Chapter 45.3: The Southern Beastmen Tribes - Thwarting a Combined Raid
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 Siege of Kor'uko-tuk Chiefdom
Finnester's vision came through the bond in pieces — altitude, angle, motion — and within seconds August had assembled a complete picture of what they were facing.
The force outside the walls was not small, and it was not disorganized in the way that underprepared raiders usually were. They had come in with numbers and the intent to conquer what is in front of them. Two and a half thousand, give or take, arranged in the rough formation of people who knew what walls looked like and had decided to walk up to them anyway. The majority were Oruks — the heavy, tusked bodies of the Berdeng clan recognizable even from the height Finnester was holding. The rest were human. Raising Warbands, from the look of them, mixed in with a force that had clearly done its share of fighting before today.
August moved to the wall where Chieftain Midoka and his captains had already taken position and relayed what he had seen.
"I estimate around two thousand five hundred enemies. Mixed force. Oruks make up roughly sixty percent, humans the rest."
The Chieftain absorbed this without a visible alarm. He had been at war with these people for long enough that the numbers did not surprise him anymore. What they produced in him was calculation. He turned to those around him and began issuing orders in the rolling tones of the beastman language, directing those among his warriors who could take to the air to form up and follow the Warrior from Maya Village.
It was a smooth transition, and it said something about them that they did not feel the need to formally ask August whether he planned to join the fight. They had felt it about him that he always was the moment he arrived. Some things declared themselves without needing to be said.
August did not think about it either. This was not a diplomatic situation anymore. Diplomacy was what happened before the drums of war occurred.
He relayed the developing situation through the Party Chat to Mee-rka, who was already connected as a temporary member of the team. What he failed to anticipate was that sending information through the Party Chat to someone in an active combat scenario meant everyone connected to the system received it simultaneously, regardless of where they were as long as they were within the 2,500 km range. The responses started coming in before he had finished his first message.
The chat filled up fast.
He ignored most of it and focused on what needed doing.
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The Party Chat
Mee-rka, for her part, handled the incoming flood of concern from the team with considerably more patience than most people would have managed while simultaneously preparing for a battle.
Milo's message came in first, characteristically direct.
*[Milo: Princess, just tell us if you need additional support and we will be there as fast as we can.]*
*[Mee-rka: Thanks Milo, but I think we have it covered for now. I'll tell August about it. Just in case we need the team here.]*
*[Erik: We'll get ready just in case. We'll come by air if you need us.]*
Others added their words, which were less tactical and more human in the way that the team's communication always eventually was when one of their own was somewhere dangerous. Mee-rka acknowledged them and then set the chat aside, because there was a battle coming through the gate and she had a role in it to play.
Above, August had already stopped reading the chat and was focused on the battle ahead.
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The Blurred Devil's Entrance
Fifty beastfolk capable of flight formed up around him and Finnester. Not an insignificant number. Enough to create disruption across a wide section of the enemy formation while the forces inside the walls finished preparing to march out and engage on the ground.
They would buy time. That was the first task.
August did not brief them on what he was going to do specifically, because what he was going to do specifically was not something that translated well into a briefing. He told them to follow his general lead, strike where they could, and pull back when they needed to. They understood enough to make it work.
Then he dropped.
He came down into the center of the enemy formation and the effect was immediate. Oruks were not creatures given to fear as a default — they had eaten enough of their own kin to have burned out most of the instincts that fear was built on — but what happened when August landed was not fear in the conventional sense. It was the passive effect of what he carried, radiating outward without any decision on his part.
Fear the Beast was not a skill he activated. It was a condition he existed in. The armor's exclusive passive, built into the layered enchantments of a set forged from materials that had been taken from creatures at the top of the Great Forest's hierarchy, projected itself outward at the enemies who came forward with intent to harm him. It was not universal. It targeted those who meant him violence, and it hit them the way cold water hits a man who was expecting solid ground — sudden, total, and disorienting.
The low-ranking Oruks at the edges of the formation went rigid. Their bodies registered something ancient, something pre-language, that said the thing in front of them was not prey and never had been. The humans with them fared no better. Several stopped mid-stride. One dropped his weapon without intending to.
August did not wait for them to recover.
He moved with a wind buff carrying him faster than the eye tracked cleanly — this was what had always given him the nickname of the Blurred Devil, the way the air seemed to distort around the shape of him when he was in motion, his image smearing at the edges of perception like something seen through heat. The glowing green of his eyes was the only thing that remained consistently visible.
