particularly fast or nimble, but when a Stone Watcher struck, its fist or weapon projected the force of a fired cannonball. Among the statues, those depicting Revered and Reviled figures alike served as leaders, wordlessly gesturing to command their automaton-like lessers.