Rise of the Horde

Chapter 790 - 789

Captain Kreese closed the throne room’s doors and turned to face the eleven men who would die with him.

Eleven Royal Guards. The survivors of the compound’s defense. Three at the Sixth Realm, eight at the Fifth. Their armor bore the campaign’s accumulated damage: dented breastplates, cracked pauldrons, scored greaves, the specific weathering that sustained combat against an army with thundermakers and plenty of ammunition produced in the equipment of warriors whose equipment’s replacement was no longer possible because the smiths who could replace it were either dead or fled through the southern gate.

The throne room was the room that the palace’s architecture had placed at the building’s center, the room whose walls were the thickest and whose doors were the heaviest and whose defensive value was the defensive value that the room’s centrality and construction provided.

The throne itself, the oak and iron chair that the kingdom’s monarchs had occupied for twelve generations, stood at the room’s northern end on the raised dais that protocol required and that tactical assessment identified as the elevated position that provided the defenders with the advantage that elevation gave to fighters holding a fixed position against attackers ascending the dais’s three steps.

But the throne room was not where the eleven men would die. The eleven men would die in the corridor that connected the throne room to the palace’s main hall, the corridor that was forty feet long and eight feet wide and that was the only approach route that the barbarian assault force could use to reach the throne room from the palace’s breached outer sections.

The corridor was where eleven men could hold because the corridor’s eight-foot width limited the assault’s frontage to three warriors abreast and three warriors abreast against eleven Realm-enhanced defenders was the specific tactical equation that the corridor’s geometry converted from a suicidal stand into a defensible position whose defense’s duration was measured in the defenders’ endurance rather than the attackers’ numerical superiority.

"The king," Kreese said.

The eleven guards looked at their captain. The captain’s face bore the scars of the campaign’s engagements: the cheekbone gash from the chieftain’s hammer at Harken Field, the brow split from the champion’s headbutt at the breach corridor, the two fingers on the left hand that hung at angles that the splints could not fully correct. The captain’s sword was drawn. The blade’s Sixth Realm enhancement was active, the energy’s luminosity reduced to the percentage that sustained combat had produced in a warrior whose Realm’s reserves had been drawn on continuously for eight days of fighting.

"Lord Fairfax is taking the king through the western passage. The passage exits at the chapel district’s crypt. The passage’s existence is unknown to the barbarians. The passage requires forty minutes to traverse at the pace that the king’s injuries permit. Forty minutes."

The eleven guards absorbed the number. Forty minutes. The number that their lives were purchasing. The number that measured the distance between the king’s current position at the passage’s entrance and the king’s future position at the passage’s exit. Forty minutes of corridor defense against the barbarian assault force that was currently breaching the palace’s outer chambers and whose advance would reach the corridor’s far end within minutes.

"Forty minutes," a Sixth Realm guard named Yaric said. A Royal Guard whose name shared the previous king’s name and whose duty’s definition had been defined by the sharing since the day the guard was appointed. "Forty minutes in an eight-foot corridor against warriors with boomsticks and hand axes and Fifth Realm champions."

"Forty minutes," Kreese confirmed.

"Can we hold forty minutes?"

Kreese looked at the corridor. Eight feet wide. Forty feet long. The ceiling twelve feet high. The walls stone. The floor stone. No windows. No side passages. One entrance. One exit. The entrance at the corridor’s far end, where the barbarians would arrive. The exit at the corridor’s near end, behind the eleven guards, where the throne room’s doors provided the final barrier that the corridor’s defense purchased time for.

"Three abreast in the corridor. The width limits their frontage to three. We hold four abreast. Our shields cover the width. The extra man provides the overlap that the three-abreast frontage does not require and the four-abreast frontage provides for the defensive coverage’s completeness. The rear seven rotate into the front four as the front four fall."

"As the front four fall," Yaric repeated. The repetition was the repetition that the statement’s content demanded: the acknowledgment that the front four’s fate was the fate that the word fall described and that the word’s describing was the word’s truth.

