Rise of the Horde

Chapter 724 - 723

Aldrath did not wait a week. He came on the third day.

The combined force advanced at dawn in a formation that was different from the three-line deployment that the Eastern Plain battle had used. Aldrath had adapted. The new formation was a broad crescent, the wings extended forward and the center held back, the geometry designed to wrap around the Horde's flanks before the Horde's center could grind the attacking front the way it had ground the previous assault.

Khao'khen saw the crescent from the ridgeline observation post and understood what Aldrath was attempting before the formation's wings had completed their extension.

"He learned," Sakh'arran said.

"He learned the wrong lesson. He learned that our center is dangerous. He has not learned why."

The Horde deployed in the concave formation that Khao'khen's tactical library called the Cannae response, the center deliberately thin and the flanks reinforced, the shape that invited the crescent's wings to close around a center that was designed to bend without breaking.

The 1st and 2nd Warbands held the center. Thin. Six ranks deep instead of twelve. The spears extended forward in the bristling wall that the Rakshas produced regardless of their depth, the visual impression identical to the twelve-rank wall that had ground the previous assault to a halt.

The combined force's wings closed.

Thirty thousand soldiers wrapped around the Horde's flanks in the envelopment that Aldrath's crescent was designed to produce. The flanking warbands, the 3rd through 8th, received the envelopment in Tohr'terra, their rectangular shields locking into the shell formation that absorbed the flanking pressure the way it had absorbed the arrow storm, each warband a moving iron shell that the flanking soldiers could press against but could not penetrate.

The center bent.

The thin Rakshas line, six ranks deep, gave ground under the combined force's center advance. Step by step, the spear wall retreated, the retreat controlled and deliberate, each step backward drawing the combined force's center forward into the space the retreat created.

The combined force's center pushed deeper. The crescent's wings, already extended, could not track the center's forward movement because the wings were engaged with the Tohr'terra shells on the flanks and could not adjust their geometry without breaking contact. The center advanced alone, pressing the thin Rakshas line backward, the soldiers at the center's front rank tasting victory because the spear wall that had been immovable at the Eastern Plain was moving now, retreating, giving ground.

The Rakshas retreated two hundred paces. Three hundred. The combined force's center followed, its formation narrowing as the flanking warbands' Tohr'terra shells compressed the space available, the center's width decreasing with each step forward until the thirty-thousand-soldier crescent had become a deep, narrow wedge pressed into the Horde's concave formation.

Khao'khen gave the order.

The Rakshas stopped retreating.

The 9th through 12th Warbands, held in reserve behind the concave's curve, hit the combined force's center from both sides simultaneously. Two thousand Yurakk warriors, their stabbing swords drawn and their rectangular shields at the assault angle, drove into the flanks of a formation that had narrowed itself into the killing corridor that the concave had been designed to create.

The Rhakaddons sealed the corridor's mouth.

* * * * *

The combined force's center was inside the bag.

The Rakshas in front. The Yurakks on both sides. The Rhakaddons behind. The corridor was four hundred paces deep and narrowing, the Threian soldiers compressed between four walls of orcish warriors who were not retreating and were not advancing but were simply standing in the positions that the trap required and killing everything within reach.

A Rakshas warrior in the first rank drove his spear through a soldier's shield and into the chest behind it. The spear point punched through the mail shirt's links, the iron tip parting the rings the way a needle parted thread, and the soldier's body folded around the shaft as the point found the space between his ribs. The warrior pulled the spear free with a twist that widened the wound and stepped forward into the space the falling body left.

"Duum," the warrior said. One word. No retreat. He set his shield and waited for the next man to fill the gap.

Three paces to his right, a younger Rakshas caught a sword blow on his shield's rim and felt the impact travel through the shield's handle into his forearm. The blow was strong. The swordsman was a veteran, his technique precise, the angle designed to slide past the shield's face and catch the warrior's exposed shoulder. The orc rotated his shield a quarter turn, deflecting the slide, and thrust his spear over the shield's top edge. The point caught the swordsman under the chin. Blood sprayed across the shield's face in an arc that painted the iron with the specific color that arterial blood produced in morning light.

"Mok'rok vol," the young Rakshas whispered. Ancestors, witness us.

On the corridor's eastern wall, the 10th Warband's Yurakks fought in the close-quarter style that the stabbing sword was designed for. A warrior named Grosh ducked under a pike thrust, the shaft passing over his lowered head close enough to scrape the iron of his helmet, and drove his sword upward into the pikeman's armpit where the armor's coverage ended and the flesh began. The sword's narrow point slid between the ribs with the ease that the weapon's engineering provided, and the pikeman dropped his pike and grasped the blade with both hands, his fingers sliding on the blood-slick iron as his legs gave out.

Grosh pulled the sword free, wiped the blade on his thigh, and moved to the next man in line.

"Zug zug," he said. The word meant acknowledged, understood, yes. The word meant everything was proceeding as expected.

The killing in the corridor continued for forty minutes before Aldrath ordered the center's withdrawal. The withdrawal required the Rhakaddons to open the corridor's mouth, which they did when Khao'khen signaled, because the corridor's purpose was not annihilation but attrition, and the attrition had been achieved.

Twenty-two hundred dead in the corridor. The Horde's losses were one hundred and ninety.

Aldrath's crescent had been designed to avoid the meat grinder. The crescent had walked into a different kind of grinder, the kind that let you in and then closed behind you, and the lesson that the crescent taught was that Khao'khen's tactical repertoire contained responses for formations that had not yet been deployed against him.

The Snarling Wolf held its position on the eastern plain. The wolf had not moved. The wolf did not need to move. The things that came to the wolf died at the distance the wolf chose, in the manner the wolf chose, and the wolf remained where it was, snarling, patient, unchanged.