Chapter 46.6: War with the Oruks - Agroba Versus August (2)
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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The Others' Battle
August was not the only one currently in a difficult situation.
The two hundred elite Oruk warriors that Agroba had peeled off from the main force before pursuing August had not been sent to stand around and observe. They had been sent to deal with the rest of the team, and they were doing exactly that with the particular commitment of creatures that did not recognize the concept of insufficient effort. Two of Agroba's injured generals were among them, which elevated the problem considerably beyond what two hundred Oruk warriors without general-class leadership would have represented.
The three groups had been forced to collapse into one. There was no longer enough space between them and the encircling force to maintain the distributed formation that gave each group independent operational flexibility. Erik had absorbed the command naturally, without anyone formally announcing it, because Erik was the next person in command to August who managed situations in his absence and started organizing responses to them while everyone else was still finishing their assessment of the situation.
"Begin positioning our rookie members in the center. We cannot allow a full encirclement. Everyone else forms up around them."
"Erik," Adam said, from somewhere to his left where Adam tended to be when things were pressing in from the front, "it seems we have already been surrounded."
Erik acknowledged this with the expression of someone who had been hoping to get the order in before the situation reached that point and had just narrowly missed the window to execute it. "Then we need to un-surround ourselves. Bren, I need eyes."
Bren and Kirpy had already gone up. The response came back through the Party Chat within ninety seconds, which was fast enough that Bren had clearly started looking before he was asked.
"There is a valley northeast of your current position, approximately three hundred meters. The terrain there narrows the approach angles. You would not have an open flank problem if you can reach it."
"Then we need to breach our current encirclement. Ask Finnester and Kirpy to do so — buy us time. Bren, I need that approach held as long as you can manage."
What followed was not graceful. Breaking an encirclement with a mixed force that included newer members who were still finding their ceiling under pressure was not the kind of tactical problem that had a clean solution. But they also had veterans with them, especially Adam who specializes in defensive manuevers.
Adam Peerce moved to the front of the breakout formation and became, in all functional terms, the reason the rest of them were able to move at all. He took blows that the formation behind him could not have absorbed and kept moving. His armor, which had been built for exactly this kind of role, worked the way it was designed to work — the defensive enchantments activated on contact, the layered materials doing what they were supposed to do, and they weren't just any random steel plate but materials they had acquired from the Beast Dominion War's that had been harvested and was turned by August's Personal System into his teams armor and weapons. The armor when something strikes them hard enough would distribute the energy rather than let it concentrate into that area. Rexy and Toto and their other tanks ran the flanks, the Grimfangs providing additional bodies that the Oruk warriors had to deal with rather than step through, and from above, Kirpy and Finnester drove diving runs into the formations that were trying to close the gaps that he breakout was creating.
Twenty of the two hundred were dead within the span of five minutes.
The remaining one hundred and eighty two remain persistent in their pursuit. Oruks that had been hand-selected by an Oruk Warlord King as his personal bodyguard were not creatures that cowered when the situation was becoming unfavorable to them and instead they adjusted accordingly. They kept coming and coming despite the injuries they sustained for they too could heal almost instantly.
"Shit, these damn bastards are quite persistent," Erik said, in the tone of someone stating an observable fact rather than complaining about it.
But thankfully within the next 10 minutes they managed to reach the valley. Bren had actually found them a good position to defend — a natural terrain feature that compressed the approach, put stone at their backs, and reduced the angles that the Oruk numbers could use to press from multiple directions simultaneously. They were still in a hard spot. But they were no longer being threatened by being completely surrounded and having to focus their attention on multiple fronts.
At least for now.
---
Leading the Fight North
August had been purposely directing his engagement with Agroba away from the chiefdom for the past several minutes, which Agroba had not noticed because Agroba was not the kind of fighter who tracked environmental context during a fight he was excited about. He was the kind of fighter who would continuously move toward the opponent in front of him.
August in comparison was the kind of fighter who would carefully consider the surrounding resource of that place base of the settlements he was responsible for and had planned to move the entire engagement five kilometers north of the chiefdom instead before Agroba registered that they were getting further away from the battlefield rather than get closer.