"As the front four fall," Kreese said. "The front four hold until the front four cannot hold. The rear seven step forward. The rotation continues until the rotation’s participants are exhausted. The exhaustion’s timeline is the timeline that the defense’s duration produces. If the exhaustion’s timeline exceeds forty minutes, the king escapes. If the exhaustion’s timeline is less than forty minutes, the king does not."

"Then the timeline exceeds forty minutes," Yaric said. "Because the timeline’s exceedance is the thing we are here to produce and the thing we are here to produce is the thing we produce."

The eleven guards took their positions. Four at the corridor’s entrance-facing end, their shields raised, their swords drawn, their Realm-enhanced auras active at the percentages that their remaining reserves sustained. Seven behind the four, their weapons ready, their positions the positions that the rotation’s protocol required.

* * * * *

The barbarians reached the corridor at the seventh minute.

The first warriors through the palace’s breached outer chambers were the infantry whose boomstick fire had been clearing the palace’s rooms and hallways in the systematic advance that the barbarian breach exploitation doctrine prescribed. The warriors moved through the palace’s architecture with the methodical progression that room-by-room clearance required: check the corners, fire the boomstick into the spaces that the room’s furniture and columns provided for concealment, advance to the next room.

The first warrior to see the corridor saw four shields filling the corridor’s width and the glow of Realm-enhanced blades visible above the shields’ rims and the specific visual of four warriors whose stance communicated the specific information that the stance communicated to anyone who had the experience to read it: these warriors were not going to move.

The warrior raised his boomstick and fired. The ball struck the leftmost shield and the shield’s Sixth Realm enhancement absorbed the ball’s kinetic energy and the ball stopped in the shield’s face, the iron sphere embedded in the wood-and-iron construction at the depth that the Realm’s energy dissipation allowed, which was the depth that prevented penetration.

"They have shields," the warrior shouted behind him. "Battle-energy enhanced shields. The boomstick did not penetrate."

More warriors arrived. The corridor’s far end filled with the barbarian infantry whose advance through the palace had brought them to the specific hallway that led to the specific corridor that led to the specific room where the barbarians expected the king to be.

Boomstick fire concentrated on the four shields. Twenty boomsticks firing in the rolling volley that the concentrated targeting produced. Twenty balls striking four battle energy-enhanced shields. The shields absorbed the impacts. The balls embedded in the shields’ surfaces. The shields held because the shields were held by warriors whose Realm’s power was channeled through the shields’ construction and the channeling converted the shields from physical barriers into barriers whose resistance exceeded the physical materials’ natural capacity.

The first champion arrived at the twentieth minute.

A Fifth Realm warrior whose war hammer bore the rune enhancement that the shamanic preparation provided. The champion pushed through the infantry at the corridor’s far end and assessed the four-shield wall that the corridor’s width contained.

"Four shields," the champion said. "battle energy-enhanced. The boomsticks do not penetrate. The corridor limits us to three abreast. They hold four abreast. The extra shield covers the overlap."

"Break the shields," the sub-chieftain behind the champion said.

"I will break the shields."

The champion charged. The corridor’s forty-foot length was the distance that the charge’s acceleration covered in the two seconds that a Fifth Realm warrior’s enhanced speed required. The war hammer struck the leftmost shield at the velocity that the charge’s two-second acceleration produced.

The shield broke. The Fifth Realm’s hammer impact exceeded the Sixth Realm shield’s absorption capacity at the specific point where the hammer’s head concentrated the impact’s force, the point load exceeding the shield’s distributed absorption, the shield splitting at the impact point and the warrior behind the shield absorbing the hammer’s residual force through the Sixth Realm’s defensive aura.

Yuric’s shield broke. The shield’s fragments scattered. Yuric’s left arm, the arm that had held the shield, absorbed the residual force and the arm’s radius bone cracked at the wrist. The crack was the crack that impact force produced in bone that was enhanced but not invulnerable, the enhancement reducing the damage from the shattering that the impact would have produced in unenhanced bone to the cracking that the enhancement’s protection permitted.

