Rise of the Horde

Chapter 801 - 800

The Rhakaddons hit the barbarian counterattack at the market district’s western intersection and the intersection ceased to exist as an intersection.

Garrok had ordered the counterattack at the twelfth hour, the warchief’s tactical assessment concluding that the Horde’s Yurakk advance through the narrow streets could be arrested by the concentrated assault of five thousand warriors funneled through the market district’s western approach, the approach that connected the palace district’s defensive perimeter to the market district’s contested blocks. The five thousand warriors advanced in the column that the approach’s forty-foot width permitted, their boomstick fire preceding the advance in the sustained volleys that the unlimited ammunition provided, the column’s depth extending back through the palace district’s streets in the formation that five thousand warriors’ compressed deployment produced.

The column entered the market district’s western intersection at the speed that the assault’s urgency and the boomstick fire’s suppressive effect combined to sustain. The intersection was sixty feet wide and eighty feet long, the open space where three streets and one avenue converged, the space that the market district’s commercial architecture had created for the market’s original purpose and that the column’s advance now occupied for the advance’s military purpose.

The Rhakaddons were waiting in the avenue that entered the intersection from the south.

Dhug’mhar’s Rumbling Clan, twenty-three of the Rhakaddons, the beasts that the capital’s broader streets and avenues accommodated but that the narrow residential streets did not, had been positioned at the avenue’s southern entrance since the ninth hour, the beasts’ three-ton mass concealed behind the market buildings’ facades in the specific deployment that urban Rhakaddon doctrine prescribed: the beasts arranged in the single-file column that the avenue’s sixty-foot width could convert into the line-abreast formation that the intersection’s eighty-foot depth provided room for.

The barbarian column’s lead element entered the intersection. The column’s lead warriors looked south down the avenue. The avenue appeared empty. The avenue’s southern end was blocked by the market buildings’ facades that lined the avenue’s sides and that concealed the things behind the facades from the things in front of them.

The facades opened.

Not opened. Disintegrated. Twenty-three Rhakaddons drove through the market buildings’ ground-floor walls simultaneously, the beasts’ three-ton mass converting the buildings’ timber-and-stone ground-floor construction from architectural elements into debris fields that the beasts’ iron-capped horns and armored chests scattered across the intersection in the simultaneous eruption that twenty-three beasts emerging from twenty-three buildings at the same moment produced.

The sound was the sound of twenty-three buildings’ walls collapsing simultaneously. The sound was the sound of sixty-nine tons of armored Rhakaddon mass transitioning from concealment to contact. The sound was the sound that preceded the impact, the specific auditory warning that the barbarian column’s lead element received approximately one-point-five seconds before the Rhakaddons’ charge covered the forty-foot distance between the collapsed facades and the column’s formation.

"GET READY TO RUMBLE!" Dhug’mhar’s war cry erupted from the Rumbling Clan’s center with the volume that transcendent readiness had been building toward for weeks. The volume exceeded the volume that previous engagements had produced because the volume was the volume that weeks of enforced patience had accumulated and that the charge’s release expelled in the specific vocalization that the Rumbling Clan’s chieftain produced when Perfection’s operational deployment was commencing.

The Rhakaddons hit the barbarian column’s flank at the velocity that forty feet of acceleration provided to three-ton beasts whose leg musculature was designed for the specific purpose of producing maximum impact at minimum distance.

The first Rhakaddon, Dhug’mhar’s personal mount, struck the column’s formation at the point where the lead element’s leftmost warriors were turning to face the sound of the collapsing facades. The mount’s iron-capped left horn caught a warrior in the center of his breastplate. The dwarven iron that the warrior’s armor provided held for the fraction of a second that the iron’s structural limits accommodated three tons of momentum delivered through inches of horn tip. The iron failed. The horn penetrated. The warrior was lifted from the cobblestones by the horn’s upward trajectory and carried six paces into the column’s interior before the beast’s head toss flung the warrior sideways into the warriors beside him.

The second Rhakaddon struck the warrior beside the first’s impact point. The beast’s horn tips found the warrior’s shield, a dwarven iron-and-wood construction that the beast’s three-ton impact converted from a defensive instrument into the specific debris that the impact’s force produced from the materials that the instrument contained. The shield fragmented. The warrior behind the shield was struck by the beast’s chest and the chest’s armored surface drove the warrior backward at the velocity that three tons of forward momentum applied to two hundred pounds of human mass, the velocity sufficient to carry the warrior twelve paces into the column’s depth before the warrior’s body struck the warriors behind him and the kinetic energy’s transfer from body to body propagated through the column’s compressed formation.

"MORG!" Dhug’mhar screamed from his mount’s saddle, the scream delivered during the moment between the charge’s impact and the charge’s exploitation, the moment that the Rumbling Clan’s chieftain used for the vocalization that the moment deserved. "GROMBASH KRUL! PERFECTION HAS ARRIVED! PERFECTION’S ARRIVAL IS THE ARRIVAL THAT THE BARBARIANS DID NOT EXPECT AND THAT PERFECTION HAS BEEN PREPARING FOR WITH THE TRANSCENDENT READINESS THAT WEEKS OF MAINTENANCE HAVE PRODUCED!"

