Rise of the Horde

Chapter 810 - 809

Brokk died in the corridor outside the throne room, and the manner of his dying was the manner that Sixth Realm warriors died when they met an enemy whose tactical preparation exceeded their individual power.

He was the largest chieftain. Physically the most imposing of the five who had descended from the highlands with Garrok, his bulk filling the corridor in a way that made the space itself feel inadequate, his war hammer requiring a modified grip because the full swing arc exceeded the width between the walls. He had compensated for the limitation by using the hammer in short, driving strokes that sacrificed reach for concentrated power, each stroke aimed at the center mass of whatever stood before him, each impact sufficient to buckle the iron breastplate of any warrior below the Fourth Realm.

The 3rd Warband did not send warriors to face him individually.

They sent a fire sphere.

The clay vessel struck the ceiling above Brokk’s head and shattered, the Bufas compound raining down in a cascade of burning gel that coated his shoulders, his helmet, the war hammer’s leather grip. The compound was not designed to kill a Sixth Realm warrior. The Sixth Realm’s enhanced constitution would resist the burns, would suppress the pain, would maintain combat function through damage that would incapacitate an unenhanced fighter. The compound was designed to blind him.

Burning gel on a helmet’s visor. Burning gel dripping into the eye slits. The one remaining eye, the left, the right already lost to the frost bolt’s glancing impact at Harken Field, now compromised by the orange-red fire that filled his vision with light and pain and the particular helplessness of a warrior who could no longer see what was trying to kill him.

He swung the hammer. The corridor wall cracked where it struck, stone dust erupting from the impact, the blow carrying enough force to have killed any warrior in its path. No warrior was in its path. The 3rd Warband had pulled back three paces when the fire sphere was thrown, creating the distance that the compound needed to do its work, and the distance that the blinded chieftain’s hammer swept through was empty.

The stabbing swords came from below his swing arc. Two warriors, low, inside the hammer’s reach, their short blades finding the gaps in the dwarven armor that every warrior in the Horde had been trained to identify since the campaign against the barbarians began. The gorget gap. The armpit gap where the breastplate met the pauldron. The inside of the knee where the greave’s strap created a finger-width channel of exposed flesh.

Brokk took six wounds in four seconds. None of them were individually fatal to a Sixth Realm warrior. Collectively, they were the arithmetic of attrition that the Horde had been applying to every engagement since the depression. Accumulated damage. Sustained pressure. The refusal to meet superior individual power with individual power, the insistence on meeting it with coordinated, systematic, professional violence that treated the Sixth Realm warrior not as an unbeatable opponent but as a tactical problem with a tactical solution.

The seventh wound was the one that mattered. A spear, thrust from the second rank over the shoulders of the two stabbing sword warriors, entered the gap between Brokk’s helmet and his gorget on the right side, where the burning gel had warped the leather strap that held the two pieces together. The spear point found the gap and continued through it, through the neck, through the tissue that even the Sixth Realm’s enhancement could not harden sufficiently against a thrust delivered with the full weight of a braced warrior behind it.

Brokk fell forward. His hammer hit the floor first, the iron head cracking the marble tile. His body followed, the largest chieftain collapsing in the corridor that was too small for his war hammer’s swing and too small for the kind of fighting that his strength had been built for, dying in the space that his enemies had chosen because they understood that the space was their weapon as much as the swords they carried.

The 3rd Warband stepped over him and continued forward.

* * * * *

Garrok felt Brokk’s death the way a commander felt the loss of a pillar. Not through any mystical connection but through the change in the fighting’s sound, the particular shift in the corridor noise that occurred when a formation’s anchor point was removed and the warriors around it had to reorganize without the presence that had held them in place.

Three chieftains remained. Garrok. Tharn. Kael. Morag’s status was unknown, had been unknown since the Rhakaddon ambush in the market district, when the last report from his position had been the sound of twenty-three beasts bursting through ground-floor walls and the silence that followed.

Three Sixth Realm chieftains and approximately seven thousand warriors compressed into a palace compound whose perimeter was contracting as the Horde’s clearance operation moved through the corridors with the methodical thoroughness that characterized every orcish operation Garrok had observed since the first intelligence reports from the southern campaign.

