A woman named Melli pressed herself and her two children against the inside wall of a bakery cellar. Her youngest, barely four, clutched a charred toy in his fingers. Outside, the world screamed.
Gunfire echoed in bursts—short, violent—followed by silence, then the brutal sound of boots crushing rubble. Arrows sometimes flew past the shattered window above. Once, a man had run past trailing blood, then collapsed without a sound.
"Mommy," the older boy whispered, "Are the bad men still here?"
She didn't answer. She only held them tighter.
In the city above, humans called for medics. Others cried out in languages she didn't understand. Then came the thunder—explosions from beneath the cobblestones. Sewer traps, once meant to catch rats, now erupted with magic mines laid by beastmen days ago—glowing runes carved into crude stone sigils, triggered by heat, pressure, or blood.
The building trembled.
Dust drifted from the ceiling like snow.
On the front, Sergeant Klemens was the first through the archway into the eastern plaza. The humans had broken past the second defensive ring. Twenty bodies lay behind them—half buried in stone and debris. Klemens kicked open the shattered door of a burned-out tavern and waved his men in.
Inside, it stank of meat and sulfur.
A demi-human was already there—a panther-kin, young, shirtless, blood smeared across his chest like war paint. He held a jagged cleaver.
Klemens opened fire, but the gun jammed.
The panther-kin screamed and lunged.
Bayonets met flesh.
Klemens shoved his rifle upward, the steel tip slicing beneath the beastman's ribs. The creature didn't die quietly. He gurgled, clawed at Klemens' face, and bit down on the barrel with dying strength. Only after Klemens drove his boot into the beastman's skull did the convulsions stop.
"Clear!" someone shouted.
Then a shriek.
A hawk-kin dropped from a broken rafter with a spear. It pierced one of the riflemen through the collarbone. His scream turned to choking as blood filled his throat.
The squad opened fire.
Feathers, bone, and blood sprayed across the tavern.
Another man vomited.
Down a nearby street, Battalion 4's engineers detonated another warehouse. A chain of mortars erupted behind the blast—aimed at a fortified school now being used as a beastman rally point.
Inside the classrooms, shields lined the walls. The blackboard still read:
"Tomorrow: herb practice & weather tracking"
The glass blew out. Fire rained from above. Smoke belched from every hallway as the building collapsed inward.
Screams rose. Then fell. Then silence.
Atop a collapsed hotel, a jackal-kin priest raised a staff and shouted prayers to the sun. He stood before a half-circle of volunteers—old men, young girls, anyone who still could hold a knife.
They had no armor.
No training.
Only fear.
And desperation.
"Wait until they're close," he whispered. "They die like anyone else when stabbed in the neck."
But the humans came prepared.
Snipers. Mortar teams. Trained rifles.
The moment the beastmen revealed themselves—flashes of gunfire lit the sky.
One woman's head snapped back and exploded in a mist of red. A boy took a round to the gut and fell, screaming until another ended it.
The priest screamed in rage.
He raised a flaming bottle, ready to throw—
CRACK.
His skull burst open.
Back near the central avenue, Lieutenant Gerhardt barked orders over the roar of machine guns.
"Bayonets fixed! Stay together! Stay low!"
Across from him, a stretch of buildings stood tall—too tall. Perfect sniper nests. But there were no shots.
It was a trap.
One rifleman sprinted forward—and the earth gave way beneath him. A pit trap. Wooden spikes. Screams. Blood.
Demi-humans burst from the buildings a second later—twenty of them, knives flashing.
Close combat.
Steel rang against steel. Bayonets plunged into throats. Teeth tore into flesh. Rifle stocks cracked skulls open.
One soldier caught a machete to the side. He tried to scream, but the blade had cleaved through his ribs. Another man slipped on blood and caught an axe in the back of the neck.
Gerhardt slammed his rifle butt into a badger-kin's face. Bone gave way with a sickening crunch.
The last beastman tried to flee.
He made it three steps before being mowed down by the Maschinenwerfer from the backline.
In the sky, Virella's magical projection flickered—briefly showing the battle to civilians across Larrak. Human villagers far from the front gasped as they watched the footage on blue arcane screens.
Some cried.
Others cheered.
One old man—missing three fingers—saluted the ghostly image with tears in his eyes.
Inside a shattered apartment building, two beastmen dragged their wounded general to safety. His leg was gone—blown apart by a grenade. His breathing was ragged. They hid him beneath a table stacked with burnt books.
"We… we can't stop them," one whispered.
"We can," the other said. "We must."
The general's eyes fluttered. He gripped their wrist and croaked:
"Set the last charge. Bring them down with us."
In the southwest quarter, Wilhelm Drossen stood atop a pile of corpses. His uniform was stained, torn, his helmet cracked. He held a shabby box radio one his back a microphone in his and a rifle in the other.
"We hold the next three streets," he growled. "We flank from both alleys, force them into the town square. Then burn them alive."
An officer nearby hesitated.
Wilhelm turned.
"I said burn them."
"Yes, sir."
Back on the plaza, Corporal Weiss led a bayonet charge.
Twenty men. Then forty.
They ran over rubble, over corpses, past abandoned carts and exploded cisterns.
A beastman with a spear lunged—
He was impaled by two bayonets at once.
Another dropped from a second-story balcony. He drove his blade into a soldier's shoulder, sending him crashing to the ground—but was shot in the gut before he could finish.
"Push them!" Weiss screamed.
A mother and her two daughters watched from a cellar beneath the old granary.
One child whispered, "Are they winning?"
The mother didn't answer.
Above them, bootsteps thundered.
One… then hundreds.
And above all else, the constant cry:
"Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!"
It echoed through the broken streets.
A chorus of blood.