Chapter 46.5: War with the Oruks - Agroba Versus August (1)
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month IX: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 9th Month
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Two Monsters
Agroba da Kill Mongar had been hearing stories since before he understood what those stories meant.
His father had told them the way that Oruk fathers told things — not as entertainment but as instruction, as the passing of important information from one generation to the next through the medium of violence and the glorification of it. The great warriors of their own warband. The names of other Oruk factions. And occasionally, in the way of a man who respected what he respected regardless of its origin, stories about the great fighters from other species. The ones who had stood at the edge of what a living body could do and pushed past it.
Agroba had loved those stories most.
Not because they featured Oruks. But because they featured the thing underneath the Oruk, the thing that ran through every species that had ever produced something exceptional — the raw and irreducible fact of strength that came from within rather than from a title or wealth or the circumstances of one's birth. A king who was strong because he was a king and had the strength to wield thousands if he wished, was nothing compared to a warrior who was strong because he had made himself to become that strong was something that Agroba understood and respected at a level that bypassed language.
He had spent three hundred and fifty years making himself into that kind of being. He was, by his own reckoning, still in the prime of it.
He had eaten his own father when the old man died. That was not sentiment — it was the highest honor the Berdeng Oruks gave to a warrior who had lived a life worth consuming. Through his father's death, Agroba had taken the final portion of a great warrior's accumulated strength into himself, and through the decades that followed, through war after war, campaign after campaign, through eating everything that was worth eating and surviving everything that was worth surviving, he had built the coloration and the reputation that he carried now.
He had never lost.
He had been in situations where losing seemed more likely than not, and he had found his way through those by exactly the same method he had always used: by wanting victory more completely than whatever was in front of him could sustain. That want — specifically, precisely, in its most physical form — was the thing he was feeling now, walking through the tree line toward the presence that had registered at the back of his awareness like a fire lit in a dark room. Someone or something was over there that had hidden its true potential behind a restraint he could not fully explain, and that restraint made it more interesting, not less.
A warrior who could restrain themselves was a warrior who understood what they carried was strength that is not normal.
He was smiling the way Oruks smiled when they had found what they had been looking for.
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The Setup
He arrived at the clearing he had made — he had cleared it himself, briefly and efficiently, by the simple method of removing the trees with his war axes while he waited — and found that his opponent (August Finn) had also just arrived there.
Agroba looked at the strong human. That human was in his measurement six foot nine, which in human terms was average and in Oruk terms was a child. Built lean and muscular in the way of someone who had optimized for speed and agility rather than mass, which was a different approach from Agroba's own but he knew not to underestimate someone who looked skinny and scrawny to his eyes. The human also had worn an armor that was as he registered it — not ordinary. The material had a quality that his instincts noted even if his understanding of metallurgy was not refined enough to name what he was looking at. Something in it was alive in a way that metal was not supposed to be alive.
He had also heard the name of a being that had wreaked havoc on many bandits and criminals in neighboring regions. The Blurred Devil. The reports from his generals had been short on the finer details and was instead long on the damage that being had produced, but the name had come through clearly enough as something that was very powerful and was now standing in front of him.
"Hekhekhek!" Agroba did not attempt to disguise the pleasure in it. "Human! You will know of Agroba da Kill Mongar's power today! I will eat you after I kill you!" He let that settle, and then added the rest because it was true and he meant it and there was no reason not to say it. "And as for your puny little friends — they will be bone picks for my teeth! And your women will be enslaved and bred to carry Oruk seed!"
He said it in the common human tongue because he wanted the human to understand every word and instill fear.
It worked, somewhat.
August Finn, who by reputation and by every observation Agroba had been able to make about him was a person of notable self-control, went still in the particular way that people went still when something had gotten past whatever they used to manage their reactions. The anger that came into his face was not the hot, immediate anger of someone caught off guard. It was the colder kind. The kind that settled in and made decisions even if there was a mask hiding it.
"I will take your head, Oruk."
It was not said loudly. It was said in the way of someone stating a fact they intended to make true.
Agroba laughed. "I shall play with you, human! Hekhekhek!"
Behind Agroba, his two surviving generals had taken their hundred warriors each and moved to intercept the rest of August's team. He had told them what he wanted clearly: no one was to disturb this fight. This was his, and he would not have it muddied by the noise of a general engagement around it. They had understood. They were not stupid — they were injured and angry, which was actually a functional state for Oruk generals in combat — and they moved towards their own targets.
The clearing was theirs alone.