Graka’s mount struck the column beside Dhug’mhar’s, the trusted wing’s position at the chieftain’s left flank maintained through the charge’s geometry the way the position was maintained through every operational configuration. Her mount’s horn caught a warrior at the knee and the warrior folded over the horn and was carried forward as the mount continued its advance through the column’s depth.

"Duum," Graka said. The single word, delivered at the volume that Graka used for all communications, was the counterpoint that Dhug’mhar’s volume required and that the Rumbling Clan’s operational rhythm depended on.

* * * * *

The Rhakaddon charge broke the barbarian counterattack in nine minutes.

Nine minutes during which twenty-three armored beasts moved through a compressed column of five thousand warriors at the speed that the intersection’s space and the column’s resistance and the beasts’ momentum combined to produce. The movement was not a single charge. The movement was the sustained application of three-ton mass to a formation that the mass disassembled one impact at a time, each Rhakaddon’s passage through the column producing the specific path of destruction that the beast’s horn tips and armored chest and three-ton momentum carved through the warriors’ compressed bodies and weapons and armor.

The barbarian warriors who survived the initial impact fought. The surviving’s fighting was the fighting that highland warriors produced when the fighting’s conditions were the conditions that survival demanded: desperate, individual, the boomsticks useless at the range where the Rhakaddons occupied the same space that the boomsticks’ barrels required for aiming, the hand axes striking the beasts’ armored flanks at the impact angles that the flanks’ curvature deflected.

A warrior struck Dhug’mhar’s mount’s flank armor with his hand axe. The dwarven-forged axe head bit into the armor plate at the angle that the plate’s curvature permitted. The bite was one-eighth of an inch. Insufficient penetration. The mount’s flank muscle, protected by the armor and by the beast’s natural subcutaneous fat layer, did not feel the impact. The warrior raised the axe for a second strike and Dhug’mhar’s lance found the warrior’s shoulder gap at the downward angle that the mount’s saddle height provided.

"Perfection notes your effort!" Dhug’mhar informed the falling warrior. "Your effort is acknowledged! Your effort is insufficient! Perfection’s response to insufficient effort is the response that Perfection applies to all insufficient things: the decisive, overwhelming correction that Perfection’s operational capability provides!"

The counterattack’s five thousand warriors were the five thousand warriors that the barbarian command had committed to the specific purpose of arresting the Horde’s Yurakk advance through the narrow streets. The counterattack’s destruction was the destruction that removed the five thousand warriors from the barbarian army’s available strength. More than twenty thousand warriors became less and less. The subtraction was the subtraction that the Rhakaddon charge’s nine minutes had produced.

The warg cavalry entered the intersection behind the Rhakaddons.

Haguk’s four hundred and sixty riders, deployed from the market district’s southern alleys where the wargs’ size accommodated the alleys’ width, hit the counterattack’s retreating survivors in the specific manner that warg cavalry hit retreating infantry: at the sprint speed that the wargs’ burst acceleration produced over the short distances that the survivors’ retreat created between the Rhakaddons’ charge and the wargs’ pursuit.

The pursuit was not the pursuit that open-field cavalry produced. The pursuit was the urban pursuit that warg cavalry’s specific capabilities produced in the capital’s street grid: the wargs flowing through the alleys and side streets that the retreating barbarians used for escape, the wargs’ padded feet silent on the cobblestones, the wargs’ predatory instincts tracking the running warriors through the streets’ turns and intersections with the specific hunting behavior that the wargs’ breeding had refined across generations of combat use.

A warg caught a retreating barbarian warrior at the market district’s northern alley. The beast’s jaws closed on the warrior’s pack and the warrior was dragged backward off his feet and the rider’s sword found the warrior’s neck in the specific motion that warg cavalry’s mounted technique used for the dispatch of prone targets.

"Grakk’tar," Haguk said, from the warg cavalry’s center. The Warghen chieftain’s voice was the quiet, precise voice that Haguk used for everything including the statement that accompanied the engagement that the statement described. Victory or death. The words delivered at the volume that the words required, which was the volume of professional assessment rather than the volume of theatrical performance.

The barbarian counterattack was destroyed. The market district was secure. The Horde’s advance resumed through the narrow streets that the thundermakers could not reach and that the Rhakaddons could not navigate but that the Yurakk warbands and the warg cavalry and the Roarers’ flanking fire combined to clear at the pace that the clearance’s systematic technique produced.

One block per thirty minutes. The pace that the wolf’s urban advance maintained. The pace that was slow and relentless and unstoppable because the pace’s continuity was the continuity that seven thousand rested warriors sustained against a force that was larger but disorganized and celebration-impaired and fighting in conditions that the force’s decisive advantage, the thundermakers, could not influence.

The wolf advanced. Block by block. Building by building. The capital’s control shifted.