Rise of the Horde - Chapter 766 - 765

The seventh hour was the hour the Threian center broke.

Not bent. Not buckled. Broke. The specific structural failure that infantry formations produced when the formation’s ability to absorb casualties was exceeded by the casualty rate that the formation was absorbing, the failure that occurred when the soldiers stepping forward to fill the gaps left by the dead and wounded ran out of soldiers to step forward with because the rear ranks had been consumed by the thundermaker fire that had been falling on the formation for seven hours.

The break began at the center’s left section, the section that had absorbed the highest concentration of thundermaker fire because the section’s position was directly in front of the ridgeline’s densest battery concentration. Twenty thundermakers aimed at a two-hundred-pace section of the Threian line. Twenty weapons firing in staggered sequence, producing the continuous bombardment that deposited one forty-pound ball into the section every four seconds. One ball every four seconds into a two-hundred-pace front. Every four seconds, another line of men carved through the formation’s depth. Every four seconds, another gap that the rear ranks filled. Every four seconds, fewer rear ranks available to fill the gap.

A sergeant in the center-left section looked behind him. The rear ranks were gone. The formation that had been twelve ranks deep at the battle’s start was three ranks deep. The sergeant was in the second rank. Behind the second rank was the third rank. Behind the third rank was the open ground that the formation’s depth had previously occupied and that was now occupied by the dead and wounded of the previous nine ranks.

“No more men behind us,” the sergeant said. The statement was delivered at the volume that proximity to sustained thundermaker concussion had left him, which was a shout that sounded like a whisper because his eardrums had been ruptured by the fifth hour’s bombardment and the subsequent hours had been conducted in the muffled acoustic environment that ruptured eardrums produced.

The soldier beside the sergeant nodded. The soldier’s face was the face that sustained bombardment produced: the eyes wide and fixed, the jaw clenched, the skin gray with the dust and smoke and the specific pallor that adrenaline sustained beyond its useful duration created. The soldier’s boomstick was empty. The ammunition pouch at his belt was flat. The soldier was holding the boomstick as a club because the boomstick’s function as a firearm had ended when the last ball was fired twenty minutes ago and the boomstick’s function as a club was the function that remained.

A thundermaker ball struck the ground three paces in front of the sergeant’s position. The impact cratered the earth and the shockwave threw both men backward. The sergeant landed on the body of a dead soldier from the fourth rank. The dead soldier’s boomstick was beneath the sergeant’s back, the weapon’s barrel digging into his spine through his armor’s lumbar gap. He rolled off the body, stood, and found that the two soldiers who had been standing to his left were no longer standing. One was on the ground with his legs at angles that legs did not produce naturally. The other was gone. Not dead on the ground. Gone. The thundermaker ball had struck him directly and the striking had removed him from the category of things that left remains.

The break began with the sergeant’s section. Not because the sergeant broke. The sergeant did not break. The sergeant stood and held his position with the empty boomstick that was now a club and the willingness to swing the club at whatever came through the gap. The break occurred behind the sergeant’s position, in the third rank, where the soldiers who had been stepping forward for seven hours watched the thundermaker ball remove their comrade from existence and decided, individually, in the specific privacy of each soldier’s survival calculus, that the position could not be held.

They stepped back. Not ran. Stepped. The disciplined withdrawal that training produced when the withdrawal’s trigger was the recognition that the position was untenable rather than the panic that untenable positions could generate. The stepping back was orderly. The stepping back was the stepping back of professional soldiers whose professionalism sustained the orderliness even as the orderliness’s purpose, which was the formation’s integrity, was being defeated by the stepping back itself.

The gap opened behind the sergeant. The sergeant looked behind him and saw the gap and understood what the gap meant and turned back to the front where the barbarian infantry was pressing against the two remaining ranks and the barbarian infantry could see the gap too.

* * * * *

The barbarians poured through.

Not a charge. A press. The sustained forward pressure that an infantry force produced when the force in front of it ceased resisting, the pressure converting the static melee into the forward movement that breaking produced. Barbarian warriors stepped over the bodies of the Threian dead and into the gap that the third rank’s withdrawal had created. Their boomsticks fired at point-blank range into the second rank’s exposed backs. Their hand axes found the necks and shoulders of soldiers who were facing the wrong direction because the soldiers had been facing the front and the threat was now behind them.

The sergeant swung his club at the barbarian who came through the gap beside him. The boomstick’s stock caught the barbarian across the jaw and the barbarian staggered but did not fall because the barbarian was wearing a dwarven helmet whose chin protection absorbed the stock’s impact and distributed the force across the helmet’s structure. The barbarian’s hand axe came down on the sergeant’s forearm and the arm broke and the club fell and the sergeant drew his knife with his remaining hand and drove it into the gap between the barbarian’s breastplate and gorget.

