Chapter 46.4: War with the Oruks - A Great Battle Ahead
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month IX: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 9th Month
---
Noticing That Something Is Wrong
The defenders of the Southern Beastmen Tribes Chiefdom were not giving ground easily.
The Oruks had only expected a stretch of walls and archers and a terrified population that would barricade itself inside and wait. What they got instead was a solid defensive line that had clearly been thought about in advance by people who had been anticipating exactly this kind of attack for some time. The chiefdom's own siege machines (ballista like) targeted the enemy trebuchets the moment they came into range, trading projectiles in a long-range contest that neither side could afford to lose. The arrows came down in continuous sheets, beastfolk archers cycling in shifts to maintain pressure on the Oruk formations massing below. The Beastfolk War Mages — the rare individuals in the chiefdom's population who could focus their elemental capabilities through pure magic alone rather than it being a combat-integrated technique — directed fire, wood and earth elemental magic where the damage would be most useful, though the Oruk archer units were making that a rather more dangerous occupation and they could not be careless about their positioning.
When the Oruks moved to the walls directly, they came with hooked chains thrown to catch on the simple wall's upper edge, and they climbed. The defenders superheated the metal. Fire elementalists ran their heat through the chain surfaces until the iron went from black to orange, and the Oruks who were fifteen feet up and halfway to the top discovered what happened when the thing you were gripping with all your weight became significantly hotter in an instant. Falling down from that height wasn't all that much but the screaming it carried gave some of the strong Oruks at the back a good laugh, at the expense of their own comrades' demise.
For those who somehow made it high enough to reach the twenty foot wooden wall ramparts, there were spears waiting for them to be pushed back down. The beastfolk on the walls were not passive in this — they were at the edge, watching for anything that cleared the top, and their reach with pole weapons was enough to deny the ledge to anything that arrived already weakened by the climb.
The battering ram was the ongoing problem.
It was a well-constructed piece of equipment. The frame was heavy and properly reinforced, designed to absorb the retaliatory fire that any reasonably prepared defender would aim at it, and whoever had built it had done the job properly. Fireballs had scorched it without collapsing it. Earth spikes from the mages below had cracked sections but were not able to break the operational mechanism. It was still continuously battering on the rainforced gates.
The Oruks were seriously pressing the situation to forward their own ambitions. But the defenders have managed to hold the line for now, but holding something this size for this long was a different problem from repelling it, and the arithmetic of attrition always eventually resolved in one direction.
Then the sections of wall that had been managing the southeastern approach started to falter.
It was not the walls themselves that started to weaken first. No, the structure was still intact, still sound, still doing what it was designed to do. Instead it was the warriors manning it that came short. They were moving differently — it was sluggish and slow like a person with a fever, it was a specific type of movement of people making an effort to do what normally required them no effort at all. A few had sat down entirely. One had let his weapon drop without appearing to notice that he had done it.
The elder observing from the command position behind the wall had seen enough battlefields to know that this was not ordinary fatigue. He did not know what it was, but he knew what ordinary battle exhaustion looked like and this was not it. He immediately called for the mages and their healers to check on them.
---
Kieran
The mage who arrived first was named Kieran — one of the chiefdom's few dedicated pure mages, trained for magical assessment rather than combat casting, with a sensitivity to mana flow that made him the right person for a diagnosis problem, a healer also came with him.
They examined the nearest affected warrior. Kieran traced the mana circulation through his assessment skills, following the pathways through the warrior's body with the focused attention of someone reading text in a language he had learned thoroughly. What he found was something abnormal in a way that made him doubt his eyes and performed a secondary examination to make sense of it.
The circulation of mana was weakening. It was not the cause from physical damage, nor from blood loss, nor from the ordinary depletion that any heavy fighting would have produced. It was because something foreign had invaded and was running through the mana veins themselves, and it was not diminishing as it moved through the body. It was like a virus that grows. Spreading from wherever it had entered and converting the mana it found inside the body into something that was no longer functioning as a mana.
