Rise of the Horde - Chapter 773 - 772

The Battle of Thornwall was fought forty-three miles from the capital, and the battle was different.

Fifteen thundermakers on the barbarian ridgeline. Fifteen weapons firing in the staggered sequence that the reduced count produced: one impact every nine seconds. Nine seconds between impacts. Nine seconds of breath. Nine seconds of aiming and firing and ducking that the soldiers in the earthworks used with the efficiency that survival demanded and that the Baron of Frost’s twenty-five-day campaign had purchased.

The difference was audible. The soldiers who had endured the four-second interval at Harken Field and the six-second interval at Kellsworth Ridge and the seven-second interval at Ashford Bridge heard the nine-second interval and the hearing produced the specific physiological response that reduced threat frequency produced: the heartbeat slowed, the breathing deepened, the hands’ tremor decreased. Nine seconds was the interval that allowed the body’s stress response to cycle between the impact’s spike and the next impact’s anticipation, the cycle that prevented the sustained stress accumulation that shorter intervals produced and that shorter intervals’ sustained stress converted into the formation-breaking panic that the thundermakers’ decisive advantage had been built on.

The panic was gone. The thundermakers were still firing. The thundermakers were still killing. But the panic that fifty thundermakers had produced was the panic of a formation being destroyed faster than it could process the destruction. Fifteen thundermakers produced the casualties that fifteen weapons produced: significant, painful, reducible. Not the overwhelming, formation-shattering destruction that fifty weapons produced. The specific quality of the bombardment had shifted from the quality that determined battles to the quality that influenced battles, and the shift was the shift that the Baron of Frost had spent twenty-five days and four griffon knights purchasing.

“The bombardment is survivable,” Aldrath said. The Lord-Commander’s assessment was the assessment of a professional who had spent four months absorbing the specific lesson that the orcish campaign had taught: the assessment of forces’ relative capabilities delivered with the flat precision that professional assessment required. “The nine-second interval allows aimed return fire. The formation can sustain the casualty rate. The numerical advantage can be applied.”

“Apply it,” the king said.

* * * * *

Twenty-eight thousand soldiers advanced.

The advance was not the advance that the previous battles had produced, the advance that pushed forward into the thundermaker fire’s suppressive curtain and was ground down by the fire’s intensity before the advance reached the barbarian positions. This advance pushed forward into thundermaker fire that was present and lethal and insufficient to suppress the formation’s full frontage because fifteen weapons could not cover the three-mile front that twenty-eight thousand soldiers’ deployment produced.

The thundermaker balls struck the advance at the nine-second interval. Each ball carved its path through the formation. Each path killed. The killing was real. The killing was the specific, individual, devastating killing that forty-pound iron balls produced when they struck human bodies at the velocity that three hundred paces of direct fire dictated. A soldier in the advance’s third rank took a ball in the shield and the shield shattered and the arm behind it broke and the soldier screamed and fell. The soldier beside the fallen man stepped over the body and continued advancing because the advance’s momentum was the advance’s survival mechanism and stopping was the thing that produced the concentration that the thundermakers required for maximum effect.

The advance reached the two-hundred-pace mark. The boomstick exchange began. Twenty-eight thousand Threian boomsticks fired in the conservation pattern at targets selected for lethality rather than volume. The Threian boomstick ammunition was at two percent. Two percent meant that each soldier carried between zero and three balls, the distribution concentrated in the forward positions where the boomstick fire’s effectiveness was highest.

A Threian soldier in the advance’s front rank fired his last ball at a barbarian warrior at one hundred and fifty paces. The ball struck the warrior’s visor and the visor cracked and the warrior fell. The soldier’s boomstick was now empty. He reversed the weapon and held it as a club, the butt stock forward, the barrel rearward, the weapon’s function converted from firearm to impact tool in the specific transition that empty boomsticks produced in soldiers whose ammunition was gone.

