Rise of the Horde

Chapter 803 - 802

Two thousand warriors walked into the earth’s wrath.

The advance was not the advance that the spear wall had used in the open field’s grinding engagements. The advance was the advance that the cobblestones’ eruption demanded: shields raised overhead in the Tohr’terra configuration, the great round shields’ curved surfaces angled upward to deflect the erupting stones’ trajectories, the warriors beneath the shields moving at the pace that the footing’s destruction allowed because the footing was the cobblestones that were erupting and the erupting cobblestones left the earth’s sublayer as the surface that the boots found beneath the eruption’s disturbance.

The first erupting cobblestone struck a shield in the advance’s front rank. The stone was the size of a man’s head, launched upward by the Seventh Circle’s force and attenuated by the Golden Wolf’s shimmer to the velocity that the attenuation produced. The stone hit the shield’s curved surface and the surface deflected the stone’s trajectory outward, the stone spinning away from the shield in the deflection arc that the shield’s curvature produced. The warrior beneath the shield felt the impact through the shield’s handle: the force of a large stone striking iron at the velocity that the attenuated Seventh Circle produced, the force that the Tohr’terra’s angular deflection converted from a penetrating blow to a glancing impact.

The second stone struck the shield beside the first. The third struck the gap between two shields. The gap’s width was two inches. The stone’s width was eight inches. The stone did not fit through the gap. The stone struck both shields’ edges simultaneously and the impact’s bilateral force drove both shields inward, the inward movement compressing the warriors beneath the shields and the compression’s force transmitted through the warriors’ bodies to their boots and the boots’ contact with the disrupted ground.

A warrior in the advance’s third rank was struck by a stone that found the specific angle that the Tohr’terra’s overhead coverage did not protect: the angle from below. The erupting cobblestone launched upward from the ground beneath the warrior’s feet, the stone’s trajectory vertical, the stone’s impact striking the warrior’s boot sole and the force traveling through the boot and the leg to the knee and the hip. The warrior’s left knee hyperextended. The warrior fell. The warriors beside the fallen warrior closed the gap and continued the advance.

"VOL DUUM MOK!" The chant rose from beneath the Tohr’terra’s overhead coverage, the voices muffled by the shields’ canopy but audible through the shields’ gaps, the chant the specific sound that two thousand warriors produced when the warriors were walking through a Seventh Circle shaman’s earth eruption and the walking’s continuation was the continuation that the chant’s words sustained. No surrender. The dead watches. "DRAK’UL VOSH!"

The advance covered the first hundred paces in four minutes. The eruption’s sustained impact produced the casualties that the advance through the eruption accumulated: forty-three warriors down from the stones’ impacts, the impacts producing the injuries that the Golden Wolf’s attenuation had converted from lethal to injurious but that the injuries’ accumulation across the advance’s duration produced in the formation’s functional strength. Forty-three warriors out of two thousand. The advance continued with nineteen hundred and fifty-seven.

Shul’Korr increased the eruption’s intensity. The Seventh Circle’s full power, directed at the advancing formation, produced the specific escalation that the full power’s application created: the cobblestones erupted at higher velocities, the stones’ sizes increased as the deeper geological layers’ larger stones were mobilized by the increased power, the eruption’s area expanded from the avenue’s width to include the flanking streets where the Yurakk warbands had been advancing.

The Golden Wolf’s shimmer strained. The Amazzfer’s arms bled. The totem’s sustained activation against the Seventh Circle’s escalated output produced the physical cost that the bearer paid for the protection the totem provided, the cost visible in the blood that seeped from the Amazzfer’s reopened wounds and the new wounds that the sustained activation’s stress produced in the bearer’s body.

The Rakshas advanced. Two hundred paces. Three hundred. The eruption’s intensity at three hundred paces from the shaman’s position was the intensity that proximity to the Seventh Circle’s source produced: the stones larger, the velocities higher, the Golden Wolf’s attenuation less effective because the attenuation’s percentage reduction applied to the larger absolute values that proximity produced.

Warriors fell at the increased rate that the increased intensity dictated. Sixty more down between the two-hundred and four-hundred-pace marks. The advance’s strength reduced from nineteen hundred and fifty-seven to eighteen hundred and ninety-seven.