The forest around them had taken considerable damage. Agroba's axes had removed trees the way a woodcutter removed brush — casually, incidentally, as a consequence of swinging in directions that happened to have trees in them. The mid-tier exchange had produced craters where certain skill collisions had landed, scorched sections where elemental output had found purchase, and a general impression that something very large and very angry had been using this particular stretch of forest as its own playground.
Both of them were still standing almost unscathed in all honesty. That was the honest summary of where the fight currently stands.
August had already mapped what he needed to do. The enemy's armor's absorption thresholds. Its regeneration rate's real ceiling, which was faster than initial assessment had suggested but not instantaneous in the way that mythology about Oruks sometimes made it sound. Its berserk accumulation and what it produced in Agroba's movement as the exchanges continued. The two-minute discharge window after the armor expended its stored energy. He had a working picture of the problem in front of him and what the problem required to end it.
That is also the reason why he put five kilometers of distance between their fight and the chiefdom.
And then he stopped in his tracks.
Agroba stopped as well, a moment later, because something had changed in that moment when the human had stopped moving. The space between them began to communicate itself as warning information to Agroba's nervous system, that gut feeling that had kept him alive for three hundred and fifty years. That same system was not something that is capable of a normal language, no it was something more ancient and built into each creature. It did not frame what it was detecting in terms that could be easily articulated. But it sent its signal clearly enough that Agroba's body stopped moving and stayed where it was.
It was, for the first time in his life, that the signal had told him that: the thing across from you is more dangerous than what you have initially thought of.
Agroba did not have a word for what he was feeling. He had never needed one before. Oruks who had survived for this long and had the red color and reputation as he did were beings that produced this response in others rather than them receiving it themselves. He had been the generating end of exactly this experience for every opponent he had ever faced before. But ironically he did not have the same internal vocabulary to identify what it was when it ran through his own body. He knew only that his hands felt strange and his body had gone still without his permission.
August's passive skill had not been working at its full effect before this moment. Fear the Beast, the armor's exclusive passive skill — the one that targeted beings who had intended harm to August with a specific, instinct-level response that bypassed the rational mind and operated on the older architecture underneath it — had been operating at diminished capacity throughout the entire guerrilla campaign and the fight thus far, because August had been operating at a diminished capacity. The limiter on his power had been the reflection on the limiter on what the passive could have projected early on.
Then August decided to release all of it.
Not just fifty percent. Not a measured increment appropriate to the assessed threat level. All of it, at once. The full weight of what he currently was, was something unmanaged and unfamiliar even to him in this form, because he had not experienced that full extent of his power in sometime. His Personal System also did not warn him and he had not asked it whether this was an advisable thing to do.
The forest responded first. The trees within a radius that was difficult to estimate from inside it settled into a specific quality of stillness and that forests did not usually achieve this much stillness and type of threat level outside from its own local predators presence. The birds that had been audible in the canopy were no longer making noises. Small movements in the undergrowth also had completely stopped in their tracks.
Agroba's body informed him very clearly that whatever it had been categorizing the human as prior to this moment was wrong and it required an immediate revaluation of its threat level. The categories it offered in replacement were things like, (do not approach and leave immediately and you are going to die), except that Agroba's body was not being metaphorical.
The presence from the unmasked human in front of him hit him in a specific way that beings at the very top of a food chain hit everything below it in evolutionary terms: as a biological fact rather than an opinion.
For the first time in his life, Agroba da Kill Mongar did not want to be where he currently was.
He did not have a word for what he was feeling. But he had the feeling, and his body was reacting to it whether he wanted it to or not.
Or simply put what he was experiencing currently was — FEAR.
---
The Real Disparity in Power
August had never had much occasion to think carefully about exactly where he stood relative to the people who had trained him or who existed at the levels he was working toward.
The understanding he had of it was approximate and came from years of training under people who were careful not to reduce him to simply measurable numbers because numbers were a way of making the gap seem fixed rather than closeable. What he knew, from enough exchanges and enough honest feedback to his power, had assembled a rough picture of what it was in comparison: he was one fifth of Grandmaster Ben's overall strength at his current level. Approximately one sixth of Grandmaster Miles Daemon's. One quarter of what Grandmaster Flamespyre represented when he had seen her work during their training encounters. And relative to Aetherwing, who had been growing in power at a rate that August could not fully track since their initial meeting, he was somewhere around one twentieth.
