Tarrin flashed the Lord General a quick smile, one that was returned enthusiastically. Darvon was old, almost elderly, but he was still one of the toughest fighters the Knights had. His aged arm had swung a sword longer than most of the Knights under his command had been alive, and he was regarded with a towering respect by professional soldiers all over the world. That respect gave the men behind him tremendous confidence facing the unworldly enemy, confident in the fact that the legendary Darvon would lead them to victory.
Darvon clapped down his visor and raised his sword. "Stand ready!" he boomed, and the humans and Wikuni behind him suddenly roared in reply, as swords, spears, and shields were raised and readied.
"We won't stand in defense!" he shouted defiantly as his night-coated warhorse pranced a little under him. "We won't huddle here like cowering babes and wait for them to come to us! We'll ram into those stinking Demons while they're still confused and send them back to the Hells they crawled out of!"
The echoing cry of furious assent from the defenders was almost deafening, swords and spears bouncing in the air over their owners' heads as they screamed their enthusiastic acceptance of Darvon's commands. Tarrin could clearly hear the shrieks in reply coming from the Demons; despite being at a disadvantage, they still wanted to fight, still wanted to kill.
"Alright then, men! They're waiting for us! Let's not disappoint them!" He turned his horse and pointed forward with his sword. "At a walk, forward!"
They started out at a slow walk, as the Demons some distance ahead quickly tried to line up even as they moved towards the defenders.
"At a trot, forward!" Darvon boomed, picking up the pace. Tarrin didn't have to run, he simply stretched out his pace to keep up with the Lord General beside him as the armor of the men behind started jangling as it bounced with their trotting steps. The Demons began to scream and brandish their claws or weapons, and they too picked up their pace.
"At a run, forward!" Darvon commanded as he spurred his horse to a canter, and the entire host suddenly broke into a sharp, fast, yet still tightly organized run. They kept their lines, kept from spreading out, keeping a pace that Darvon set that any professional soldier could hold for a short amount of time. It wasn't a dead sprint, which would let the men behind set the wedge, but it was fast enough that them crashing into the Demons was going to split their enemies into two groups. The Demons, not nearly as disciplined as the soldiers they faced, charged at the host, breaking up as the faster ones outpaced the slower ones. Every eye was locked on that unworldly horde of nearly two hundred Demons, big ones, small ones, thin ones and heavy ones, but all universally ugly. But not a single man faltered in his charge, despite charging into battle against the spawn of the Hells themselves. As one, they were confident in Darvon, and they would not break under his command.
"Set-shields!" Darvon barked, raising his own sheild to his side, tucking it in. In a singular rattling sound, the Legionaires all raised their curved, rectangular shields to form the shield wall that would split the Demons' line apart. The Demons only screamed in fury and ran at them even faster, some of them frothing at the mouth with a horrible grayish foam.
"Spears-ready!" the Lord General boomed, and the forest of raised spearpoints suddenly lowered in a single motion, putting glowing steel spearpoints to either side of Darvon's charger and the loping Were-cat. The Demons did not falter in their mad charge, closing the distance in a shocking amount of time. But still the men behind did not waver. Tarrin raised his black-bladed sword grimly, ready to do his job and punch through the lines, break a hole in them the host would use to separate them, surround them, then grind them to dogmeat within a ring of unyielding steel teeth.
"No mercy!" Darvon boomed furiously as he raised his sword to ready to do battle with a vulture Demon not ten spans away. The defenders screamed in an intimidating war cry and followed as Darvon deflected aside the cruel point of the vulture-Demon's wicked hooked polearm with his shield, then sent its head flying with a powerful stroke from the saddle of his warhorse. Tarrin didn't bother with fancy fencing, he simply chopped his sword over his head at a heavily armored cambisi, shearing through the sword raised in defense and cleaving a horrid wound in its face and shoulder. The power of the blow sent it flying to the side, only to be trampled into the ground by the warhorse's grinding steel-shod hooves.
The impact of the defenders and the Demons was loud, ringing across the grounds and well into the city. The larger Demons stopped the forward movement of the wedge, but only momentarily, for their lines were very loose and disorganized. The Demons did not fight as a group, they fought as a collection of individuals, and that prevented them from reacting to the tactics the defenders used against them. Instead of regrouping in the hole that Darvon and Tarrin opened in their middle, they instead each fought its own private battle. But the spears of the Legionaires kept them from closing in and using their size to break up the defenders' lines, and those trying to get at the Knights found that their heavy armor and powerful broadswords made them impossible to split up. The wedge began moving forward as the first Demons to reach them were cut down, and those Demons reaching them after the initial rush came with a wider and wider gap in the center as Tarrin and Darvon, still side by side and moving ahead of the formation, split the charging Demons into two groups, leaving the rapidly dissolving bodies of their victims behind them as they advanced. When they ran out of Demons in front of them, they split up, Tarrin going one way and Darvon the other to engage those on the flanks, and the Legionaires, now with Ulger serving as the head of the wedge, advanced into the hole they created behind them. Amid the din of shouts, ringing steel, and the shouts and cries of the wounded, and the howling and screaming of the Demons, the wedge passed between the lines of the Demons and began to widen as the Marines rushed out from the core to either side and enveloped their foes, surrounding them.
The formation worked perfectly. The two pockets of Demons, realizing to their chagrin how they had been trapped, fought with zealous ferocity, assaulting the Legionaires and Knights that now stood between them, but the spears of the Legionaires on the front rank had been discarded and now they wielded glowing shortswords. They let the Demons crash into their shields, and then expertly shifted the large shields and stabbed out from behind them with their short-bladed weapons. Demons screamed in pain and fury, clawing at the shields, the stronger ones ripping them away, but the Legionaires simply closed ranks around any man who fell, men who lost their shields stepping back into the formation against the shields of the second rank and letting the men on each side in the first rank close the hole with their shields, denying the Demons a chance to get between them. The Legionaires in the second and third ranks still wielded their spears, jabbing and thrusting them at the Demons, pushing them back and preventing them from getting inside the front rank, aiming for the face and chest and shoulders, trying to maim or incapacitate if they couldn't kill. Marines that had swiftly gotten behind them and began assaulting them from behind now proved to be a deadly distraction to those trying to get past the Legionaires and Knights, allowing those in front to get in a killing blow as the Marines behind harried and harassed them.