Delara only had a few second to prepare, moving to the back row of the phalanx, raising her shield overhead, and bracing against her fellow Amazon’s back, while the hull bearers spoke a command word and rows of barbed spikes sprung out from the tops of the hull shields.

     The mass of zombies slammed into the Amazon battle line and immediately the phalanx failed. Delara felt herself getting shoved backwards, her feet sliding across the frozen earth. The hull shields groaned under the stress, but held. But that meant that there was now a sizable gap between the front phalanx line and the shield line. Delara ran around to help plug the hole, and found Cora and Rue fighting zombies at close range, hacking away with their short swords at the undead monsters. Cora was doing okay, with her back braced against the magically-reinforced control strut and her shield held between herself and the wave of undead, but Rue had been grabbed by the helmet and was struggling to keep it from being torn off. As Delara charged to the rescue, she saw the zombie attempt to sink its teeth into Rue’s neck, but the cage around its head prevented this from happening.

     Delara thrust her spear at its head, hoping to slip her spear-point through a gap in the bars, and she did, but the penetration was too shallow to do significant damage. She did drive it back a step or two, enough for Rue to rip her head free, though she lost her helmet in the process.

     “Where’s your jester cap?” yelled Delara, despite herself.

     “Shut up!” snapped Rue, desperately hacking at the zombie.

     Delara thrust her spear at the mass of undead before her, surprised they hadn’t broken through the gap. It took her a second to realize why. The entire row of zombies before her had been impaled on the same Amazon spear like a shish-kabob. Normally, that would be a total victory for a defending phalanx, but the zombies were still driving forward with their legs. No wonder the Amazons had been driven back so easily. Delara saw that the front row of the phalanx had dropped their trapped spears and were hacking away with their sidearms, axes and short swords, but to little effect. Normally, when fighting a zombie you’d decapitate them or otherwise destroy the head, but the cages and collars they wore made that difficult. The only upside was the spears impaled in the zombies’ torsos were jamming them against the sides of the hull shields, preventing them from flowing through the gap. But that would change if the phalanx was pushed further back than a spear-length. Then the line would fail completely.

     On top of that, Delara heard the thumps on the other side of the hull shield coming from higher and higher up, as more zombies started crawling over the backs of their compatriots in the front row. Soon they’d be boiling over the top of the shield, spikes be damned.

Delara fought down a wave of panic and despair. There had to be some way to win this, though it wasn’t looking good. 

But her moment of reflection was cut off by a titanic, deafening boom as a bolt of lightning crashed into the mass of zombies directly in front of the phalanx, dangerously close. But it took out nearly twenty of the things, the smell of their rotted flesh not improved at all by being charred, and the phalanx rallied, pushing forward to meet the next zombie wave, and Delara turned her attention to the monsters that were now trying to go over the hull shield.

     She jabbed at the things with her spear, but was again frustrated by the head cages. Delara’s spear was actually more like a pole-mounted short sword, with a shallow S-shaped cross bar, allowing her to either trap an enemy’s weapon or hook on a cavalryman’s armor to drag them off their horse. She was able to slash at the zombie’s fingers as they found handholds at the top of the shield, and poke them hard enough in their head-cages to knock them back down the pile, but she knew that she was just delaying the inevitable.

     That’s when the wardancer’s song changed, the chant conveying a new order: withdraw twelve paces. The chant went on for another twenty seconds, to make sure everyone heard it, then began the countdown to execution.

     Cora and Delara threw themselves against the hull shield to try to control its withdrawal, expecting a horrific shove once the anchoring magic was released. Then the beat dropped, the hull shield levitated, and indeed they were thrown backwards, feet skidding across the frozen ground—for a second or two, and then the forces lessened. Delara had lost count of the paces, but Rue called out a halt once they’d aligned with everyone else. 

     Suddenly it felt like they had breathing room again, and Delara realized why. The zombies that had been piled up against the bottom of the hull shield would’ve been crushed, or at least trapped in place by the weight of zombies climbing on top of them, and wouldn’t have been able to keep pushing once the hull shield moved. And now, they formed a defensive berm that the rest of the horde would have to climb over. The only zombies on the shield now were the ones who’d impaled themselves on the spikes, where they lay trapped, moaning and writhing, lacking the strength or intelligence to pull themselves free.

     Delara had an idea. “Rue, retract the spikes.”

     “What?” she said. “Are you nuts?”

     “They’re barely doing anything useful. Trust me.”

     Rue frowned, but did as she was asked, and Delara reached up with her spear, hooked it on one of the zombie’s head-cages, and dragged it over the top, to land in an undignified pile at her feet. Before it could get up, she stomped on its head-cage to pin it to the ground, dropped her spear, drew her battle-ax from her belt, and chopped down into the gap directly beneath its iron collar, severing its spine.

     The monster shuddered and went still. Okay, that worked, then. Delara picked up her spear, as Cora called out, “Heads up,” and dragged another zombie over, before immediately turning to jab another of the monsters back. Rue dispatched the downed zombie, and the division of labor was decided. Cora and Delara controlled the rate that the zombies fell over the shield, and the two hull-bearers executed them.

     A pool of radiance erupted on Delara’s left, and from the corner of her eye she saw that Asha had dropped her cat form and had cast a new spell, a column of holy moonlight about ten feet across, right in front of the phalanx. The white light slowly burnt holes in the zombie’s flesh, until they collapsed and began to turn to ash. The front row of the phalanx, now comprised of fresher troops who’d rotated in from the back, then focused on striking the zombies in their head-cages to drive them back into the light where they’d gradually dissolve, though Delara saw a few of them jab the blades of their various pole-arms right beneath the iron collars, while a compatriot hooked onto the same zombie’s head-cage. Together, they pushed and pulled like a pair of makeshift shears, tearing their prey’s head from its body.

     All of a sudden, the balance of the battle had shifted, as more columns of moonlight descended along the Amazon’s battle line, and the back rows of those phalanxes redeployed to reinforce the hull shields. And it didn’t seem like the Amazons had suffered any losses, either. In fact, no-one seemed to be hurt. The head cages made the zombies difficult to kill, but it also took away their main weapon, as these zombies weren’t smart enough to do anything besides grab and bite.

     But of course. These mercenaries were slavers, after all, and they couldn’t sell a bunch of half-eaten corpses. This zombie army was designed to overwhelm, exhaust, and subdue. Presumably they had some necromancer that could call them off once their task had finished. And it had nearly worked, but they’d held fast. They could win this fight. 

     But, no sooner had that thought crossed her mind than a series of explosions ripped out along the battle line, followed by screams. Delara felt a blast of heat from the other side of the hull shield as the zombies climbing over were lit on fire.