The healer confirmed it from her own scan. The scanning skill she used was a light elemental form of magic that lit up the affected areas in colors that should not have been there — a contamination was running through the mana system like a dye introduced to a water supply, already present in both the veins and beginning to concentrate toward the processing organ at the center.
"Kieran," the healer said carefully, "find the source."
Kieran already understood. He asked where the warrior had been stationed before he fell. He was pointed to a section of the wall. He went there, brought his perceptive skills to bear on the environment around him with the full attention they deserved, and extended his nose — beastfolk sensory capability being what it was even in mages who had dedicated most of their practice to the magical rather than the physical.
He smelled the air around the entire place. There was a wrongness in the air around a cracked stone that had landed there during the second barrage. A particular quality to the smell that had nothing to do with rock or if the char of the fire used on it or the ordinary aftermath of a projectile's impact.
He scaled the wall section. He looked at the damage across the ramparts. The cracked stones were everywhere — dozens of them, distributed across every section that had taken fire in the second volley. And the wrongness was in all of them.
He came down and reported to Chieftain Midoka directly.
"Chieftain. The Oruks are using some form of magical power I do not understand or have information of. They laced it into the stones and hurled them at us. It is affecting everyone who was near the impact points."
Midoka absorbed this. "Then we must destroy those stones. What element breaks it?"
"I am not certain, Chieftain. My best assessment is that it originates from the dark elements. I don't have the specific name of what type of magic it is, I cannot confirm the specific type without more time."
"Then get every light warrior mage we have and start destroying those stones. Now."
The healer cut in before Midoka could issue the next order. "Chief. It may be too late for some of the affected. The warriors who were closest to the impact points have already developed symptoms beyond weakness. We need to prioritize healing the afflicted before anything else, or we will lose them."
Midoka's jaw tightened. "How many have been affected so far?"
"By our count, approximately five hundred are already showing some level of affection. Many are still manageable. But the ones who were standing closest..." She did not finish the sentence, which was its own answer.
"Damn it." He made the calculation fast. "Tell our earth elementalists to move the contaminated stones to the center courtyard and bury them deep. We cannot pull the warriors off the walls to do it ourselves. The light mages should start on purifying the afflicted. Healers slow the progress of this abomination from everyone else that is affected."
It was not a perfect solution. It was not close to a perfect solution. Ten light elementalists in the entire chiefdom was not a number that would be able to adequately address five hundred affected warriors with any speed. But it was what they had, and the alternative was doing nothing, which would produce more deaths than they would have wished.
---
Rokruk
The situation changed for the worse in the medical area before it had time to improve.
The warriors who had been moved there for treatment — the ones whose corruption had progressed furthest into their organs before anyone understood what was happening — had reached a point where the Chaos Magic had done what it did when it finished converting the mana veins into corrupted mana and had arrived at the source of production. The mana core, that was invaded and was corrupted, it stopped functioning as a processing organ for the body that filters the mana it takes from the outside for the person to be able use it and the afflicted organ became something else entirely: it now became a generator of the same chaotic energy that had entered it, pumping that energy back through a body that was no longer being guided by a rational mind.
Three of the patients erupted simultaneously, they were in a furious madness as if their very own thoughts were consumed by madness, they began attacking, biting, punching and more wild erratic movements that shouldn't have been normally possible.
The word for what happened was not a medical term. There was no clean medical term for a being whose mana core had been fully converted by Chaos Magic and who was now moving through a crowded medical area with the unguided, total-force violence of something that had lost the capacity to make distinctions between friend and foe or between action and consequence. They hit indiscriminately and they hit hard, because corruption did not diminish the physical capability — it only removed the judgment governing it, while slowly consuming the person until they die.
The medical area became a catastrophic scene in the span of about twelve seconds.
Healers who had been focused on other ppatients found themselves dealing with patients who were no longer patients in any functional sense. Light elementalists who had been in the middle of purification work had to abandon it to protect themselves. Two beastfolk who had been helping with the wounded were knocked into the ground before they understood what was happening, with one of them being grievously injured.