These were not numbers that produced humility so much as they produced a sense of scale. The world was larger, much larger than most people understood from inside it.
What this also meant was that Agroba da Kill Mongar, who was a genuine grandmaster-class entity by any reasonable measurement and who had never had a name applied to that status because no other grandmaster had ever formally acknowledged him as such, sat at approximately half to a third of what August was currently capable of without any restrictions in place.
Agroba had never known this. Simply because he had nothing to compare himself to that would have told him so.
But he was about to find out.
---
The First Strike
August did not give any speech like every strong character did before their battles. He was not one that announced what was coming for his enemies. He simply moved into their direction and delivered an overwhelming blow.
The name Blurred Devil had not been assigned arbitrarily. It was descriptive in the specific, literal sense of what happened when August moved at the speed the wind buffs produced on top of his own base movement capability at full output. The air around him was distorted. The image of him ceased to be a clean picture and became a smear of motion, a suggestion of where he had been rather than a clear record of where he was at that moment. The glowing green of his emerald eyes was the only element that remained consistently visible, because it moved with him rather than lagging behind the way everything else did.
He hit Agroba in the torso.
It was not a weapons technique, nor was it a skill with a name and a damage calculation. It was simply a full-body impact using a teep at full speed with the complete weight of what he currently was behind it, aimed at the center mass of something that had been standing approximately where he was looking and was still there when he arrived.
The sound it made was not a combat sound. It was closer to the sound that happens when two large natural forces meet at a speed that the surrounding environment registers as a catastrophic event.
Agroba went backwards. Not stepping backward, not staggering, not the controlled backwards movement of a fighter absorbing a hit through practiced technique. He went backward the way objects went backward when the force applied to them exceeded their capacity to remain where they were, he went flying. Trees came down in a line behind him as he passed through them, the trunks at his level snapping at the moment of contact and continuing to break at intervals after he had already moved past them. The momentum did not stop at twenty meters or fifty. It continued for one hundred and fifty before the accumulated resistance of the environment brought it to a halt, an explosive earth shattering one.
The armor had managed the impact to a certain degree. The Mytherium surface on August's striking foot surface had met the enchanted plates on Agroba's chest, and the contest between the two materials had been resolved in the way that contacts between high-tier and slightly-lower-tier materials were resolved: the slightly-lower-tier one dented.
Agroba had felt his internal organs receive the destructive information about the impact.
He became unconscious for approximately three seconds. He came back from it to find August already standing over him, which told him that the human had covered the one hundred and fifty meters of debris-strewn distance between where the impact had happened and where he currently was while Agroba had been in the brief dark.
The healing was already moving through his body, working on what had been displaced and compressed and disrupted. It was fast. But it was not fast enough for the situation he was in.
He quickly activated the armor's stored reserves and his own berserk state simultaneously, which was the most complete defensive response available to him, and he brought both war axes to bear on the sword August already had in hand and was ready to strike him.
He braced the block with mana reinforcement. He gritted his teeth. The impact of the sword against both axes, with the mana reinforcement behind them, still sent him into the air again.
The axes came apart. Not just damaged but completely destroyed, the internal structure of the weapons gave up at the contact point with a material that had been made from things that were on a different tier than whatever the axes had been forged from. They had served him for over two hundred years. Sadly they did not survive that exchange.
He hit the ground for the second time and tried to stand. His body was in the process of repairing itself and did not yet have the full use of the regeneration speed that the repair was working on. He made it to one knee before August's hand found his throat and stopped the rest of the movement.
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The Reckoning
What followed was not a fight. It was August making good on something he had said before the first exchange of the day, and doing it methodically.
Agroba had been specific about his intentions regarding the people who were with August. He had said it in the common tongue deliberately, because he wanted to be understood. He had meant every word. August had believed him then and believed him now, and the anger that had settled into him when those words were first spoken had not gone anywhere in the intervening time.
He worked through it.
