Rise of the Horde

Chapter 789 - 788

The thundermakers came for the king on the final day.

Garrok had been watching the palace compound’s walls from the command position that the barbarian advance’s eighth day had established at the intersection two hundred paces from the compound’s northern gate. The warchief’s jaw wound ached with the sustained dull pain that the Sixth Realm’s diminished healing produced when the wound’s scar tissue was stressed by the jaw’s movement and the jaw’s movement was required for the commands that the warchief’s voice delivered continuously.

"The pinkskin king is inside," Tharn reported. The chieftain whose crooked elbow bore the campaign’s early damage stood at the command position’s observation point with the specific attention that the observation’s subject demanded. "The king’s guard holds the compound. Six Realm-enhanced warriors and approximately two hundred soldiers. The compound’s walls are twelve feet of stone. Standard garrison construction. Not rated for thundermaker bombardment."

"The thundermakers," Garrok said.

"Twelve weapons repositioned to the approach positions that the compound’s northern exposure provides. Range: one hundred and fifty paces. Direct fire."

"The king is Sixth Realm."

"The king is Sixth Realm at reduced capacity. The scouts report the golden aura’s luminosity flickering, far from its full combat manifestation. The king is wounded. Left hip. He walked to the compound with visible impairment."

Garrok considered. The consideration was the consideration of a Sixth Realm warchief who understood the specific value that a Sixth Realm opponent represented and the specific cost that eliminating the opponent required when the elimination’s method was the method that Garrok was contemplating.

"The king’s presence sustains the defense," Garrok said. "The Threian soldiers fight because the king fights. The king’s incapacitation ends the defense. The defense’s end is the capital’s fall. The capital’s fall is the objective."

He looked at the twelve thundermakers that his crews had positioned at the approach road’s firing positions, the weapons’ barrels aimed at the compound’s northern wall at the range where the direct fire’s flat trajectory would place the balls into the wall’s surface at the height where the wall’s structural joints were weakest.

"The king will come out," Garrok said. "The thundermakers fire at the compound’s wall. The wall breaches. The assault force enters through the breach. The king comes to the breach because the king is Sixth Realm and the king’s Realm-level presence at the breach is the defense that the breach requires. When the king comes to the breach, the thundermakers redirect."

"Redirect at the king."

"At the king. Twelve thundermakers. Direct fire at one hundred and fifty paces at a single target. The king’s Sixth Realm aura at reduced capacity cannot absorb twelve simultaneous thundermaker impacts. The king falls. The defense collapses. The capital is ours."

"The champions at the breach."

"The champions at the breach are the thing that draws the king to the breach. The champions fight the king. The champions hold the king at the breach’s position. The thundermakers fire at the breach’s position. The champions are in the thundermakers’ firing path."

Tharn looked at the warchief. The look was the look that a chieftain produced when the chieftain understood the specific implication of the warchief’s plan and the implication’s cost was the cost that the chieftains would bear.

"The champions die," Tharn said.

"The champions die with the king. The champions’ death is the sacrifice that the capital’s fall requires. The champions understand sacrifice. The champions are Fifth Realm warriors whose tradition includes the specific concept of the offering: the warrior who stands in the place where the standing produces the outcome that the standing’s cost purchases. The champions stand at the breach. The king comes to the breach. The thundermakers fire. The champions and the king die together. The capital falls."

The plan settled into the command position with the weight that plans carried when the plans’ cost included the planners’ own warriors and the planners’ acceptance of the cost was the acceptance that the cost’s purpose demanded.

"Three champions," Garrok said. "The strongest three. They engage the king at the breach. They hold the king at the breach’s position for the time that the thundermaker crews require to redirect and fire. The time is approximately ninety seconds. Ninety seconds of fighting the king at the breach. Ninety seconds of holding the king in the thundermakers’ firing path. Then the thundermakers fire and the ninety seconds’ cost is the cost that the capital’s fall purchases."

* * * * *

The thundermakers struck the compound’s northern wall at the eleventh hour.

Twelve weapons at one hundred and fifty paces. Direct fire. The balls struck the twelve-foot wall with the concentrated force that twelve simultaneous impacts produced at the range where the balls’ velocity was the maximum that the weapons’ powder charges generated. The wall cracked. The wall shattered. The wall collapsed in the specific structural failure that twelve thundermaker balls’ concentrated force produced in stone construction whose design had not included the consideration of twelve simultaneous impacts at one hundred and fifty paces.

The breach was twenty feet wide. The rubble slope was shallow because the wall’s height was twelve feet rather than the capital’s outer wall’s forty feet and the reduced height produced the reduced rubble pile that the reduced height’s mass dictated.

The assault force entered the breach. Three champions at the front.

The first champion was Draeg, the warrior whose knee the king had cut at the seventh day’s barricade. The knee was bound. The binding provided the structural support that the tendon’s partial severance had removed. Draeg moved with the specific limp that bound knees produced in warriors whose Realm’s pain suppression sustained the knee’s function past the function’s natural termination point.