The knife went in two inches. The barbarian grabbed the sergeant’s knife hand and bent it backward until the wrist snapped. The sergeant headbutted the barbarian. His helmet’s rim caught the barbarian’s nose and the nose broke and the blood sprayed across both men’s faces. The barbarian released the broken wrist and punched the sergeant in the throat with the gauntleted fist that the dwarven armor provided. The sergeant went down, choking, his trachea compressed by the impact.

Around the sergeant’s position, the break widened. More barbarians through the gap. More Threian soldiers stepping back. The break that had started as a section of the center-left became the collapse of the center-left, the collapse spreading laterally as the barbarian pressure exploited the gap’s widening edges and the Threian soldiers on the edges discovered that the position beside them was no longer held and the not-holding propagated through the formation in the wave that breaking produced.

“CENTER IS BREAKING!” Aldrath’s report to the king was the report that the Lord-Commander delivered with the specific urgency that four months of campaign experience produced in a commander who recognized a formation’s collapse in the first seconds of the collapse’s propagation. “The center-left has given way! The barbarians are through!”

The king disengaged from Garrok. The disengagement was not voluntary. The king stepped back from the warchief because the break’s propagation had reached the perimeter of the king’s individual combat and the barbarian infantry pouring through the gap was now between the king and the warchief. The infantry did not attack the king because the infantry was flowing past the king toward the Threian rear and the king’s Sixth Realm aura was the aura that the infantry’s Fourth Realm bodies recognized as the aura that proximity to would kill them.

Garrok did not pursue. The warchief stood on his damaged knee, his jaw wound bleeding freely, his axe resting on the ground beside him, and watched the break with the eyes of a Sixth Realm commander whose army was winning because the thundermakers were doing what the thundermakers did: making the numbers irrelevant by killing faster than the numbers could replace.

On the ridgeline, the forty-eight remaining thundermakers shifted their fire. The crews adjusted their weapons’ elevation to track the Threian formation’s retreat, the barrels’ angles decreasing as the range decreased, the balls’ trajectories flattening as the weapons fired at the closer range that the Threian withdrawal was producing. The closer range increased the accuracy. The increased accuracy increased the casualties. The increased casualties increased the withdrawal’s speed.

The king rallied the center. His Sixth Realm voice, the command harmonic that the Realm’s power provided, projected across the breaking formation with the authority that overrode individual soldiers’ retreat instinct and replaced it with the compulsion to stand. The voice’s effect was real. Soldiers stopped stepping back. Soldiers turned to face the barbarians who had penetrated the gap. The rallying produced the temporary stabilization that Sixth Realm command authority provided.

The stabilization lasted ninety seconds. Then the thundermakers fired into the stabilized formation and the stabilization’s foundation, which was the soldiers standing in the positions the command had designated, was undermined by the thundermaker balls that removed the soldiers from the positions.

“We cannot hold the center against the thundermaker fire,” Aldrath said. His voice carried the flat quality of a professional who was delivering the assessment that the professional’s training existed to produce. “The thundermaker fire’s rate exceeds the formation’s ability to absorb casualties and maintain structural integrity. We can rally. The rallying produces a target. The target is struck by thundermaker fire. The thundermaker fire breaks the rally. The cycle repeats until the formation ceases to exist as a formation.”

The king looked at the ridgeline. Forty-eight thundermakers. Forty-eight weapons with unlimited ammunition. Forty-eight weapons that his army could not silence because the weapons were defended by infantry and by two chieftains whose Sixth Realm power matched his own and whose wounds were real but whose wounds’ severity was insufficient to remove them from the combat because the Sixth Realm’s pain suppression sustained their functionality past the point where lesser Realm warriors would have collapsed.

“Fifth Realm officers. How many remain?”

“Six functional. Two killed assaulting the eastern battery position. They destroyed two thundermakers before the position’s defending infantry overwhelmed them.”

“Six Fifth Realm against forty-eight thundermaker positions defended by two Sixth Realm chieftains.”

“The arithmetic is prohibitive, Your Majesty.”

The arithmetic was prohibitive. The arithmetic had been prohibitive since the battle began because the arithmetic was determined by the fifty thundermakers that the dwarven forges had provided and the unlimited ammunition that the dwarven supply chain sustained and the two Sixth Realm chieftains whose wounds were wounds and whose fighting capability was still the capability that the Sixth Realm provided to wounded warriors whose Realm sustained them past the wounds’ natural consequences.

The king made the decision.

