The melee at Harken Field was the melee that the advance’s three-hundred-pace closing had been building toward, the contact range where boomsticks became clubs and the engagement’s outcome was determined by the things that close combat determined: strength, skill, numbers, and the willingness to sustain the contact’s cost.

The Threian center hit the barbarian center at the two-hundred-pace mark, the closing distance’s final hundred paces covered at the run that the charge’s momentum required, forty-two thousand soldiers driving into seventeen thousand barbarians with the mass that two-and-a-half-to-one numerical superiority provided.

The impact was the impact that colliding infantry formations produced when both formations were moving at the charge’s pace: the sound of shields striking shields, the grunt of warriors absorbing collision, the scream of soldiers who found blades or bayonets or hand axes in the contact’s compressed violence.

A Threian infantryman in the king’s center drove his bayonet into the barbarian in front of him. The bayonet caught the barbarian’s breastplate and skidded, the dwarven iron deflecting the point away from the chest and toward the arm gap. The bayonet’s point found the gap and entered the arm’s inner surface at the bicep, the point sliding along the bone and severing the artery that ran parallel to the humerus. The barbarian’s arm went limp. The hand axe in the barbarian’s grip dropped. The Threian pulled his bayonet free and the barbarian swung with his remaining arm, the short sword in his left hand coming across in the horizontal slash that the highland close-combat tradition used.

The sword caught the Threian across the face. The blade’s edge, dwarven-forged and holding the sharpness that dwarven metallurgy provided, opened a gash from the Threian’s left ear to his chin. Blood sheeted down the soldier’s neck and into his collar. He staggered. The barbarian drove the sword point forward into the gap that the stagger created and the point found the Threian’s throat above the gorget.

Both men fell. The soldiers behind them stepped over the falling bodies and into the space the falling bodies created, the melee’s geometry filling every gap as fast as the killing produced it.

On the right flank, the barbarian champions engaged.

The Fifth Realm champions, warriors whose personal combat power exceeded the standard infantry’s capabilities by the exponential margin that Realm differences produced, drove into the Threian right with the individual lethality that the Fifth Realm provided. A champion the size of a Rhakaddon rider, his iron armor glowing with the runes that shamanic enhancement painted on Fifth Realm warriors before battle, swung a two-handed war hammer into the Threian shield wall.

The hammer struck a shield and the shield disintegrated. Not cracked. Disintegrated. The Fifth Realm’s power, channeled through the champion’s arms and into the hammer’s head, produced an impact that the shield’s construction could not absorb because the impact’s force exceeded the material’s structural limits by the margin that the Fifth Realm’s enhancement provided. The soldier behind the shield was thrown backward by the impact’s transferred energy, his arm shattered at the elbow where the shield’s handle had been gripped, his body colliding with the soldier behind him.

"Fifth Realm champion! Right flank!" The officer’s report was the report that the Threian military’s command structure produced when the thing being reported was the thing that the command structure’s response protocols had been designed for.

Three Fifth Realm Threian officers converged on the champion. Their swords blazed with the battle energy that the Fifth Realm’s activation produced, the specific enhancement that the Realm provided to edged weapons when the wielder’s power was channeled through the blade. The convergence was the convergence that multiple Fifth Realm practitioners produced against a single Fifth Realm opponent: the attack from three directions simultaneously that the single opponent could not address without exposing the direction the opponent was not addressing.

The champion blocked the first sword with his hammer’s shaft. The second sword caught his thigh plate and scored a groove that the dwarven iron’s quality reduced from a penetrating wound to a surface cut. The third sword found the gap between the champion’s shoulder plates and entered the muscle beneath.

The champion roared. The roar was the roar that Fifth Realm warriors produced when the Realm’s pain-suppression capabilities were engaged, the specific sound that the body made when the wound’s pain was acknowledged and overridden by the Realm’s power. He swung the hammer in a full circle, the rotation clearing a space around him that the three officers had to vacate or be struck by a weapon that had just disintegrated a shield.

* * * * *

Above the melee, the magical battle continued.

The king’s Sixth Realm aura contested the Seventh Circle shamans’ atmospheric manipulation in the sustained duel that the highest levels of magical combat produced. The aura pushed against the downdraft. The downdraft pushed against the aura. The sky above the battlefield was the sky that magic and battle energy contest produced: fractured light, atmospheric distortion, the specific visual artifacts that occurred when two incompatible energy systems occupied the same space and neither was powerful enough to displace the other.

The Threian Fifth Circle battlemages engaged the barbarian Fourth Circle shamans in the middle tier of the magical battle, their structured academy spells against the shamans’ natural-force manipulation, the engagement producing the mixed results that the previous campaigns had established: some spells reached their targets, some were redirected, the ratio favoring the shamans because the shamanic field’s natural resonance with the battlefield’s environment provided the defensive advantage that the academy’s structured approach could not match. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

A Fifth Circle battlemage named Caelith, the senior practitioner who had disrupted the shamans’ fog at Vinefield Ridge, targeted the Seventh Circle shamans’ position with the specific approach she had developed through the campaign’s three weeks of magical engagement: ground disruption beneath the shamans rather than direct magical contest.

The ground beneath the western shaman shifted. The shaman’s footing disrupted. The Seventh Circle’s atmospheric manipulation wavered as the shaman’s concentration adjusted to the ground’s movement. The downdraft thinned for four seconds.

Four seconds. The king’s Sixth Realm aura surged into the thinned downdraft’s space, the golden energy expanding to fill the gap that the disruption had created. The Threian center, released from the atmospheric pressure for four seconds, fired a concentrated boomstick volley into the barbarian center at the range where the balls’ accuracy was certain and the targets’ density made every ball a hit.

The volley tore into the barbarian center. Three hundred barbarians fell in four seconds. The Seventh Circle shaman recovered. The downdraft returned. The atmospheric contest resumed.

But the four seconds had cost the barbarian center three hundred warriors, and three hundred warriors at the contact range where the melee was being fought was three hundred warriors whose absence created the gap that the Threian numerical superiority was designed to exploit.

The melee’s individual combats raged across the three-hundred-pace front that the engagement’s closing had compressed both armies into, the combat producing the specific intensity that close-range engagement between equal-quality troops produced when both sides were fighting for outcomes that the fighters considered existential.

The Threian soldiers fought for the kingdom’s survival. The barbarian warriors fought for the valley’s resources that their mountain homes could not provide. Both motivations were the motivations that produced the specific quality of combat that military historians described as the quality that determined battles’ outcomes when weapons and formations were equal: the quality of the individual fighters’ willingness to sustain the contact’s cost and continue fighting after the cost had been paid.

A Threian officer of the Fourth Realm channeled his Realm’s power through his sword and struck a barbarian champion of the Fifth Realm. The Fourth Realm’s strike was the strike that the Fourth Realm produced: strong, skilled, enhanced beyond the natural limits of muscle and steel. The Fifth Realm champion absorbed the strike on his shield, the Realm-difference between them manifesting as the difference between the strike’s delivered force and the shield’s absorbed force. The champion’s Fifth Realm power absorbed the Fourth Realm strike entirely and the champion’s counter-strike, delivered with the Fifth Realm’s full enhancement, shattered the officer’s sword at the forte and drove the broken blade’s hilt into the officer’s face.