"HOLD THE ADVANCE!" Arka’garr’s command was the command that the advance’s integrity required from the commander whose authority sustained the advance through the conditions that the authority’s absence would have converted from advance to retreat. "FORWARD! THROUGH THE ERUPTION! THE SHAMAN IS AHEAD! THE SHAMAN DIES WHEN WE REACH HIM! FORWARD!"

The advance reached four hundred paces. The eruption’s intensity at four hundred paces from the shaman was the intensity that close proximity to the source produced when the source was a Seventh Circle practitioner at full output. The cobblestones that erupted at this distance were the cobblestones that the attenuation’s reduction still left at the velocity that shields’ deflection was the only defense against. The shields deflected. The shields cracked under the sustained impacts. The cracked shields continued deflecting because the shields’ warriors held the cracked shields in position and the cracked shields’ deflection, reduced in effectiveness by the cracks’ structural compromise, was the deflection that the advance’s continuation required.

Five hundred paces. Shul’Korr was visible at the avenue’s northern end. The shaman stood with his staff raised, his body surrounded by the shamanic field’s visible distortion, the distortion the specific visual artifact that the Seventh Circle’s sustained output produced in the air around the practitioner’s body. The distortion was the distortion that heat produced in the air above a forge’s mouth, the shimmering that the energy’s proximity created in the atmosphere’s optical properties.

The Rakshas’ front rank could see the shaman. The seeing was the seeing that converted the advance’s abstract objective into the specific target that the advance existed to reach. The shaman was there. The shaman was five hundred paces ahead. The five hundred paces were the five hundred paces that the eruption’s intensity and the advance’s casualties and the shields’ cracking and the warriors’ determination combined to measure.

"THERE!" Arka’garr’s voice, the flat command tone that did not distinguish between the word’s volume and the word’s content’s urgency. "THE SHAMAN! FIVE HUNDRED PACES! FORWARD!"

* * * * *

The advance’s final five hundred paces took eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes during which the eruption’s intensity reached the maximum that the Seventh Circle’s proximity produced. Eleven minutes during which the cobblestones erupted at velocities that the Golden Wolf’s attenuation reduced from lethal to severely injurious. Eleven minutes during which one hundred and twelve warriors fell from the stones’ impacts and the advance’s strength decreased from eighteen hundred and ninety-seven to seventeen hundred and eighty-five.

The advance reached the shaman.

Shul’Korr’s shamanic field surrounded the practitioner in the defensive barrier that the Seventh Circle’s power sustained. The field deflected the projectiles that the Roarers fired and the spears that the Rakshas thrust and the stones that the eruption’s own output produced when the eruption’s radius included the shaman’s position.

The field did not deflect warriors.

The first Rakshas warrior to reach the shaman’s position walked through the shamanic field’s perimeter. The field’s energy washed over the warrior’s body in the specific sensation that magical fields produced in bodies that passed through them: the tingling, the pressure, the awareness of energy that the body’s nerves detected and the body’s muscles registered as resistance. The resistance slowed the warrior’s movement by approximately thirty percent. The slowing was the slowing that the field’s defensive function produced in physical bodies that entered the field’s perimeter, the function’s design intended to slow the attackers’ approach to the speed that the practitioner’s awareness could track and respond to.

Shul’Korr responded. The shaman’s staff struck the warrior’s shield. The strike was not a physical strike. The strike was the Seventh Circle’s concentrated energy delivered through the staff’s focus point and into the shield’s surface, the energy producing the specific effect that concentrated Seventh Circle output produced in physical objects: the shield’s iron face cracked from center to rim, the crack radiating outward from the staff’s contact point in the pattern that catastrophic structural failure produced in iron when the iron’s molecular bonds were disrupted by energy that exceeded the bonds’ tolerance.

The shield disintegrated. The warrior behind the shield was struck by the staff’s energy at the distance that the shield’s disintegration exposed: point-blank range, the energy’s full force applied to the warrior’s breastplate, the breastplate’s iron absorbing the energy at the rate that the iron’s molecular structure permitted before the structure failed and the energy penetrated to the flesh beneath.

The warrior fell. The Seventh Circle’s point-blank strike was the strike that the Seventh Circle produced when the Circle’s power was applied to a single target at the range where the power’s dispersion was zero and the power’s full output was the output that the single target received.

