Two thousand warriors walked into the earth's wrath.
The advance was not the advance that the spear wall had used in the open field's grinding engagements. The advance was the advance that the cobblestones' eruption demanded: shields raised overhead in the Tohr'terra configuration, the great round shields' curved surfaces angled upward to deflect the erupting stones' trajectories, the warriors beneath the shields moving at the pace that the footing's destruction allowed because the footing was the cobblestones that were erupting and the erupting cobblestones left the earth's sublayer as the surface that the boots found beneath the eruption's disturbance.