The call for one of the Warrior Heroes went out immediately.
Rokruk arrived at a speed that suggested he had been close and had heard enough of the chaos to be moving before the formal request reached him. He was one of the ten Warrior Heroes of the Southern Beastmen Tribes — the champion-tier fighters, the individuals whose combat capabilities had elevated them above the general warrior population through a combination of natural talent and hard-won experience. He was built for this in a way that the healers and mages were not.
He stopped one of the converted warriors mid-charge with a grip that communicated clearly which of them was physically stronger, he took in the image of the scene with the rapid assessment of someone who had seen bad situations before, and started asking questions while simultaneously managing the individual he had just restrained.
The healer came to him with the information in a rush. What the corruption did, what the end state looked like, how many were showing advanced symptoms. The numbers. The prognosis for those who had progressed beyond what the light mages could safely purify.
Rokruk looked at the warrior he was holding, who was no longer the person he had been a day ago and was not going to be that person again given how far the conversion had progressed, and made a decision that anyone who had fought in enough battles would recognize as the merciful one.
"Tsk." The sound came out of him with the particular quality of disgust that a warrior felt when the battlefield stopped being a contest of strength and became something that was simply ugly. "Those insufferable curs! I would slaughter every last one of them for this!"
He went to work. Taking down those who were too far gone to be saved, it was not the part of a warrior's function and creed he enjoyed or acknowledged, but Rokruk did not flinch from it. He was efficient, he was as quick as the situation allowed, and the look on his face said everything that needed to be said about his opinion of Oruks who won battles by turning people's own bodies against them.
The ones who could still be saved, he protected the space for. The light mages returned to their work. The healers continued slowing what they could not yet stop.
Above the walls, the Oruks pressed harder. They had a sense of the disorder inside — not the specific details, but the indicators that things were already starting to go wrong behind those walls, and Agroba's forces were not creatures who let an opportunity go unexplored. The pace of their assault increased.
---
Kirara
August and Brenn, who were riding Finnester and Kirpy, had dropped the rest of the combined force at the rear of the Oruk position and had gone back up. Finnester and Kirpy were at altitude, providing the elevated observation that allowed them to read the full geometry of the siege — the trebuchet positions, the battering ram's approach angle, the distribution of the Oruk formations across the chiefdom's perimeter, and the gaps in that distribution that a rear assault could exploit.
It was in the air above the chiefdom's side of the engagement that they encountered the Harpees.
The Harpee company had been providing aerial support to the defenders from the moment the siege began, and they were still at it — circling, diving, directing wind-element attacks at the Oruk formations massing at the wall base, disrupting the chain-throwing teams where they could. They were not the most elegant flyers in the world. That distinction belonged to creatures like Finnester and Kirpy, who were built for the air from every structural element of their bodies. Harpees flew because every member of their species was born with the wind element, which they channeled through a body that was otherwise human in its proportions — feathered from neck to hairline, with plumes where another beastfolk species would have had ordinary fur or hair, and with hands that functioned less as hands in flight and more as supplementary surfaces alongside their wind-assisted wings. Their taloned feet were their primary aerial weapons and their most reliable landing gear.
It worked of course, but it did not look like the effortless aerial mastery of an eagle, and at the altitude they were operating from it was enough to cause meaningful disruption to formations that had not brought serious anti-air capability that was able to reach them at that height.
The company captain found August and Bren before they found her.
Her name was Kirara, and her human-tongue was functional in the way that the languages of people who had to communicate across other species tended to become functional — it was broken in its grammar, but accurate in its intent. She came alongside Finnester and spoke quickly, because the situation did not allow for a leisurely briefing.
"You are the ones from behind. We thought you were lost. Retreat maybe." She looked at August with the direct assessment of someone who had been watching the siege from above long enough to have opinions about what was needed. "Chieftain Midoka will be glad. Princess is okay?"
"She is with the main group at the rear. She is fine."
