Chapter 50 (Patreon)

Gravel crunched under a hundred boots as the testudo advanced.

Hale moved inside the formation, shield locked with the men around him, watching the nest through the gaps between rims. The stench hit first—rot and smoke and something underneath both that made his jaw tighten. The walls rose ahead, rough timber lashed together, stakes jutting outward from the base of a ditch that looked deeper than the scouts had reported.

Shrieking rolled down from the palisade in waves. Goblins lined the top, crude spears waving, working themselves into the frenzy that passed for courage among their kind. The sound was almost rhythmic. Almost like drums.

"Spacing," Hale said. His voice didn't carry far, but the men near him adjusted by inches, shields tightening.

Stones began to fall.

The first ones came in high arcs, poorly aimed, clattering off the shield roof and skidding into the mud. A few thudded into wood hard enough to jar the men holding it, but no one broke formation.

"Steady."

The ditch was thirty yards out now. Hale could see the stakes clearly—sharpened logs driven into the slope at angles that would gut anyone who slid down too fast. Behind him, the second maniple was already splitting, one century angling left with ladders across their shoulders while another moved right. The assault would hit three points at once.

Twenty yards.

The shrieking intensified. Arrows began to mix with the stones—short, crude shafts that splintered against shields or buried themselves in the mud between formations. One punched through a gap and took a legionary in the shoulder. He grunted, stayed in formation, kept moving.

"Garrick!" Hale said without turning.

Somewhere behind him, inside the shield shell, the scout commander shifted.

"Ready."

Fifteen yards.

"Drop shields! Loose. Up!"

The roof split open in three places. Scouts rose from their crouches, bows already drawn, and loosed in the same breath. The shields slammed back into place before Hale finished exhaling.

On the wall, a hobgoblin pitching its arm back to throw dropped its stone and clutched at the shaft in its throat. Another spun sideways, arrow through its eye, and tumbled off the palisade into the ditch below. A third took a shaft through the chest and sat down hard, still trying to scream orders that came out as wet bubbles.

The effect rippled outward. The section of wall those hobgoblins had commanded dissolved into chaos—goblins shoving each other, some charging forward to hurl stones, others scrambling back, one cluster turning on each other with shrieks that had nothing to do with the assault below.

Hale watched it spread. Noted the sections that stayed disciplined. Those still had officers.

"Again!"

The shields dropped. Arrows snapped out. Shields rose.

Two more hobgoblins fell. A third caught a shaft in its arm and stumbled back from the palisade, disappearing behind the wall. The chaos widened.

The ditch was ten yards away now.

"Breach teams forward!"

Legionaries with axes broke from the formation and sprinted the last distance, sliding into the ditch with their shields angled to catch the stakes. Wood cracked as they began hacking at the obstacles, clearing a path wide enough for men to climb.

Hale's formation reached the ditch edge and halted, shields still locked, arrows and stones hammering the roof in a constant rain. Through the gaps, he watched the axemen work. One went down with a spear through his back—a lucky throw from the wall. Another took his place without pausing.

The first stake came free.

Then the second.

A path began to open through the obstacle line, and the men with ladders moved forward to—

The stone came down like a fist from heaven.

Hale didn't see it fall. But when he heard the whistle, he almost instinctively dropped to the ground. He felt the formation around him flinch, and then the world became sound and flying mud and screaming.

The testudo to his left was deeply breached. Where eight men had stood, there was now a crater and shapes that didn't look like men anymore. The shield roof buckled as legionaries stumbled back from the impact, formation integrity shattering in the span of a heartbeat.

Hale was already looking up.

Three trolls stood behind the palisade, visible now above the wall. They'd been crouching, hidden, waiting. Each one held a boulder the size of a man's torso. The leftmost was already drawing its arm back.

"There's our friends," Hale muttered.

He'd hoped and planned for it.

His whistle cut through the chaos—two sharp notes that carried over the screaming.

From the flanks, knights surged forward. They'd been waiting for this moment, out of sight, Kers' heavy javelins in their hands. The weapons were ugly things—iron-tipped, thick-shafted, weighted for penetration rather than range, and each knight carried two.

The leftmost troll released its stone.

The knights released their javelins.

The stone smashed into a reforming century and scattered men like leaves. The javelins punched into the troll's chest and shoulder in the same instant—three hits, the iron heads disappearing into gray flesh.

The troll staggered. Roared and dropped its arm.

