Chapter 635: Chapter 634

Dhug’mhar found the Scorcher at the place where the earth had turned to glass.

His strike team had ridden through the demon’s territory for eight hours, the heat intensifying with each league they covered until the air itself seemed to resist their passage, pressing against their lungs with the heavy, sulphurous weight of a forge’s exhaust. The Verakh scouts, ten of them, had eliminated the Scorcher’s perimeter network of corrupted sentries with the silent efficiency that was their craft’s foundation, each kill executed with Bufas-treated crossbow bolts that ignited the corrupted flesh and consumed it before an alarm could travel through the demon’s awareness network to its master.

But they could not eliminate all of them. The Scorcher’s territory held nearly two hundred corrupted creatures, and the deeper the strike team penetrated, the denser the population of claimed thralls became. Corrupted wolves that patrolled in packs of six rather than three. Corrupted boars that stood like living barricades across the approaches, their bark-armored bodies generating heat that shimmered the air around them. And at the territory’s center, clustered around the tear, a collection of corrupted creatures that included two corrupted trolls, a corrupted ogre, and dozens of lesser demons whose ember-wrought bodies trailed smoke and ash wherever they moved.

The strike team could not bypass the inner defenses. They would have to ride through them.

Dhug’mhar grinned.

He turned in the saddle and looked back at his mount’s broad, armored neck, then beyond it to the forty riders arrayed behind him. The Rumbling Clan sat astride their beasts …massive, broad-shouldered creatures that stood nearly seven feet at the shoulder, their hides like layered slate, their hooves wide as anvils, their paired horns sweeping forward in long, wicked curves of bone that could gut a war elephant if the rider lined the charge correctly. The animals breathed in great, measured pulls, steam rising from their nostrils despite the suffocating heat. They were not nervous. They were never nervous.

“Rumbling Clan,” he said, and the forty veterans who had followed him through the corrupted territory for eight hours without complaint responded with the discipline that their tradition demanded: they raised their spears, the iron tips gleaming in the tear’s dimensional glow, and waited for the order that would transform them from a traveling formation into a killing machine.

“The Verakhs take the flanks. Bolts into the wolves first, then the boars. Draw their attention outward.” He leveled his own spear at the cluster of corrupted defenders between them and the tear. “Rumbling Clan goes straight through the center. Spear formation. We do not stop. We do not wheel. We go through them, and when the spears are spent, we draw swords and we go through them again. I want a path to the demon. A clear path, paved with whatever we have to kill to make it clear.”

He looked at his warriors, at the scarred, battered, heat-scorched faces of orcs who had fought the Threians at Lag’ranna and survived, who had held the line at Yohan’s perimeter and survived, who had ridden eight hours through air hot enough to blister skin and corrupted earth that crumbled to ash beneath their mounts’ hooves and were still upright, still ready, still hungry for the fight that had brought them here.

“GET READY TO RUMBLE!”

The answer came back at the volume that forty throats and forty riders could produce, a sound that shook the ground before the charge even began. The beasts beneath them surged forward as one, responding to the cry with the trained ferocity of animals bred for a single purpose, their hooves striking the glassed earth with a rhythm that built from a canter to a gallop to something that was less like riding and more like being carried by a landslide.

They charged.

* * * * *

The inner perimeter erupted into violence.

The Verakhs struck first, their Bufas-treated bolts streaking into the corrupted wolves that guarded the flanks. Each bolt ignited on impact, the compound’s chemical fire producing bursts of orange light that revealed the battlefield in stark, flickering snapshots: wolves writhing in flame, boars turning toward the commotion, the enormous silhouette of the corrupted ogre rising from its position near the tear.

The Rumbling Clan hit the center like a landslide given hooves.

Dhug’mhar led, because Dhug’mhar always led. His mount’s horns caught the first corrupted boar head-on, the left horn punching through the creature’s bark-armored skull with a crack like a tree splitting in a storm. The beast did not slow. It drove through the dying boar, the body folding and spinning away under the sheer mass of the charge, and Dhug’mhar’s spear found the next defender before the first had even struck the ground …the iron tip driving through the chest of a corrupted wolf that had turned to face the thunder too late, pinning it against the earth as the momentum of the charge tore the shaft from his grip. He released it cleanly, his hand already dropping to the short stabbing sword at his hip, and drew.

Behind him, the Rumbling Clan fanned into a Spear formation that drove into the corrupted defenders like a chisel into wood. Spears found their targets and were abandoned as the charge carried their riders past, each weapon left buried in whatever it had struck. The beasts did as much killing as their riders …horns hooking and gutting, hooves crushing, sheer bulk scattering lesser demons like thrown gravel. One veteran, a scarred giant named Brugg, guided his mount directly into a pack of corrupted wolves with a knee press alone, both hands occupied with his crossbow, loosing three bolts in rapid succession before the pack could scatter, each bolt igniting on impact and turning the wolves into a chain of small, screaming pyres. Another rider, a woman named Graka whose mount was the largest in the clan…drew her stabbing sword and drove into a cluster of lesser demons at the gallop, the blade punching in and withdrawing in short, efficient thrusts that left bodies collapsing in her wake like a field being harvested.

