The melee at Harken Field was the melee that the advance's three-hundred-pace closing had been building toward, the contact range where boomsticks became clubs and the engagement's outcome was determined by the things that close combat determined: strength, skill, numbers, and the willingness to sustain the contact's cost.
The Threian center hit the barbarian center at the two-hundred-pace mark, the closing distance's final hundred paces covered at the run that the charge's momentum required, forty-two thousand soldiers driving into seventeen thousand barbarians with the mass that two-and-a-half-to-one numerical superiority provided.
The impact was the impact that colliding infantry formations produced when both formations were moving at the charge's pace: the sound of shields striking shields, the grunt of warriors absorbing collision, the scream of soldiers who found blades or bayonets or hand axes in the contact's compressed violence.
