“What one expected, and what one got from life, were most often two very different things.” - Saying attributed to an unnamed philosopher from Knallzog.

The battle had been going their way for a while, then, it just didn’t do so anymore.

Alvaro’s unit had been pulled towards the center of the Warforged formation after the battle had been joined, to allow them to recuperate for a while. The small group of Algenverrian troops they fought against had pretty much been swallowed whole by the Warforged when their own side refused to let them escape, and Alvaro had even distinguished himself in the fighting.

He had been the one to charge deepest into the enemy formation, leading an ever-widening wedge into the enemy formation straight from the very front. It was a risky undertaking, and had he lacked either the training he had gone through or his better armor, he would have likely perished in the attempt. Instead, he succeeded, and even notched up another feat for himself when he took down an enemy noble.

Alvaro had forged so far ahead that he even reached where one of the Algenverr nobles commanded the battle from atop his steed. The man had loosed his guards at him, forcing him to tangle with them while greatly outnumbered. He was on the backfoot and hard-pressed to hang on against them until Njeri caught up with him and helped fight them off.

Together they fought off the man’s guards, and Njeri eked out an opening that Alvaro capitalized on to break through their formation. That placed him within reach of the surprised noble, who failed to react to his arrival properly. The way the somewhat portly noble fumbled with the sword he carried on his waist was almost comical, his hand failing to grip the weapon properly in his panic.

Alvaro just struck the man down with his khopesh, the curved blade cleanly chopping its way through one of the man’s legs even as his horse reared away. The strike had also injured the animal, causing it to neigh in pain and rear up on its hind legs, unceremoniously depositing its now one-legged rider on the ground right before Alvaro.

It was an opportunity the young Warforged had not wasted.

He chopped down with his blade and collected the nobleman’s head just before the signal to withdraw had been given because the frontlines were about to clash all around them. The feat had earned him a word of praise from the noble son that commanded his unit, and all of them felt elated as they pulled back to the middle of the formation to recuperate, allowing fresh units to do the fighting in the frontlines.

It was not too long after that when the tables turned with a suddenness that caught them off guard.

Alvaro himself had not noticed the fighting that took place in the formation’s right flank, a bit further behind where his unit had pulled back to. They only learned that an enemy detachment had forced their way into the midst of the Warforged formation when messages were relayed from others about the situation. By then the fighting had drawn even closer to them.

Their commander ordered an about-face as the shieldbearers moved from the front to the back of the formation while the pikemen also turned around. Alvaro and the other Blademasters of his unit were stationed close to the commander, where they prepared themselves to deal with whatever situation they were faced with.

They found out that they were not prepared for the situation they found themselves in, the hard way.

The first sign that things were going awry was when Alvaro noticed that he could see the figure heading the enemy formation even over the heads and shoulders of his compatriots. It was a sight quite unlike anything he had ever seen before. The figure that led the enemy’s advance stood half again as tall as even the tallest of the Warforged, and easily more than twice as wide.

What the enemy reminded Alvaro of the most was a great bear, the sort of beast he had seen in the wilderness during his training once or twice. Except that this bear stood upright and led a wedge formation of similarly large, animalistic figures from the very front, and held a truly massive two-handed blade in its arms, which it swung with horrifying power.

It was also wearing armor. Heavy armor that rendered it impervious to the pikes at the pikemen of his unit tried to stab it with. Their pikes either failed to do anything to the beast or were simply shattered into pieces by swings of that massive blade it carried. Even with all that, though, that was not the worst of what happened to them.

The worst was that the beast was not alone.

Behind it followed a horde of other similar, bestial creatures, some of them very similar to the one in front, others very different in looks. The shieldbearers failed to hold them back for even a moment, their sturdy tower shields shattered into halves with one swing, as were their bodies behind it. The situation rapidly spun out of their control.

Alvaro had just turned to their commander, his mouth opening to ask for a command, when he saw a sight he would never forget. A large arrow, one easily as thick around as one of his fingers, struck the young nobleman directly in between his eyes, its point piercing out the back of his helmet even as the man lifelessly toppled over from atop his steed.

He exchanged a shocked look with Njeri, neither of them knowing what they were to do in that sort of situation. Their training had decidedly not covered the sort of enemy they were facing at the moment, but after a moment of deliberation, they chose to run towards the front, where the enemies were carving through their lines like a hot knife through a block of butter.

They had just traversed most of the distance through the throng of panicking pikemen when all of a sudden, the dead body of a Warforged happened to be sent flying in their direction. The corpse’s helmeted head struck Alvaro right on his face, hard, and he knew no more.