The magical item pouch at his side fed his hands whatever the next half-second required. Dorgon's Fang came out first — forty inches of dark crimson metal with veins of orange that ran through it like something that had never cooled — and it did not stay out long because it did not need to. Three Oruks who had managed to hold through the fear effect and charge him anyway found out what it felt like when a blade moving at that speed connected with bodies that were built tough but not tough enough. They went down before they had even registered the impact.
He dematerialized the sword in the same motion and there was a spear in his hand for the next range, gone before the target hit the ground. A throwing dagger already in motion. A sword and shield combination that lasted four exchanges before it vanished when August stepped inside someone's guard and the reach became a liability rather than an asset. The weapon set changed every few seconds, adapting to whatever the next moment actually needed, and the enemy soldiers watching could not build any consistent picture of what they were up against because the answer kept changing.
The ones who managed to land blows on him discovered that his armor did not care. The hits that made contact were absorbed by layers of protection and enchantment that had been tested against things considerably more dangerous than an Oruk with a war-axe. He did not stagger. He did not slow. Every block or parry ran directly into a counter, and every counter ended the exchange.
He kept himself deliberate. He did not reach for his more deeper capabilities, the levels of output that would have solved the problem faster and more completely. He had reasons for this. The terrain was not his and the people around him were not his enemies. Collateral destruction was not something he was willing to produce for the sake of efficiency, and beyond that, he had a feeling that had been sitting in the back of his awareness since the drums of war started — the sense that this force was not the full weight of what was coming. He was not going to spend himself dry on the opening move of something that wasn't finished yet.
He kept the pace controlled. He kept the output measured.
Within five minutes of the drop, approximately one hundred to two hundred of the enemy were dead or were pulling out of the fight as casualties. That was his count alone, not accounting for Finnester and the fifty beastfolk in the air doing their own damage across the rest of the formation.
Finnester was not subtle. The young eagle at eighteen feet tall and thirty-six feet of wingspan produced a different kind of disruption than his father Aetherwing would have — less sheer mass, more speed and precision. His lightning affinity crackled across the sections of the formation he dove through, and the light element combined with it in ways that were still developing but were already enough to make a significant section of the left flank break and fold inward.
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The Warlord's Problem
The Warlord commanding this force had not planned for any of this.
He had arrived expecting walls, which beastfolk hid behind, and expected to punch through those walls with numbers and momentum. That was how this worked. That was how it had always worked. You brought enough of something ugly and you threw it at something until it broke. The Warlord was not a creature built for sophisticated operational planning. He was a creature built for volume.
What he was not built for was the thing currently standing in the middle of his formation, surrounded by bodies, not looking particularly inconvenienced.
He redirected his captains to engage August and stall him while the rest of the force pushed toward the beastman walls. This was, strategically speaking, the only sensible option he had left. What it produced in practice was a series of larger, stronger Oruks — the captain class, elevated through the same cannibalistic tradition that powered their entire species' progression — moving to intercept something that had already killed a significant portion of their subordinates in the opening minutes.
The captains were not trivial. They were built larger than the average Oruk, stronger, with the accumulated mass of whatever they had consumed over their careers worked into their frames in ways that were visible and measurable. August registered them the moment they moved toward him and adjusted accordingly.
They slowed him. That was the honest accounting of it. He was not fighting at full output, which meant that things built specifically to absorb punishment could absorb enough of what he was giving them to make each engagement take longer than it would have otherwise. He worked through them, but it cost time, and time was what they were buying.
The humans in the mixed force had already broken. Their morale had not survived watching what happened to the first group that engaged August, and the aerial assault from the beastfolk overhead had stripped away whatever remained. They scattered, some fleeing the field entirely, others going to the ground and hoping the chaos moved past them.
The Warlord looked at his numbers and made the calculation that any creature with minimal self-preservation instinct would make. The walls of the chiefdom had opened. The beastman army had come out to meet them in the field. His formation was compromised. The thing in the middle of his people was still moving, still reducing his numbers, and showed no sign of having a ceiling on how long it could do this.
He ordered the retreat.
From the two thousand five hundred who had come, three hundred Oruks managed to pull away and flee the field. The humans had already been gone for some time. The ground between the walls and the treeline held what remained of the rest.
