"The city has fallen! The walls have collapsed!"
The shrill cries, laden with boundless terror and the collapse of the last shred of fighting spirit, tore through the drifting Smoke and dust like the wails of dying beasts, only to be swallowed by still greater thunder and the roar of steel.
The towering wall that had once symbolized the Kingdom of Cassandra's last dignity, gleaming a dull gold beneath Baghdad's blazing sun, was no longer a barrier. It had become a vast tombstone for everything it protected.
The White Scars' meticulously planned precision demolitions had not been intended to create a neat breach through which an army could pour. They had carried out a symbolic dismemberment.
Explosions ripped the sturdy composite wall apart from within. Heavy golden alloy and synthetic stone crumbled as though crushed in a colossal god's palm, becoming a rain of death, lethal fragments mingling with smoke and dust as they poured down upon the defenders behind it, who had yet to recover from their shock.
A gaping wound nearly a hundred meters long lay exposed before the kingdom's beating heart.
"For the Khan! For our brothers!"
"Kill! Kill them all!"
The deafening war cries were not a unified chorus. They were sharp howls filled with the fury, bloodlust, and cold efficiency of steppe wolves descending upon wounded prey.
A white torrent surged through the hideous wound in the wall.
The warriors of the White Scars pushed their mobility to its limits. The roar of Jump Packs and the shriek of Hover Bikes became the battlefield's dominant refrain.
They did not concern themselves with maintaining a solid battle line. In groups of three to five, they raced, leaped, and killed along streets, through ruins, and even across vertical walls, cutting through resistance like a hot knife through