The second champion was a warrior named Skald, whose dual-axe fighting style used the ambidextrous technique that the highland tradition’s elite warriors practiced. Both axes glowed with the shamanic rune enhancement that the pre-assault preparation had applied.

The third champion was a woman named Bhera, whose spear technique was the technique that the highland tradition’s female warriors practiced: the long weapon held in the specific grip that compensated for the reach advantage that smaller stature eliminated by the spear’s length and the precision that the spear’s point provided at the extended range that the spear’s construction created.

Three Fifth Realm champions. Their purpose: engage the king. Hold the king at the breach. Hold the king for ninety seconds.

The king came to the breach.

The Sixth Realm’s golden aura, reduced to approximately eighteen percent by the hip wound’s sustained blood loss and the seventh day’s continuous fighting, blazed at the breach’s interior edge. The aura’s luminosity was the luminosity that eighteen percent produced: visible but diminished, the golden light present but lacking the intensity that full capacity provided, the specific visual indicator that the king’s power was the power that sustained combat effectiveness but no longer the power that dominated the engagement’s dynamics.

Draeg’s hammer struck first. The Fifth Realm warrior drove the rune-enhanced weapon at the king’s chest in the direct thrust that used the hammer’s head as a battering ram rather than a striking surface, the thrust’s linear force directed at the center of mass that the Sixth Realm’s defensive aura protected. The king caught the hammer’s head on his cracked blade. The blade held. The crack widened.

Skald’s dual axes struck simultaneously from the flanks. The left axe targeted the king’s wounded hip, the specific wound that the intelligence from the seventh day’s fighting had identified and that the champion’s attack pattern was designed to exploit. The right axe targeted the king’s left shoulder, the shoulder whose pauldron had been lost in the Garrok duel and whose protection was the Sixth Realm’s aura alone.

The king blocked the right axe with his shield arm’s gauntlet, the dwarven iron catching the axe’s edge at the angle that the gauntlet’s construction deflected. The left axe found the hip wound. The blade struck the wound’s location, the axe head hitting the king’s hip armor at the point where the armor’s gap existed because the gap was the gap that Korgh’s sword had widened on the seventh day. The axe entered the gap and the blade found the wound and the wound reopened.

The pain penetrated the eighteen percent’s filtering at approximately fifty percent of the wound’s full signal. The king staggered. The stagger was the stagger that pain produced in a Sixth Realm warrior whose Realm’s suppression capacity was insufficient for the pain’s magnitude. The staggering exposed the king’s back to the third champion.

Bhera’s spear drove at the king’s exposed back. The spear point struck the king’s rear cuirass at the gap between the backplate and the tasset, the same style of gap that the hip wound had exploited from the front. The point entered the gap. The Sixth Realm’s defensive aura slowed the point. At eighteen percent, the slowing reduced the point’s penetration from lethal to serious: two inches into the lower back’s muscle, missing the spine by the margin that the aura’s deflective effect provided.

The king was hit from three directions simultaneously. Hammer at the front. Axe in the hip wound. Spear in the back.

He did not fall.

The Sixth Realm’s remaining eighteen percent sustained the specific function that the Realm existed to provide: the function that kept the warrior fighting when the warrior’s body had accumulated the damage that would have stopped any warrior whose Realm was lower. The function was not invulnerability. The function was endurance. The endurance that allowed the damaged body to continue producing the combat output that the damage should have prevented.

The king struck Skald. The cracked sword, channeling the eighteen percent’s offensive enhancement, caught the dual-axe champion’s right wrist at the joint where the gauntlet’s cuff ended and the forearm’s flesh began. The blade’s edge, Realm-enhanced despite the crack’s structural compromise, severed the wrist’s tendons. The right axe fell from Skald’s grip. The champion’s right hand hung limp.

The king struck Draeg. The sword’s point, driven in the thrust that the Sixth Realm’s speed produced at eighteen percent, found the hammer champion’s throat above the gorget. The point entered the throat at the depth that the thrust’s reduced power produced: one inch. Insufficient for lethal penetration. Sufficient for the blood flow that one inch of throat penetration generated.

Draeg stumbled backward. His hammer dropped. His hands went to his throat. Blood seeped between his fingers.

Bhera pulled her spear from the king’s back and thrust again. The point struck the king’s left shoulder blade. The aura slowed it. One inch of penetration.

The king turned. The turning drove the hip wound’s pain through the filtering at sixty percent and the back wound’s pain through the filtering at forty percent and the combined pain signals reached the king’s consciousness at the aggregate level that produced the specific physical response that aggregated pain produced in a body whose damage management system was operating at eighteen percent of capacity: the tremor. The hands’ tremor. The specific involuntary oscillation that accumulated damage produced in the neuromuscular system when the system’s load exceeded the Realm’s capacity to stabilize it.

His sword hand trembled. The cracked blade vibrated with the tremor’s frequency. The vibration was visible to the three champions and the visibility communicated the specific information that champions assessed in wounded opponents: the opponent’s remaining capacity was approaching the threshold where capacity became insufficiency.