The soldier beside him had no boomstick at all. The soldier carried a sword and a shield, the weapons of the pre-boomstick era, the weapons that the Threian army had used before the dwarven trade provided the firearms that the dwarven trade’s severance had now denied. The soldier advanced with the shield raised and the sword at the ready position that the academy’s melee curriculum taught, the position that the soldier had not expected to use in a war where both sides carried firearms.

The advance reached the barbarian positions at the one-hundred-pace mark and the melee began.

Twenty-eight thousand soldiers against fourteen thousand barbarians. Two to one. The ratio that the thundermakers’ decisive advantage had made irrelevant at fifty weapons and that the thundermakers’ supporting advantage made relevant at fifteen weapons. The melee was the melee that two-to-one numerical superiority produced when the numerically superior force’s soldiers were willing to sustain the contact: the specific, grinding, attritional close combat that numbers eventually won because numbers meant more swords and more shields and more bodies pressing forward into the space that the dead and wounded vacated.

The barbarian warriors fought with the ferocity that highland warriors produced when the warriors were fighting in the specific condition that their traditions called the mountain’s stand: the combat that occurred when retreat was available but dishonor was worse than death and the warrior chose the combat over the retreat because the choosing was the thing that the warrior’s ancestors would remember.

A barbarian champion of the Fifth Realm held a section of the barbarian line for eleven minutes against seven Threian soldiers. The champion’s war hammer struck the first soldier’s shield and the shield exploded and the soldier behind it flew backward ten paces. The second soldier’s sword struck the champion’s thigh plate and the plate dented and the champion’s counter-strike found the soldier’s neck above the gorget. The third and fourth soldiers attacked simultaneously and the champion’s hammer’s arc caught both of them in the same swing, the Fifth Realm’s enhanced striking power sufficient to fold both soldiers’ armor at the points where the hammer’s head struck and to drive both soldiers to the ground with the impacts’ force.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh soldiers found the champion’s flanks and rear while the champion was completing the swing that had struck the third and fourth. Three swords against the champion’s unprotected back and sides. The first sword caught the champion’s kidney armor and the plate cracked. The second sword found the arm gap and entered the bicep at the depth that the gap’s width permitted. The third sword struck the champion’s helmet from behind and the helmet’s chin strap snapped and the helmet flew from the champion’s head.

The champion turned. His face was the face of a Fifth Realm warrior whose Realm’s pain suppression was processing three simultaneous wounds and whose Realm’s combat awareness was identifying the three threats’ positions and calculating the response that three threats’ simultaneous engagement required. He swung the hammer in the full circle that cleared the space around a Realm-enhanced warrior, the swing’s radius exceeding the swords’ reach, the three soldiers forced to step back or be struck by a weapon that had just exploded two shields and folded two breastplates.

The champion was bleeding from the bicep wound. The blood ran down the arm that held the hammer and made the grip slippery and the Fifth Realm’s enhancement compensated for the slipperiness by increasing the grip’s strength, the Realm’s power converting the wound’s debility into the enhanced effort that maintained the weapon’s control.

He killed the fifth soldier with the hammer’s butt spike. He wounded the sixth with the hammer’s shaft. The seventh soldier drove his sword into the champion’s exposed head, the blade entering at the temple where the removed helmet no longer provided the protection that the temple’s vulnerability required.

The champion fell. Eleven minutes. Seven soldiers engaged. Three killed by the champion. The champion killed by the seventh. The specific mathematics of Fifth Realm combat against Fourth Realm infantry: one champion equals three to four soldiers before the champion’s wounds and the attackers’ numbers produce the outcome that numbers produced when numbers were sufficient and the Realm difference was one level.

The melee ground forward. The Threian advance pushed the barbarian line backward. The thundermakers continued firing but the firing’s effect at nine-second intervals was the effect that influenced the battle rather than determined it. The fifteen weapons killed soldiers. The killing was real. The killing was not sufficient to prevent the twenty-eight thousand soldiers’ numerical weight from pressing the fourteen thousand barbarians backward.

