The Minotaur General was a beast. In Bella's estimation, he was easily the equal of the Pyramid Head before he'd killed the Corrupted Monk.
"Hold the line! Hold, damn it! No one attacks without my order!" Bella rode up and down the formation on her unicorn, repeating the command.
The unicorn had been sulking at her. It seemed to resent the fact that she doted on her gryphons and left it neglected.
Only after Bella raised a fist and declared herself a pure maiden—which was really just a bit of magical camouflage—did the unicorn forgive her.
The animal's willingness to cave so quickly only sank it lower in Bella's esteem. Look at that, she thought. Weak-willed as a wet rag. No wonder an English schoolboy got to ride one in the original timeline—a disgrace to fantasy, a man riding a unicorn? Honestly.
Still, the unicorn was a dashing mount, a cut above any ordinary horse, so she could just about tolerate it.
The Minotaur General was barreling toward her line with a killing aura rolling off him like smoke. Plenty of the centaur and faun warriors wanted to charge out and meet him—every last one of them held back under Bella's command.
The coalition was a thousand strong, three formations, and her unicorn could gallop the length of the line in no time. After she'd drilled the order into them again and again, the formation held.
The Minotaur closed the distance. Bella sat her unicorn without flinching.
Closer. Closer still. Three hundred paces, two hundred paces—when the gap narrowed to a hundred and fifty, she raised her right hand. The fauns began whirling their slings. The centaurs nocked arrows. The strongest among them hefted their javelins.
The small animals beat the drums from the rear, pounding out a war rhythm.
"Hahaha! A phalanx? Children's tricks. Is that really all you've got?" The White Witch jeered from her chariot far behind the line.
The laugh died in her throat. The Minotaur General, a towering two-and-a-half meters (about eight feet) a moment before, suddenly dropped several handspans—dust exploded around him—he pitched forward into a pit like a chariot with its axle sheared through.
A Minotaur at full charge carried tremendous momentum. When that momentum met a sudden stop, the strain on the ankle was proportional. Crack. A hoof that could leave prints in steel twisted right off.
The rest of the evil vanguard met the same fate. They tumbled into a trench three hundred meters long (about a thousand feet), two meters wide, and half a meter deep.
"Beautifully done, Mr. Beaver." Bella nodded her approval to the hero of the moment, Mr. Beaver, and his small army of bunnies, pangolins, and groundhogs.
The little creatures had been digging for three solid days.
From above, the ground looked perfectly ordinary. Underneath, it was hollow. Anything heavy enough would put its foot through.
Seeing the first wave of the evil army broken on that trap, Bella slashed her arm down. "Fire!"
The centaurs and fauns loosed in a wave. The evil creatures were already in chaos—some had twisted ankles and couldn't move, some were trying to turn back, some were bowled over by their own reinforcements piling in behind them—and now a rain of arrows came down on their heads.
"Fire! Keep firing! Even if your arms dislocate and your fingers split, put down every one of them in front of you!"
A touch of Suggestion magic threaded through her voice, and the coalition's courage surged. Arrows fell like rain on the massed evil.
Bella drew her own bow, sighting on the Minotaur General's eye.
Her arrow was barely there—a trick she'd picked up watching Kaecilius, though he certainly hadn't taught it to her on purpose. Still, she could manage seventy or eighty percent of it. The arrow went silent the moment it left the string, slipped through the air invisible, and drove clean through the Minotaur General's left eye, punching several centimeters (about an inch and a half) deeper before the force behind it ran out.
The Minotaur General bellowed and kept coming, limping.
Arrows sprouted from his body. He seemed not to feel them. He just kept his head down and charged.
The White Witch's shock troops were all bruisers—the minotaurs in particular were sheer brute force, and several of them came on bristling with arrows like pincushions without losing a step. They hit the faun phalanx like boulders.
"Center, hold! For Narnia! Left and right flanks, forward!" Bella shouted.
The centaur general met the Minotaur General head-on with twin swords drawn, and the Minotaur came on limping, half-blind, with more than a dozen arrows in him.
The fauns had dug armor out of the ruins of Jotunheim—pieces left behind after Asgard's ancient campaign against the Frost Giants. The armor was battered, but in the current circumstances it qualified as sturdy. With their battered armor and their own bodies, the fauns held the Minotaur charge. The centaurs, old enemies of the minotaur kind, struck from the flanks with spears and arrows, cutting the tough-hided brutes down.
Minotaurs were strong, yes. But take seven or eight spears and a dozen arrows, and even a Minotaur dies.
The Asgardian weapons salvaged from that ancient battlefield earned their keep. The centaur general, wielding a keen long blade, fought the wounded Minotaur General to a standstill.
Morale broken, the evil army met a coalition that had been waiting for them rested and ready. The two sides were evenly matched. Even Mr. Beaver had drawn a bow, hoping to pick off an enemy or two.
But morale could only do so much against numbers. When that first rush of courage burned out, the coalition found itself staring down a force that vastly outnumbered them. The scales began to tip the wrong way.
"For Aslan!" A faun sprang with remarkable agility, landing behind two minotaurs, and drove his short blade into a minotaur's spine.
The sword was too short. His arm was too weak. And the beast's fur and muscle were too thick. The blow did almost nothing.
"Roar!" The minotaur reached back, seized the faun by the arm, and wrenched in the opposite direction. A severed arm, streaming blood, hit the ground. A second minotaur stepped on it almost at once. The faun it had belonged to went down in the mud a heartbeat later, his chest torn open, his heart ripped out of his ribs by the minotaur's fist. He died laughing—in his last moment, his short blade had found the minotaur's jaw, and he'd twisted it twice.
Brutal. That was the word for what the coalition and the evil army were locked in.
Can't win on strength? Then fight to the death.
The faun's fate was not unusual. It was the rule.
A cluster of cheetahs circled a three-meter (about ten-foot) giant, roaring. The giant carried a touch of Frost Giant blood—tall, strong, skin hard as frozen ice. The cats came at him one after another, tearing at his throat. More than a dozen were pulped by his fists before he finally collapsed, bled out, on the field.