Yaric did not step back. His broken shield was gone. His left wrist was cracked. His right hand held his sword. He drove the sword at the champion’s throat in the thrust that the Sixth Realm’s combat speed produced at the close range that the corridor’s confined space dictated.

The sword found the champion’s gorget. The point struck the iron at the angle that the gorget’s curvature produced and the point skidded along the gorget’s surface and found the gap between the gorget’s upper rim and the helmet’s lower rim, the gap that existed because the gap had to exist for the head to turn. The point entered the gap. One inch. The champion’s throat’s anterior surface was one inch from the gorget’s inner surface. The point found the surface.

The champion’s hands went to his throat. The hammer dropped. Blood seeped between the gauntleted fingers. The champion stumbled backward into the warriors behind him and the warriors behind him caught the stumbling champion and the corridor’s far end became the compressed space that a dying Fifth Realm champion and the warriors supporting the dying champion produced.

Yaric stepped back into the second rank. His shield was gone. His wrist was broken. His throat-thrust had removed the champion from the engagement. The exchange was the exchange that the corridor’s defense required: one shield for one champion. The exchange rate that the defense’s economics demanded.

The third guard stepped forward to fill Yuric’s position. Fresh shield. Full Realm enhancement. The four-shield wall reformed across the corridor’s eight-foot width.

The barbarians pushed again. More infantry. More boomstick fire. The balls struck the reformed wall and the wall held. Another champion arrived. The hammer struck another shield. The shield broke. The guard behind the shield drove his sword into the champion’s flank at the gap between the breastplate and the hip armor. The champion fell. The guard stepped back. The next guard stepped forward.

The rotation continued. Shield breaks. Guards fall back. Fresh guards step forward. Champions enter. Champions fall. The corridor’s forty-foot length filled with the dead and wounded of both sides, the specific debris that sustained corridor combat produced: broken shields, dropped weapons, bodies that the living stepped over and fought above.

Twenty minutes. Four guards had rotated through the front position. Two shields remained intact from the original eleven. The guards’ energy reserves were declining. The guards’ wounds were accumulating. The corridor’s defense was holding because the defense’s specific purpose, the forty minutes that the king’s escape required, was the purpose that the guards’ remaining capacity was calibrated to produce.

The guards did not look at the throne room doors behind them. The doors were the doors that the king had passed through on the way to the western passage. The guards did not need to look at the doors to know that the doors’ closure was the closure that their defense was protecting. The guards looked at the corridor’s far end, where the barbarians continued to arrive, and the guards’ looking was the looking that warriors produced when the warriors’ attention was entirely and exclusively directed at the thing that the warriors existed to kill and die against.

Thirty minutes. Seven guards remained standing. Four had fallen in the corridor’s defense, their bodies on the corridor’s floor among the barbarian dead whose bodies the corridor’s fighting had deposited. The four fallen guards were dead. The corridor’s combat did not produce wounded. The corridor’s combat produced dead because the combat’s proximity and intensity left no space for the wounded to occupy between the fighting and the dying.

"Ten minutes," Kreese said. The captain stood at the second rank’s center, his cracked fingers’ pain managed by the Realm’s suppression, his sword’s golden edge dimmed by the reserves’ depletion, his voice carrying the flat authority that the voice had carried through every engagement of the campaign’s eight days. "Ten minutes and the king is clear. Hold ten minutes."

"We hold," the guard at the front rank’s center said. The guard’s name was Sennet. Fifth Realm. Twenty-six years old. His shield bore seventeen boomstick balls embedded in its surface. His sword had killed three barbarian warriors in the corridor’s fighting. His left shoulder was dislocated from the champion’s hammer blow that the Realm’s pain suppression had converted from the screaming agony that dislocation produced to the dull pressure that allowed the arm to hold the shield despite the joint’s displacement.