The relief in Kirara's expression was brief and real and quickly set aside because there was work to do. "The rear attack — I think it is good. The wall defenders are getting weak inside, I can see it. Something is wrong with them. If you can stop the machines from the back it will help." She shifted her angle slightly, scanning the formation below with practiced eyes. "But be careful when you fly low. They have prepared for enemies from the air. There are defenses below that you should know of."
August took note of it. "We will. Tell Chieftain Midoka that we are here. Tell him that we will assault their rear shortly."
Kirara made the sound that served as an Oruk-world equivalent of an acknowledged order among people who did not have time for longer words, banked away from them and went back toward the chiefdom's side of the engagement.
August looked down at the Oruk formation below him and began mapping the attack geometry in his head. The trebuchets were the priority — remove the ranged bombardment capability and the walls would stop taking the battering from the (chaos-laced) stone projectiles. Along with that, they would focus on the enemy's supply lines and their rear guard. Reduce the coherence of the siege from behind while the chiefdom's forces held from within.
He sent the plan through the Party Chat to the ground team below.
---
Agroba Takes Notice
Agroba da Kill Mongar was not satisfied.
His forces were advancing albeit slowly, which was the correct direction for his raiding horde to advance, and the chaos magic from the warlocks had clearly done something to the defenders because the wall response had been degrading for the past half hour. But advancing slowly when you had the numbers he had was a problem of its own kind. He wanted the walls down. He wanted the chiefdom open. He wanted to be inside it before the end of the day, but with the current rate of progress was not going to produce that.
Then he felt it.
It arrived in his awareness the way that genuinely dangerous things arrived for someone who had survived long enough at the top of the Oruk hierarchy to have learned the difference between threats that could be managed and threats that required personal attention. A presence at his rear, approximately a kilometer out, with the particular weight of something that had been suppressing itself and was now deliberately releasing its own terrifying aura for others to clearly see.
He had already felt this presence before. It was at the war camp a few days ago, when his generals had come back injured and unable to explain exactly how something had moved through them fast enough that their defensive skills had barely registered the attack before it landed.
And that presence had returned to threaten their rear and it had brought other ones with it.
Agroba then made his final assessment. The presence at his rear was the same category of entity as the presence at his front — inside the chiefdom, behind the walls, the strong one he had assumed was the beastfolk chieftain. Grandmaster rank was not a concept in the Oruk hierarchy. Oruks measured strength by their color and what they had eaten and what battles they had survived, which was a different framework but arrived at the same place in practice. What stood behind him was comparable to a Warlord King like him. Not many beings in his experience had been comparable to a Warlord King, and even fewer still had shown up bold enough to challenge him voluntarily at the rear of a force of nine thousand strong war horde while carrying that level of capability.
Agroba found this interesting in the way that creatures built for violence found strong opponents interesting: as a problem he wanted to solve personally.
He gave his third general command of the siege line with instructions to maintain the assault. Then he turned away from the walls, gathered two of his other generals and two hundred of his strongest warriors, and began moving toward the rear of his own formation.
The presence at the back of his camp was going to need his direct attention.
Below, on the ground at the tree line edge northeast of the Oruk host, August was finishing his read of the enemy formation. He had already registered the movement from the Oruk center — especially the large figure, with the deep red coloration that marked it as something that had been eating its way up the hierarchy for a very long time, moving toward him with what could only be described as enthusiasm.
He recognized the feeling of a mutual assessment. He had been in enough of these moments to know when something dangerous had decided that he was worth its personal time.
Around him, the combined force of Talon One and Two was in position and waiting for the word. Exhausted, patched up, running on the last reserves of two days of continuous operation.
August looked at the Oruk king making his way toward the rear of his own formation and thought, briefly, about what the next few minutes were going to look like.
Then he thought about the beastfolk on those walls and what was happening to them.
"All right," he said. "We will start moving. Group One with me. Groups Two and Three, will target the enemies trebuchets and their rear supply will be your targets. Move fast, hit hard, and don't stop moving. A direct fight would be deadly in the middle of enemy territory, and most of all survive and let us all return home."
He did not wait to see if they acknowledged it. He was already heading toward what was dangerously coming for them.