“Withdraw,” the king said. “General withdrawal. Maintain formation integrity. Rear guard covers the retreat. The army withdraws to the secondary position at Kellsworth.”

The word went out through the command chain. Withdraw. The word that the battle’s seven hours had been building toward, the word that the thundermakers’ sustained fire had been dictating since the first ball struck the formation at the ninth hour’s opening, the word that the finite-ammunition army spoke when the finite ammunition’s expenditure and the thundermaker fire’s infinite expenditure produced the specific mathematical intersection that made continued engagement the equivalent of standing in rain and expecting to stay dry.

The withdrawal was professional. Aldrath’s four months of campaign experience, the experience that had been earned against the orcish Horde’s combined-arms warfare, produced the specific withdrawal discipline that the Horde’s own operations had taught him. The rear guard held the retreating formation’s tail in the layered defense that sacrificed space for time and time for lives. The cavalry screened the flanks. The remaining battlemages, sixty-three practitioners whose reserves were at single-digit percentages, provided the covering spells that the screening required.

The thundermakers fired into the withdrawal. The balls struck the retreating formation at the ranges that the withdrawal’s increasing distance produced, the impacts’ accuracy decreasing with distance but the impacts’ psychological effect increasing because every ball that struck the retreating formation was a ball that reminded the retreating soldiers that they were retreating from weapons they could not silence and could not match and could not escape.

The barbarian infantry pursued. Their boomstick fire harassed the retreat’s rear elements with the sustained volleys that unlimited ammunition provided. The pursuit was not the aggressive, formation-breaking pursuit that a victorious army conducted against a routing enemy. The Threian army was not routing. The Threian army was withdrawing in order, its formation intact despite the center’s break, its rear guard holding the distance that the withdrawal required.

The pursuit stopped at the five-mile mark. The barbarian sub-chieftains called the halt, the Fifth Realm warriors’ tactical judgment recognizing that the pursuit’s extension beyond five miles risked the overextension that their own force’s reduced numbers could not sustain. Seventeen thousand barbarians reduced by the battle’s casualties to approximately fourteen thousand. The reduction was sustainable because the highland reinforcements continued arriving and the dwarven supply continued flowing. The Threian reduction from forty-two thousand to approximately thirty-one thousand effective was not sustainable because the Threian replacements were not arriving and the Threian ammunition was at eight percent.

The Battle of Harken Field was over. The barbarian army held the field. The Threian army withdrew.

The field held its dead. Seven thousand Threian dead on the ground that the army had advanced across at the ninth hour and retreated across at the sixteenth hour. Four thousand barbarian dead, the lesser toll that the defensive position and the thundermaker advantage had produced. The thundermaker advantage. The fifty weapons, forty-eight of which remained operational, whose sustained fire had made seventeen thousand barbarians competitive with forty-two thousand Threians and whose continued operation ensured that the next engagement would produce the same dynamic: numbers against weapons, and weapons winning.

At Ashwell, the Verakh network reported the battle’s outcome within the hour.

“The pinkskins lost,” Sakh’arran said. “Seven thousand dead. They withdrew to Kellsworth. Boomstick ammunition reduced. The thundermakers were decisive. The barbarians hold the field.”

Khao’khen looked at the map. The barbarian army at Harken Field. The king’s army at Kellsworth. The Horde at Ashwell.

“Eight percent,” he said.

“One engagement remaining. Perhaps. After that, the pinkskins fight with steel against dwarven boomsticks. The outcome of that engagement is not in question.”

“The convergence.”

“The convergence is here, Chief. The kingdom cannot fight another battle. The barbarians can fight indefinitely. The Horde is the only force whose capability is undiminished.”

Khao’khen looked at the wolf banner above the command position. The wolf’s snarl. The wolf’s direction. The wolf that had been watching and waiting and preparing for this specific moment since the day the camp at Ashwell was established.

“Prepare the messages,” Khao’khen said. “Both sets. One for the pinkskin council. One for the barbarian chieftains. The terms are the same. Our city’s security. The southern territories. The word in the preamble. Whoever accepts first determines what happens next. Whoever refuses learns what refusal costs.”

“And if both refuse?”

“Then the Horde conquers. Seven thousand warriors, rested, supplied, fortified, against exhausted forces on both sides. The wolf has been patient. The wolf’s patience has produced the position the wolf was designed to produce. If neither side will give the wolf what the wolf requires, the wolf takes it.”

“Zug’nar’ruf,” Sakh’arran said.

“Zug’nar’ruf,” Khao’khen answered. Let’s get moving. The wolf’s patience was ending. The action was beginning. And the wolf, patient for months, was about to move.