"They are not in a hurry," Kael observed. He was studying the reports from the barricade positions with the three-fingered hand that held his tactical awareness together, arranging the information in the pattern that his analytical mind required. "They are clearing room by room. They secure each section before advancing to the next. They are not trying to reach us quickly. They are trying to reach us with their full strength intact."

"Patient," Tharn said. He said it with the particular bitterness of a warrior who recognized professional excellence in an enemy and resented the recognition because the excellence was being applied to killing his people.

"Disciplined," Kael corrected. "There is a difference. Patience is passive. This is active. Each room they clear is a room we cannot use to flank them. Each corridor they secure is a corridor our warriors cannot move through. They are not waiting for us to weaken. They are removing the ground we stand on, one room at a time, until the only ground remaining is this room."

Garrok stood from the throne.

The movement was deliberate. Standing, with the war axe in his hand and the jaw wound bleeding and the Sixth Realm aura beginning to manifest around his body in the golden-amber shimmer that combat readiness produced, was the statement of a chieftain who had stopped administering a victory and started preparing for a fight.

"How many corridors between them and this room?"

"Two," Kael said. "The central hall junction is contested. The grand corridor beyond it is ours. The throne room antechamber is fortified."

"Two corridors is two engagements. Each engagement costs them."

"It favors the defender against conventional assault," Kael said carefully. "They do not assault conventionally. Those short-barreled weapons they carry, the ones that hit harder than our boomsticks at close range. The fire spheres. The ogre that punched through the foyer barricade like it was kindling. Every defense we have established, they have found a way around it, or through it, or a way to make the defense itself into the thing that kills the defenders."

"Then we do not wait for them to come to us," Garrok said. "We go to them. In the central hall. Where the space opens and the corridor fighting ends and a Sixth Realm war axe can swing at full arc."

"That is what they want," Kael said. "The central hall is where their formations can deploy. Where their numbers become weight rather than a queue."

"And where my axe can find their chieftain."

The words changed the room. Kael looked at Garrok. Tharn looked at Garrok. The guards at the throne room doors heard something in those words that was neither tactical nor furious. It was personal. It was the particular tone of a Sixth Realm warrior who had identified another Sixth Realm warrior as the obstacle between the current situation and the situation he intended to create.

"Khao’khen," Kael said.

"The tusked chieftain who took this city from us while we were celebrating the taking of it. The one whose warriors walked through Shul’Korr’s eruption and put spears in a Seventh Circle shaman. The one whose ogre punched through our barricade and whose warriors carry weapons that sound like boomsticks but hit like siege hammers and fight in rooms the way we fight on open ground." Garrok’s jaw wound seeped as he spoke, the blood running down the exposed bone, dripping onto the golden Realm aura and dissolving into the light. "If he falls, his army does not stop. But what it fights for is what he fights for, and when the thing a force fights for is embodied in a single warrior, killing that warrior changes the equation."

"And if you fall?" Kael asked.

Garrok looked at the throne he had risen from.

"Then you hold the corridors. And the dwarven resupply arrives in fourteen days. And the chieftain who comes after me finishes what I started."

He walked toward the door with his war axe in his right hand and his Sixth Realm aura blazing and the jaw wound bleeding and the absolute certainty of a warrior who had decided that the next engagement would be the one that determined everything.

Kael watched him go. The analytical mind that had warned about the Horde as a variable, that had calculated the force ratios, that had advised caution when the other chieftains had dismissed the tusked brutes as a lesser threat, processed the warchief’s departure with the precision that was its defining characteristic.

The calculation was not favorable. But Garrok was Sixth Realm. Garrok had wounded a king. Garrok’s war axe had taken a throne that twenty thousand Threian soldiers had died defending.

And the tusked chieftain on the other side of the corridor was also Sixth Realm. Also unwounded. Also carrying the momentum of an army that had not been stopped by anything it had encountered in four months of continuous operations.

Two Sixth Realm warriors. One palace. The corridor between them closing.

Kael began organizing the throne room’s defense for the contingency that Garrok did not return, because analytical minds prepared for outcomes that emotional minds refused to consider, and because the contingency was what kept the remaining seven thousand warriors alive long enough for the fourteen days to matter.

In the corridors, the Snarling Wolf advanced. In the throne room, the barbarian war axe moved toward it.

The palace held its breath.