"I hear that Oruks like you like to play with their food," August said, between hits. "You torture them for a bit before you consume them. Wouldn't it be fair if I returned the favor on behalf of everyone who did not survive your courtesy?" He let the next hit land where it was going to land, on Agroba's body. "You are quite sturdy after all. I'm sure you can take it. Normally something your size would be dead by now. This time I want to make sure all those who have died by your cruelty will have their own vengeance and justice first."
He was not comfortable with this. He knew he was not comfortable with it. It was cruel by his own standards, and he had his principles. But when he thought about the things Agroba did, the things he had ordered to be done, the chaos magic in the stones and what it had done to the warriors in the chiefdom's medical area, the deaths of the beast folk and everyone else in the past who had been unfortunate enough to cross his destructive path. What fueled this more than anything else was Agroba's words had meant in the start of their fight about what the Oruk intended to do to his people if this fight had gone differently, the discomfortable anger did not produce a change of course.
He kept on beating this deplorable being.
Agroba, who by this point looked considerably less like the figure who had walked out of the tree line with such confident strides, with two war axes and three hundred and fifty years of undefeated record behind him, was now making sounds that his mouth was not cooperating with well enough to form into words. His face had taken enough direct hits to require more regeneration than the rest of his body was receiving simultaneously, which meant the facial repair was slower than usual, which meant what Agroba was trying to say was not coming out cleanly. (He was beaten to a pulp)
"Nuh... nuhh... pleahhh... mashterrr...."
August paused and looked at him.
A ten-foot hulking red Oruk Warlord King, lying on the ground beneath his feet, eyes streaming, nose running, having apparently lost control of various bodily functions that warriors of his reputation generally preferred not to lose control of in front of anyone. It was, objectively speaking, the most undignified thing August had witnessed in some time.
"Hmmmm…" August considered him with the detached assessment of someone trying to make a genuine decision rather than a performative one. "I suppose I could let you go. If you order your forces to return home and commit to never doing this again." He looked Agroba in the remaining functional eye. "Because if I hear about it afterward, you know what happens next."
Agroba nodded. The nod had the quality of a person who had just agreed to anything because that was the only option they had left. It was an earnest nod in its entirety even if the reasoning behind it was entirely self-interested, which was the only kind of earnest Oruks of his nature could produce.
August released him and began to walk away.
---
The End of It
He heard the shift in the air behind him. The particular change in atmospheric pressure that a creature of Agroba's size produced when it made the decision to move from a resting position to an attacking one. Agroba's body had been informing him for his entire life of what these moments felt like from the initiating end, and August had spent enough time around dangerous things that he recognized the mirror of that information from the receiving end.
Then August vanished from Agroba's sight.
Agroba, who had weighed his humiliation against his survival and found his humiliation the heavier of the two burdens, was in the middle of the motion. His fangs and crooked teeth were visible. His intention was clear. He had made his calculation: the distance was short, the human's back had been turned, the resources remaining in his own body were sufficient to the opportunity. Three hundred and fifty years of being the most dangerous thing in any room had produced a very powerful confidence in his ability to resolve situations like this one.
He was now experiencing what happened when that confidence ran directly into an incorrect assessment of the situation.
August did not even give him the full count of a second as he had estimated were available to him. Dorgon's Fang came out in the same motion as August's disappearance, forty inches of dark crimson metal with the veins of fire running through it like something that had never fully cooled from whatever fire had first made it. The arc that the blade took was clean and the outcome was immediate.
The head of Agroba da Kill Mongar left its previous position and did not return to it.
August stood there for a moment looking at what remained, and then did the thing that was necessary for an Oruk of this level to be able to no longer its absurdly powerful healing prowess — one with this level of regeneration was a threat to others existence, one whose tradition was to be consumed by his own kind to transfer his remaining strength forward. He used one of his fire magical skills. The comprehensive kind, applied to everything that remained, maintained until there was nothing that could be re-attached or consumed or otherwise used by someone else to carry this particular force of nature forward in a different form.
He watched Agroba's body burn from cinder to ash.
"This," he said, to no one in particular, "is why people call Oruks dumb. All that power, and the only thought underneath it is war and consumption. Greedy pieces of shit, the lot of you."
He put Dorgon's Fang away and checked the Party System for updates of his friends and other teammates.
---
The Valley
The news from Erik's group was not good, which he had anticipated.
