A bunch of things happened at once. 

Drake thought he saw a tree swaying but he passed it off as a bit of his imagination. Then some long range shrapnel or whatever it was landed into the ground ranks and Drake raised his voice immediately, "Spread apart but keep your lasers focused on those elves and fire!" Unfortunately they couldn't hear his commands, and so they just fired their lasers at the elves out of retaliation as some of them fell to the elves attack upon them. 

Then the elves brought up some sort of shield which blocked all attacks, from the lasers that happened to hit it from the hornets above and from the ground and yet it didn't affect the shield at all. 

"Stop wasting the Lasers! Can't you see it has no effect??"

Drake's commands fell on seemingly dead ears yet again....

The hornets continued to fire the lasers and it still had no effect. 

[i]To hell with this, if these cyborgs can't or won't listen to me, then I'm going to leave and spare my skin. [/i]

And so he booked it away from his post on foot towards the safety of the city, without looking back.