“One mistake compounds into another, small ones piling up into greater and more fatal mistakes over time, until total failure occurs.” - Saying by Diaz Enos Zves, Philosopher from Clangeddin, circa 402 VA.

“Raise your shields! March onward! Show your mettle to these unwashed peasants! Show them what the battlefields have taught you!” yelled Earl LeCroix the next morning as he exhorted his troops to charge up the sloped road towards Aldenstadt from the back of the formation, with a wind mage conveying his words to the ears of the troops ahead.

Despite the setback of losing his favored aide and the annoyance caused by the attack just earlier in the morning that day, the Earl chose to press on with his plan to assault Aldenstadt as soon as possible. He knew that it would take Levain at least a week to send reinforcements to the city, which should have given him a few days to either occupy or ransack it before they could arrive.

Of course, he had no idea that his troops’ presence was detected long before they even entered Levain territory and that said reinforcement was merely a day and a half away at that point.

The soldiers from Kolain, most of the veterans who had seen at least five years of service, raised their shields even as a hail of arrows from the city uphill welcomed them. The enemy archers were nowhere in sight, as they had simply shot their arrows en masse at an angle where their shots would land around the base of the hill, where the Kolain soldiers were.

As they climbed up the hill, the rain of arrows spread out more, part of the shots still aimed at the Kolain troops who were still near the base of the hill, while other shots aimed at those who already climbed higher up. Some of the soldiers naturally took injuries from the arrows, a few unlucky ones even dying, but this sort of arrow barrage was something they expected, and thus they continued to march onward stoically.

Earl LeCroix – still well and safe in the base camp further away from the hill, outside arrow range – smiled as he saw the army march uphill with determination, the rain of arrows barely bothering them. In his mind, he could already taste the glory of the achievements that would be his, and even dreamed of the rewards the Marquis would bestow on him for it.

It was around when the frontmost line of the troops reached a distance of two hundred meters from the city that things went horribly wrong.

First, a group of people emerged from hiding behind the rooftops of the houses nearest to the city’s eastern edge. Each of them carried an oddly shaped bow that was shorter than the norm with quivers full of arrows behind their backs. Before his troops could react, those archers loosed several arrows each, their third or fourth arrow already in flight before the first even landed.

The sudden barrage of shots was far better aimed than the arrow rain the troops had been dealing with so far, and caused more casualties as a result. Earl LeCroix cursed under his breath and was wondering why the knight in command at the frontlines had not ordered the soldiers to react to the barrage when he caught sight of said knight through his spyglass.

All he saw was the sight of the knight in question lolling backwards as he was kept seated atop his saddle by the stirrups, a large arrow through the eyeslit of his helmet, with blood dripping out from the seam at the back of the helmet’s neck.

That was when the logs started to roll down.

From the corner of his eye the Earl detected movement near the city gates, and he turned his spyglass in that direction to witness a group of large-bodied people – many of which weren’t humans – removing a few stakes that had kept the logs by the city gate firmly anchored in place. Then they gave a heave from the side and the piled logs of wood started rolling down the slope one after another.

Each of the aforementioned logs of wood were large enough that three grown men would barely be able to circle its circumference, and was only slightly shorter than the road was wide. Each of them must have weighed hundreds of kilograms at the minimum, and they quickly built up momentum as they rolled downhill towards the troops that now started to panic as they saw what was headed their way.

A cacophony of screams went up as the massive log rolled over and crushed the soldiers in the Kolain formation’s first few lines before its momentum was slowed and finally halted, allowing the soldiers further behind to barely stop its rolling rampage.

Of course, that came to nothing when the second log struck the first from behind moments later and their combined weight caused another three lines of soldiers to be ground underneath them. A third log hit a bump when it rolled down and was momentarily thrown into the air before it landed just ahead of the first one, while several more logs followed from behind.

The onslaught of the rolling logs alone was plenty to turn the frontline of the Kolain formation into disarray, some of the soldiers desperately trying to hold their ground, supporting the back of the soldier in front of them to push against the falling logs, while some others panicked and tried to flee every which way. The rain of arrows never stopped all that while, which only made the already miserable situation even worse.

It was right at that moment when a sharp whistling noise came from the city of Aldenstadt, soon echoed by a loud and shrill bird’s screech from above. A group of soldiers rushed out from the now unobstructed eastern gate of the city with weapons in hand, rushing down the hill’s slope towards the stalled advance of the Kolain soldiers, while the archers kept up their barrage, switching their aim towards the enemy backlines.

At the same time, many groups of soldiers seemed to emerge from the woods on both sides of the road, as they charged out and struck the surprised and panicking Kolain troops from the flanks. Most devastating was the charge aimed right at the formation’s center, where a three-meter tall bear therian wielding a massive blade and a stocky woman holding a pair of oddly shaped void-clad axes slaughtered all before them and pushed hard into the formation.