While he hurriedly moved towards that direction, while also calling on Finnester who took flight immediately leaving the battlefield to fetch August, that also means that they now lack one or the deciding factors that made them survive for this long.
The valley Bren had found was three hundred meters of terrain that provided defensible angles but was now functioning as a very scenic location for a prolonged engagement between the combined Talon force and approximately ninety Oruk elite warriors still on their feet, plus two injured generals who had declined to stop being a threat despite their prior encounters with August's skill set.
The defensive formation had held for so long. Holding it had cost everyone something. Adam was at the front of it where he had been since the breakout from the encirclement, which meant Adam was the person who had absorbed the most of what the Oruks had been throwing at the formation's leading edge for the past however long this had been going on. His armor had done its job, it is apparent since he was still standing, although bleeding from all fronts. He has the look of a man who had chosen a position and decided not to vacate it regardless of what came to remove it, that look was on his face and it had been there for a while.
The scene had the specific quality of something that had been ongoing long enough that everyone involved had settled into their respective roles with a grim familiarity. The Oruks had pressed them this far and though their formation held the pressure, their injuries were also distributed throughout, which means they were already tired from yesterday's battle and now they are on their last legs.
The two generals had learned, apparently, not to go directly at the positions held by specific people, because those specific people at those positions had proven to be consistently able to go toe to toe with them. So they were applying pressure to the edges, testing for the softer points among the newer members, trying to find the gaps that would widen if enough force was applied to the right location.
Adam watched this from his position at the front and spoke, without turning his head from what he was watching.
"Erik. Betty. Milo. Bren. Isabel." He named them deliberately. "Make sure to protect our rookies and our apprentices."
Isabel and most of them have shocked looks on their faces.
"What are you talking about, brother?" Isabel's voice, from somewhere in the formation behind him, carried the particular irritation of a person who has been in a fight for too long and does not need additional things to be annoyed about. "Stop talking nonsense and focus on surviving. You absolute nobhead."
Adam smiled at nothing in particular. He had wanted to say it in case it needed to be said. Just in case.
"HAHAHA!" The laugh was genuinely loud enough that several of the Oruk warriors paused for a moment in what they were doing, which was a reaction that nobody had specifically planned for but was briefly useful. "I JUST WANTED TO ACT COOL IN FRONT OF YOU ALL!"
"Your wives will hear of this nonsense of yours!" Isabel's voice had escalated in exact proportion to her annoyance. "You complete, utter nobhead!"
The laughter settled back into the steady controlled breathing of a man holding a position. The banter had served its purpose, which was not primarily comic — it was the sound of people who were still themselves despite everything that had been happening to them for the past two days, and that sound was important to the newer members in the formation behind them who were watching the old members for information about what this situation was.
The information the old members were providing was: this is difficult, but we are still here, so keep going till the bitter end.
The Oruks had pressed them even harder. The two generals attempted simultaneous pressure from opposite sides of the valley's natural choke point. The formation bent but did not break. Fifty percent of the original two hundred were no longer among the living. The surviving half were still fully committed to killing the foe in front of them, which was the nature of what Agroba had chosen for his personal bodyguard.
The formation reached the cliff wall at the valley's interior end, which meant there was nothing behind them that would be able to make them retreat even further and everything that was in front of them was trying to kill them. Meanwhile their beasts — Rexy and Toto, were still fighting despite being surrounded and having already done far more today than anyone would have asked of them voluntarily — but they helped and held the flanks. While Kirpy maintained overhead coverage and supported those below where the terrain allowed it, snatching those Oruks who weren't paying attention to the skies.
It was a hard position to win from.
Then August arrived a bit later on.
---
The End of the Siege
There was a great change in the Oruk force's behavior especially those who are strong enough to feel the presence of their King, when they felt that Agroba's dominating presence had disappeared, it arrived to each Oruk warrior in the battlefield in whatever communication system passed information through a force that did not have the luxury of the Party Chat, it was an immediate and visible change.
Something had transmitted itself through the hierarchy, though it was withheld for long enough for the news to reach the ears of the grunts of their main force.
The first to feel this change about the disappearance of their Oruk King's presence five kilometers northwest of here had reached not just the Oruks in the valley, but all of those who were strong enough that were currently engaged in the siege and it had greatly changed the way they were operating.
