While Thorin Oakenshield and Dáin Ironfoot were sending word to the seven clans of the Dwarves, the cleansing of the halls went on without pause.
Moria was vast beyond easy telling. Each single hall could thousands of souls, and from it ran countless corridors, stairways, and hidden chambers.
In nearly a thousand years of darkness, Orcs and foul creatures had dug and burrowed unceasingly. The place had become like a spider's web, with passages crossing and recrossing. Every hall was a maze in stone.
To seize a hall in battle was simple enough. A hard charge, a relentless pursuit, and the walls were theirs.
To cleanse it thoroughly was another matter entirely.
It took them ten full days of slow searching, hall by hall and tunnel by tunnel, before they could be sure that the ground they held was truly safe.
They did not wait for the Dwarven reinforcements to arrive. When at last the war-horns sounded again, all forces were assembled, and they launched their assault upon the Chamber of Mazarbul.
"Shields!"
At Thorin's order the Dwarven Heavy-armored warriors moved as one and raised a wall of steel.
"Spears!"
At Kaen Eowenríel's command the King's Guard stepped up behind the shieldwall, their two-and-a-half-meter spears coming level over the Dwarven shoulders like a forest of gleaming pikes.
Dáin, clad in the mithril armor of Durin and bearing Durin's Axe, pointed toward the enemy atop the stairs, then charged, leading the advance himself.
Arrows of the Orcs came down from the heights in a black rain, rattling on helm and breastplate. Against such heavy troops they were no more than stinging hail, noisy but almost harmless.
When the Dwarven Heavy-armored warriors and the King's Guard reached the foot of the great stair and began to climb in tight formation, the Orcs above started to panic.
"Raargh!"
An Orc commander roared in fury. "Stones, roll the rocks! Crush them!"
Huge trolls lumbered forward, each heaving boulders weighing hundreds of pounds, and sent them tumbling down the steps.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The shieldwall buckled. Gaps were smashed open, and warriors were hurled backward.
Kaen reacted at once. "Archers!"
Thousands of Caladhîn Elven archers strode forward, bows already strung. At a single shouted signal they loosed.
Their shafts hissed up the stair in a deadly storm.
Unlike the well-armed Free Peoples, the Orcs' weapons and armor were a ragged patchwork. Some wore full iron mail, some were half naked. Some clutched stolen swords and axes, others brandished nothing but sticks and stones.
Before the Elven arrows they had almost no defense. Orcs fell in heaps.
Several trolls took shafts straight through their eyes. They staggered, lost their footing, and were crushed beneath the very stones they had tried to hurl.
Seeing that the way was opening, Dáin did not hesitate for a heartbeat.
"For justice, strike!" he cried, and drove upward.
The vanguard surged after him. Kaen chanted under his breath and raised a hand, casting down a rain of golden light upon the enemy line.
The front ranks of Orcs screamed. Where the light touched them, flesh charred and blackened. Whole knots of them fell in moments.
Yet the war-beasts and trolls were not so easily cowed. Their bulk alone made them deadly. Even blind, a single sweep of a limb could swat warriors aside like toys.
On the stairway the two sides crashed together and the fiercest fighting yet broke out.
...
At that very moment, from all directions around the Seventh level, from the entries of other halls and from the great square before them, roars rose up.
From every tunnel poured more creatures, a teeming mass of claws and fangs, striking at them from many sides at once.
"Form ranks, meet them!"
Thorin reacted in an instant. He raised his war-sword and led the remaining Dwarves to block the enemies rushing in on the left.
"For our allies, strike!"
Andric took his Eowenría heavy infantry to the right, holding the foes that poured from that passage.
Reger's calm voice sounded behind them as he and his King's Guard drew up in a tight formation to protect the rear.
They had expected such a counterblow. So they moved with smooth precision, each commander and each troop knowing his task without need of further orders.
Watching the enemy's reserves flooding in, Kaen stopped holding anything back.
He crossed his hands before his breast and began to chant in the high tongue of the Elves, a holy white spell that purified and weakened the forces of darkness.
It was a pure light, bringing warmth and strength, cleansing all that was foul and shielding all that belonged to the side of light.
When Kaen finished the incantation, he flung his crossed hands outward. A wave of white power burst from him and swept out in all directions.
Hum.
Where the light washed over them, the dark creatures shrieked as if aflame, writhing in agony.
And it did not end there.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
Wave followed wave, each stronger than the last, until the whole of the Seventh level lay within the radiance.
EXP +1.
EXP +2.
Hundreds of the weaker Orcs were simply seared where they stood.
With the dark host weakened, the Men and Elves and Dwarves surged forward again, hunting the fleeing creatures through every hall and passage.
The army spilled into all corners of the Seventh level, fighting the Orcs for every corridor and every doorway, in the bitterest close-quarter slaughter.
At the entrance of the Twenty-first Hall, Dáin led his finest warriors, climbing under the covering fire of Elven archers until they burst onto the top of the stair.
The Dwarves locked shields once more and advanced step by step, roaring the rhythm of their assault, each word matching a motion:
"Hold!"
"Advance!"
"Thrust!"
Pressed so, the enemy was driven back into the Twenty-first Hall.
Kaen drew his sword and, with the soldiers who still stood at his side, rushed in shoulder to shoulder with Dáin.
Within that vast hall the greatest battle of all erupted.
Between thirty and forty thousand Orcs were trapped there, together with several hundred trolls and war-beasts. This was the core strength of Moria's Orcish host, yet here they were, surrounded and hammered by only several thousand warriors of the Free Peoples.
A cornered beast still fights. One side could not retreat. The other would not retreat.
The struggle became a storm of steel and blood.
At last Kaen and his allies won the day. The whole of the Seventh level was cleared.
After the fighting, Kaen sat on the steps, breathing hard, and fell into thought.
Before his mind's eye his system appeared.
Level: 6 (624 / 700).
He was close to advancing, and some part of him could not help looking forward to the battles yet to come.
Yet when he thought of the price they had paid, he forced down that flicker of excitement.
This time the cost had been heavy.
The Dwarven Heavy-armored warriors had lost a thousand warriors. The King's Guard had lost five hundred. Eowenría's heavy infantry had lost two thousand five hundred. The Caladhîn Elves had lost two thousand.
Six thousand troops in all, and these were at the very least elite units, with some fifteen hundred counted among the epic ranks and higher.
For any realm that would have been a blow to the very bones, a loss that could not be lightly spoken of.
For Kaen and his allies it meant they had lost half their fighting strength, and no longer had the power to press the attack further for now.
Remembering how many enemies still infested Moria, and how much stronger than normal Orcs these creatures had become, Kaen understood that the evil in the depths had been swollen by the power of Morgoth.
He saw clearly that with such foes, the numbers they had brought were not enough. More troops must be drawn into the struggle.
In wars of this scale, only by having more hands to bear swords could each blow fall less cruelly.
Once he had reached that conclusion, Kaen went at once to Thorin and Dáin. The three conferred together and agreed to halt further assaults on the remaining halls. They would hold what they had won and wait for reinforcements. When the full host arrived they would begin a new great offensive, striving to cleanse Moria as swiftly as possible.
Kaen also sent word back to West Eowenría, calling for ten thousand troops and three thousand more of the King's Guard to join the war.