The second warrior entered the field. The third. The fourth. The warriors entered the shamanic field’s perimeter at the rate that the field’s slowing allowed and the shaman’s staff struck each warrior who entered and each strike was the strike that the Seventh Circle’s concentrated power produced at point-blank range.

But the warriors kept coming.

The Rakshas advance was the advance of seventeen hundred warriors whose advance’s momentum was the momentum that the advance’s determination sustained through the field’s slowing and the shaman’s strikes and the strikes’ casualties. The shaman struck one warrior. The next warrior entered. The shaman struck the next warrior. The warrior after that entered. The rate of entry exceeded the rate of striking because the shaman’s strikes required the specific recovery interval that the Seventh Circle’s concentrated output demanded between applications and the recovery interval’s duration was longer than the entry rate’s frequency.

The fifth warrior reached the shaman. The shaman’s staff struck the fifth warrior’s shield and the shield cracked and the warrior fell. The sixth warrior was behind the fifth. The sixth warrior’s spear found the space that the shaman’s staff’s striking motion’s extension created between the staff’s recovery and the staff’s next strike.

The spear entered the shamanic field at the velocity that the field’s resistance reduced to seventy percent of the spear’s thrust velocity. Seventy percent of a Rakshas warrior’s spear thrust was the velocity that the spear’s point traveled at when the thrust’s force was the force that a warrior whose physical strength exceeded a human’s physical strength produced at the range that the spear’s length provided.

The spear point found the shaman’s abdomen. The shamanic field’s defensive function slowed the point. The point entered at the reduced velocity that the slowing produced. The penetration was three inches. Three inches of spear point in the Seventh Circle shaman’s abdomen.

Shul’Korr screamed. The scream was the scream that the Seventh Circle’s pain response produced when the pain’s source was the physical wound that the Seventh Circle’s defensive function had been designed to prevent and that the Seventh Circle’s defensive function had not prevented because the defensive function’s design had not anticipated the specific scenario of seventeen hundred warriors walking through the field’s perimeter at the rate that exceeded the field’s ability to stop them.

The earth eruption stopped. The cobblestones fell to the ground. The streets’ surfaces settled. The Seventh Circle’s output, sustained for twenty minutes of continuous eruption, ceased at the moment that the spear’s penetration disrupted the concentration that the output required.

The seventh warrior’s spear found the shaman’s chest. The eighth warrior’s spear found the shaman’s throat.

Shul’Korr fell. The Seventh Circle shaman who had pressed the Threian army into the earth and covered the barbarian army’s withdrawals and erupted the capital’s cobblestones against the Horde’s advance fell on the avenue’s disrupted surface with the specific impact that a Seventh Circle practitioner’s body produced when the body’s magical sustenance was interrupted by the wounds that the body’s death was producing.

The shamanic field collapsed. The deflection ceased. The eruption ceased. The earth was still.

"Grombash krul," the sixth warrior said, his spear dark with the shaman’s blood. The strong have earned this. The words spoken at the volume that conviction required, the volume that the avenue’s sudden silence amplified into the statement that the silence’s cause deserved.

The Rakshas had walked through the Seventh Circle’s wrath. The Rakshas had lost two hundred and seventeen warriors in the advance’s twenty minutes. The Rakshas had killed the Seventh Circle shaman.

The avenue was open. The thundermaker that had blocked the avenue was now the thundermaker that had no shamanic field to protect it from the seventeen hundred Rakshas whose advance through the eruption had placed them within striking distance of the weapon’s position.

Arka’garr looked at the thundermaker. The weapon’s crew was backing away from the crew’s position because the crew’s position was the position that seventeen hundred orcish warriors with blood-darkened spears were advancing toward.

"Take the weapon," Arka’garr said.

The Rakshas took the weapon. The crew ran. The thundermaker was the Horde’s.

"MORG!" The victory cry erupted from the formation. "GROMBASH KRUL! MOK GROMBASH KRUL!"

The strong have earned this. The ancestors witnessed it all.

The avenue was open. The Seventh Circle was dead. The advance resumed. And the wolf, inside the capital’s walls, advanced through the streets that the shaman’s death had opened, the wolf’s snarl directed at the palace district where the barbarian command waited and where the barbarian command’s options were diminishing with each block that the wolf’s advance cleared.

Forward. Always forward. The wolf did not stop.