The battlefield had dropped into a never seen before spectacle of chaotic, non-lethal pandemonium.
Across five leagues of frozen tundra, forty thousand heavy cataphract lancers were wildly attempting to maintain military formation atop their restless mounts. But warhorses, no matter how rigorously trained on royal drill grounds or conditioned to ignore the roar of battle horns, don’t react well when their riders suddenly begin dropping their weapons in rapid, confused row.
It began with the forward cavalry squadron.
A veteran royal captain, desperate to prove his martial valor before the distant royal chariot, raised his ten-meter ash-wood lance into the air, screaming: “Follow me! Couched charge! Run the heretic down!”
He dug his brass spurs into his dragon-steed’s armored flanks and tightened his iron gauntlets around the wooden handle, leaning his shoulder forward to absorb the massive recoil of the charge.
SCHWUMP.
The moment his fingers squeezed the wood, the zero-drag crystal ice did what zero-friction physics dictated. The ten-meter lance squirted forward out of his grip like an oiled river loach squeezed by a startled child. The weapon shot twenty feet through the air, turned end-over-end with a gentle whistle. Then he planted its bulbous blue crystal spearhead harmlessly into a soft snowdrift thirty paces away.
