The pre-war probing and negotiations ended with both sides parting on bad terms.
Arthas failed to persuade Dalaran's mages to surrender, and Antonidas failed to frighten off the overwhelming undead.
And so, the war began.
Even knowing full well how powerful the magical barrier before him was, Arthas still wanted to try to break through it.
In life, he had been a paladin and knew little about magic, but he did know that casting spells consumed arcane energy.
The larger the spell, the more energy it consumed.
Based on this simple notion, he assumed that maintaining the enormous magical barrier before them was tremendously costly for Dalaran, and that continuous attacks would further increase that expenditure.
And with countless expendable fodder at its disposal, the Scourge feared nothing more than attrition.
As long as he could fully exploit the Scourge's numerical advantage and use an endless stream of troops to attack the magical barrier, draining its energy, Dalaran would soon be unable to maintain it and would ultimately become lambs awaiting the butcher's blade.
Thus, Arthas gave the order to attack.
And so, the war machine composed of hundreds of thousands of undead finally began to move.
The siege engines launched the first assault.
They were the most terrifying weapons in the Scourge—the Meat Wagons.
These machines were used to collect and store corpses as a reserve of Scourge forces awaiting reanimation.
But they also had another way of using those corpses: expending them as siege ammunition.
Blood-soaked corpses hurled before the enemy's eyes not only posed an immense test to the fragile minds of the living, but could also inflict physical damage.
Worse still, the launched corpses were often infected with the Scourge's plague. As the bodies shattered, clouds of disease spread outward, posing a tremendous threat to any