"Pull back, retreat now, ah—"
The warning never finished.
The instant the armored panels along the demonic fel war machine's flanks snapped open, the entire coalition sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. They had been watching that machine like hawks ever since the last engagement, when a single shell had erased a million lives in a flash of white fire. No one who had survived that could ever forget it, and no one with a functioning brain would underestimate it again.
That was why the coalition had halted fifty kilometers out, spreading their forces thin across the plain instead of advancing in a dense mass. The logic was simple and brutally practical. If that war machine launched another shell, at least it would not take everyone with it. One explosion could not wipe out an army that refused to cluster.
Now, somehow, they were only five kilometers away, and the war machine still had not fired.