Sennet held. The front rank held. The rotation continued. Guards fell. Guards replaced. The corridor’s floor rose with the bodies. The fighting became the fighting that accumulated bodies produced in confined spaces: the footing uncertain, the stance compromised, the combat’s geometry altered by the dead whose presence converted the corridor’s flat floor into the uneven surface that dead bodies’ irregular shapes created.

A barbarian warrior stumbled on a body and Sennet’s sword found the warrior’s neck in the stumble’s exposed moment. The warrior fell on the body he had stumbled on. Another barbarian warrior stepped over both bodies and Sennet’s shield caught the warrior’s hand axe and the shield cracked and Sennet drove his sword into the warrior’s armpit and the warrior fell and Sennet’s shield was gone and the next guard stepped forward.

Thirty-eight minutes.

Kreese was in the front rank. The captain had rotated forward at the thirty-fifth minute when the last guard with an intact shield had fallen. Kreese had no shield. Kreese fought with the sword alone, the blade’s Sixth Realm enhancement providing the defensive capability that the shield’s absence demanded, the blade’s speed and the Realm’s perception allowing the blade to serve as both weapon and shield in the specific dual-function technique that Sixth Realm warriors practiced for the specific scenario of shieldless corridor defense.

His blade caught a boomstick ball. The blade’s flat intercepted the ball at the angle that deflected the ball’s trajectory upward into the corridor’s ceiling. The deflection was the deflection that Sixth Realm perception and reaction speed combined to produce: the specific interception of a projectile in flight using the blade’s surface as the deflection instrument. The technique consumed Realm reserves at the rate that sustained perception and reaction consumed, the rate that was the rate of the reserves’ final percentage points’ expenditure.

Thirty-nine minutes.

Two guards remained. Kreese and Sennet. Both in the front rank. Both shieldless. Both fighting with swords that were dimming as the Realm reserves approached the single-digit percentages that preceded exhaustion.

The barbarian assault pressed. Three warriors abreast in the corridor. Boomstick fire from the rear ranks over the front ranks’ heads, the balls striking the corridor’s walls and ceiling above the two guards’ positions. Hand axes and swords from the front rank, the weapons aimed at the two guards whose shields were gone and whose swords were the only things between the barbarian advance and the throne room doors.

Forty minutes.

The throne room doors were intact. The western passage was forty minutes long. The king, carried by Fairfax and the two guards who accompanied the escape, had reached the passage’s exit.

Kreese did not know this. Kreese did not have the communication that would tell him this. Kreese had the count that the first minute’s statement had begun and that the fighting’s continuous demands had not interrupted because the count was the count that ran in the background of the consciousness that the fighting’s foreground occupied.

Forty minutes. The number that the defense had been calibrated to produce. The number that eleven guards’ lives had purchased. The number that was now exceeded by each additional second that the two remaining guards’ defense sustained.

"The king is clear," Kreese said. The statement was not based on information. The statement was based on the count and the count’s completion and the specific faith that the count’s completion’s meaning carried: that the forty minutes’ passage meant the king had reached the passage’s exit and the king was clear.

Sennet looked at the captain. The Fifth Realm guard’s sword was shaking with the tremor that exhausted Realm reserves produced. The guard’s dislocated shoulder had swollen to the size that dislocation’s sustained activity produced. The guard’s face was the face that sustained combat produced in a twenty-six-year-old warrior who had been fighting for forty minutes in a corridor whose floor was covered with the dead of both sides.

"Then we can stop holding," Sennet said.

"We can stop holding," Kreese confirmed.

They did not stop holding.

Sennet drove his trembling sword into the next barbarian warrior’s throat. Kreese’s blade caught a hand axe’s stroke and redirected it into the warrior beside the axe’s wielder. Both guards fought with the specific quality that fighting produced in warriors whose purpose had been fulfilled and whose fighting’s continuation was the continuation that the purpose’s fulfillment had freed them to choose: the fighting that was no longer necessary and that was therefore the fighting that was chosen rather than required, the fighting that warriors chose because the choosing was the thing that the warriors’ training and conviction and the specific quality of their devotion to the crown they served demanded.

