Author's Nightmare: Chapter 157 (Patreon)

Solitaire POV: Day 144

Current Wealth: 213 gold 21 silver 32 copper

The orcs were like a tidal wave bearing down on us, all death and mayhem. Humans, really. Less intelligent, bigger, more impulsive. But humans still. I hated them, I loved them. Just like I hated and loved my own kind. 

And I would kill them today. I felt a lot of ways about that, but the end result of my emotional cocktail was a smile.

Arrows started cracking against cobbles, whipping by ears. A lucky few thudded into the meat of bodies and sent people down and screaming. Everyone was trying to move, now, but there were limits to how quickly several hundred humans could disentangle themselves, and it was far easier for several thousand to charge across the same direction. 

The ambush had been perfectly timed, by a genius. Shango couldn’t have done this, Phelia definitely couldn’t either. It betrayed a certain tactility to the mind of whoever had done it that I’d only ever seen exceeded by myself. I wasn’t left long to ponder it though. 

Because the gatling gun started firing shortly after.

Obviously I’d predicted this backstab. I mean, I’d predicted about fifty others that hadn’t actually happened, but that’s just good tactics. The point was I’d seen this coming, saved the day through my preparations and everybody should’ve been really impressed by how clever I was. 

Except the orcs, they had more pressing things to worry about. Ten things, in fact, every second. Each one weighing about forty grams and hitting them at somewhere north of mach speed. Iron plate armour was all well and good against arrows and spears, but it really wasn’t designed for this kind of punishment. Neither was steel for that matter.

Gatling rounds punched clean through the metal, and the flesh below. They impacted so forcefully that the sounds of armour on bullet was almost as loud as that of the gunshots themselves. Thousands of orcs were coming, but the tight streets were funnelling them toward us a few hundred at a time. That was a lot, but ten dead per second was still a notable loss among figures like that.

And the orcs were freaking out.

They were slowing, though still coming on. Hate and fury doing as much to drive them forwards as the snarling upper-rankers holding them in place. They were weathering casualties well, for a force which had never been faced with massed gunfire before, and that was holding them together through precious strides. They’d be on us in minutes. Could we uncoil our forces from the swarming civies before then?

I had to try.

“Argar!” I called out, whipping around and soon finding the giant shoving his way through. “ARGAR!” He heard me, turned, face frantic and sheet-pale with terror. But my words were getting through, and that was the first step to controlling any situation. A chink in the panic. 

 He was the largest of us, physically, and what we needed now was sheer bodily presence. Argar made quick work of the chaos, beating it back- sometimes literally- by weight of personality and, well, weight. In moments he’d gotten a few more listening to us, within a minute they’d expanded to dozens. 

Not easy, forcing hundreds of people at once to all fight back panic and behave properly. Maybe impossible. The trick is to turn their emotions against them. Argar was big and screaming, the people around him were following suit, together they made a collective terror which drove the crowds all away. In the same direction.

That omnidirectional scrambling ended in some scattered, clumsy form of unity. Finally, we had room to form up into formation once more as our men were freed at the shoulders. It happened just in time.

In regards to stopping a charge from several hundred rabies-infested bodybuilders covered in iron, there really aren’t a lot of easy solutions. The one we went with, standing ground, ceding ground, and blunting the impact with our own weight, proved to be a poor one. We weren’t competing in weight. 

But we had a cohesion they lacked, and our armament spoke for itself. Wave after wave the orcs crashed against us, fought, died. Pressed into spears by the charging allies at their backs and trampled by their own side as the momentum of battle snatched away any hope of retreat. I, naturally, was getting stuck in with the rest of us. Snarling, hissing. 

My own spear was a big and thick thing made to withstand by growing strength, the sort you’d drive through a bear. It did orcs even better. Creaking and groaning as iron plates surrendered and rent apart, spilling vaporous innards out and wetting the floor. 

It’s not fun, fighting in a tight formation. Not interesting, not exciting. Not even in retrospect. I wish I could tell you about our epic heroics and incredible feats but, really, the best any of us did while the bodies remained packed was hold, snarl and push. This was too dense a conflict for any single person to distinguish themselves. 

Except for Beam, that is. Except for bloody Beam. 

He was a thing. A really impressive thing, that kills lots of people but isn’t one- thus making it extraordinary and evocative to have his effect on the battlefield compared to the thing in question. Orcs just died wherever he went, and Beam moved on so fast from each kill that he was making the next even before bodies finished falling. 

Somehow, though, the biggest change wasn’t the five or six dead cunts per second. It was the morale. I physically felt our lines hold better as Beam did his work, the sight of him like a reinforcing steel spine at the backs of our defence. With his actual armour properly equipped, and that ethereal substance coating his weapon and glinting out at the joints, he almost seemed to be glowing. The orcs seemed to pick up on it too, backing off from him as if they could taste the violence around his body. 

It was probably the smartest thing I’d seen them do yet, but it didn’t do any much good.

And we were still losing ground. Because there were more orcs coming all the time, a giant fucking flood of them that Beam could only stem so much no matter how fast he killed. We backed up, and backed up, and grew ever closer to having no more space to back up through. 

From the corner of my eye, I saw the army arrive. There wasn’t anything strange about this, if I didn’t maintain my peripheral vision in a fight I’d get killed about twice per altercation. What was unusual was…Well, the fucking army arriving. 

There’s a weird sort of awareness that hits you during a fight. Everything is rough and fast, you see movement more than texture and mass more than anything else. I didn’t get the chance to do much studying of the new arrivals until a lapse came in the orcish attack, and even then I barely believed what my eyes told me.

A thousand men- one thousand one hundred and eight to be exact. All were decently armed, gambesons and proper spears for the most part, bowmen unfurling around the rear flanks. They were ordered and well moving, and…Absent. Held back, waiting. They weren’t engaging us, and they weren’t engaging the enemy. I caught a banner flapping in the wind and sifted through my memory for its owner.

Lord Viras, just fucking brilliant. The vultures had arrived, here to wait and see how the fight panned out and either fuck off or finish whichever side came out weakened. That was low. Unsporting, underhanded. Exactly what Shango would’ve done, and maybe what I’d have done if you ignored the absence of any pyrotechnics. Was that Lord Viras himself I saw standing at the head, or just the overactive imagination of a paranoid with too much adrenaline poisoning his conclusions? Given that I’d never met or seen the man, probably the latter. 

Oh, and there went my lapse. The orcs crashed back against us and I was back to killing.