"So, Torstein..." Erik yelled loudly over the continuous roar of the gunfire, not taking his eyes off the terrified old man below. "How many more seconds do you think it takes to completely break a frog’s mind?"

Torstein let out a laugh, pouring a fresh measure of black powder into the smoking barrel of his musket. "They are already tripping over their own feet! The rebels are routing!"

It certainly looked like it. The snowy slope was covered in fallen bodies, and the Viking charge had been shattered by the wall of lead.

The survivors of the first wave were scrambling backward, sliding down the ice to get away from the deafening thunder.

Down on the frozen lake, Halfdan yanked the reins of his warhorse, dodging a fleeing warrior.

The old man’s sharp eyes darted past the white sulfur smoke billowing from the ridge. He listened.

The booming thunder had suddenly stopped.

A well-trained musketeer in the Iron Kingdom takes about twenty seconds to reload his weapon.

He has to bite the paper cartridge, pour the powder, drop the lead ball, and ram it all down with an iron rod.

When an entire line of shooters fires in quick succession, there is an inevitable window of silence where everyone is trying to reload at the same time.

Halfdan heard that silence. He saw the Iron Kingdom soldiers reaching into their pouches instead of pointing their metal tubes.

"They need time to breathe!" Halfdan’s voice boomed, "Hide behind the dead! Take cover, you cowardly dogs!"

After hearing such words, the panicked rebel army instantly obeyed. The seasoned Viking warriors threw themselves face-first into the deep snow, pulling the corpses of their fallen brothers over their own bodies to act as fleshy meat shields.

The snowy slope suddenly looked lifeless, completely denying Torstein’s shooters a clear target.

"Damnit!" Halig cursed, leaning forward.

"Hold your fire!" Torstein shouted to the musketeers, waving his hand. "Do not waste your powder on the dead! Wait for them to stand up!"

But Halfdan had no intention of making his men stand up. He spurred his horse back toward the open timber gates of the city and raised his massive double-bitted axe, pointing it directly at a cluster of low, wooden pens built near the defensive walls.

"Unleash the hounds!" Halfdan roared.

As such, the doors of the kennels were thrown open by the rebel guards.

Suddenly, dozens of massive war dogs burst out of the city gates. They were massive Norse wolfhounds, bred for aggression, starved for two days, and trained to tear the throats out of armored men.

"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me..." Erik muttered.

"Dogs!" a young musketeer screamed. "They are sending the dogs!"

A hungry wolfhound is low to the ground, moving at incredible speeds, and darting unpredictably over the ice and snow.

Trying to hit a sprinting dog with a smoothbore musket from a hundred paces away is like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks in the dark.

"Shoot the beasts!" Torstein barked, raising his own gun and firing down the hill.

The bullet kicked up a spray of snow two feet behind a massive black hound.

A ragged volley of gunfire popped off from the Iron Kingdom line. A few dogs yelped and tumbled into the bloody snow, but the vast majority of the pack simply leaped over the dead bodies on the slope, ignoring the noise.

They were closing the distance terrifyingly fast, their jaws snapping wildly as they charged the ridge.

Afterward, as if the dogs weren’t bad enough, a loud horn blew from the watchtowers of the rebel city.

Standing on the high timber platforms were dozens of Halfdan’s best archers.

They had finally knocked their stolen steel arrows onto their bows. They pulled the strings back all the way to their ears, aiming high into the gray sky.

"Shields!" Erik screamed, "Arrows coming down!"

"We don’t have shields, Erik!" Halig shouted back, ducking low behind a small rock.

"Then pick up the ones the dead dropped, you lazy bitch!" Erik roared, rushing forward and grabbing a blood-stained round shield from a fallen rebel at the edge of the ridge.

The men holding the new steel maces abandoned their straight lines, scrambling to pick up the shields scattered across the edge of the battlefield.

They formed a tight, overlapping wall of wood and leather just seconds before the sky darkened. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The deadly steel-tipped arrows rained down on the ridge. The sharp tips easily pierced the outer layers of the wooden shields, stopping only inches away from the faces of the soldiers.

Several musketeers in the back, caught trying to reload, screamed as arrows buried themselves into their shoulders and legs.

"The shield wall is handling it!" Halig grunted, his shoulder pressed hard against the wood as three arrows slammed into his shield. "But the dogs are almost here! The shooters behind us can’t hit them, and we can’t swing our maces while holding this wall against the arrows!"

Torstein was bleeding from a shallow graze on his cheek, his eyes wide. "King Erik! If those hounds get into the musket lines, the men will break! They will tear us apart while we are reloading!"

"We are not going to stand here and get chewed on!" Erik yelled, "Torstein! Tell the shooters to fix bayonets and brace!"

"What are you doing, Erik?!" Halig shouted over his shield.

"I am pulling the shield wall!" Erik laughed. He kicked his stolen shield away, completely exposing himself to the open air.

He raised his mace high above his head.

"With me!" Erik roared.

Without waiting for the next volley of arrows to fall, Erik leaped over the edge of the snowy ridge.

He charged directly down the bloody slope, running headfirst into the pack of vicious war dogs and the hidden rebel warriors.

"AAAAAAH!" Erik screamed at the top of his lungs, raising his mace.

"AAAAAAH!" Halig echoed, throwing his shield aside and charging blindly after his King, swinging his mace like a madman.

The hundreds of soldiers armed with the unbreakable steel maces didn’t hesitate for a single second.

Seeing their King charge down the mountain, they threw away their shields and let out a terrifying roar.

Down in the valley, Halfdan watched as Erik abandoned the high ground and threw his men into a chaotic melee charge.

As Erik’s boots slammed into the icy slope, the first massive black dog leaped at his throat, its jaws wide open.

Erik swung his mace in a sideways arc, slicing the hound out of the air before it could touch him.

Right beside him, Halig brought his mace down on a rebel warrior who had tried to stand up from beneath a pile of dead bodies.

"Smash them!" Erik yelled, kicking a dead body out of his way as he continued charging down the hill. "Break their fucking skulls!"

Up on the ridge, Torstein quickly reorganized the surviving shooters. They fixed their long bayonets to the ends of their muskets, stepping forward to fire carefully over the heads of Erik’s charging men, picking off the rebel archers in the watchtowers.

Erik was breathing heavily, his mace dripping with fresh blood as he carved a path through the snow, getting closer and closer to the frozen lake.

He could see his uncle Halfdan, sitting on his horse, screaming at his men to hold the line against the sudden counter-charge.

Erik smiled, dodging a clumsy swing from a rebel farmer and driving the pommel of his mace straight into the man’s face.

They were pushing them back. The Iron Kingdom was winning the mud fight!

But as Erik took another step forward, his boot hit the edge of the frozen lake. He looked down at the tclear ice beneath his feet. He saw the cracks spreading outwards from the thousands of heavy, struggling boots fighting above.

Erik stopped swinging. He looked up at the smoking volcano behind the city. He looked down at the thousands of men fighting on top of a giant sheet of frozen water.

And he looked at his own men, carrying hundreds of pounds of highly explosive black powder in their pouches.

"Halig..." Erik whispered, his eyes widening. "If we fire our guns on this lake... what happens to the ice?"