Chapter 687: Chapter 686

The 1st Warband came out of the depression at the double-pace, and what the Threian road column’s advance guard saw was not what it had been told to expect.

The briefing had described a defensive position. An army of eight thousand in a depression between two ridgelines, organized to receive the assault of a larger force with the fortified-position advantages that terrain and preparation provided.

The advance guard had been trained and briefed and organized for the task of pushing forward, pressing the defensive line, identifying its weak points, reporting back to the main body.

What the advance guard encountered instead was a thousand-warrior shield wall advancing toward it at the controlled rapid pace that the 1st Warband used for assault approaches, shields locked, formation intact, their Roarers distributed through the ranks firing in the rolling volleys that maintained suppressive fire through the approach.

The advance guard was six hundred soldiers. It was doing advance guard work, which meant it was scouts and light infantry moving in the dispersed formation appropriate for terrain assessment. It was not in the formation appropriate for receiving a thousand-warrior assault.

The collision happened three hundred paces from the depression’s northern mouth, and the collision was entirely the 1st Warband’s.

Arka’garr had given the formation its instruction in five words before the advance began: Hit them. Do not stop.

The orcish warriors who had spent seven weeks performing the controlled, measured, precisely calibrated violence of professional soldiers applied to specific tactical objectives did not abandon that calibration. They applied it at maximum output.

The difference was immediate and significant.

A warrior who was performing controlled violence at seventy percent of capacity and a warrior performing controlled violence at full capacity were not the same warrior from the perspective of the person on the receiving end.

The orcish physical advantage, the strength differential that was a product of biology rather than training and that Arka’garr’s discipline had been channeling rather than maximizing, was now operating without the channeling constraint.

A sword strike from a fully committed orcish warrior of the 1st Warband hit with a force that Threian shields had been designed to absorb at the levels that previous engagements had produced. They had not been designed for this level.

Shields cracked. Arms went numb from absorbed impacts. Warriors who had been bracing for a standard assault were thrown from their feet by the pure mass-and-momentum of an opponent who was heavier, stronger, and moving at a pace that did not slow when it met resistance.

The advance guard broke in four minutes. The fastest the Horde had ever broken a Threian formation.

Haguk’s wargs were already moving at the moment of the break, flowing from the depression’s eastern mouth in the pursuit configuration that converted broken formations into destroyed ones.

The wargs ran down the scattering advance guard soldiers with the ground-covering efficiency of animals built for pursuit, and the riders on their backs did their own work with the focused, efficient economy that the Warghen tradition applied to violence conducted at speed.

* * * * *

The road column’s main body heard the engagement and its commander made the decision that the engagement’s nature required: he pushed forward to support the advance guard, compressing the formation into the approach column that the road enforced, six thousand soldiers in a depth that the depression’s entrance would accept in waves rather than all at once.

This was the geometry that Khao’khen had designed for.

The 1st Warband did not retreat into the depression when the main column arrived. It rotated. The front rank fell back through the second rank, which stepped forward to take the contact as the third rank moved up behind it, the rotation continuing in the sequence that Arka’garr had drilled into the formation until the cycle was as natural as breathing.

The 1st Warband was not a static wall that broke under the main column’s pressure. It was a moving surface that absorbed the column’s energy and converted it into the attrition of continuous close engagement.

Every thirty seconds of that engagement, three hundred Roarers fired from the depression’s ridgeline positions into the flanks of the road column, targeting the compression point where the column’s forward elements were packed closest together by the road’s width.

At the engagement ranges that the ridgeline positions provided, the Roarers were firing into a mass of soldiers so dense that a ball that missed its primary target struck another behind it. Every volley produced casualties in numbers that the engagement of a distributed formation would not have produced.

The eastern ridgeline erupted at the twentieth minute.

Trot’thar’s three warbands had spent two days on the eastern ridgeline not in the positions that the Threian flanking force was moving to occupy but in positions behind those positions, dug into the reverse slope where they were invisible from the approach until the flanking force was already committed to the ridgeline’s forward face.

When the Threian infantry that had been sent to flank from the east arrived at the ridgeline’s crest and found the depression apparently defended as expected, they began their descent toward the orcish force’s flank.

They descended into Trot’thar’s formation.

Four thousand Threian infantry moving downhill in the assault deployment, shields forward, expecting to hit the flank of a force engaged at the depression’s center, met fifteen hundred orcish warriors who were waiting for them at the halfway point of the descent and who were not behaving like a flank guard. They were behaving like an assault force, because they were one, and the assault went uphill rather than down.

An assault force moving uphill against an assault force moving downhill loses the physical advantage of momentum. But the physical advantage of orcish mass and strength going uphill against human mass and strength going downhill is a different calculation, and the calculation resolved in Trot’thar’s favor within three minutes of contact.

The Threian eastern force stopped. Then it began to give ground. Then it was fighting for the ridgeline it had expected to control rather than the flank it had come to turn.

Aldrath watched from the combined force’s command position two miles north of the engagement and received the reports with the controlled composure of a Lord-Commander whose experience covered three campaigns and who had never, in thirty-two years of professional military service, received reports that described a situation developing in exactly this pattern.

“They attacked,” he said, to no one in particular.

“Yes,” Snowe said, beside him. “They attack when you expect defense. They defend when you expect attack. And they do both at a physical intensity that the briefing did not adequately prepare you for.”

“How do we stop it?”

“We have not fully stopped it in seven weeks. What we have done is make it expensive. That is their goal.”

Aldrath looked at the engagement map and the markers that were not where the planning had placed them. “Redirect the western ridgeline force to support the road column. Pull the cavalry from the reserve and send them east to relieve the flank.”

“The cavalry east will meet Haguk’s Warg Cavalry, which has been operating in that sector since the advance guard broke.”

“Then it will be a cavalry engagement.”

“Yes,” Snowe said. “That is what it will be.”

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