Author's Nightmare: Chapter 153 (Patreon)

Solitaire POV: Day 143

Current Wealth: 212 gold 26 silver 14 copper

I didn’t like fighting, honest. Too messy, too dangerous. Too much risk of me being the one to bite it. I liked hurting people though, and I liked watching a good plan come together. On balance I decided the first clash of our men and the orcs was a generally positive experience, though it certainly could’ve been better.

A club came at me, a big, mean club swung by a big, mean orc. I sidestepped, let it whip by me, and stuck a knife down to the hilt in its wielder’s armpit. I felt the blade snap off against iron plating as it actually exited the shoulder and crunched up into the pauldron from below. By then, though, I was twisting around as I caught movement behind me and lashed back to avoid an axe. I did. Barely, and the axe kept coming right up until a spear gutted the giant bastard holding it. 

There’s always a temptation to waste time and watch a kill finish when you’re fighting for real, I’d learned that much well since I came to Redacle. I ignored that temptation and moved on to the next enemy. A big orc came thundering up to our formation, and I splashed him with enough nitro to reverse his momentum as it blasted his chest open. Arrows spat down at us in plunging volleys, sent shooting back to hit their own charging men by Corvan’s winds. Argar…Argar, he was having the time of his life, a giant, laughing golem of meat and steel plates one-handing a pair of bearded axes so big most men could barely swing one. He took off heads, limbs. Split helmets completely in half, gouged deep into breastplates and sent rivers of blood sizzling out of the jagged cuts. 

Beside him Helena was the opposite in every way, lacking his physicality but killing with a mechanical precision. She went for joints with her spear in short, fierce jabs that never committed too much of her weight to any one attack, while her shield staved off counters better than any of our men’s. This was the style we'd passed onto our unit, thanks to her expertise in teaching it, and with the small alleys around us it was devastatingly effective. We’d split our forces to advance down two routes, each picking a set of thin streets to cross, both chosen to be sized just right that there was no room around us in them. 

I was in the first group, the other had more of the trainees, but Beam to even things out. I saw a rank of orcs forming up ahead, ready to meet our shield wall with a formed defence of their own. They had the numbers, with ranks maybe four times deeper than ours, and it was doomed to be a bloody one.

Right up until Beam’s group smashed into them from their flank. 

The chaos was instantaneous, and we hurried in charging over to compound it. Orc shields turned one way and the other, forced to block two directions at once and managing neither. Corvan doused the centre with a fireball so potent it killed half a dozen with that single casting, and our rocketeers managed almost as much damage with their own projectiles. By the time we came there wasn’t much form left to the formation, and we cut it apart in moments. Double our number turned into mincemeat and fleeing men.

It was scary, honestly, what a decent attack can do, and incredibly empowering. But we’d killed only a hundred orcs just now, and maybe twice that in smaller groups so far. They still had plenty more fight left in them. Their numbers were in the thousands.

I could tell, despite our success in winning short-term, that the overall plan had failed. Beam had sent me the info needed for it, telling me everything he’d seen and learned with a note attached to an arrow. English, not any Redaclan language, so none but myself could read it. I’d timed this attack to come just a few minutes after his assassination of the orc leader, and if he’d succeeded in that then it would’ve meant we were falling on their forces at their most disorganized. We might have killed thousands, and at worst we’d have sent a lot spewing out of the city. 

That, as far as I could tell, was more luck than we’d had, but the secondary function had worked at least. We’d given Beam an opening to escape after his assassination failed, and very possibly saved his life. He was returning the favour by personally killing as many of the enemy as any three of us, and perhaps all the recruits combined.

Another arrow volley was knocked aside by Corvan, and another infantry unit got eaten alive by ours. I realised there was a lethal combination going on that we’d not even planned for. Enemies who bunched together were susceptible to Corvan and the rocketeers, their tight formations letting each fireball or rocket kill several enemies at once and mount up casualties. If they spread out, the damage was limited. But they were fodder for our own infantry’s overlapping shields and thick armour. 

We cannibalised one unit after another, but I kept my eyes out the entire time for enemy reinforcements. We were still a force of dozens against an occupation of thousands, and sure enough, after fifteen minutes of fighting, I caught glimpses of more motion building to the side of us. A mass of bodies advancing between buildings just fifty metres from the carpet of corpses we were making. 

There really were quite a lot. A wall of them, I’d say, all big and iron-clad, and clearly well organised. Beam winced, and I followed his gaze to see a taller one with boulders levitating around him at the front. Their leader, I guessed. Funny, the letter hadn’t mentioned him being a magus.

“RETREAT!” I squawked, like a majestic eagle having its neck wrung by several boa constrictors and a serial strangler. Not my finest order, I’ll admit, but there’s really only so much coolness you can slip into what is fundamentally a command meaning “turn around and leg it before we die”.

Fortunately, we’d drilled that too. If you couldn’t run away from a fight then you wouldn’t last very long having them, that was a lesson dear old mum had taught me very early on indeed, and it brought a prideful tear to my eye to watch my young grasshoppers scrambling away like such cowardly little rats alongside me. 

We didn’t flee the town of course, that would be utterly unthinkable. After today there wasn’t a chance we’d be getting through the gates again, this little blitzkrieg of ours would have made the orcs doubly cautious against attacks in the future. They knew, now, that our force of twenty nine was more than equal to any hundred of theirs. Even any two or three hundred. We were no longer something to be ignored, or tolerated. They’d be going for the kill now.

So our fallback point had to be defensible.

Good thing about having such a small force of course was that there was never a shortage of defensible places you could squeeze into. While I’d been squatting on top of that building and doing my ceremonial war dance, I’d taken the opportunity to scan as much of the town as I could and commit its layout to memory. There was a very robust-looking warehouse just a quarter-mile from our current location, and I directed us towards it promptly. 

Difficult, to move a large group with any great speed. Particularly when they’re weighed down by armour and weaponry, and you don’t want anyone to lag behind. Difficult for twenty nine, but impossible for the thousands that were following us. The distance only grew as we scurried off like the mighty little rats we were, reaching the warehouse in no time at all. 

It was just barely big enough to fit everyone in with ample storage and movement room, and we wasted no time in cramming ourselves past its doors. Within minutes the warehouse was beset by the sounds of an army of footfalls crunching around from all sides.

But they didn’t get closer than hearing distance, they didn’t turn into an attack. I waited a minute, until my brain started vibrating with the urge to start digging up the cobbled floor for hidden traps, and then slowly shuffled to one of the windows and peeked outside. 

The orcs were there of course, and there were a lot of them. Three thousand two hundred, at an eyeballed guesstimate. My more concerted calculations narrowed that down by a further fifty. 

“Beam.” I began. “I need you to take the next opening you can find and run off to fetch something we stashed outside. This is gonna get dicey.”