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People have spears. They die.
People have blades. They die.
Peoplehave bows. They die.
People try with shortblades. They die.
They try with fists and four men jump it at once to hold it down and wrest the deadly blade its hand and they die.
The Stainfingers live up to their name and push themselves beyond all reasonable levels of exertion to reload faster than any formation have reloaded a smoothbore musket before and they fire off a volley that cracks across the surface of this monster, but the bullet impacts barely slow it down for all that the hairline fractures spread across its surface and the man beneath starts leaking something was once blood.
Zivka had the axe. Zivka is gone. Edward had explosives, and perhaps demolitions could destroy this thing? Edward is gone. Jove with the halberd? Gone. The Iconotheurges, with their wards and training and careful instruction on how to keep monstrosities like this at bay with ward-writing and sigildry?
Who know where and doing who know what. And since they are not here, troopers die by the score.
The Stern Ravens are too determined to die like dogs to monsters that pikes cannot even scratch, and lock formation, and plant their feet, and though they are crying and screaming and panicked beyond reason, they push back against the thing that is killing everybody. The pikes do nothing. But the weight of them all means It loses its forward momentum. It cannot find ground to push on any further, because it is too blood slick with the destroyed human beings that used to be a fighting formation. It loses it balance. Briefly. Stumbling over half a woman who was laughing a minute ago.
Desperate, terrified spearmen see the trick of it and join in and the Resolute Crows join in and then, finally - finally - the forward momentum of this thing is arrested enough that it slows down so the musketeers can land another volley, those few of them that can still hold a gun and have the wherewithal to use it.
Thiry-seven seconds is all the time that has passed. Not even a minute.
Rushing up from the village on pounding feet, responding to the horror of the screaming and the desperation of the alarm call, Markhan and Wicklighter arrive on the heels of the Resolute Crows. Wicklighter takes in the thing that has murdered scores. It is listing. Like a ship, toppling. Musket impacts has blown some of its body apart finally, shattering like a statue.
And it is already pulling itself back together, crystal-flesh reknitting and blade sharpening and it is not dead. You do not have cannon. You would need a cannon.
Or . . . The enormously heavy halberd, in Markhan's hands, built to shatter armor and bend bone. Swung at full weight, it cannot possible be that this thing resists that too.
But though the spearmen and pike-wall has kept it at bay, it is already healing. And the musketeers have pushed beyond themselves beyond endurance. There'll be twenty seconds to the next volley.
In twenty seconds you will all be dead.
