And thus has the decision made for them. It would, perhaps, have had a chance at its own evacuation, but when some of mages lose their links with the fleeing helicopters, they change targets. It goes down with all hands, ice suddenly building up even more rapidly than before.

It's not, objectively, the worst thing that happened today. The equipment is expensive, but civilization can afford to replace it, and if the true deaths are unfathomably high for normal operations they're still not the majority of those who perished in the last 12 hours. It still hits really hard.

They knew going into this that the aliens had bizarre anomalous capabilities at odds with their normal combat performance and were not in all ways best modeled as a primitive army of dath ilan's past. The ability to open portals wasn’t even an isolated example, but this was still not... what they expected to happen, and it's still a bizarre combination of incredibly devastating and incredibly restrained. The lesson is learned, though; the aliens are either bizarrely capable of downing flying machines, or else consider them enough of an escalation to escalate back, and in either case dath ilan doesn't want to lose more helicopters and crews trying. The decision to keep the fighter jets far from the city earlier is feeling very justified right now. 

The order goes out to redirect the advancing troops towards the landing zones for the parachuters, as well as encircle the crashed helicopters; it's vitally important that they advance until they can cover emergency services medical officers getting at the bodies, and hold it long enough that they can do their work before withdrawing. The assault itself is being called off, though, due to the need to reorganize and reassess. They're going to have to figure out if there's a form of air support they can and should risk, or else how to handle things with just grounded assets, and also buy time to see if they can start predicting some of these twists in advance rather than after people get killed. And they're probably, much as they dislike it, going to have to start holding back less; their earlier use of gunfire on enemy air support didn't provoke an escalation, and it's increasingly uncertain that they can win this fight without either suffering or inflicting significant casualties.

Victory! That'll teach them not to mess with the empire.

Some of the troops had been getting nervous hearing about the barbarian advances through rumor and garbled word of mouth, but as impressive as their armor is it's pretty clear they aren't actually all that, and the bosses clearly have the plan to deal with it. The mood along the defensive lines is significantly more cheerful now.

It would have been better if that had gotten all the local  ?birds? They’re not dragons or gryphons, not of any variety he’s ever heard of, but his experts were not particularly confident in any guesses as to what they were instead.

The first engagement was one sided, just like you always hope for in a clash with enemy elites, but they’d have to be spectacularly stupid to let him do it again. If he’s lucky, it’ll at least have been enough of a scare that they’re not in a hurry to try it again. If he’s not lucky, they’ll be angry enough to trust in whatever countermeasure the barbarian wizards can cook up, and his legion will get a chance to find out firsthand just how effective the barbarian air cavalry and wizards are. There’s little he can do to affect that decision, save through beseeching the gods.

But he can take steps to mitigate the results. His best wizards will rotate back from the front lines, to conserve their power and ensure they don’t fall victim to whatever has been targeting his dragons; lesser mages will have to suffice to handle any threats that emerge. And he can rearrange the lines, sending his subordinates to do the job wherever he lacks the information to decide properly. Some places took the abortive assault better than others, and depending on why will need to be either reinforced or abandoned. And he can make sure the wyverns know to expect water magic from their counterparts.