The corrupted trolls moved to intercept.

They came from opposite sides, their massive forms silhouetted against the tear’s dimensional glow, their movements coordinated by the Scorcher’s will into a pincer that aimed to break the cavalry charge between them. Each troll stood ten feet tall, their bodies radiating the same heat that characterized everything in the Scorcher’s territory, the air around their corrupted flesh shimmering with thermal distortion.

The right-flank troll met Brugg’s mount. Its fist, the size of a barrel and wreathed in heat that scorched the air, descended in a hammerblow aimed at the beast’s skull. The animal twisted …not with grace but with the brutal economy of a creature whose every instinct had been trained toward combat …and the troll’s fist struck its armored neck plate instead of its skull, the impact staggering it but not stopping it. The beast’s right horn caught the troll’s extended arm at the elbow on the follow-through, the curved bone driving through the joint with a crack loud enough to hear over the chaos of the surrounding battle. The troll’s arm bent backward at an angle nature had not designed, and the creature roared …rage rather than pain …its other fist already swinging toward rider and mount both.

Three Rumbling Clan riders wheeled and converged on the wounded troll, their mounts circling with the trained precision of a pack hunt. Swords found the knee joints. A crossbow bolt, fired from the saddle at point-blank range, punched through the gap in the troll’s shoulder plating and ignited inside the wound, the Bufas compound burning inward through the channel the bolt had carved. A fire sphere from the support team struck the already-damaged arm and turned the broken joint into a torch. The troll went down in stages, each leg failing in sequence as the coordinated assault stripped away its ability to stand, its roar diminishing to a gurgling rasp as the flames reached its chest and found the corrupted heart within.

The left-flank troll met Graka. She did not circle. She did not wheel. She lined her mount’s horns on the troll’s leading knee and rode straight at it, the beast’s mass and speed combining into an impact that shattered the joint entirely. The troll pitched forward as its leg gave way, hands reaching for the earth. Graka’s mount drove its left horn through the troll’s outstretched right hand, pinning it to the ground. Graka leaned from the saddle, her stabbing sword driving into the base of the troll’s skull with the concentrated force of a rider who had spent twenty years learning exactly where to put a blade. The sword punched through corrupted bone and into the brain beneath. The troll stopped moving.

The corrupted ogre was already in motion, its enormous body advancing toward the breach the Rumbling Clan’s charge had carved through the inner perimeter. But three fire spheres found it simultaneously, the Bufas compound coating its corrupted hide in burning gel that the ogre’s thrashing only spread further. Riders wheeled past it at the gallop, crossbow bolts punching into the fire-soaked hide, each impact spreading the burning compound deeper. By the time it reached the edge of the Rock Bear formation, it was a walking pyre, its strength sapping with each step as the fire consumed the corruption that sustained it. It fell ten paces from Dhug’mhar, its body crashing to the glassed earth with a tremor that cracked the surface underfoot, its burning bulk illuminating the scene in hellish detail.

The path to the Scorcher was clear.

* * * * *

The demon stood beside its tear, waiting.

It had watched the destruction of its inner defenses through the eyes of its corrupted servants, experiencing their deaths as a series of severed connections that left its awareness network diminished but not blind. It still saw through the lesser demons that clustered at its feet, still felt the mortal world through their senses. And what it felt approaching was something it had not encountered in its previous incursions into this realm.

Organized resistance. Not the panicked flight of scattered clans. Not the desperate last stand of a settlement too slow to evacuate. This was a military force, disciplined and mounted, coming toward it with the specific intent of ending its existence.

The Scorcher’s burning eyes fixed on Dhug’mhar as the orc chieftain rode forward from the carnage of the inner perimeter, his mount’s horns dark with ichor, its flanks heaving, the beast’s chest scarred by heat but its legs still steady. Dhug’mhar’s own armor was scorched and dented, his frost-scarred chest visible where a corrupted boar’s tusk had torn the front plate loose earlier in the night.

He brought his mount to a halt twenty paces from the demon, the beast pawing at the glassed earth with one broad hoof, impatient.

“Perfection has arrived,” Dhug’mhar announced. “You may begin dying at your convenience.”

The Scorcher’s response was not verbal. It raised its burning spear and charged.

The demon moved with a speed that should have been impossible for a being of its size, the seven feet of iron-hot muscle crossing the twenty-pace gap in a fraction of a heartbeat. The spear’s tip, trailing a wake of superheated air that left afterimages on the retina, thrust toward Dhug’mhar’s chest in a strike that combined the precision of a trained warrior with the elemental fury of a being whose body was forged from fire itself.

