In the frozen belly of the Bleeding Gorge, the air was thick with the stench of rot of the soulles who rotted away the moment they died, and the deafening clash of bronze against iron echoed relentlessly between the two-thousand-foot granite canyon walls.
Squad 25 stood back-to-back in a tight defensive triangle beneath a sloping mountain overhang.
Kaka let out a guttural Asakana war cry, swinging his primary war axe in a brutal horizontal arc that cleaved through three bronze breastplates. The sheer force of his attacks hurled any human shells that came within a foot of him ten paces into the icy creek bed.
His broad chest heaved, steam billowing from his nostrils into the air. He had done most of the fighting but they kept coming and soon he would be overwhelmed.
"They just keep crawling out of the shale like maggots!" Kaka roared, his secondary axe decapitating an advancing spearman.
