Book 2 - Text Updates 024
Jetstone heavies crunched and pounded across the bridge. Wrigley stood with his stack.
He could see only heads: the faces of Battle Bears and G-RAFs looming above the gleaming helmets of his compatriots.
He felt no fear. Standing in an unled stack blessed him with a feeling of comfort, purpose, unity. Wrigley was one of many like him. To either side of him was another Stabber, spear held at the same ready angle as his own. The stack was subject to orders from the Commanders in other stacks in the hex, or from the capital. But in the absence of a Warlord stacked among them, the men calmly and wordlessly stood their ground in common understanding.
Captain Ford shouted orders, but they were not intended for Wrigley's stack, so he took no note. The cloth golems crashed into Captain Twenty's stack, and it looked to go badly, quickly. The enemy was torn by lances, but not one of those towering heavies fell. They trampled forward, crushing Gobwin Knob's units underfoot.
Over the tip of his black spear, Wrigley watched Captain Ford's final charge. Seeing the enemy's Chief ride in in a tankeroo, the Captain made a valiant play for him. Alas, he got nowhere close. Another stack of heavies engaged him first. An unmounted warlord took his leg at the knee. He managed to leave his sword in the side of an LFN, but then...it crushed him to dust.
They were truly alone, now. The stack decided as one. Charge!
The line moved. Wrigley's boots moved.
They could not possibly win. Every man knew this with certainty, and lo it was glorious.
To charge to one's end was no futility. Futility was Wrigley's first life, croaked in the mud after doing nothing but drain his side's treasury turn after turn. Futility was his first spear, lying on the ground somewhere, having never pierced enemy flesh.
They engaged the nearest and weakest stack, an infantry squad with a Level 1 warlord.
But she was good. His comrades fell around him, perhaps three-to-one as they managed to take a few of the enemy's Stabbers. Wrigley pressed in to fill gaps as men fell before him. For a moment he stood in a bubble: of shouts, of the clacking of steel, of the heat of bodies...and counted himself a soldier at last.
He loved the Titans, and Wanda their Tool, for granting him this new life and this new spear. And though he had never yet used it, now he knew what he was for. His side was the Titan's side. They had raised him from the ground to use this spear just once.
And so he did.