Another volley. One javelin went wide but two found the throat.

The troll went down thrashing, its fall shaking the palisade hard enough that goblins tumbled from the wall.

The second troll turned toward the knights, stone raised.

Garrick's scouts were faster.

Arrows streaked from positions Hale hadn't tracked, mana flickering blue-white along the shafts. They didn't kill it—trolls took more than arrows to drop—but they found eyes, joints, the soft tissue of inner arms. The troll roared and swung blindly, its stone flying wild, smashing into its own palisade and taking a couple-foot section of wall down with its wild thrashing. It was too far away for Hale to exploit.

The third troll threw before anyone could redirect.

Its stone caught the century, attempting to form up for a ladder push. Men flew. Shields splintered. The formation dissolved into scattered survivors scrambling for cover.

Hale opened his mouth to order the knights to shift targets.

A shrieking horn cut through the chaos first, and the troll ducked back down.

It came from inside the nest. Not goblin shrieking—something deeper and more controlled. The surviving men from the shattered century stopped their scramble and pulled into the shadow of the ditch before the third troll could line up another throw.

Hale grunted filed it away as a problem. Someone was thinking in there. Problem for later.

"Ladders up!" he ordered. "Make it look real. Let’s get to work!"

“Kill!”

Immediately, the cohort took up their commander's call. 

“Kill! Kill! Kill!”

The first men over the wall died fast.

Hale watched from the ditch as legionaries scrambled up the rough-hewn ladders and met a wall of crude spears and shrieking bodies. The goblins fought like cornered animals—no skill, no coordination, just numbers and desperation and blades swinging at anything that moved.

The first rank of climbers went down in seconds. The second pushed through their bodies and gained the wall, boots slipping in blood, swords hacking at everything in reach.

Cohesion shattered immediately.

This wasn't a shield wall. This was knife work—tight quarters, no room to swing properly, men fighting shoulder to shoulder against a tide of green-skinned bodies that kept coming. Mana was spent in seconds, and a legionary killed three goblins and took a spear through the gut from a fourth he never saw. Another lost his footing on the blood-slick timber and went over the inside edge, his scream cut short by the sounds below.

More men climbed. The breach widened.

A century got enough soldiers on the wall to lock shields, and for a moment, Hale saw the shape of a real push forming. The wedge drove forward, goblins falling back, the shrieking changing pitch as fear crept into it.

Then the third troll moved.

It grabbed a log from the palisade itself—actual timber, twenty feet long—and swung it into the breach like a man swatting flies.

The shield wall crumpled. Bodies flew. The wedge became a scatter of broken men, some falling inside the wall, some tumbling back down the ladders, some simply gone.

Hale let one breath pass.

"Dammit, Sound the retreat!"

The horns took up the call. 

The men on the wall didn't have to fake the panic. They scrambled down ladders, jumped, and fell. Shields were dropped in the mud. Formations dissolved into running men, cohesion gone, the centuries streaming back from the ditch in what looked like a complete rout.

Hale ran with them.

He stayed in the middle of the chaos, stumbling like a man who'd lost his nerve, watching over his shoulder the whole time. The nest walls were chaos—goblins shrieking in triumph, waving weapons, some already climbing down to give chase.

Come on, he thought. Take the bait.

A horn sounded from inside the nest.

The same voice that had given that barked command earlier, now calling across the entire horde, and the goblins on the wall froze. The ones climbing down stopped and got back onto the wall.

But from the treeline to the west—not from the nest—came the thunder of paws on packed earth.

Hale stopped running.

The warg riders burst from the forest in a black tide. Forty of them, maybe more, mounted on wolves the size of horses with jaws that could close around a man's torso. The goblins on their backs were different from the ones on the wall—darker, larger, armor that actually fit. Black-jawed goblins. Blackjaw stock.

They'd been flanking. Waiting for exactly this, he shuddered to think how it would have gone if they had committed to the assault and they charged their rear.

The “scattered” cohort was still reforming, men stumbling into rough groups, shields coming up too slow, the picture of a broken force about to be run down.

Hale turned to his horn caller.

"Sound it!"

Three sharp notes cut across the field.

The scattered centuries stopped scattering. Men who'd been running suddenly weren't. Shields that had been dangling snapped into place. In the space of three heartbeats, the chaos became lines. Centuries formed up facing the charge, front ranks kneeling, second ranks bracing, javelins coming up in hands that had been waiting for this moment.