Dhug’mhar dismounted.

Not a fall. A choice. He dropped from the saddle an instant before the spear would have skewered him and his mount together, his boots striking the glassed earth as the demon’s weapon passed through the space where his chest had been. His mount, trained to respond to a rider’s departure, wheeled immediately and drove its horns at the Scorcher’s exposed flank.

The demon spun, deflecting the mount’s charge with the haft of its burning spear, the impact sending the massive beast staggering sideways. Dhug’mhar was already moving. His stabbing sword found the gap between the demon’s ribs while its attention was on his mount, the blade driving inward six inches before the resistance of flesh harder than any natural material arrested its progress. The Scorcher screamed …the sound was fire given voice, a roar that carried physical heat, the shockwave scorching Dhug’mhar’s face and singeing the hair from his arms. The demon’s counterattack was immediate: its spear swept in a horizontal arc aimed at Dhug’mhar’s midsection, the burning tip trailing flame.

Dhug’mhar absorbed the hit. At this range there was no room to dodge, no time to parry. The spear struck his left side, the burning point sliding across his armor’s lateral plate and finding the gap between the front and back sections where the straps held the pieces together. It cut through leather, through the thick skin of his flank, through the muscle beneath, and stopped when it struck a rib. The pain was extraordinary …a combination of penetration and fire, the heat cauterizing as it cut, sealing the wound even as it created it.

Dhug’mhar did not fall. He grabbed the spear shaft with his left hand, his fingers closing on burning iron despite the agony that shot through his palm, and he held it. The demon tried to pull the weapon free. Dhug’mhar held. The demon pulled harder, its superior strength beginning to overcome his grip.

“GET READY TO RUMBLE!”

Riders surged from behind him. Four warriors had dismounted at the gallop, hitting the ground at a dead run, the strongest the clan had ever produced. Swords bit into the Scorcher’s legs. A crossbow bolt, discharged from arm’s length, punched through the demon’s jaw and ignited within the wound. Fire spheres exploded against its torso, the Bufas compound finding the gash that Dhug’mhar’s sword had opened and burning inward through the gap. The mount …his mount, the beast he had ridden for six years …drove its horns into the Scorcher’s spine with a crack like a thunderbolt.

The Scorcher’s scream changed pitch. Higher, thinner, the sound of a being whose internal structure was being consumed by fire it could not extinguish, fire that was not demonic but something mortal, something chemical, something that burned with a logic the demon’s physiology had no defense against.

Dhug’mhar released the spear, dropped his sword, and seized the demon’s head with both burning hands. He had neither greataxe nor leverage, but he had weight, and he had stubbornness, and he drove the Scorcher’s skull downward into one of his mount’s upthrust horns with every ounce of both.

The horn punched through the base of the demon’s skull and into the brain pan beneath. The Scorcher’s burning eyes exploded outward in twin gouts of flame that licked across Dhug’mhar’s face and set his beard smoldering. He did not flinch. He held until he felt the resistance cease and the demon’s body go slack against the horn that had killed it.

The Scorcher fell. Its body hit the glassed earth and shattered the surface, cracks radiating outward like a spider’s web in frozen amber. The flames that had wreathed its form guttered and died, the demonic energy draining away through the wound at the base of its skull, returning to the dimensional tear that had birthed it. The body dissolved …faster than the corrupted creatures’ remains …the demonic flesh becoming ash and then smoke and then nothing, leaving behind only the scorch marks on the earth and the lingering heat in the air.

The corrupted creatures in the Scorcher’s territory stopped. Every one of them. The wolves, the boars, the remaining lesser demons, all frozen in place as the will that had directed them vanished. Then the red film faded from their eyes, and one by one they collapsed, their bodies failing as the corruption’s enhancement withdrew and left them with damage no natural creature could sustain.

Dhug’mhar stood over the place where the demon had died. His left side was bleeding freely, the spear wound a cauterized gash that the shamans would need to treat before infection set in. His hands were burned, the palms blistered from gripping the scorching spear shaft. His face was raw, reddened by the explosion of demonic fire. His mount stood beside him, head lowered, one horn still steaming faintly with the residue of demonic blood. He pressed his burned palm against the beast’s armored neck, and the animal pressed back.

He was standing.

“One down,” he announced to the Rumbling Clan who surrounded him, their mounts blowing and stamping, their own bodies battered and bloodied but upright, their swords still drawn. “Perfection has slain a demon.”

He paused. Touched the frost scarring on his chest, the legacy of the Blue Countess. Touched the new burn on his side, the legacy of the Scorcher.

“I am becoming a collection of souvenirs.”

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