The barbarian line bent. The bending was the bending that numerical pressure produced in a formation whose individual fighters’ quality exceeded the pressing force’s individual fighters’ quality but whose individual quality could not compensate for the pressing force’s mass. The line bent at the center where the Threian advance’s weight was concentrated. The line bent at the flanks where the Threian cavalry, sword-armed and shieldless, struck the barbarian screening positions with the mounted charge that boomstick-armed cavalry could not sustain because the cavalry’s boomstick ammunition was gone.

The barbarian shamans, the nine remaining lesser practitioners whose capabilities had been degraded at Harken Field and further reduced at every subsequent engagement, provided the magical support that their reduced numbers allowed. Ground disruption beneath the Threian advance’s center. Atmospheric humidity that interfered with the Threian boomstick fire’s remaining ammunition. The support was real. The support was insufficient to reverse the advance because the support’s practitioners were nine shamans against seventeen Threian battlemages and the seventeen battlemages’ Fourth and Fifth Circle spells penetrated the shamanic field that nine practitioners could no longer sustain at the density that twenty-two practitioners had maintained.

A Fourth Circle frost bolt struck the barbarian center’s ground and the ground froze and the barbarian warriors on the frozen ground slipped and the slipping produced the gap that the Threian advance exploited. A Fifth Circle force projection struck a barbarian formation’s shield wall and the wall buckled and the buckling produced the penetration that the Threian infantry poured into.

The magical battle, which had been the barbarians’ advantage since the campaign’s first engagement, was now the Threians’ advantage. Not because the Threian battlemages were more powerful. Not because the shamanic tradition was inferior. Because the shamanic field’s practitioners had been reduced by the campaign’s attrition to the number that could no longer sustain the field’s defensive and offensive functions simultaneously, and the battlemages’ spells were reaching their targets with the effectiveness that the field’s degradation permitted.

The barbarian line broke at the sixth hour.

Not collapsed. Broke. The specific structural failure that a numerically inferior force produced when the force’s advantages, the thundermakers and the shamanic magic and the warriors’ individual quality, were insufficient to offset the numerically superior force’s mass and the mass’s sustained pressure exceeded the line’s capacity to absorb it.

The barbarians withdrew north. The withdrawal was the withdrawal that highland warriors produced when the mountain’s stand had been made and the stand’s cost had been paid and the withdrawal’s dignity was the dignity that the stand’s courage had earned. The warriors withdrew in order, their boomstick fire covering the retreat with the sustained volleys that unlimited ammunition provided, the volleys’ density sufficient to prevent the Threian pursuit from closing the distance that the withdrawal required.

The Threian army held the field. The Threian army had advanced. The Threian army had pushed the barbarian line backward for the first time since the campaign began.

The thundermaker count was fifteen. The threshold had been reached. The mathematics had changed. And the change was visible in the field that the Threian army held and the barbarian army had vacated.

“We advanced,” the king said. The words carried the weight of a monarch who had been retreating since Fort Harken’s fall and whose retreating had ended on this field on this day.

“We advanced, Your Majesty,” Fairfax confirmed. “For the first time.”

“The thundermaker count.”

“Fifteen. The Baron’s threshold. Fifteen weapons insufficient to determine the battle’s outcome against our numbers.”

“Casualties?”

“Thirty-one hundred Threian dead. Approximately twenty-eight hundred barbarian dead. The exchange rate, for the first time in this campaign, favors us.”

For the first time. The exchange rate. The number that had favored the barbarians at every engagement since Fort Harken. The number that the Baron of Frost had been changing, one thundermaker at a time, one ammunition wagon at a time, one griffon dive at a time, for twenty-five days and four griffon knights.

The exchange rate favored the Threians. The mathematics had changed. The war had changed.

The kingdom was no longer retreating.