So far, the monsters remained in their ranks across the center of the desert. They were smart. They did not want to charge up a hill nor to spread the already long front farther. Still, it meant Thaddeus and Agnate ate up easy ground on either side. The noose tightened.
"Halt!" Thaddeus called as they reached the base of the hill, just within stout bow range. "Archers to the fore!"
The shout echoed down the line. The march snapped to sudden stillness. Archers flooded ahead. They formed two lines, front ranks kneeling. From powerful shoulders, they unpacked stout bows that could shoot over a mile. The shafts they nocked were six feet long and tipped with powerstone-chips, devised to seek Phyrexian oil-blood.
"Ready?" Thaddeus called. "Loose!"
Ten thousand bowstrings shuddered. Ten thousand arrows vaulted into the sky. They moaned as they went. Their thick shafts arced hungrily upward. In moments, those huge black arrows were so high they seemed starlings. The shafts reached the heights and descended in a deadly hail. They roared down toward the lifted heads of the tightly arrayed monsters. Soon ten thousand of them would be impaled.
The shafts entered a silvery cloud. In an eye-blink, they dissolved.
"What is it?" Thaddeus wondered aloud.
The silvery cloud rose, following the path the arrows had taken. It arched above the desert and coiled down toward the Metathran army. The swarm shimmered as it came. It descended with the same speed as the arrows.
"Battleflies!" Thaddeus warned. "Lift shields!"
The order shot out among the troops. Thaddeus and his personal guard yanked the shields from their backs and crouched beneath them. The battleflies fell. They cracked against the metal like hail from a tin roof. Where flesh was exposed, the metal wings of the beasts clove. Ears and noses and fingers were severed. Razor wings sliced through brows and imbedded in the skulls beneath. Shoulders were masticated. Metathran who had awakened after five hundred years died in instants. The moments after were filled with jittering and deadly swarms.
Thaddeus reached gauntleted hands out from beneath his shield and crushed battleflies as if they were deerflies. The living Metathran all around did the same. Razor wings fell to the ground. Soon, the swarm had thinned enough that the warriors of Dominaria stood and smashed the killing creatures beneath their boots.
"Forward!" Thaddeus ordered, pointing his sword across the desert.
Leaving their brave fallen where they lay, the Metathran army surged toward their waiting foes. If anything, the lacerations across their tattooed faces only whetted their appetite for Phyrexian blood. Swatting the last few battleflies that followed them, the warriors marched double-time. Pikes and swords ran red. Soon, they would run golden.
"Why haven't they moved?" Thaddeus wondered through gritted teeth.
He suddenly had an answer.
The ground erupted before him. It seemed a volcano had burst from the cracked desert. Dirt hurled out in a pelting spray. In the midst of that fountain of soil emerged something enormous. It had a black hide that jutted hairs as stout and sharp as daggers. A huge mouth, formed of three triangular lips, fronted the gigantic worm.
Chunks of rock turned to sand on those lips and slid inexorably inward. Worse, five more of the giant beasts appeared to either side, extending in a wall before the charging Metathran.
These were the beasts that had dug out the Phyrexian trenches. Now, they would dig out the Metathran themselves.
One of Thaddeus's personal guard, running with sword lifted high, attacked the beast before them. His blade sank into the mucousy upper lip of the thing. The weapon disappeared to the haft. A sucking sound followed. The warrior disappeared with it. That mouth, which could pulverize rock and dust, ground the man inward until he was but a red smear on dark lips.
The worm lurched forward, its daggerlike hairs driving into the ground. A second guard, hewing at the lower lip of the thing, fell beneath the advancing monster. Hairs pierced him in a hundred places. His life gushed out. When the beast landed atop him, he burst open.
Thaddeus roared. He hurled his powerstone pike into the bloody lip of the thing. The weapon bit true. Its head ground muscle to pulp and dragged its way deeper. It dug through lip and oral cartilage. The shaft slipped away after the pike's gnawing head.
"Use your pikes!" Thaddeus commanded.
Three more of the weapons sank in the worm before him. Each pierced and dug and drew itself inward. The beast lunged, bellowing through ruined lips. Hot, bloody breath shot out before it.
Thaddeus stepped back. If this worm were like every other, its brain would straddle its alimentary tube. It was only a matter of time before the pikes reached it.
The worm entered a sudden convulsion. Its head spiked the warriors crowded up beside it. Metathran fell back. The monster sprayed gore as it flopped. All along the line, worms were dying. One by one, they issued last gasps and dropped to stillness.
"Form up!" shouted Thaddeus, dragging a hand across his crimson face. He pointed to avenues between the dead hulks. "Form up! Advance!"
Thaddeus led his troops between dagger-walls. Beyond, the Phyrexian forces still waited. They were cowards, hiding behind battleflies and worms. What would it take to goad them into charging? Perhaps they would simply wait for the Metathran to overrun them. Thaddeus was glad to oblige.
The first flood of Metathran had only just cleared the field of dead worms when movement began along the Phyrexian lines. Their advance line charged.
Oh, but the cowards! They did not send true Phyrexians even now. That line of rushing things-it glinted metallic. Artifact creatures, machines-and what strange machines! They were perhaps four feet long, with a snakelike central body made up of metal nodes in a line. The things scuttled rapidly forward on metallic legs, their tails jutting up like scorpion stingers above them. They seemed mechanical centipedes-simple-looking beasts, with no apparent weaponry except for that barbed stinger. A thousand of them broke from the Phyrexian ranks and undulated forward.
Thaddeus strode to meet them. His powerstone pike was gone, even now chewing its way through the dead hulk of a trench worm. His powerstone sword was out. It gleamed in his hand as he charged. All along the Metathran line, blades flashed.
These creatures did not so much seem centipedes but metallic spinal columns…
The lines converged. With a glad shout, the Metathran met beasts they could at last fight.
Thaddeus did not shout. He was too busy dodging aside. A war centipede launched its stinger at his face. He swung his sword. Steel flashed, striking the giant bug behind the stinger. The blow sparked on hard metal, slid, and caught the soft copper cables that strung them together. With a flash of arcane power, the blade severed the creature's tail from its scaly body. The momentum carried it on. Metal knobs crashed into Thaddeus's chest, knocking him back a pace. Spikes along the centipede's back scourged his shoulder and neck. The artifact creature tumbled in two writhing halves on the ground.
All around Thaddeus, the desert was alive with twitching hunks of centipede. Among them lay many, many slain Metathran. Their mouths had been sliced open, and pulpy blood disgorged from them. The corpses shuddered as if something were crawling through them.
There was no time to see more. Another centipede hurled its stinger at Thaddeus. He was slower this time. Gritting his teeth in determined fury, he dragged his reluctant blade before him. It sliced only air. The beast vaulted over the sword tip and struck Thaddeus's face.
The blow made his vision go white. There was a sharp, strange looseness in his lower lip. Next instant, his sight returned. With it came blood-his own blood-in a crimson cloud.