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The First Exchange
August did not come forward immediately. He had made the command transfer to Erik and Ragnar before he came to this spot, and to Benethar for his own group, and those were done. His attention was here now, entirely here, and the first thing it produced was a cold calculation.
He asked his Personal System to run some numbers about his armors coverage while he maintained the distance between himself and Agroba and watched how the Oruk king move.
What came back was an honest computation of a machine in the way that the system had always been honest on its calculations: the armor's joints were the main liability at least for his current opponent. Every set of armor had them, because an armor that did not allow movement was not armor, it was a coffin, and the compromise between coverage and mobility created the seam lines that experienced opponents learned to find, although August's armor covers most of it with a metal that could move still it could only do so much. But the saving grace of it would be the layered Mytherium construction which allowed it to absorb any impact it receives and was able to multiply what is already covered, and it covered almost everything, even those weak seamlines.
Still with an opponent like Agroba the joints were at seventy percent odds of a critical failure if Agroba's axes found them.
Everywhere else, he would survive the hit as the armor would dissipate the damage, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't get injured, as he would still feel its impact. Everywhere else, the Mytherium would do what it was made to do.
That meant the approach was not complicated, even if executing it was going to be. In summary do not let the axes reach the joints. And do not pretend that the gap between almost everything else and everything was smaller than it was.
He released and set his internal power limiter at fifty percent — up from the thirty percent he had been operating at through the guerilla phase of this operation, because this situation did not call for conservation. It called for more. The rest would be available as the fight developed and he understood better what the fight required.
His first weapon of choice was always his bow, he started with it as a child so he has the most complete understanding of it, it's weaknesses and how to utilize it better.
The current range probe he was doing was not intended to win the exchange. It was intended to generate information. He needed to see how Agroba moved at distance, how he registered incoming projectiles, what he prioritized when something was coming at him from a direction he had not already closed. August put arrows at him with the steady economy of someone using the tool correctly for its purpose — not to penetrate, because penetrating Agroba's armor at range was not the goal, but to observe what the penetration attempts revealed about the armor's response and Agroba's response to the armor's response.
What he saw was that Agroba did not dodge. He did not shift his angle or reduce his profile or use any of the standard physical adjustments that people who had spent time on the receiving end of ranged fire had learned to employ. He simply walked forward towards it, it was a confident stride of a being that knows it wouldn't be able to kill him. The arrows hit him. Some found gaps at the edges of his pauldrons or the lower sections of his leg armor, and those drew blood, but the hole closed within seconds.
The healing properties of Oruks that August heard of was real and it was faster than what he had anticipated and there was not going to be a single solution to this problem.
August set the bow aside and pulled his spear, stepping the engagement into medium range, and the exchange that followed was not clean in the way that most fights were not clean. Agroba's axes produced a sound as they moved — not quite whistling, more like the air complaining about being displaced this fast by something this large — and the first swing came in with the weight of something that had never needed to refine its motion because its motion had always been sufficient. It was a tremendous swing. It caught nothing, because August had already moved out of the line it was going to pass through, but the displacement of air from it was enough to be felt even at a distance.
He stabbed with the spear. It went in at the gap between Agroba's upper arm and the shoulder plate, because that was where his line of approach left open, and Agroba looked at it the way a person looked at a mildly inconvenient thing that had happened to them and did not particularly matter. The wound closed within a second. While Agroba kept moving.
So that was what their fight was going to look like for now.
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Understanding What You Are Fighting
There were two things August's Personal System flagged as the early exchanges continued that changed how he thought about the problem in front of him.
The first was the armor.
It was absorbing skills. Not all of them — the low-tier outputs went into it and did not come back out in the form of damage, they went somewhere else, and that somewhere else was to Agroba himself. The armor was not merely protective. It was a conversion mechanism. Magic that hit it at low enough intensity was captured and stored, and the stored energy went to the wearer. When August stepped his output up to mid-tier, the damage got through, but the absorption was still happening at the margins — partial capture, partial transfer — and Agroba was receiving benefit from everything that did not fully land.
There was a limit to it. The storage had a ceiling, beyond which it would need to discharge before it could capture again. The discharge appeared to be a choice: a single burst of everything stored at once, or a sustained boost over roughly two minutes that amplified the wearer's output before the need to recharge again. It was a system designed for a fighting style that absorbed damage and converted it into fuel, which was the exact fighting style Agroba employed and had presumably employed for the entirety of his life.
The second thing was the natural berserk progression of Oruks.
