Rise of the Horde

Chapter 788 - 787

The king fought on the seventh day with the Sixth Realm’s remaining power at twenty-two percent and the specific awareness that his power could only sustain his combat effectiveness for approximately three more hours of continous engagement before he rans out of strength. That became the single point that converted a Sixth Realm warrior from a decisive combat asset into a man with a sword and diminishing magical support.

The fighting had reached the palace district’s outer boundary. The barricade lines at the market district had held for thirty-six hours, the hours that the boomstick ammunition had sustained, and the barricade lines had fallen when the ammunition fell to zero and the defenders fought with steel against the barbarian boomstick fire that unlimited ammunition sustained. The falling was not sudden. The falling was the progressive, block-by-block retreat that urban defense produced when the defense’s weapons advantage was eliminated and the defense’s tactical advantage, the barricades and the firing positions and the knowledge of the streets’ geometry, was the only advantage remaining.

The king fought at the third barricade line, the barricade that spanned the boulevard that connected the market district to the palace district. The barricade was the barricade that the defense’s final phase prescribed: the barricade behind which the palace’s approaches began and behind which the crown’s last defensive positions were established and behind which the king’s presence communicated the specific message that the king’s presence at the final barricade communicated, which was the message that the crown was not leaving and the crown’s defense was the defense of the thing the crown represented rather than the defense of the person who wore it.

The barbarian champions came for the king.

* * * * *

The first champion was a Fifth Realm warrior named Draeg whose physical size exceeded Garrok’s by two inches and whose war hammer bore the rune patterns that the shamanic enhancement painted on champions’ weapons before the engagements that the champions were designated to decide. The rune patterns glowed with the amber light that shamanic enhancement produced, the glow visible in the street’s smoke-hazed twilight, the light communicating to every combatant within visual range that the weapon’s wielder was not a standard warrior and the weapon itself was not a standard weapon.

Draeg hit the barricade.

Not climbed. Hit. The war hammer struck the barricade’s timber-and-iron construction at the point where the construction’s structural joints converged, the point that the champion’s Fifth Realm tactical awareness identified as the point where a single strike’s force would produce the maximum structural disruption. The hammer’s rune-enhanced head struck the joint and the joint failed and the barricade’s central section buckled inward, the timber frames separating, the iron plates shifting, the construction’s integrity compromised at the specific point that the integrity depended on.

The barbarian infantry poured through the buckled section. Draeg stood in the gap’s center, the war hammer clearing the space around him in the arcs that the Fifth Realm’s enhanced reach and speed produced, each arc a killing zone that no Threian soldier could enter without encountering the hammer’s head or the hammer’s shaft or the shockwave that the hammer’s Realm-enhanced strikes produced in the air around the weapon’s path.

The king engaged Draeg at the gap’s interior edge.

The Sixth Realm’s golden aura, dimmed in luminosity, the strikes flared at the contact point between the king’s sword and the champion’s hammer. The contact produced the shockwave that Realm-level weapon impacts generated: the concussive pulse that scattered the soldiers within four paces and cracked the cobblestones beneath the impact point. The king’s cracked sword, the blade that had been damaged in the duel with Garrok and repaired by the palace’s smiths with the repair that mortal smithing could provide rather than the dwarven craftsmanship that the blade’s original construction had received, held at the contact. The crack did not widen. The repair held.

The king pressed. The Sixth Realm’s remaining power, channeled through the cracked blade in the specific pattern that offensive enhancement required, produced the strikes that his remaining battle energy power allowed: precise, economical, each strike aimed at the specific joints and gaps that the champion’s dwarven armor left exposed because the armor’s design required the joints and gaps for the mobility that combat demanded.

The sword found Draeg’s left knee joint. The blade’s edge, enhanced by the twenty-two percent, cut through the joint’s leather backing and into the tendon that the knee’s function required. Draeg’s left leg buckled. The champion’s Realm-level pain suppression engaged. The leg did not collapse. The leg functioned with the reduced capability that the tendon’s partial severance permitted. The champion compensated by shifting his weight to his right leg and adjusting his stance to the specific stance that single-leg primary support required.

The hammer came across in the horizontal arc that used the weight shift’s rotational momentum. The arc was wider than the two-leg stance’s arc because the single-leg stance’s rotation was less controlled and the less controlled rotation produced the wider arc that the control’s absence allowed. The king ducked. The hammer passed over his head and struck the barricade’s remaining section behind him and the section collapsed.

The barricade was gone. The boulevard was open. The barbarian infantry advanced through the open boulevard toward the palace district’s approaches.

The king fought Draeg in the boulevard’s center while the infantry flowed past them on both sides, the specific configuration that Realm-level individual combat produced in urban terrain: the pocketed engagement whose combatants’ power created the cleared space that lesser fighters could not survive within and that the lesser fighters’ advance bypassed because the advance’s objective was the palace district rather than the individual combat’s outcome.

The second champion arrived.

