Mogdin was furious, roaring incessantly.
In response, more and more Dwarves instinctively crouched, retreated, and even curled up behind their shields.
Once the defenders deployed artillery, the situation grew even worse.
Corpses lay strewn across the battlefield ahead. The fallen warriors had not been merely grazed by arrows or pierced by spears. Their limbs had been blown apart, their chests caved in, and their skulls shattered—the brutality of their wounds far exceeded anything they had experienced fighting through the mines and caverns over the generations.
A young warrior knelt beside his companion's corpse and reached out with a trembling hand to check for breath, only to discover that half the man's face was gone. Brain matter mixed with blood and flowed into the mud. He suddenly vomited, and the axe in his hand clattered to the ground.
"This isn't a battle..." he cried out in terror. "We're being slaughtered unilaterally."
Another, older Dwarf warrior tried to rally their morale. "Hold formation! Raise your shields! If we move fast enough, we can make it to the walls alive!"
But before he could finish, a bullet struck the gap in his shoulder armor. The Metal Projectile tore through flesh and sent a spray of blood into the air. He screamed and collapsed, his shield slipping from his hand. The few companions around him immediately fell into chaos.
The Dwarf warriors were not cowards. They had fought monsters from the depths in the dark mines and clawed their way through collapsed rock with their bare hands. Every one of them was a tough-as-iron veteran.
But they had never experienced a war like this—no roaring charges, no clash of axes and shields, no hot-blooded contests of strength at close quarters. There was only the fire spitting from behind a gray wall a hundred paces