The beastfolk cheered. The kind of sound that only came after a fight with real stakes, after real losses, when the thing you were defending was still standing. August heard it from where he was, already making his way back through the field, and he did not feel the victory in it the way they did.
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More To Come
Ten warriors from the chiefdom had died, and more were wounded. August had seen them fall during the engagement — caught in moments when the Oruk captains had pinned his attention and the fighting at other sections of the field had gone badly without his ability to redirect. He had been conservative with his power output for reasons he stood by, and he acknowledged without drama that the conservation had a cost attached to it.
This had not been his fight to begin with. But that was not the thought that made the deaths easier to look at.
He moved through the wounded without being asked. Most of the warriors he stopped beside could not speak his language and he could not speak theirs, but the language of checking a wound and doing something about it translated cleanly enough. They watched him work with the kind of wariness that turns into something else when it becomes clear that the person doing the work is not just doing it for performance sake — that they genuinely mean to help and have no secondary interest in the situation.
It made him something in their eyes that had not been there before. Not only the legend of the green-eyed blur who had moved through their enemies like stormy weather. It was something more grounded than that, it was the admiration for another species despite their differences.
The celebration and the mourning ran together the way they always did after a battle with real losses. The beastfolk knew how to hold both.
When the immediate work was done, August sought out Chieftain Midoka.
"Chief, take what I'm about to say as a gut feeling rather than a certainty. But I don't believe that was their full force. The way they committed, the numbers they brought, the way the Warlord withdrew when it started going badly — it felt like a probe rather than a full assault. A test of your defenses, not a genuine attempt to break them." He kept his voice level. "I think we should expect something heavier. I would like your permission to send for my team to be here."
Chieftain Midoka looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached out and gripped August's shoulder in the way that beastfolk did when the words available were not quite sufficient.
"Our warriors are honored to have fought and fallen alongside a warrior such as you. What you did out there today is something they will speak of for a long time." He paused. "Send for your team, August Finn. We will heed your counsel."
August opened the Party Chat.
The message was brief. The responses were immediate. Talon One and Talon Two both confirmed they were moving. They would arrive within a few hours by the fastest route available, which for people operating within range of the Mighty Peregrine Eagles flight network was faster than it would have been for anyone else.
He closed the chat and went back to help in tending the wounded.
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The Warlord's End
The retreating Warlord reached the main camp of the warband with three hundred survivors and a report that was, by any measurement, catastrophic.
He delivered it to his Great Warlord King anyway, because the alternatives were worse than the conversation. The Berdeng Oruks' Great Warlord King was a red Oruk named Agroba da Kill Mongar, and red was what an Oruk became after eating enough of its own kind to have crossed a threshold that most of them didn't survive reaching. Agroba had survived it.
The cannibalistic tradition of the Oruks was not complicated, but its outcomes were consistent. They started gray, almost all of them, the base coloration of a species that began at the bottom of its own hierarchy. The more they consumed their own, the more they changed. Each Oruk consumed transferred a fraction of that creature's accumulated strength to the one who had eaten them — a slow accumulation, half a percent at a time, building toward something that took decades of sustained practice to produce. The coloration shifted through the earthen tones as the power accumulated. Brown. Orange. Green. And then, for the ones who had eaten long enough and survived the process of becoming what the eating produced, red.
Red meant they had gone mad with it. Red also meant they were very, very difficult to kill.
Agroba listened to the Warlord's report. Then he ate the Warlord afterwards.
The assembled Oruks did not find this surprising. The surviving three hundred stood in their ranks and watched the Great Warlord King finish his meal and felt the air around him grow heavier by a fraction that all of them could measure and none of them would be able to quantify. That was how it worked. That was how it had always worked.
Agroba da Kill Mongar looked in the direction the fleeing survivors had come from and made a decision that required very little deliberation.
The probe had answered what he needed to know. The beastman chiefdom had unexpected assets. The thing that had moved through his forward force was something he had not accounted for. He had not survived to his current state and his current color transformation by ignoring information about things that could kill him.
He would come himself next time.
And August Finn, somewhere in the chiefdom behind the walls, watching the treeline from the ramparts while the celebration below ran its course through grief and relief in equal measure, had the distinct sensation that this was precisely what was going to happen.
Talon One and Two were on their way.
It would not be enough time to rest fully, but it would have to be enough for the next battle to come.