Chapter 259 — The Road to Baldwin I

Chapter 259: Chapter 259 — The Road to Baldwin I

They got about forty meters.

James ran with Durendal low and his lungs burning and let himself believe, for the length of those forty meters, that the road was going to stay open, that two enormous things had found each other in the mud and would be busy with it long enough to matter.

Then Morcant stopped fighting the orc.

He did it mid-exchange. He turned an axe stroke off his blade, gave ground twice, and simply broke contact and started moving away from the fight, across and cutting a diagonal through the churned ground toward Raymond.

He had come down that lane for James. He was Baldwin’s Lord Commander before he was anybody’s grieving master, and the man closing on his prince with a sword and a claim was not the necromancer.

Kargan took it as an insult.

The Orc Chief roared something that had no words in it and came after him, because in whatever code an orc war-chief lived by, a man did not simply decide he had somewhere better to be halfway through.

Which meant both of them were coming.

James looked south while he ran, through a gap in the smoke, and the Crown standard was in the wrong place.

It had been sitting at the centre of that army since they arrived, fixed, a landmark. Now it was two hundred meters closer than it had been, and moving, and there were mounted shapes around it.

Baldwin had come off his ground.

James did not panic about it. He simply understood that a clock he could not read had started somewhere behind him, and that every second he spent on anything other than moving was a second Baldwin spent covering distance.

---

Morcant reached Raymond first.

He came across the prince’s line at an angle and cut at him without a word or announcement, no challenge, nothing but a Lord Commander removing an obstacle from in front of his king.

Raymond took the first cut on his sword and gave ground, and did not look back at Team Zero.

He did not ask for help. There was no version of him that was going to.

Kargan came after him, and Team Zero was in the road.

The Orc Chief did not go around. There were five humans between him and the man who had walked away from him, and he came through the middle of them at a dead run, and the first thing Team Zero knew about it was Ronan being hit.

After that it did not matter what Kargan had originally been chasing. Something had hit him back, and the battlefield split into two fights inside three seconds.

Neither of them got a private arena. Crown soldiers kept flowing past on both sides trying to seal the corridor. Northern Legion veterans fought to keep it open, and lost men doing it. Goblins came through the eastern smoke and attacked whoever was nearest, and twice in the first minute somebody’s ordinary soldier died between the bosses without either boss noticing.

---

Raymond found out what Battleflow was the hard way.

He was handling Morcant’s sword, meeting the disciplined cuts, holding his distance and then a Crown spearman stepped past on his left. Raymond turned two degrees to account for the spear, and Morcant’s blade came through the space that turn had opened and put a line across his shoulder.

Raymond gave ground four paces and put his hand on it, and looked at the blood, and did not pretend it had not happened.

Morcant came forward. His posture had changed, squarer, more forward on the front foot, the weight of a man who had just confirmed something about his opponent.

He started calling soldiers past.

Not a shield ring. Just men, ordinary Crown infantry, moving through the space around him on errands that made no difference to the war and every difference to him, and each one of them handing him another angle.

Raymond stopped trying to fight both things.

He caught the next spearman’s shaft with his free hand as the man came past, pulled him sideways, and put him into the soldier behind him and the pair of them went down in the mud directly in the lane Morcant had been about to use.

He did it again with a shield, hooking it out of a man’s grip and dropping it flat where Morcant would have to step around it.

He started using the dead. There were plenty. He fought backward across ground where bodies lay thickest, and every time Morcant tried to slide to an angle, the angle had a corpse in it.

And he kept moving away from the Crown ranks. Every exchange took the pair of them another few meters into open ground where the only soldiers left were the ones already lying down.

Morcant’s cuts started arriving on their own.

Then Raymond hit him properly for the first time.

[MORCANT — HP: 32,340 → 27,900]

---

James saw the number go past in the corner of his vision and had no time at all to think about it, because Kargan had found Ronan’s bad arm.

The Orc Chief came down overhead at the shield side, aiming to break through an arm that had already been driven into its own owner’s chest once today.

Ronan did not try to stop it.

He had learned that lesson four minutes ago and it had cost him a shoulder. Instead of planting, he stepped inside the widest part of the arc where the axe had the least speed and caught the haft on the angle of the shield rather than the face, and turned the whole descending mass a foot and a half to his left.

The axe went past him and buried itself in the dead warhorse James had hidden behind earlier, deep enough that Kargan had to haul on it twice.

It still nearly took Ronan’s arm off at the shoulder. He came out of it with the shield hanging low and his teeth locked, and he stayed standing, and that was the entire achievement.

Cillian, who the swing had been travelling toward, did not get hit.

"Knee!" Maeve shouted. "His right knee, it’s still open from Raymond—"

Finn was already moving. He had been waiting for a target that was worth what he was about to spend, and an Orc Chief with a compromised leg was exactly that, this was not a formation and Linebreaker had nothing to build on here, so he went to the other end of his kit.

[FINN HALE — GIANT BREAKER STRIKE]