"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!"
The cone-shaped objects screamed strangely as they tore through the air at high speed, like monstrous birds sweeping across the sky.
The sound was immediately picked up by the lich leading a flanking maneuver through the swamp.
Riding a skeletal warhorse, the lich raised its head. Cold blue soulfire flickered beneath its gloomy hood. Though its skin was as shriveled as a corpse's, its features were still faintly recognizable.
Its prominent nose and sunken eye sockets marked it as a northerner in life.
Unlike the gaunt frames of other liches, this one had retained its broad build after being resurrected, making it look particularly strange. And unlike the others, it wore a sharp bone blade at its waist for close combat.
It looked less like a lich and more like a death knight.
It quickly spotted six strange objects in the sky, trailing white smoke as they hurtled toward it along standard parabolic arcs. With its extensive experience in war, the lich immediately sensed that something was wrong.
Though it had rarely seen such bizarre things before, it could roughly guess what they were for.
The lich raised its eerie, decaying staff and conjured a psionic shield around itself, while ordering the elite skeleton troops under its control to raise their shields.
The advantage of undead creatures—their incredible discipline—was on full display. In the blink of an eye, the entire formation had shifted into a defensive stance.
At the same time, the strange shells began their descent.
The buzzers attached to them caught the wind. As their trajectories steepened, the shrill sound grew ever more piercing, like invisible ghosts diving from the sky to devour in great gulps the offerings already laid upon the altar of war.
"Dwarven shells."
The lich on horseback was