Rise of the Horde - Chapter 785 - 784

The breach fighting was the fighting that breach assaults produced when the defenders were professional soldiers fighting for the capital that contained their families and the attackers were highland warriors fighting for the valley that their mountains could not provide.

The Threian garrison’s breach defense was the defense that General Snowe’s dispatches and the campaign’s accumulated tactical wisdom had produced: not the static wall of shields behind the breach’s interior that the traditional breach defense doctrine prescribed, but the layered defense that the Horde’s own defensive engineering had inspired, the defense that accepted the breach’s existence and converted the breach from a gap in the wall into a killing corridor whose interior was more dangerous to the attacker than the wall’s exterior had been.

The killing corridor’s geometry was the geometry that Captain Kreese, the Sixth Realm Royal Guard officer, had designed during the four days between the bombardment’s beginning and the breach’s opening. The corridor’s walls were the buildings that flanked the breach’s interior, the buildings whose upper floors provided the firing positions that the boomstick-equipped soldiers used to deliver plunging fire into the breach’s throat. The corridor’s floor was the rubble slope that the collapse had produced, the slope’s broken surface providing the uncertain footing that armored warriors ascending the slope would fight against while the defenders fired from above.

The first barbarian warriors entered the breach at the eighth hour.

Three abreast. The breach’s width allowed twenty warriors abreast but the rubble slope’s footing restricted the practical frontage to three warriors who could maintain their balance and their shield coverage simultaneously. The restriction compressed the three-thousand-warrior assault force into the column that the breach’s throat demanded, the column’s depth extending back through the breach and into the exterior where the assault force waited for the space that the column’s advance created.

The first three warriors climbed the rubble slope with their shields raised and their boomsticks slung across their backs because the slope’s ascent required both hands for balance and the boomsticks’ firing required one hand for the weapon and one for the trigger and the balance’s requirement exceeded the firing’s requirement at the slope’s angle.

The plunging fire from the flanking buildings struck the first three warriors from above. Boomstick balls from the garrison’s carefully conserved remaining ammunition descended into the breach’s throat at the angles that the buildings’ upper-floor windows provided. The balls struck the warriors’ helmet tops and pauldrons and the specific surfaces that the plunging angle exposed, the surfaces that horizontal fire at the same range would not have struck because horizontal fire’s trajectory did not provide the downward angle that the buildings’ elevation created.

The first warrior took a ball in the helmet’s crown. The dwarven iron dented. The ball did not penetrate. But the impact’s downward force drove the warrior’s neck into his shoulders and his knees into the rubble and the warrior fell forward onto the slope’s broken surface with the specific collapse that neck compression produced in a body whose spinal column had been momentarily shortened by the impact’s force.

The second warrior’s shield caught two balls. The shield held. The balls’ impacts drove the shield downward and the warrior’s arm with it and the warrior’s balance shifted and the rubble’s uncertain footing converted the shifted balance into the stumble that produced the fall.

The third warrior reached the slope’s crest. He stood at the breach’s interior edge, the point where the rubble slope’s ascent became the corridor’s level surface, and he looked into the killing corridor that the defense had constructed and the looking produced the specific assessment that a warrior produced when the warrior understood that the thing ahead was worse than the thing behind.

The corridor’s level surface was strewn with caltrops. Iron spikes scattered across the rubble-strewn ground in the density that the defenders’ preparation had provided, each spike positioned at the angle that the spike’s design dictated, each spike’s point upward and the spike’s base downward, the specific arrangement that produced the maximum probability of a running warrior’s foot descending onto the spike’s point.

The warrior stepped into the corridor. His boot found a caltrop. The spike penetrated the boot’s sole, the iron point driving through the leather and into the foot at the angle that the spike’s entry produced. The warrior stumbled. A boomstick ball from the flanking building’s second floor struck him in the back of the neck, above the gorget’s rear rim, below the helmet’s rear edge. The ball entered the cervical spine.

He fell.

* * * * *

The breach assault lasted fourteen hours.

Fourteen hours during which the three-thousand-warrior assault force pressed through the breach’s throat and into the killing corridor and against the defense that the corridor’s geometry and the caltrops and the plunging fire combined to produce. Fourteen hours during which the assault force’s warriors climbed the rubble slope and entered the corridor and fought through the corridor’s hazards and pressed forward against the defenders who held the corridor’s interior end.