A Fifth Realm warrior named Korgh whose fighting style was the dual-weapon technique that the highland tradition’s elite warriors practiced: a short sword in each hand, the ambidextrous approach that the Fifth Realm’s enhanced coordination converted from a fighting style into a killing methodology. Korgh entered the king’s engagement radius from the left, the direction that the king’s engagement with Draeg had left less defended because the king’s attention was oriented toward the hammer that Draeg was swinging from the right.

Korgh’s left-hand sword struck the king’s exposed left flank.

The blade caught the king’s hip armor at the joint where the cuirass met the tasset, the joint that the left flank’s exposure had revealed and that Korgh’s Fifth Realm perception had identified in the fraction of a second that the perception required to assess the engagement’s geometry. The blade entered the joint and the point found the flesh beneath and the flesh parted at the depth that the blade’s entry allowed before the king’s Sixth Realm defensive aura slowed the blade’s penetration.

Two inches of blade in the king’s left hip. The wound’s pain was the pain that the Sixth Realm’s suppression managed by converting from the sharp agony of tissue separation into the dull pressure that the Realm’s filtering produced. The filtering was less effective at twenty-two percent than at full power. The pain leaked through the filtering in the specific percentage that the reduced power permitted: approximately thirty percent of the wound’s full pain signal reaching the king’s conscious awareness.

The king pivoted. The pivot drove the blade deeper because the pivot’s rotational force acted on the blade that was embedded in the hip’s flesh and the blade’s resistance to the pivot’s motion was the resistance that embedded blades produced in rotating bodies. The pain spiked. The king’s pivot continued because the pivot’s completion was the movement that brought his sword’s arc across Korgh’s exposed neck at the height where the gorget’s upper edge left the throat’s anterior surface unprotected.

The sword struck Korgh’s throat. The Sixth Realm’s remaining enhancement drove the blade through the flesh and the cartilage and the artery that the throat contained. Blood erupted from the wound in the arterial spray that the carotid’s severing produced. Korgh’s eyes widened. The dual-weapon stance’s balance failed because the balance’s neural coordination failed because the brain’s blood supply failed because the artery that supplied the brain was no longer connected to the heart.

Korgh fell. The king pulled Korgh’s sword from his own hip. The withdrawal produced the specific wet separation that blade extraction produced in wounds whose tissue had compressed around the blade’s cross-section. Blood flowed from the wound at the rate that hip wounds produced when the hip’s vascular supply was disrupted at the depth that two inches of blade penetration achieved.

The third champion arrived before the king’s hip wound’s bleeding was controlled.

A Fifth Realm warrior. War axe. Full charge from the boulevard’s eastern side, the direction that the second champion’s engagement had drawn the king’s attention away from. The axe came down in the overhead strike that used the charging momentum’s accumulated force.

The king raised his cracked sword. The blade caught the axe’s head at the angle that deflected the overhead strike’s vertical force into the lateral direction that the deflection’s geometry produced. The axe slid along the blade and the blade cracked further, the crack that the Garrok duel had begun and that the repair had stabilized now extending past the repair’s coverage into the blade’s previously undamaged section.

Fairfax arrived.

The Fifth Realm lord’s sword struck the third champion from behind, the blade entering the shoulder gap that the champion’s overhead strike’s arm extension had exposed. The champion staggered. Fairfax’s follow-up strike found the champion’s right knee and the knee buckled and the champion went down.

"Your Majesty!" Fairfax’s voice carried the specific urgency that a subordinate’s voice produced when the subordinate was watching his sovereign bleed from a hip wound while fighting multiple Fifth Realm opponents simultaneously. "The palace district’s approaches are compromised! The barbarian infantry is past the barricade line! We must withdraw to the palace compound!"

The king looked at the boulevard. The infantry flowing past the individual combat’s cleared space. The barricade gone. The palace district’s approaches overrun.

"Withdraw," the king said. The word was the word that the seventh day’s fighting had been building toward, the word that the capital’s progressive loss demanded and that the king’s cracked sword and bleeding hip and twenty-two percent power could not prevent.

The king’s guard formed around the king. Captain Kreese, his left hand’s two fingers still splinted from the breach corridor’s engagement, led the withdrawal toward the palace compound. The guard’s Sixth and Fifth Realm warriors cleared the route with the specific violence that Realm-enhanced close combat produced in urban terrain, each intersection’s barbarian occupants swept aside by the guard’s combined Realm-level combat capability.

The king walked. The hip wound’s blood soaked his left leg from waist to boot. The Sixth Realm’s healing function, operating at twenty-two percent capacity, slowed the bleeding but could not stop it because the healing function’s power at twenty-two percent was insufficient for the wound’s severity. The blood loss was the blood loss that a two-inch hip wound produced when the wound’s vascular disruption was managed but not corrected by the Realm’s reduced healing capability.

The palace compound’s gates closed behind the king and the guard. The compound’s walls, the inner fortification that the palace’s original construction had provided, became the defense’s final line.

Outside the compound, the capital’s streets fell to the barbarian advance.