Rise of the Horde - Chapter 764 - 763

The king’s sword carved a furrow across Garrok’s jaw.

The blade’s Sixth Realm edge split the iron chin guard and opened the flesh beneath from ear to chin, the cut deep enough to expose the white ridge of the mandible through the curtain of blood that sheeted down the warchief’s throat and soaked the leather gorget’s inner padding. Garrok’s head snapped sideways. His eyes whitened for a fraction of a heartbeat. His massive frame swayed, the seven-foot body in its custom-forged dwarven plate tilting like a siege tower struck by a catapult stone.

He did not fall.

The Sixth Realm’s pain suppression seized the wound’s shrieking signals and crushed them into a dull background hum. Garrok used the stagger’s rotational momentum, converting the sideways lurch into the backhand arc that the war axe’s weight turned from a recovery into a killing stroke. The axe head screamed through the air at the king’s midsection, the displaced atmosphere cracking audibly along the arc’s path, the specific sound that Sixth Realm striking velocity produced when the weapon’s passage exceeded the speed that air could part quietly.

The king dropped flat. His back hit the cratered earth and the axe passed through the space where his chest had been, close enough that the pressure wave peeled the leather covering from his remaining pauldron and ripped the plume from his helmet’s crest. Fragments of the plume drifted through the smoke-hazed air above him, the feathers disintegrating in the axe’s wake turbulence.

He rolled left. The war axe came down where he had been lying, the overhead strike cratering the earth two feet deep, the impact’s shockwave bouncing the king’s body off the ground by three inches and scattering the soldiers who had been fighting within eight paces. A Threian infantryman caught in the shockwave’s edge was thrown sideways into a barbarian warrior and both men went down in a tangle of limbs and weapons, the shockwave not distinguishing between the combatants’ allegiances.

The king came up in the crouch that the Sixth Realm’s combat stance produced. His golden aura flared at his feet, the energy’s ground contact providing the traction that the blood-soaked, cratered earth could not. His left arm hung with the dull heaviness that damaged muscle communicated to a Sixth Realm brain. The arm was functional. The functionality had a timer. He could feel the timer counting.

Garrok wrenched his axe from the crater and pivoted on his wounded knee, the joint that Fairfax had cracked hours ago grinding audibly beneath the dented plate. The pivot produced a grunt that the warchief’s pain suppression could not fully contain, the sound leaking through the Realm’s filters in the specific register that structural damage produced when the damage was being used rather than rested.

The exchange continued. Strike and counter. The war axe’s broad arcs against the sword’s precise thrusts. Each contact between the weapons produced the shockwave that Realm-enhanced impacts generated, the concussive pulses radiating outward in rings that pushed soldiers away from the combatants’ radius and created the clearing that two Sixth Realm warriors required when they fought, the clearing defined not by courtesy but by the specific danger that proximity to the combat represented for anyone whose Realm was below the combatants’.

Garrok caught the king’s blade on the axe’s shaft. The Sixth Realm energies ground against each other at the contact point, golden light and the warchief’s own amber enhancement sparking where the weapons met. Garrok twisted the shaft. The king’s sword was wrenched sideways, the blade’s runic anchors screaming under the torsional stress, a crack appearing at the forte where the blade met the guard. The crack was a dark line in the steel that the golden runic light no longer covered, the structural failure beginning at the point where the stress exceeded the reinforcement’s capacity.

The king disengaged. He stepped back three paces, the distance that reset the engagement’s geometry and gave the cracked blade’s runic system a moment to restabilize. The crack remained. The blade was compromised. Every subsequent strike would stress the crack further. The blade’s remaining lifespan was measured in impacts rather than hours.

Garrok pressed. The warchief limped forward on the damaged knee, the limp compensated by the Sixth Realm’s muscular override but visible in the asymmetry of the stride, the right leg driving and the left leg dragging. His jaw wound bled freely, the blood painting his beard and chest in the glossy sheen that arterial proximity produced, the wound not fatal but not minor, the mandible’s exposed bone visible with each breath that opened the gash’s edges.

He swung. The king parried. The crack in the blade widened by a millimeter. He swung again. The king dodged rather than parried, preserving the blade’s remaining integrity. The warchief swung a third time and the king caught the axe on his cracked shield, the shield absorbing the blow’s force through the two intact runic anchors while the two cracked anchors flexed toward failure.

The shield held. Barely. The two cracked anchors were now cracked further, the fracture lines visible as dark traces in the golden runic pattern, the anchors’ structural contribution reduced to approximately thirty percent of their original capacity. One more blow at full Sixth Realm power and the anchors would fail and the shield would separate.

* * * * *

While the king and Garrok fought, the battlefield’s larger geometry continued producing the casualties that the geometry’s design intended.

Fifty thundermakers on the ridgeline behind the barbarian positions fired in the staggered sequence that sustained continuous bombardment. Fifty weapons. Fifty crews. Each crew reloading from the dwarven ammunition stacks that the supply wagons had positioned behind each weapon. The staggering meant that at any given moment, approximately eight thundermakers were firing simultaneously, the impacts striking the Threian formation at eight-second intervals, the rhythm of destruction as regular and as relentless as a heartbeat.

