It felt great to be in battle again.
The fight for the outer isle had not been a battle but a slaughter. The Phyrexians had stood as if in a trance as Agnate and his Metathran army clove their heads. No adversary should die that way, but Agnate had been ordered to take the isle. With the help of Weatherlight and the titan engines, he had. It had been a military necessity to win an Urborgan beachhead from which the true battle could be launched.
"Prepare for landing!" Agnate shouted. He lifted high his powerstone pike. Corded muscles rippled beneath his shoulder tattoos.
Behind him, forty thousand other weapons rose-battle axes, swords, maces, tridents. As metal filled the air, so did a battle cry. It was a deep and pure sound from countless throats, queer like the drone of war pipes. It echoed from the shimmering sea and mixed with roaring billows.
Another call answered beneath the waves. Leviathan songs bellowed through the deeps. Grampuses and cachalots twined their mournful howls. Humpbacks and rorquals added angry shrieks. Porpoise whistles and dolphin clicks, sea cow moans and otter growls-every denizen of the deep came in company of their rulers, the Vodalian merfolk.
Not only did sea creatures bear forward the amphibious assault, but they also prepared the shore. Any Phyrexian who strayed too near the sea was dragged below by tentacles and ripped apart by fangs. In saltwater marshes lurked lightning eels. In freshwater streams flashed schools of piranha. Swordfish and hammerheads and rays made certain Agnate and his troops could come to ground at a run and drive far inland. In their wake would rise the conch-armored Vodalian warriors, who would hold the beaches.
While the music of the deep played beneath Metathran feet, another song swelled the skies. Weatherlight was the chorus master. From extreme distance, she sang among the clouds. Her fluted figurehead piped shrilly. Her ray cannons moaned. All around her, lesser craft made their own music. Helionaut rotors drummed the heavens. Jump-ships coursed on keening wings.
The whole world rushed to purge Urborg of Phyrexians.
Agnate raised a cheer as Weatherlight roared by low overhead. Cyclones churned the water in her wake. Her gunwales blazed. Energy melted Phyrexians in their trenches. It ripped out gun embankments even before they could hurl flack. Weatherlight shot over the shore and strafed the swamps. Her aerial armada flanked her. Helionauts peppered the woods with exploding quarrels.
Jump-ships wove among trees and flushed monsters from hiding.
"Charge!" Agnate shouted.
The Metathran's turn had come. On dolphin back, they surged to shore. Sand churned in the water as grampuses and cachalots beached themselves. Blue warriors leaped from their backs and ran up the berm. No Phyrexians stood on the beach, slain already by sea monsters or the aerial assault. In the swampy wood beyond, though, they were thick.
Powerstone pike before him, Agnate charged through a curtain of moss. In the darkness, something leaped toward him. His pike smashed into it. The blade chewed its way through flesh. Agnate had only a moment to glimpse the creature-a scab-skinned warrior with horns protruding from shoulders and skull-before the dead thing fell against him. He let go of his pike-it would eat its way through the shuddering corpse-and drew the battle axe from his belt.
One sloshing step deeper into the wood, and the axe cleft through the head of another monster. It had been a goat-skulled thing. Now it was only a warm mass in the swamp. In the follow-through of his swing, Agnate stooped to snatch up his powerstone pike. He glimpsed a huge and leathery fist falling on him. He set his pike in the muck.
The fist descended like a hammer. Agnate sank down away from it. His pike rammed between scaly knuckles. It ate through the flesh stretched there and burrowed upward. With a shriek, the monster hauled its bloodied hand away. Only then did Agnate see what it was.
The gargantua reared up between the trees. It was a meaty beast, twice the height of a mammoth and eight times the bulk.
On two hulking talons it stood, its belly scales drawn tight in a shriek of agony. It clutched its wounded fist and bellowed through fangs.
The gargantua was a mountainous monster, and mountains were meant for climbing.
Agnate swung his axe like a pick, chunking a foothold in the monster's leg. He stepped onto the broad blade and flung himself upward. One hand grasped the leathery wattle beneath the beast's throat. The other yanked the axe from the creature's leg.
With its healthy claw, the gargantua reached up and grabbed the Metathran commander. Its fingers flexed around him. In moments, his macerated flesh would spew out between those claws…
Agnate clutched his axe beside him. The blade bit through the gargantua's scale and muscle, down to tendons. They snapped like cables under pressure. Hot oil gushed over Agnate. The beast's claws went slack. Agnate slipped downward.
The gargantua wasn't through with him. Between its injured hands, it caught him. Though claws dangled limply from its palms, the pressure of those arms was inescapable. The gargantua lifted its captive to its fangy mouth.
Agnate struggled to yank his axe free, but it was pinned at his side. Noxious breath billowed over him. He kicked furiously, trying to escape. It was no use.
The gargantua's jaws dropped open. It shoved its prey within. Fangs shuddered. Blood gushed hot up the beast's throat and out across Agnate. It was not his blood but the Phyrexian's.
Suddenly free, Agnate hurled himself from the beast's jaws. He fell toward the swamp, not even trying to get his feet beneath him. As he plunged, he saw a gaping hole in the beast's chest, and he knew what had happened. The powerstone pike had eaten its way down the arm of the beast and out the elbow. It had jutted out only to pierce the monster's chest. In moments, the pike had chewed into the gigantic heart of the thing. It died where it stood, its own oil-blood gushing up its neck.
Agnate landed on his back in the swamp. Gripping his axe, he got his feet beneath him and lunged away-only just in time.
The gargantua fell like a tree. Wind rushed up around it, escaping the enormous bulk. It struck the swamp with a huge splash and sank into the deep muck. A gassy sound came as it settled.
Struggling out of the mud, Agnate fetched up against a tree. All around him, Metathran ran onward through the swamp. They fought and felled Phyrexians.
A rattling sound came from the back of the gargantua. The powerstone pike that had killed it dug its way out the spine.
Agnate shoved away from the tree, hung his axe from his belt, and strode to the fallen beast. He climbed onto the island of its hunched back and grabbed his pike.
Through torn curtains of moss, Agnate glimpsed merfolk warriors on the sand. Seawater streamed from their chitinous armor. They walked on fins transformed into legs. In their hands, they held wickedly barbed tridents. Some had killed Phyrexians already and hurled their bodies to the sharks.
"Good," Agnate huffed as he strode down the length of the gargantua. There was no point advancing unless the rear was secure. Flinging mud and blood from his arms, he loped forward through the marsh.
The initial fury of the charge was gone. Now all that remained was grim-jawed killing.
A Phyrexian scuta, seeming a giant horseshoe crab, scuttled through the marsh toward him. Water churned off its black skull shield. A once-human face stretched absurdly over that contorted bone. Two long, barbed legs lashed out. One grasped Agnate's thigh. It yanked, intent on pulling him beneath its shell. No man dragged there would ever emerge.
With a single swipe of his axe, Agnate severed the first limb and leaped over the other. A mud-slick boot caught on the brow ridge of the beast. Agnate vaulted to the creature's back.
He heaved the axe down overhead. It cracked the shell and bit shallowly into the brain. Agnate hauled sideways on the haft and cracked the wound wider.