Chapter 672: Chapter 671

The assault on Thaddeus’s position at the corridor entrance began with the dawn and was fought with everything that the Horde had brought across the highlands and down the Dry Pass and held through three days of supply difficulty and tactical patience.

Khao’khen’s main force hit the eastern face of Thaddeus’s fortifications at first light, the 1st and 2nd Warbands leading in the assault formation that Arka’garr had designed for attacking prepared positions: not the mass charge of warriors breaking themselves against an obstacle, but the calculated, coordinated application of pressure that targeted the specific points in a defensive line where engineering had not fully compensated for the terrain’s limitations.

Thaddeus’s position had three such points.

The Verakhs had identified all of them during the three days of observation.

The northern anchor of the earthen berm, where the slope required a sharper turn than the engineers had properly accounted for and had left a section of less-than-optimal gradient in the berm’s face.

The junction between the eastern berm and the crossbow towers, where the spacing between structures had been determined by available timber rather than optimal fields of fire and had produced a gap of approximately forty paces with reduced crossbow coverage.

And the western face, which Thaddeus had prioritized less heavily than the eastern because his plan had assumed the threat came primarily from the corridor mouth rather than from the flanking approach that Trot’thar was now executing.

The Roarers opened the engagement, their fire distributed across all three identified weakness points simultaneously, the volumes calibrated to suppress rather than destroy, preventing the defenders at each point from observing the shield wall movements converging on their sectors without significant risk to their own crews.

The suppression was not perfect but it was sufficient, the Roarer volleys forcing the crossbow operators behind the berm crests and into the tower interiors in ways that reduced their effective observation of the approach.

The 1st Warband moved on the northern anchor with the controlled speed that characterized every assault Arka’garr led personally. He did not run his warriors into prepared positions. He moved them in the overlapping, interval-maintaining advance that kept the formation intact across the broken ground between the ridge and the berm, each rank covering the preceding rank’s vulnerability to crossbow fire from the towers by maintaining the shield angles that Arka’garr had drilled until the angles were instinctive rather than remembered.

The warriors who hit the berm’s northern anchor did so with the sustained aggression that was the product of eight months of training applied through weeks of continuous campaigning, the ferocity not wild but focused, directed at the specific structural weakness rather than the general obstacle, the orcish physical strength that no human soldier could match channeled through the discipline that Khao’khen had built into the Horde from its first day of existence.

Shields drove into the berm’s face at the compromised gradient point and the earth moved. Warriors drove iron-shod boots into the loosened soil and climbed where a berm was supposed to prevent climbing. The first warrior over the top was Arka’garr himself, his sword already drawn before his boots hit the interior ground.

What followed on the interior of the berm was the kind of combat that training prepared for and that nothing fully captured until the moment it was happening: the sustained, close, continuously adapting violence of trained warriors in a space too narrow for the formations that had brought them there, fighting with the weapons and the bodies that were all they had.

The Threian soldiers who met them on the berm’s interior fought with the professional courage that had characterized Snowe’s force throughout the campaign. They yielded yards slowly, each one contested, the defenders using the tower positions and the internal berm angles to maintain resistance after the breach had been forced.

The fire sphere teams worked alongside the 2nd Warband’s assault on the tower junction gap, their burning clay projectiles not aimed at the towers, which held Threian soldiers inside them whose deaths served no operational purpose beyond what the assault required, but at the approach channels between the towers, using the fire to discourage the cavalry reserves that Thaddeus was attempting to push through the internal corridors toward the breach at the northern anchor.

* * * * *

Trot’thar hit the western face at the second hour of the assault.

Fifteen hundred warriors emerging from the eastern highlands onto the open ground behind Thaddeus’s fortifications produced an effect that no amount of professional discipline could fully neutralize, because the effect was not merely tactical, it was psychological, the discovery that the enemy was not only in front of you but behind you, coming from a direction that your fortifications were not facing.

Thaddeus recognized immediately what had happened and what it meant. He had been flanked, his prepared position rendered partly irrelevant by a force that had moved through terrain his engineers had assessed as unsuitable for military movement and had arrived exactly at the moment the eastern assault on his main face was fully engaging his reserves.

He made the command decision that professional soldiers made when they understood that holding a position was going to cost the force rather than the enemy: he organized the withdrawal rather than the defense.

“Fall back to the corridor,” he ordered, his voice carrying the controlled authority of an officer who was not panicking but who was moving with the urgency that the situation demanded. “Western companies hold the flanking force long enough for the eastern companies to break contact. Cavalry covers the rear. We withdraw through the corridor mouth in order.”

The withdrawal was not clean.

Trot’thar’s warriors pressed the western companies hard, the fresh soldiers against the force that had been engaged on the eastern face for two hours, and the western companies paid for the time they bought.

The cavalry that covered the rear ran into Haguk’s Warg Cavalry at the corridor mouth, the wargs moving to seal the exit while the infantry withdrew through it, and the engagement between the cavalry elements was fierce and brief and settled in the Horde’s favor by the same margin that all engagements between Haguk’s riders and Threian cavalry settled.

Six thousand soldiers moved into the corridor and north through it, withdrawing in the organized fashion of a professional force that had been beaten but not destroyed.

They left behind their earthworks, their construction materials, their advance supply stocks, and approximately eight hundred soldiers killed or captured in the assault and the withdrawal.

The corridor was fully in orcish hands.

The supply wagons from Trot’thar’s north position would reach the Horde’s location within hours. The Rhakaddons and the catapults, freed from the defensive holding position by Snowe’s redirection toward the corridor, were already moving south.

Khao’khen stood at the corridor entrance where Thaddeus’s fortifications had stood twelve hours earlier and watched the last Threian riders disappear north into the corridor’s first bend.

The wolf banner was raised behind him and to his right, its snarling profile catching the morning light of a day that had begun with the Horde in a position of supply difficulty and ended with the campaign’s essential connection secured.

“Snowe?” he asked Sakh’arran.

“Approximately six hours out. Thaddeus’s withdrawal will meet his vanguard in the corridor. They will consolidate north.”

“Then we have six hours.”

“For what?”

Khao’khen looked at the map one more time, at the province spread before him with its roads and its settlements and the particular piece of ground that he had been carrying in his mind since the council where Vir’khan had asked the question that the campaign had been building toward for weeks.

“For the message,” he said.

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