Rise of the Horde

Chapter 717 - 716

Varen committed his mages on the fifth day because the arrow supply was depleted and the spear wall was holding and the ford was contested and the upstream crossing had cost eighteen hundred dead and the combined force's forty-seven thousand soldiers were being fought to a standstill by eight thousand orcs at a river that should have been a minor obstacle.

The mage corps advanced to the eastern bank's forward positions in the formation that magical doctrine prescribed for concentrated assault casting. Forty-three practitioners, the combined force's full magical complement after the losses and equipment destruction that the campaign had produced, arranged in the circle patterns that allowed their power to be concentrated and directed in the area-of-effect spells that battlefield magic used to break formations and destroy fortifications.

The first spell was a Fourth Circle frost storm, the kind of concentrated ice magic that the Baron of Frost's tradition specialized in, a wall of freezing energy directed at the Rakshas center where the spear wall anchored the Horde's entire defensive line.

The Golden Wolf answered.

The Amazzfer raised the totem above the 1st Warband's formation and the golden shimmer expanded, the arcane shield flowing outward from the totem's position like a wave of warm light that spread across the Horde's line in the seconds before the frost storm struck. The shimmer's expansion was visible to every soldier on both sides of the battlefield, the golden light spreading like sunrise across the orcish formation, the warriors beneath it feeling the warmth that the shimmer produced, the physical manifestation of the collective belief that eight thousand warriors held in the chieftain who had led them from Yohan to this river crossing and who had not been wrong yet.

The frost storm hit the shimmer and split. Not shattered. Split. The Fourth Circle spell's power exceeded the shimmer's nullification threshold, the spell's energy penetrating the shield in attenuated form, the full force reduced to perhaps a third of its original intensity. Warriors at the spear wall's center felt the cold bite through the shimmer's protection, frost forming on their shields and armor, but the killing force that the spell was designed to deliver was absorbed by the shimmer before it reached the warriors' bodies.

"Grakh tor Urkhan grah!" The Amazzfer's cry carried across the formation. "The Chieftain is with us! The Wolf drinks your frost! DUUM!"

The mages adjusted. They shifted to Third Circle spells, the combat workhorses, the lightning bolts and force projections and fire lances that every trained practitioner could cast repeatedly and that formed the volume of battlefield magic that a mage corps relied on for sustained engagement support.

The Third Circle spells hit the shimmer and vanished.

Not attenuated. Not reduced. Vanished. The golden shield absorbed the Third Circle magic the way the Tohr'terra absorbed arrows, the energy striking the shield's surface and dissipating into the golden light that the warriors' collective belief sustained. Lightning bolts dissolved into sparks. Force projections rippled across the shimmer's surface and faded. Fire lances struck the golden light and went out.

"GUL! GUL!" The quick-fire insults erupted from the Horde's line as the mages' Third Circle spells vanished against the shimmer, the Orcish word for empty and hollow screamed at the practitioners whose most reliable combat magic was producing no effect. "SHRAK! Less than nothing! ZUG'NULL! Your strikes hit nothing! Your magic contributes nothing!"

"Morg'null!" Krak'thul screamed from the 4th Warband's position. "You cannot even celebrate properly! Your victory spells are as empty as your victory!"

* * * * *

The mages pushed to the Fourth Circle. The higher-order spells required more energy, more concentration, more time between casts. A mage who could fire ten Third Circle spells in an hour could manage three Fourth Circle spells in the same period. The mathematical relationship between spell power and casting frequency meant that the Fourth Circle's penetration of the shimmer came at the cost of the volume of fire that the Third Circle provided.

Three Fourth Circle spells per mage per hour. Forty-three mages. One hundred and twenty-nine Fourth Circle casts per hour. Each one penetrating the shimmer at reduced intensity, producing casualties among the Horde's formation but at a rate that was a fraction of what the same forty-three mages would have produced at the Third Circle if the shimmer had not been nullifying the Third Circle entirely.

The Amazzfer held the Golden Wolf through the assault. Blood streamed from his arms where the strain of sustaining the totem's connection to the Horde's collective belief was manifesting as physical cost, the price that the bearer paid for the protection the totem provided.

His wounds from previous battles reopened. New ones appeared, the mystical feedback of an arcane shield sustained by faith and physical endurance producing the specific toll that the Golden Wolf's history recorded in every bearer who had carried it.

He did not lower the totem. The shield held. The Third Circle spells died against it. The Fourth Circle spells penetrated at a third of their power. And the Horde's formation, protected by the shimmer and the Tohr'terra and the spear wall and the Roarers and the discipline that held everything together, continued to hold.

"The Wolf stands," Arka'garr said, from the 1st Warband's command position, and the words were the acknowledgment that the 1st Warband's master gave to a capability that was not his, that he did not fully understand, but that he recognized as real because its effects were real and because the warriors beside him were alive because of it. The acknowledgment was the acknowledgment of a warrior whose professionalism was built on the material world of shields and spears and formation discipline, a warrior who had not believed in arcane protection until the arcane protection had kept his warriors alive through an assault that should have killed hundreds and had killed dozens instead.

"Vor'kash grombash," Arka'garr added, the words a warrior's recognition: worthy warrior, I see you. Spoken to the Amazzfer, whose blood was streaming from his arms and whose grip on the Golden Wolf had not loosened despite the physical toll the totem's sustained activation was exacting.

The mage assault lasted three hours. The mages withdrew at the eighth hour, exhausted, their reserves depleted, their Third Circle capability rendered useless by a golden shimmer that should not have existed in any magical framework that the Threian academy recognized and that existed anyway because the warriors beneath it believed that their chieftain would protect them and the belief was strong enough to become the thing it believed in.

The Snarling Wolf held its position. The Golden Wolf blazed. Two wolves, one of cloth and one of light, both snarling at the forces arrayed against the Horde, both refusing to yield, both sustained by the thing that sustained everything the Horde had built: the conviction that they had a right to exist and the refusal to accept any argument to the contrary.