They fought for four more minutes. Four minutes past the forty that the defense had required. Four minutes of unnecessary fighting that the two warriors conducted because the two warriors were Royal Guards and Royal Guards did not stop fighting because the mission was complete. Royal Guards stopped fighting when the fighting stopped them.

The fighting stopped Sennet at the forty-third minute. A boomstick ball from the corridor’s rear rank struck the guard in the throat above the gorget’s rim and the ball entered the trachea and the guard’s breathing ceased and the guard fell.

Kreese fought alone. One guard. One sword. The corridor’s width that four shields had covered was now covered by one warrior whose blade moved in the specific pattern that a lone Sixth Realm defender produced in an eight-foot corridor: the blade covering the width in the arcs that the Realm’s speed sustained, each arc a defensive sweep that denied the corridor’s width to the warriors pressing forward, each arc’s completion followed by the next arc’s initiation in the continuous cycle that the Realm’s final reserves powered.

Forty-four minutes. Forty-five.

A Fifth Realm champion entered the corridor. The champion’s war hammer struck Kreese’s sword and the sword shattered. The blade that had been cracked and repaired and cracked again and sustained by the Realm’s enhancement through eight days of continuous fighting separated into three pieces at the stress points that the campaign’s accumulated damage had defined.

Kreese held the sword’s broken hilt. The hilt was not a weapon. The hilt was the thing that the sword had been and that the sword no longer was. The captain looked at the hilt and the looking lasted the fraction of a second that the looking’s assessment required.

He threw the hilt at the champion’s face. The hilt struck the champion’s visor and the visor cracked and the champion flinched. The flinch’s duration was the fraction of a second that the captain needed to draw his belt knife, the short blade that every Royal Guard carried for the specific scenario that the guard’s primary weapon’s destruction produced.

Kreese drove the knife into the champion’s throat. The same gap that had received the sword’s point in the earlier engagement. The knife’s shorter blade entered the gap at the depth that the shorter blade’s length permitted: three inches. Sufficient.

The champion fell.

Kreese stood in the corridor with a belt knife and no sword and no shield and a Realm that was in the single-digit percentage and the corridor full of dead and the barbarian assault pressing forward through the dead toward the one guard who remained.

He lasted two more minutes.

The hand axe found his right knee and the knee buckled. A boomstick ball struck his breastplate and the Realm’s remaining percentage absorbed the lethal component but the kinetic component drove him backward and he fell among the dead that the corridor’s floor held. A barbarian warrior stood over him with the hand axe raised.

Kreese looked up at the warrior. The captain’s face carried the specific expression that dying warriors produced when the dying was the dying that the warrior had chosen and the choosing’s purpose had been fulfilled and the fulfillment’s knowledge was the knowledge that the dying’s last moment held.

The hand axe came down.

The corridor was silent after the forty-seventh minute. Eleven Royal Guards. Forty-seven minutes of corridor defense. Nine guards and seven barbarian champions dead on the corridor’s floor. Two guards died in the corridor’s final four minutes.

The barbarians breached the throne room doors. The throne room was empty. The king was gone. The western passage’s existence was unknown and the passage’s entrance was concealed behind the throne room’s paneling and the concealment held because the concealment had been designed three centuries ago by architects whose paranoia about the specific scenario of a king’s escape from a fallen palace had produced the concealment’s quality.

Forty-seven minutes. Eleven lives. The king’s escape.

The sacrifice’s accounting was the accounting that sacrifices produced: the specific column of names and minutes and wounds and deaths that the sacrifice’s participants had contributed to the sacrifice’s purpose, the column that would be remembered by the people who survived and that would be written in the histories that the surviving’s duration allowed the survivors to produce.

Eleven names. Forty-seven minutes. The corridor.