Poke and Prod

“As someone of your experience must surely know,” Thassarian said, “there’s no better way to familiarize one’s self with their enemy than by confronting them in combat. While you no doubt lust for the glory of taking Icecrown Citadel, that cannot happen without taking each of the Lich King’s gates first. For now, you must focus your efforts on the first of these… Return to the Broken Front. Engage the enemy in battle. Search for a weakness we might exploit and return to me with a detailed report.”

The first of these. Nobody else on that ship has said the word first out loud. Bartlett talks about the gate the way a man talks about a door. Thassarian has been through them, from the other side, and counts.

So I went back down to the field where I had finished five of our own men two days ago, and this time I went to work on the things standing over them.

The abominations I have known since Andorhal. They are slower than their size promises and they do not tire, and the only honest way through one is the seams, which is where somebody’s ribs were sewn to somebody else’s hip. The Destroyer opens those.

The necromancers work in pairs. One holds a shield while the other casts, and the pair is the whole of their strength; break the caster and the one left holding the shield stops being a soldier immediately. I have been killing that arrangement since Scholomance and they have not improved it.

The adepts were new to me. They do not stand in the world the whole time. They go to smoke and come back, and while they are smoke you can put a mace through the space they occupy and hit nothing at all. What they cannot do is cut without arriving first. So you stop swinging at the smoke and wait for the arrival.

That is the report. They are not clever. They are precise, and they are precise in the same way every time, because there is one will running all of them and it has never had to improvise.

“You’ve returned. Anything to report?”

I told him no. It was a small piece of pettiness and I enjoyed it.

“Really? Nothing notable to report?” He looked at the state of my armor, at what a Hulking Abomination leaves on a man who took it apart at the seams, and he smiled. “I beg to differ…”

First time I have seen a death knight do that. It did not improve his face.

The weakness Thassarian had been fishing for was standing in plain sight the whole time, stitched together out of Alliance and Horde dead and too stupid to check whose armor it was wearing, which made the next order simple and That’s Abominable!