The wargs closed the distance.

Hale counted heartbeats. Watched the foam on black muzzles, ”Damn, they’re big,” the way the lead riders leaned forward, the rhythm of massive paws churning mud.

"Loose!"

Three hundred javelins arced into the charge.

Hale expected the front rank of wargs to drop—the mana-edged weapons always punched through, always cut clean, that's what mana did.

But the javelins hit, and the wargs kept coming.

He saw the shafts strike home, saw them penetrate—but not deep. The mana edge that should have sliced through hide and muscle like air hit something denser and stopped. Wargs that should have been dead kept running with javelins lodged in their chests, their shoulders, their necks.

Blackjaw creatures, Hale realized. Harold had warned him about this. The mana density in mountain stock was higher than the basin, higher than anything his legionaries had faced. Their weapons still worked—but the margins were different now.

"Second volley!"

More javelins. More hits. A few wargs finally went down, tripping the ones behind them, but not enough.

The charge hit the infantry like a battering ram.

The first rank broke. Men flew—thrown, trampled, jaws closing around limbs and torsos and tearing. The second rank buckled, shields shattering under the impact of bodies that weighed more than horses. The third rank held, barely, boots sliding in the mud as wargs slammed into the wall and kept pushing.

The formation bent but didn't shatter.

And now the wargs were in, trapped between the ranks they'd breached and the ranks behind them, their momentum spent.

"Knights!" Hale bellowed. "Get in there!"

Parker hit the melee at a sprint, and his blood sang.

Mana flooded through his legs as he ran, feeding his muscles, sharpening his reflexes until the chaos around him seemed to slow. He'd been waiting in the flank reserve, watching the trap close, counting the seconds until Hale's call. Now he drove into the slaughter with his sword already glowing, mana wrapped so tight around the blade that the air hummed, and he felt alive in a way that sixty-three years on Earth had never offered him.

God, he loved this world, but now it was time to earn his place here.

The first warg he reached was already down, three legionaries stabbing at its belly while its rider shrieked and swung a crude axe. Parker took the rider's head with a single stroke and kept moving. His shoulders didn't ache. His knees didn't grind. Whatever the system had done when it brought him here, it had stripped thirty years off his body and given him back the strength he'd mourned losing. Every fight reminded him of that gift.

The second warg was still fighting.

It was bigger than the others—alpha, maybe, or just older. The rider on its back wore actual metal armor, not bone and leather, and carried an axe that looked like it had been forged rather than scavenged. The warg's eyes tracked Parker as he approached, yellow and calculating, nothing like the mindless beasts in the basin.

Parker didn't slow. His blood pounded in his ears, and he willed more mana into his limbs, feeling the familiar burn spread through his forearms and calves.

The warg lunged.

Jaws wide enough to close around his torso snapped at his shield arm. Parker caught the bite on his rim and felt the impact slam through his shoulder, down his spine, into his heels. The force of it drove him back a half-step—more than any goblin or beast had ever managed, more than the berserkers, more than anything he had fought. He stabbed for the neck in the same motion, mana flaring along his blade.

His sword cut—but shallow. Not the clean slice he expected. The mana edge that should have parted hide like water hit resistance, skipped, scored a line across the creature's throat that bled but didn't kill.

The rider's axe came down.

Parker blocked with his sword, steel screaming against crude iron, and shoved the warg's head away with his shield. The beast was strong—its neck muscles bunched and pushed back, and Parker had to feed more mana into his arms just to hold the line. He felt something in his shoulder creak under the strain, the bones flexing in ways they weren't meant to, his body paying the price for the power he was forcing through it.

He didn't care. The pain was distant, drowned out by the roar of blood in his skull and the savage joy of a fight that actually mattered. Mattered in ways those shit fights in a forgotten jungle didn’t.

The warg reset. Parker circled, reading its rhythm, watching the way its weight shifted before each lunge. The rider was screaming something in a language that sounded like rocks grinding together, axe raised for another swing.

Legionary blades were bouncing off these things. Parker's was cutting, but barely. The mana density in its hide was thicker than anything he'd fought before—Blackjaw stock, mountain-bred, fed on whatever horrors lived in those peaks.

This is gonna suck, he thought.

The warg lunged again.

Parker stepped into the bite instead of away from it. His shield caught the jaws at an angle, forcing them past his body, and he rammed his shoulder into the creature's snout with every ounce of mana-fueled strength he could muster. Something cracked in his collarbone—he felt it go, a sharp snap beneath the surface—but the warg's head wrenched sideways, and its mouth opened in a snarl of surprise.