Ninety seconds.

The ninety seconds had elapsed.

The king did not know about the ninety seconds. The king did not know about the thundermakers’ redirection. The king knew about the three champions and the wounds and the eighteen percent and the tremor that the wounds and the percentage combined to produce.

Garrok’s command carried from the position two hundred paces distant. The command was one word. The word was the highland dialect’s word for the specific action that the plan required the thundermaker crews to execute at the ninety-second mark.

"FIRE."

Twelve thundermakers fired simultaneously at the breach.

The twelve balls’ trajectories converged on the twenty-foot breach that the king and the three champions occupied. The trajectories’ convergence at one hundred and fifty paces produced the concentration that twelve simultaneous direct-fire impacts created at the specific area that the breach’s width defined: twelve forty-pound iron balls striking a twenty-foot-wide space in the same fraction of a second.

The three champions were in the firing path. Draeg, clutching his bleeding throat. Skald, his right hand hanging limp. Bhera, her spear drawn back for the third thrust. The three warriors whose purpose had been to hold the king at the breach for ninety seconds and whose purpose’s fulfillment was the purpose’s cost: the thundermaker balls that the ninety seconds’ expiration had released.

Three balls struck Draeg. The champion’s body absorbed the first ball’s impact and the body’s structural integrity failed at the second ball’s impact and the third ball struck what the first two had left, which was not recognizable as the thing it had been.

Two balls struck Skald. The champion was thrown twenty paces by the combined impact’s force, the body’s trajectory ending when the body struck the compound’s interior wall and the wall stopped the trajectory.

One ball struck Bhera. The ball caught the spear-wielder in the chest and the dwarven breastplate folded around the ball’s curvature and the ball’s momentum carried the warrior backward through the breach and into the exterior rubble where the warrior’s body came to rest in the stones that the breach’s collapse had deposited.

The remaining six balls struck the area around the king.

Not the king directly. The area. The balls’ spread at one hundred and fifty paces produced the dispersion pattern that twelve weapons’ individual aiming variations created at the range where the aim’s precision was the aim that the crews’ training provided and the crews’ training’s precision was the precision that one-hundred-and-fifty-pace direct fire allowed.

Two balls struck the ground within three paces of the king’s position. The impacts’ shockwaves struck the king simultaneously from two directions, the concussive forces’ lateral components intersecting at the king’s body, the intersection producing the specific compression wave that simultaneous bilateral concussion created in a body standing between two impact points.

One ball struck the wall section above the king’s position. The wall fragment’s cascade descended on the king’s position from above, the stone blocks and mortar debris striking the king’s helmet and shoulders and the exposed surfaces that the armor’s coverage left unprotected.

The king went down.

The Sixth Realm’s defensive aura, operating at eighteen percent, absorbed the concussion waves’ lethal components and the wall fragments’ crushing components and the specific aggregate of damage that the twelve thundermakers’ concentrated fire had produced in the area that the king occupied. The aura absorbed the lethal damage. The aura could not absorb the kinetic damage. The kinetic damage threw the king to the ground and the ground’s impact added to the damage he sustained, exceeded his capacity to sustain consciousness.

King Aldric III lay on the breach’s rubble floor, unconscious. His cracked sword beside him. His armor dented and cracked by the concussion’s force and the debris’s impact. His golden aura flickering at the single-digit percentage that unconsciousness and critical injury produced in a Sixth Realm warrior whose Realm’s autonomous functions sustained the body’s survival past the point where the body’s conscious functions had ceased.

The three champions were dead. The sacrifice’s purpose was fulfilled. The king was incapacitated. The defense’s anchor was removed.

Fairfax reached the king’s body and dragged the monarch to the compound’s interior, the Fifth Realm lord’s enhanced strength sufficient for the drag that the king’s armored body’s weight required. Captain Kreese and the remaining guard formed the rearguard that the drag’s withdrawal required, the guard’s Realm-enhanced warriors holding the breach’s interior for the three minutes that the withdrawal needed.

"The king is down!" Kreese’s report carried through the compound with the specific urgency that the report’s content demanded. "The king is wounded! Critical! Withdraw to the inner compound! WITHDRAW!"

The compound’s outer section fell. The defenders withdrew to the inner compound, the palace itself, the building whose walls were the last walls and whose corridors were the last corridors and whose defense was the defense that had no defense behind it.

The barbarians occupied the compound’s outer section. The palace’s doors closed. The capital’s fall was the fall that the seventh day had been building toward and that the twelve thundermakers’ concentrated fire on the king’s position had accelerated to the specific conclusion that the fall’s mechanics produced.

The capital had fallen. The king was unconscious. The defense’s remnants held the palace. And outside the capital’s walls, the Snarling Wolf banner at the Horde’s observation position held its direction northeast and the wolf’s snarl was the snarl that observed the fall and that the observation’s assessment would convert into the action that the observation’s conclusion demanded.

The seventh day ended. The agreement’s week was complete. The capital had fallen. And the wolf’s week of observation was over.