For a long, terrible moment, the line wavers. It's not just a question of the shock at seeing their comrades cut down like wheat, though that of course also leaves a strong impact, but rather that psychological threat is followed up by a group of very physical high pressure water blasts slamming into second-row shields that were wholly unprepared for the impact. Even so, though, it's not enough to bring them to a halt, because they have been drilled on this. As strong as the human instinct to flee within them is, it has to clash with the tirelessly drilled response that the only proper reaction is to press on, that the army that breaks is dead and the army that endures will triumph. That pushing through a flashy attack gets you victory when you kill the exhausted caster, and withdrawing leaves them free to do it again and again until there's no more of you left to die. 

The centurion shouts his encouragement, urging them on despite everything to follow through, though it's hard to hear him over the horrible noise.

He drops. They've got marksmen in elavated crows nests a hundred meters back, to pick off any priority targets, and the angle of their shots means that the bullet doesn't need to go through anyone to get close and personal with his lungs.

When that doesn't stop things, they follow it up by dropping the second row too.

At that, they break. Perhaps in another circumstance - in open Saderan fields, whipped into a frenzy by their officers - they might have found the strength to charge through such a wall of death to close with their foes, but caught unawares in the choking smoke the attack proves simply too much for even their discipline to withstand. The imperials break, turn, and run, not as a disciplined formation but as a mob only seeking escape, and even those whose courage hasn't failed them know better than to hope for victory now that their fellows have put to flight. They join into the pack, running and pushing for cover, and only careful civic engineering from the street's designers keeps more of them from slipping on the wet concrete.

Some of them are going to be sick. This isn't what they signed up for, isn't what they trained for, there are all those bodies cooling in the street and there's blood everywhere and they look just like any other humans, why didn't they just stop -

There's some pursuit, with nets and more gas, but there's not a good way to nonlethally stop people from fleeing en masse and they still need to make sure the area is clear for emergency responders.

The medical and cryogenics teams, on the other hand, get to work as soon as its safe. This is a lot messier than the norm, and it's awkward trying to do their jobs in gas masks and hastily-assembled body armor, but even if this is the worst any of them have ever personally seen they're at least used to the idea of seeing mangled bodies. Besides, their job here is to help people, and there's enough of them in one place that the triage doesn't need to be too ruthless just yet.

They're not going to get everyone. Bullets are lethal even when you aren't actively trying to kill people, and some of the head injuries are severe enough that it'll probably cause problems for unthawing them. But at least the response is prompt, and there's a lot they can do a minute after the injury that would be useless in five. Only about half the people lying on the ground need immediate cryogenics, though some more of them might end up getting frozen over the next day if their situation deteriorates.

The still-living soldiers attempt to prevent this!

They're outnumbered and heavily injured, and they're up against stiff opposition. Dath ilan is good at using superior numbers to restrain people without hurting them; if there's any combat skill that Civilization can be said to have mastered, it's that. Neither their struggles nor screamed invectives slow things down, though the consent for treatment is... dubious enough to be concerning. It's one thing to cryogenize people to save their future - though the resemblance to execution might be a cause of some of their other problems-, but another to offer mundane medical care that they might have opinions on if they were more able to communicate. It seems likely that they would want it, but the prediction markets don't feel confident enough to trade much above an an 80% average holistically.

This would be much easier and less sketchy if they shared a language and could actually communicate with the patients, though being believed might still be a real problem. Hopefully the linguists will be able to get on that soon.

They're not going to get a ton to work with from these prisoners, since even the ones that aren't in extreme pain are not necessarily feeling the most cooperatively inclined, but there are a lot of Saderans in Schelling Point right now and most of them speak the same language.

Why would they not all speak the same language???

Over the next half an hour, similar engagements play out across the city. In each attempt Civilization iterates on their initial playbook in the hopes of a better outcome, to mixed results. Concussion explosives prove a particularly useful tool in this arsenal, as they actually end up sufficient to regularly halt Saderan advances without needing sustained gunfire support, but they're also concerningly lethal and indiscriminate, particularly when it comes to avoiding head injuries, and Civilization does not actually have a particularly large stockpile of them on hand. Attempts at blinding lights manage disorientation and prove useful for the purposes of safe withdrawals, but fail to actually stop the soldiers, and it proves rather difficult to find an alternative to bullets that works without killing; as predicted, rubber rounds are only weakly effective against skirmishers and nearly wholly ineffective against a full shield wall. 

To make matters worse, in addition to the casualties they inflict on the invaders, dath ilan's forces steadily weaken in turn. Many people prove incapable of continuing lethal operations after their first attempt, often even when they are in a supporting role rather than themselves killing, while others remain willing but their participation is psychologically inadvisable. Joining them are a steady stream of injured soldiers, as blunt impacts, lucky arrows, and in one case casualties from a missed ambush start taking their toll on the dath ilani vanguard. Their combat effectiveness is being degraded significantly more slowly than that of their foes, particularly given their superior troop numbers, but it's still not exactly an ideal outcome by any means.