He drove his sword into the opening.

Up through the palate. Into the brain.

The warg thrashed. Its body convulsed, legs scrabbling at mud, spine arching. Parker tried to pull his blade free, tried to step back—

Its jaws clamped shut.

The pressure came before the pain. A crushing, grinding sensation around his wrist and forearm, his sword hand suddenly gone from his awareness. The warg twisted in its death throes, and Parker went with it, dragged sideways as the massive body collapsed.

Someone was screaming. It might have been him.

His vision went white at the edges. He hit the mud on his back, and the sky was gray and spinning, and his arm—

His arm ended just below the elbow. The warg's jaws had closed on the rest, even in death.

Then hands grabbed his shoulders, hauled him clear, and another knight was cinching something around what remained—a belt, twisted tight, cutting off the blood that pulsed in hot spurts across the mud. A potion flask forced itself between his teeth.

"Drink, you stubborn bastard—"

Parker swallowed. The agony didn't stop, but the bleeding did. The potion burned through him, knitting what it could, closing the wound into something that wouldn't kill him in the next five minutes. Notifications were blinking, but he shoved them away.

He tried to sit up. A hand shoved him back down.

The collarbone he'd cracked throbbed in counterpoint to the phantom fire where his forearm used to be. His body was already paying the bill for how hard he'd pushed it—mana burnout settling into his muscles like acid, the price of forcing more power through flesh than flesh was meant to hold.

"Finish the fight," he managed. His voice sounded distant.

"Already finished," the knight above him said. "We got them."

Parker turned his head.

The field was a charnel ground. Warg bodies lay in heaps, massive and still, legionaries swarming over them with swords and axes. The black-jawed goblins were dead or dying, pinned by shields, stabbed by men who took no prisoners. The formations had reformed around the slaughter, containing it, finishing it with the methodical discipline Hale had beaten into them.

Forty warg riders. All dead.

But the field was littered with legionary bodies too. More wounded than dead, but the wounded needed potions—potions they didn't have enough of.

And Parker wasn't the only one missing pieces.

Hale walked the field as the rain started.

The nest still stood. Goblins still lined the walls, watching, not shrieking anymore. The warg cavalry was gone, but the infantry inside hadn't chased—someone had given an order to hold.

He'd hoped they'd all come pouring out. The impulsive goblin charge he'd planned for. Hit them in the open, break them against the centuries, roll up the survivors. Goblins were supposed to be stupid. Greedy. Incapable of restraint when wounded prey ran in front of them.

Someone in that nest had held them back.

Hale hated fighting smart people.

Dumb enemies died on schedule. They made the mistakes you planned for, walked into the traps you set, broke exactly where you wanted them to break. Smart enemies adapted. They saw the bait and didn't bite, or worse, they bit and turned it back on you. The warg flanking maneuver had been good—staged out of sight, timed to hit the fake rout at its most vulnerable. If his centuries hadn't been ready for it, if the whole retreat had been real instead of theater, those riders would have rolled up his entire cohort.

Someone in that nest understood combined arms. Cavalry screening, infantry holding, trolls as artillery. That wasn't goblin thinking. Or at least not basin goblin thinking.

Still.

It wasn't a total loss.

Hale turned from the walls and walked back toward the aid station Tribune Tran had set up in the lee of the supply wagons. The warg cavalry was dead—all forty-plus riders, every mount. Whatever else happened, that force wasn't coming back. No more flanking maneuvers. No more shock charges into broken formations. The nest had lost its teeth.

He passed a century reforming near their hasty ditch, legionaries checking each other's wounds, passing waterskins. A few nodded as he went by. Most just kept working. Good. They'd taken a beating, but they weren't broken.

The aid station was worse.

Tran had commandeered three wagons and turned the space between them into a triage ground. Wounded men lay in rows on planks stretched across the mud, medicos moving between them with bandages and potion flasks. The serious cases were obvious—missing limbs, gut wounds, men whose breathing came in wet rasps that said their lungs were filling with blood. The lesser wounded sat against wagon wheels or leaned on each other, waiting their turn.

They had brought enough potions for a fight to clear out dens and mop up survivors. Not a campaign like this. The alchemists that Harold had sent had been busy making every healing potion they could.

