She can scarcely feel her legs sprinting beneath her, but she knows that’s just the fear and anticipation coursing trough her body. Twenty yards from the Sicclunan line, Evie feels a shadow overtake her and hears a fierce rattling above her head. She looks up, midrun, just as one of the suicide tumblers careens overhead, rotating in a slow arc. The Savages on foot are ten yards away when the first tumbler crashes behind the Sicclunan front line.

It’s impossible to see beyond the wall of shield and spear and ax and armor, but Evie watches large pieces of the wooden octagon fly into the air after impact. It must be designed to break apart behind the enemy’s front line, releasing its human cargo into their ranks, or at least the ones who survive both the impact and avoid being pinned to the ground or hacked apart by Sicclunan blades, anyway.

The name “suicide tumbler” suddenly makes all the sense in the world to Evie.

There are three men directly in front of her when the first of the Savages crash upon the Sicclunan shields. Evie turns to her side and lets her lead foot skid through the muddy grass, stopping her momentum and halting her before she becomes part of the pileup. She bends her knees and raises both ax and long knife, staring through her reforged helm at a rioting curtain of shoulders and necks.

A sharp scream and a spray of blood across her faceplates cause Evie to back up a step in alarm. One of the bodies massed in front of her turns around and slumps forward, cradling a hole in his guts spilling gore down his legs and onto the grass. Evie looks down, knowing it’s a mistake to do so, but unable to take her eyes off the twitching body of the impaled man until he stops moving and his eyes go glassy and vacant.

The spell broken, Evie faces forward to see that the bodies directly in front of her have been cleared. There’s a hole just big enough to frame a single Sicclunan shield. It looks like a closed door marked with sacrificial blood as some type of warding ritual. It hovers there, perfectly still, the soldier holding it completely obscured from view. It’s an almost hypnotic sight, even in the chaos and carnage of the moment exploding all around her.

Evie steps over the corpse at her feet, keeping herself crouched low. Her gauntleted grip on the long knife is reversed, its blade running the length of her forearm. When she steps within three feet of the shield, the largest spearhead she’s ever seen emerges from behind the wall of wood and steel. Evie swings blade and gauntlet, batting away the thrust aimed at one of her main arteries.