Every hit that landed on Agroba, whether it came through or was partially blocked, was feeding something within him. Not just his strength but his overall state. He was getting angrier in the specific way that Oruks got angrier as a fight went on, which was not the diminishing anger of someone spending emotion but the accumulating kind, the kind that built up until it became something structurally different from the emotion it had started as. His movements were still simple — that had not changed. But they were faster than they had been at the start, and the force behind each swing was not the same force that had been in the first one.
He was growing inside that fight, with every exchange that they did.
This presented a problem that was not going to resolve itself through a battle of attrition, because fighting in a battle of attrition would always favor Agroba's direction. Every minute of sustained engagement was a minute in which Agroba became more of what he already was but a lot more stronger, and August's resources were finite in a way that Agroba's apparently were not.
August kept moving. He kept the distance where he wanted it, used his full arsenal of mid-level skills to probe the armor's limits and map which angles produced genuine damage versus which produced capture and conversion, and built the picture of what defeating this thing actually required. It was definitely through a prolonged battle. Nor a volume of hits that accumulated into an outcome. It should be one clean, total, irreversible hit to something that could not be healed from.
The other is the destruction of Agroba's mana core. Or something else that met the same criterion: complete and instantaneous and irrecoverable.
He now had a framework to work on and he kept fighting.
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Agroba's Proposal
"Are you done figuring it out, little human?"
Agroba had stopped advancing for a moment and was standing in the wreckage of the last several exchanges, which had reduced the trees at the edges of his previous clearing radius to additional debris. His axes had passed through three separate trunks in the last minute, not by targeting them but simply by swinging at August's direction and finding the trees in the swing path instead. The forest around the cleared area was becoming a different kind of cleared area.
He was smiling. The murderous quality of it was something that could be physically felt at a radius of five kilometers, which was not just August imagining things — the pressure of that expression had rolled out from Agroba like a weather event and washed over the chiefdom in the distance and over every living thing within range, which had reacted accordingly.
"Should we finally start?"
August did not answer. He was thinking about mana cores and the geometry of reaching one inside a creature that could heal at the insane rate that Agroba healed himself, inside armor that converted incoming energy into the wearer's strength, inside a frame that was ten feet of densely packed muscle with the accumulated dietary history of three hundred and fifty years of consuming things that had made him harder to kill with each one.
He was thinking about what fifty percent of his current output could and could not do.
He was thinking about when to begin using the rest of it.
Agroba, reading the silence correctly as a fighter who had been in enough fights to know what different kinds of silence meant, seemed satisfied that the preliminary portion of this was finished. He rolled his neck, adjusted his grip on both axes, and set his feet.
The clearing went quiet only for a moment.
Then it stopped being quiet as Agroba used his leg power to explode towards August's direction.
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The Real Battle
What changed when both of them stopped treating it as a probe was not subtle.
August came in with the full weight of his mid-tier arsenal applied simultaneously rather than in sequence, using his Personal System's party buff modifiers and armor amplification to push the ceiling of what mid-tier output meant in his specific case, which was not the same mid-tier that most mid-tier users were producing. The Mytherium amplification ran underneath everything he did, multiplying the existing power by the fifty percent that was built into every surface and seam of the armor, and the result was that what he was bringing forward was not quite what Agroba's armor had calibrated for in the early exchanges.
Some of it got through in ways that the early testing had not.
Agroba took the hits with the expression of a creature that registers pain the same way most people register being tapped on the shoulder — as information, not as an impediment. He swung back. A tree went down in the arc that August vacated. Another followed it. The ground where August had been standing a moment before was being rearranged by the passage of two war axes moving at a speed that two war axes that size had no right to be moving at.
But August was no longer there each time.
He was somewhere Agroba had not finished predicting, doing what he did when someone was throwing the kind of force at him that required him to be somewhere else entirely and make contact from a different location they had not anticipated yet. It was not elegant. It was not the kind of swordsmanship that could be drawn in clean lines afterward. It was the compressed version of everything he had learned in the Great Forest, applied at the limit of what he could currently bring to it.
Agroba began to glow at the edges. Not from any external light source — from the inside, in the specific way that Oruks began to glow when their berserk accumulation crossed a certain threshold and the additional strength stopped being a quality of the muscle and started being something that expressed itself in the visible spectrum.
August noted it and adjusted himself accordingly.
The fight was not close to being finished. But both of them now knew exactly who they were dealing with.
And in the next few exchanges, only the one whose drive to survive will be victorious.