Rise of the Horde

The ambush on the northern column was where the Horde’s warriors showed, for the first time in the campaign, what it looked and sounded like when eight thousand orcs stopped performing discipline and started performing joy.

The Roarers opened at six hundred paces and the warriors behind the Roarer line did not hold the silence that formation engagement required.

They roared.

Not the signal-shout of a warband master giving an order but the sound that orcish warriors made in the old stories that Threian historians had written down from the terrified accounts of the soldiers who had faced orcish warbands before the Lag’ranna campaign, the sound that generations of Threian children had been taught to fear before they were old enough to understand why.

It was the sound of creatures who were bigger and stronger than you and who were not afraid of you and who found the prospect of fighting you genuinely pleasurable.

"Grak’thar!"

"KRAGH!"

"VRAAK!"

The war cry of the Horde went up from the 3rd Warband as the shield wall advanced, the ancient phrase let them burn and the phrases crush, smash and tear apart, shouted not as a grim acknowledgment of stakes but as a declaration of preference. These warriors wanted the engagement. They had wanted it since Westyn left and the ceiling came off and the thing they had been trained to do was combined with the thing they had always been.

"You fight like a stunted troll’s afterthought!" This from Brugg of the Rumbling Clan, whose facility with Threian insults had been developing since the campaign crossed the frontier and who had discovered that screaming them at close range in accented Threian while driving his mount’s horns into a formation produced a specific effect on the formation that pure violence alone did not. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

The Threian soldiers who found themselves being insulted in their own language by a mounted orc whose animal was actively trying to gore them had a particular fraction-of-a-second processing difficulty that pure surprise alone did not produce.

"Zug zug, pinkskin! Your shield-holding is worse than your smell!" This was a warrior of the 4th Warband whose name in the Horde’s rolls was Kraka’thul and who fought with the focused exuberance of a warrior who had found his element.

He drove into a gap in the northern column’s compressed formation with the shoulder-first entry that the 1st Warband’s doctrine used and that the 4th Warband had been borrowing since Thornfield, and the gap widened in the way gaps widened when the force widening them was operating at full output.

The northern column’s rear contact was being managed by the 7th Warband under a sub-chief named Gol’thar whose approach to tactical communication was entirely non-verbal and whose warriors had spent the waiting period in the cover position with the specific, coiled-spring quality of fighters who had been still for four hours and were done being still.

When the northern column’s commander pushed forward and the rear closed behind him, Gol’thar gave no order. He simply moved. His formation moved with him because the formation had been watching him and the formation had learned over eight weeks that when Gol’thar moved without speaking it meant the moment was exactly right and there was no time for anything except being in it.

The rear contact hit the column’s back with the full weight of five hundred warriors who had been waiting for precisely this geometry and who brought to it the additional investment of warriors who had been waiting too long and were correcting for that with interest.

* * * * *

The northern column’s commander was a major named Crewe who had served in two previous campaigns and who kept his composure with the professional determination of an officer who understood that composure in a trap was the difference between the trap killing everyone and the trap killing most people.

He pushed forward. He organized the rear guard from the companies that had maintained their formation best under the initial contact.

He called for the mages attached to his column to provide suppressive fire on the Roarer positions that were creating the forward contact’s suppression.

The mages provided what they could, which was less than the replacement equipment allowed for because replacement equipment, however freshly supplied, was equipment whose practitioners had not been working with it for the weeks that the original equipment’s practitioners had, and the loss of the spell matrices at the camp penetration was a loss not just of material but of the time that had gone into preparing them.

The mage fire suppressed the Roarer positions for forty seconds. Forty seconds was enough for the forward push to gain forty paces.

Then the Roarers reloaded and opened again, because a Roarer crew that takes cover for forty seconds and returns to its weapon is a Roarer crew that was never truly suppressed, only inconvenienced.

Crewe pushed for another hour before accepting the conclusion that the column’s professional instinct had been offering him since the twentieth minute: the road was not an exit. The road was the trap’s tube, and pushing along it pushed further into the tube rather than out of the tube.

He ordered the breakout. Not along the road but perpendicular to it, off the road’s eastern edge into the farmland where the formation’s width was not constrained and where the numerical superiority of three thousand against whatever was on the road’s flanks might assert itself.

The perpendicular breakout succeeded in the sense that it got the column off the road. It succeeded in the further sense that it moved three thousand soldiers from the interior of the trap into the open ground where the Horde’s warriors, who had been waiting on exactly this decision since the ambush began, met them with the combination of formation discipline and personal ferocity that had cost the depression engagement eleven hundred and forty dead.

It cost the perpendicular breakout six hundred dead in forty minutes.

Crewe regrouped what remained and sent a runner back to Aldrath’s command with the assessment that the northern column required immediate relief or immediate permission to withdraw northward on its own initiative.

Aldrath sent the permission. He was already managing two other columns that were reporting similar situations on their respective approach routes, and the eastern column’s reports from inside the valley had stopped arriving twenty minutes ago, which was a silence that communicated more than any report would have.

The four-column convergence plan’s results were tabulated at the end of the day: eight hundred and ninety soldiers killed, six hundred and forty wounded. One column inside the valley still unaccounted for. Three columns returned to the depression camp battered, reorganized, and in need of the rest that the combined force’s new operational tempo was not providing.

Khao’khen received the day’s numbers from Sakh’arran that evening and sat with them.

"We are winning," Sakh’arran said. Not with satisfaction. With the flat accuracy of the campaign’s accountant.

"We are winning today," Khao’khen said. "The question is whether today’s winning is enough."