Parker was propped against a supply crate, his remaining hand pressed against the stump of his arm. A medico knelt beside him, undoing his tournaqiet. His face was gray, but his eyes tracked Hale as he approached. He heard the medico telling him, “Drink this all, you're gonna bleed, but this potion will regrow your arm in a couple of days.”

"How many?" Parker asked, nodding his thanks to the harried man.

"Count is still coming in, but it’s ugly." Hale crouched beside him, keeping his voice low. "Good job on those wargs."

Parker's jaw tightened. "Worth it?"

Hale didn't answer immediately. He looked across the aid station—at the rows of wounded, at the medicos rationing potions, at Tribune Tran directing stretcher bearers with the calm efficiency of a man who'd done this before.

He grunted, "Ask me after the next assault, this is gonna get worse," he said.

He straightened and moved toward Tran, who was marking something on a tablet while a runner waited at his elbow.

"Casualties?" Hale asked.

Tran didn't look up. "Sixty-seven dead confirmed, probably a dozen more we haven't found yet. One hundred and six were wounded seriously enough to need potions. Another sixty walking wounded who can fight if we need them." He finished his mark and handed the tablet to the runner. "Potion stocks are very thin. We've got maybe thirty healing draughts left, and half of those are the weak stuff; we need a lot more of the more powerful potions only Lord Harold can brew."

Hale absorbed the numbers. The cohort had started with just over five hundred. They'd lost nearly a fifth in a single engagement, and the nest was still standing.

"The men?" he asked.

Tran shrugged, "Shaken but holding. They know the wargs are dead, but those trolls are a problem." Tran finally looked at him. "What's the next move?"

Hale turned back toward the nest.

The walls were crude but solid. The ditch was deep, the stakes thick, and somewhere behind those timbers, at least three trolls waited—two wounded but probably healed by now with their constitution, one still fresh. Plus whatever else the commander in there had held in reserve. Probably beserkers, A straight assault would take the position eventually, but the cost would gut what remained of his force.

Siege work was the obvious answer. Sappers, tunnels, fire. Undermine the walls and burn what they could, force the goblins to come out on his terms instead of theirs. It would take days, but days were cheaper than bodies.

But he didn’t have days.

Harold needed him south. The war with Henri was coming, probably already started, and every hour Hale spent grinding against this nest was an hour his Lord fought without the cohort at his back. If Henri engaged before Hale arrived, he wouldn't be there to force a surrender. 

The math was ugly but simple. Ending this tomorrow saved more lives than a proper siege, even if tomorrow cost him another fifty men.

"We hit them again at dawn," Hale said.

Tran's expression didn't change, but something flickered behind his eyes. "Same approach?"

"No." Hale rubbed the stubble on his cheek. "The ploy worked halfway. We killed their cavalry, bled their officers. But that commander in there is smart enough to hold the garrison. He won't chase a rout twice."

He stared at the walls, turning the problem over.

If the goblin wouldn't come out, Hale needed to dig him out of his hole. Burn him out. Smoke him out. Something that cracked the walls or made the nest unlivable, something that forced a fight in the open where his centuries could do their work.

Fire was the obvious choice, but those walls were green timber, rain-soaked. They'd smolder, not burn. Oil would help, but they didn't have enough to—

He stopped.

"The alchemists," he said slowly.

Tran frowned. "Sir?"

"The battle alchemists. Harold's experiment." Hale turned to face him fully. "We've got what, four of them attached? Three?"

"Three. They've been making healing potions non stop." Tran's frown deepened. "They're crafters, sir. We've been keeping them in the rear."

"Get them up here." Hale felt the plan crystallize, sharp and ugly. "They volunteered for this. It’s time for them to earn their perks for battle alchemist."

“What are you planning?”

"I want options." Hale looked at the nest one more time. The goblins were still watching from the palisade, silent and still. "That commander in there thinks he can wait us out. Thinks if he holds the walls, we'll either assault and bleed or sit and starve. He doesn't know we're on a clock, and he doesn't know what our alchemists can cook up overnight."

He turned away from the walls.

Hale walked back toward the command wagon, the rain soaking through his cloak. The plan wasn't elegant. A proper siege would save more of his men, give them time to recover, and let the wounded heal before the next push.

But Harold didn't have time for proper.

Tomorrow, one way or another, the nest would fall. And then Hale would march his battered cohort south to finish what his lord had started.

He just hoped there'd be enough of them left to matter.