A thundermaker ball struck the Threian right flank’s second line at the three-hundred-pace range where the direct-fire trajectory was flat and the ball’s path through the formation was horizontal rather than plunging. The ball entered the formation at chest height and passed through the first soldier, the iron sphere punching through the breastplate’s center panel, the dwarven iron failing against the dwarven iron ball at the velocity that three hundred paces of direct fire produced.

The ball’s trajectory did not change as it exited the first soldier’s back because the ball’s mass exceeded the body’s resistance by the margin that maintained the ball’s course. The ball struck the second soldier in the shield. The shield shattered. The ball struck the third soldier in the hip, the impact spinning the soldier like a child’s top, the rotation flinging his arms outward and his boomstick from his grip. The ball continued into the fourth soldier’s thigh and lodged there, its velocity finally consumed by four bodies’ collective resistance.

Four soldiers from one ball. One of fifty balls fired in the volley. Fifty balls, each one carving its own path through the Threian formation, each path a line of broken men and shattered armor and the specific wet sounds that iron balls produced when they entered flesh at velocities that the flesh could not accommodate.

The Threian formation endured the volley the way infantry formations endured the things they could not prevent: by closing the gaps that the dead and wounded left and continuing to stand in the positions that the formation’s integrity required. The gaps were filled by soldiers from the rear ranks stepping forward into positions that had been occupied by men who were now on the ground. The stepping forward was the act that infantry discipline sustained through the specific mechanism of training: the soldiers stepped forward because the training said step forward and the training’s authority exceeded the body’s instinct to step backward.

Eight seconds later, the next volley arrived. Eight more thundermaker balls at three hundred paces. Eight more paths through the formation. Eight more lines of broken men.

“We are losing four hundred soldiers per minute to the thundermakers alone,” Fairfax reported from the command position, his Fifth Realm perception calculating the casualty rate with the precision that the Realm’s enhanced cognitive processing provided. “Four hundred per minute. Twenty-four hundred per hour. The thundermakers will reduce our effective strength below the threshold for sustained engagement within three hours if the rate is maintained.”

“Can we silence the thundermakers?” the king shouted across the fifteen paces that separated his engagement with Garrok from the command position where Fairfax was standing between dodging thundermaker debris.

“Fifty thundermakers on the ridgeline with infantry protection and two Sixth Realm chieftains guarding the battery positions. We do not have the Fifth Realm assets to assault fifty positions simultaneously and the positions we cannot assault continue firing while we assault the positions we can reach.”

A thundermaker ball struck the ground ten paces from the king’s engagement with Garrok. The impact’s shockwave interrupted both combatants, the concussive force staggering both men simultaneously, the Sixth Realm’s balance enhancement straining to maintain both warriors’ footing against a force that was not directed at either of them but was directed at the general area that both of them occupied.

The thundermaker’s crew did not distinguish between the combatants. The crew was firing at the Threian formation’s general area. The Threian formation’s general area included the king. The king’s engagement with Garrok was occurring inside the formation’s general area because the engagement had been occurring inside the formation since it began. The thundermaker fire did not respect the boundaries that individual combat created. The thundermaker fire destroyed everything in the area that the fire was directed at, and the everything included the king and the warchief and the soldiers around them and the ground they stood on.

Garrok stumbled from the shockwave. His damaged knee buckled fully for half a second. The king’s cracked sword found the opening that the buckle created and drove toward the warchief’s exposed flank.

The sword struck Garrok’s breastplate at the joint where the chest panel met the abdominal panel. The Sixth Realm energy channeled through the cracked blade produced the force that the strike required, but the crack’s structural weakness reduced the force’s transmission efficiency. The blade bit into the dwarven iron to a depth of half an inch and stopped. The crack widened. The blade’s remaining lifespan decreased from impacts to impact. One more strike at this intensity and the blade would fail.

Garrok’s counter was immediate. The war axe came across in the horizontal arc that used the stumble’s recovery as the swing’s initiation, the warchief converting the defensive weakness of the buckled knee into the offensive momentum of the rotation. The axe caught the king’s cracked shield at the precise point where the two damaged runic anchors held the shield’s structural integrity.

The anchors failed.

The shield separated into three pieces. The largest piece, the shield’s center boss and the surrounding twelve inches of iron, spun away from the king’s arm trailing the leather straps that had connected the boss to the arm’s grip. The two remaining pieces fell at the king’s feet. The king’s left arm, unshielded, absorbed the axe strike’s residual force through the Sixth Realm’s defensive aura. The aura held. The arm went numb from shoulder to fingertip, the nerves’ conduction shut down by the impact’s transferred energy.

The king was fighting with a cracked sword and no shield and a numb arm against a warchief whose jaw was opened to the bone and whose knee was grinding and whose Sixth Realm power was at approximately fifty-five percent while the king’s was at thirty-eight percent.

Neither man was winning. Both men were wounded. The individual combat that the Threian soldiers and the barbarian warriors had cleared space for was the individual combat that equal-Realm engagements produced: sustained, grinding, and incapable of producing the decisive outcome that the battle’s resolution required.

The thundermakers fired. The formation bled. And the two Sixth Realm warriors fought inside the bleeding, their individual contest a sideshow to the artillery’s main performance, the swords and axes and Realm-enhanced strikes irrelevant beside the fifty dwarven-forged weapons that were winning the battle without the chieftains’ participation.