Rise of the Horde - Chapter 648 - 647

The advance began at midday under a hazy sky that cast flat, even light across the farmland between the ridges.

Eight thousand four hundred warriors moved down the Thornfield ridge in echeloned formation. The 1st Warband under Arka’garr held the center, one thousand veterans advancing in tight, disciplined ranks. The 2nd Warband anchored the right flank against the river. The 3rd through 8th Warbands filled the spaces between, creating a front that stretched across half a mile of farmland.

The Roarers fired their first volley at four hundred paces. Fourteen hundred weapons discharged in a staggered pattern that produced a sustained crackle rather than a single blast. The balls struck among the Threian positions on the northern hills. The range was extreme for the Roarers’ limited accuracy and casualties were light, but the psychological effect was immediate. Threian soldiers dropped behind cover.

The advance continued at the steady pace Arka’garr’s drill had established. Not running. Walking, with measured steps that kept the formation intact and the shields locked.

* * * * *

On the northern hills, the Threian advance guard’s commander faced a decision that his orders had not prepared him for. General Snowe’s instructions had been explicit: establish contact, observe, and hold position while the cavalry executed the flanking maneuver. The advance guard was not equipped or positioned for a defensive battle against a full-scale assault. Its infantry companies were spread across multiple hilltops in observation positions rather than concentrated in defensive formations. Its cavalry was deployed for screening, not for the kind of concentrated countercharge that a full assault demanded.

The orcish advance was not what anyone had expected. Eight thousand warriors in formation, advancing at a steady pace across open farmland, their ranged weapons firing in coordinated volleys that suppressed the hilltop positions while the main body closed the distance. It was, the advance guard commander realized with the clarity that crisis produced, the kind of combined-arms assault that the Threian military doctrine described as its own specialty, executed by an enemy that was not supposed to be capable of it.

“Pull back!” he ordered, and the decision was correct because the alternative was being overrun by a force four times his size in positions that had been designed for observation rather than defense.

The Threian advance guard withdrew northward, its companies peeling off the hilltops in the controlled retreat that their training demanded, each unit providing covering fire for the units behind it. The withdrawal was professional, executed with the discipline that Snowe’s reorganization had instilled, but it was a withdrawal nonetheless, and the ground it conceded was ground that the orcish advance occupied with the methodical thoroughness that turned farmland into contested territory.

The Horde crested the northern hills and found the main Threian force.

* * * * *

General Snowe’s army was partially deployed across a broad front approximately two miles north of the hills. Infantry formations were still assembling from their marching columns into the battle lines that the engagement required. Cavalry squadrons wheeled on the flanks, their horses stamping and snorting with the nervous energy that animals produced when the sounds and smells of approaching combat reached them. The mages stood at their designated positions behind the infantry line, their hands already glowing with the focused energy that magical preparation produced.

Snowe himself was visible on the slight rise at the center of his position, his silver armor catching the flat light, his presence a fixed point around which his army organized itself. He was, Khao’khen recognized through the spyglass, calm. The orcish assault had changed his plan but not his composure. A general who had survived the Lag’ranna campaign and the political upheaval that followed it was not a man who lost his balance because an enemy did something unexpected.

“They are not fully deployed,” Sakh’arran observed. “The eastern infantry companies are still in column. The cavalry that was screening the advance guard has not yet reformed. The mage line has gaps.”

“Then we hit the gaps before they close.”

The war horns sounded the command for general advance, and the Horde’s formation surged forward with the controlled aggression that was the product of discipline applied to ferocity. The Roarers fired continuously now, their volleys striking the assembling Threian formations with a frequency that prevented the infantry from forming the shield walls that their doctrine required for defending against close assault.

Fire spheres arced from the flanks, the troll teams hurling their clay projectiles at the mage positions where the practitioners’ glowing hands represented the most dangerous capability on the Threian side. The spheres exploded among the mages in bursts of flame and chemical fury, forcing the practitioners to divert their energy from offensive preparation to personal protection, extinguishing fires and shielding themselves from the Bufas compound’s burning effects.

The shield wall hit the Threian line at the center, where the infantry had managed to form a partial defensive formation. The collision was the sound that battlefields had produced since the first armies met in the open, the crash of iron against iron, the grunt of warriors absorbing impact, the sharp screams of those who found gaps in the defense or gaps in their own. Spears thrust through shield gaps. Swords found necks and arms and the vulnerable spaces where armor met flesh.

Arka’garr’s 1st Warband drove into the Threian center with the weight of one thousand elite warriors moving in synchronized formation. The Threian line bent. Bent further. And in the center, where the 1st Warband’s pressure was greatest, it broke.

The breach was narrow, perhaps thirty paces wide, but it was enough. Orcish warriors poured through the gap, their formation maintaining its integrity even as it flowed through the breach like water through a crack in a dam. Behind them, the Roarer crews advanced to the breach and fired point-blank into the flanks of the broken line, the balls tearing through the side armor that the Threian infantry’s forward-facing shields did not protect.

The Threian line’s center collapsed. The flanks, still intact, bent inward to contain the breach, creating a pocket around the advancing orcish warriors. For a moment, the battle hung in balance, the Threian flanks pressing inward while the orcish center pushed deeper, each side trying to impose its geometry on the engagement.

Then the Rhakaddons hit.

Sixty armored beasts, held in reserve behind the advancing infantry, charged through the breach with the ground-shaking force that nothing on the battlefield could withstand. The Threian soldiers who tried to close the pocket were swept aside by three-ton animals moving at full speed, their iron-shod hooves and their riders’ spears turning the narrow breach into a wide, irreparable rupture in the Threian formation.

Snowe saw the breach widen and made the decision that saved his army from destruction. “General withdrawal! All units! Fall back to the river crossing at North Bridge!”

The order traveled through the Threian ranks with the speed that discipline produced, and the kingdom’s soldiers began the controlled retreat that their training demanded. It was not a rout. The flanks maintained their formation, covering the center’s collapse with the professional steadiness of soldiers who understood that retreating in order was the difference between an army that survived to fight again and an army that ceased to exist.

But the Horde pursued. Not with the wild, disorganized chase that orcish warbands had historically employed against retreating enemies, but with the measured, relentless advance that maintained formation integrity while closing the distance on an enemy whose retreat, however disciplined, was slower than the Horde’s advance.

The battle of Thornfield was not over. The Threian army was retreating but not broken. Snowe’s cavalry was still in the field, either returning from the failed flanking maneuver or being redirected to cover the withdrawal. The mages were intact, their capabilities undiminished despite the fire sphere disruption. And the griffon knights circled above, their presence a reminder that the sky still belonged to Threia, even if the ground beneath it was being contested.

But the initiative had shifted. The Horde was advancing. The Threians were retreating. And the war that had begun with a bypass at Valdenmarch had escalated into a pitched battle whose outcome would be determined by whatever came next.

Khao’khen rode at the formation’s center, his Rhakaddon’s pace matching the infantry’s advance. The sword in his hand was bloodied. The plan he had built over eight months was being tested against the best the kingdom could field, and so far, the plan was holding.

The north waited. The war continued. And the Yohan First Horde pressed forward into the heart of a kingdom that had once believed it had nothing to fear from the creatures south of its frontier.