It did not produce an immediate retreat to the horde. Oruks did not retreat easily under any circumstances and the personal bodyguard of a dead Warlord King who had just learned their Warlord King was dead were not creatures that experienced simple grief. But the coherence of the pressure shifted. The two Oruk generals, who had accompanied Agroba on this side of the battlefield had been coordinating with whatever remained of their prior strategy. But now they were working on a different problem than the one they had been ordered to do.
Later upon August's arrival at the valley, he immediately went to work and did not give them time to arrive at a comfortable resolution.
The engagement that followed was brief in the way that engagements with a fully-unlocked grandmaster-candidate who had just finished a fight with their King and had not yet sealed his capabilities to a comfortable standard and was instead going to use it to eradicate all that still stands.
The two generals at this point discovered, in rapid succession, that their current situation had gone from a favorable situation to its most extreme unfavorabiliy: they were completely fucked.
Though neither of them died in the next preceding exchanges. That was August's choice for the moment rather than a product of their own capability. The main reason for this was that August had injured them beyond the capability of their natural healing, in fact they had worse regeneration speeds than Agroba. So when they went down, they decided to stay down, because getting back up to fight an overwhelmingly powerful enemy had been demonstrated to be the worse outcome than simply remaining where they were.
Meanwhile the remaining Oruks, with the Oruk General that Agroba left at the main battlefield, was now in disarray, especially when he felt that their Warlord King had died and its other two commanders were already incapacitated to continue to fight. The remaining Berdeng Oruk General took the only option that Oruks in their structural position had available: he decided that they were going to fight until the end, individually, as the force's coherence dissolved without the appropriate command layer to maintain its cohesion.
At the chiefdom's walls, the news traveled differently.
The battering ram had managed to breach the gate. The beastfolk had known it was going to get breached eventually — the gate had been the most expensive point to defend and they had been defending it against the sustained Oruk engineering for hours. When it gave way, the defenders were already positioned for it: their Warrior Heroes took their own positions in the breach, along with what remained with the defenders and the deepest reserve warriors behind them, everything that was left was arranged to hold the line at the back of the gate rather than at the gate itself. They formed a U shaped killing field at the entrance, spears and shields up front with arrow fire and magic behind.
The fight in the breach was as expected it would go, it was ugly in the way that such breaches normally do. It was an all out close quarters battle, with no room to maneuver, and the end result of it was determined by who could sustain the contact longest. The Beastfolk were able to hold the line, while the Oruk's attacks were more desperate than they were organized, but that is what made them dangerous.
As time passed by though, night had come to witness the closing battle of this bloody war, the Oruks who had learned that they had just lost their King and their entire command structure were in a desperate disarray, also began to lose their sense of direction.
The trebuchets had stopped cycling rounds to launch at the beastfolk settlement, because the crews had received information from whatever Command structure was left that confused them rather than motivated them. Units that had been maintaining pressure at the walls began looking back toward where the camp was rather than forward toward the walls. The coherence that had made ten thousand Oruks into a dangerous functional siege force began to develop the early signs of the thing that happened to forces when their leadership structure had been decimated.
The beastfolk on the walls and at the gate felt it before they understood what was going on. Something had drastically changed on the other side of the wall. The Oruks' pressure was different. Not entirely gone, not immediately, but the difference in its quality and its direction could be felt all throughout the battlefield.
Chieftain Midoka, standing at the ramparts with the dust and blood and chaos magic contamination of a day's siege on him and on his people, looked at the Oruk force below him and registered the change.
He did not know yet what had caused it. But he had been alive long enough to know what a force looked like when it had lost something it needed.
The war was in its final stage.
The weaker Oruks had not known that their king was already dead until the news reached them eventually through their own channels. When it did, what happened to a leaderless and disorganized Oruk force of this size in territory that was not their own, depleted of sixty percent of their supplies, with their generals incapacitated and their elite warriors destroyed, was not something the beastfolk needed to concern themselves with strategically. It was going to resolve itself in the direction of retreat or internal conflict, because those were the two options available, and either way the siege was finished.
Below the walls, the first Oruk units at the rear of the formation began moving away from the direction that was not toward the chiefdom.