The defenders fought with the specific determination that the capital’s defense produced. The garrison soldiers in the flanking buildings fired their carefully conserved boomstick ammunition at the barbarians entering the corridor’s throat, each ball aimed with the precision that ammunition scarcity demanded, each ball directed at the targets that the plunging angle exposed: helmet crowns, shoulder joints, the specific gaps that the downward firing trajectory revealed.

Captain Kreese held the corridor’s interior end with the Royal Guard’s Sixth Realm warriors. The captain’s sword blazed with the golden energy that the Sixth Realm’s combat activation produced, the blade’s enhanced edge cutting through the dwarven armor that the barbarian warriors wore at the joints and gaps that the corridor’s close-quarters combat exposed. Each barbarian who reached the corridor’s interior end met the Sixth Realm’s combat capability at the range where the boomsticks’ advantage was irrelevant because the range was too close for the boomstick’s firing and the hand axe’s swinging was the weapon that the range allowed and the Sixth Realm’s sword was the weapon that exceeded the hand axe at the range that the sword and the axe shared.

A barbarian champion, a Fifth Realm warrior whose boomstick had been abandoned at the slope’s base in favor of the war hammer that the close quarters demanded, reached Kreese’s position at the corridor’s interior end. The champion’s hammer struck Kreese’s shield and the shield’s Realm-enhanced construction held but the impact drove Kreese backward two paces and the two paces created the gap that the barbarians behind the champion pressed into.

Kreese counter-struck. The Sixth Realm’s blade found the champion’s right shoulder gap, the same gap that every armor design left exposed because the shoulder’s rotation required the gap’s existence. The blade entered the gap and the champion’s right arm went numb and the hammer’s grip loosened and the hammer fell.

The champion headbutted Kreese with the dwarven helmet’s reinforced brow ridge. The impact split the skin above Kreese’s left eye and the blood flowed into the eye and the eye’s vision became the red-tinted vision that blood over cornea produced. Kreese blinked. The blinking was the fraction of a second that the champion’s left hand needed to draw the short sword from his belt and drive it toward the gap between Kreese’s breastplate and his gorget.

Kreese caught the short sword’s blade on his gauntleted left hand. The dwarven edge cut through the gauntlet’s iron fingers and into the flesh beneath. Two fingers opened to the bone. Kreese’s left hand closed on the blade despite the wounds and held the blade in place and his right hand drove his Sixth Realm sword into the champion’s exposed right shoulder gap where the first strike had entered and the second strike followed the first strike’s path and the blade went deeper.

The champion fell. Kreese released the blade that his left hand had been holding. Two fingers hung at angles that fingers did not produce naturally. The blood from the finger wounds mixed with the blood from the brow wound and both mixed with the blood from the corridor’s floor, the corridor’s surface now slick with the blood that fourteen hours of breach assault had produced.

“Hold the corridor!” Kreese’s command carried through the breach’s interior with the Sixth Realm’s authority. “Every man holds! The corridor is the line!”

The corridor held. Through the fourteenth hour. Through the fifteenth. Through the eighteenth. The barbarian assault force’s pressure continued. The defenders’ resistance continued. The breach remained contested.

At the twenty-second hour, the barbarians breached the corridor.

Not through the corridor’s defended end. Through the flanking building’s eastern wall. The barbarian shamans, the nine remaining lesser practitioners whose capabilities had been reduced by the campaign’s attrition, targeted the building’s eastern wall with the ground disruption technique that the shamanic tradition used for structural compromise. The wall’s foundation shifted. The wall cracked. The wall fell inward.

The barbarian infantry poured through the building’s collapsed wall and into the corridor’s flanking position, the position that the boomstick-equipped soldiers had been firing from for fourteen hours. The soldiers in the building turned to face the barbarians entering through the collapsed wall and the turning exposed their backs to the breach’s throat and the barbarians in the throat pushed through the gap that the turning had created.

The corridor’s defense collapsed. Not gradually. The specific, sudden collapse that occurred when a defense that had been sustaining pressure from one direction was suddenly required to sustain pressure from two directions and the two-direction pressure exceeded the defense’s capacity.

The barbarians were inside the capital.

The breach was through. The fighting moved to the streets.