Rise of the Horde

Chapter 800 - 799

The Yurakk street fighting was the fighting that the stabbing sword had been designed for.

The 3rd Warband’s advance through the capital’s northwestern residential district proceeded at the rate that twenty-foot-wide streets and sustained close-quarters combat combined to produce: one block per thirty minutes, each block’s defense cleared by the specific technique that the Yurakk warriors had developed across four months of continuous combat and that the capital’s urban terrain demanded the refinement of.

The technique was the technique of the shield and the sword and the doorway.

The doorway was the chokepoint. Every building in the residential district had a doorway. Every doorway was approximately three feet wide and six feet tall. Every doorway was the point through which the building’s barbarian occupants had to exit to engage the advancing Yurakk formation and through which the Yurakk warriors had to enter to clear the building’s barbarian occupants from the position that the building’s interior provided.

A Yurakk warrior named Drenn approached the first doorway on the block’s western side. His rectangular shield covered his body from chin to knee. His stabbing sword was held in the specific position that the doorway-clearing technique prescribed: blade horizontal, point forward, the sword’s narrow profile aligned with the doorway’s narrow width.

Drenn kicked the door.

The door was wooden. The kick’s force, delivered by a Fourth Realm warrior’s enhanced leg, drove the door inward on its hinges. The door struck the wall behind the door and bounced back. Drenn’s shield caught the rebounding door and held it open.

The building’s interior was dark. The darkness was the darkness that shuttered windows and the absence of lamp light produced in stone buildings whose construction’s thickness made the interiors the specific dim environment that close-quarters combat’s most dangerous conditions included.

A boomstick fired from the darkness. The ball struck Drenn’s shield at the center boss. The iron absorbed the impact. The ball embedded at the depth that the iron’s layered construction permitted. Drenn’s arm felt the impact’s force through the shield’s handle, the force transmitted from the iron surface through the core through the handle to the arm that held the handle. The arm held.

Drenn advanced through the doorway. The doorway’s three-foot width compressed his shield’s coverage to the width that the doorway allowed. The shield covered the doorway’s width entirely. The sword’s point extended past the shield’s right edge by six inches, the extension the specific reach that the stabbing sword’s technique used for the transition from doorway entry to interior engagement.

The boomstick’s wielder was three paces inside the building’s interior, the warrior reloading the weapon with the specific fumbling that darkness and the engagement’s adrenaline combined to produce. The reloading required fourteen seconds. Drenn’s advance through the doorway and across the three paces between the doorway and the warrior required four seconds.

The stabbing sword found the warrior before the reloading was complete. The blade’s narrow point entered the gap between the warrior’s breastplate and his left arm’s pauldron, the gap that the arm’s elevation during the reloading motion exposed. The point entered the gap at the depth that the gap’s width and the thrust’s force combined to determine: four inches into the armpit’s soft tissue, the tissue that contained the brachial plexus’s nerve bundle and the axillary artery’s vascular supply.

The warrior dropped the boomstick. The arm that had been reloading went limp. The warrior’s mouth opened but the sound that the mouth produced was not the scream that the wound’s pain demanded because the brachial plexus’s disruption had interrupted the neural pathway that the scream’s vocalization required.

Drenn pulled the sword free and struck again. The second thrust found the warrior’s throat above the gorget. The warrior fell.

* * * * *

The building’s second floor contained three more barbarian warriors.

Drenn’s fire team, four Yurakk warriors who had trained for the building-clearance technique during the weeks at Ashwell, entered the building behind Drenn and ascended the stairway that connected the ground floor to the upper floor. The stairway was narrow: two and a half feet wide, spiraling clockwise, the spiral’s direction providing the specific advantage that the spiral’s geometry gave to defenders at the stairway’s top because the defenders’ sword arms were on the inside of the spiral where the spiral’s curvature provided the wider arc.

The Yurakk warriors ascended the stairway with the specific technique that clockwise spirals demanded from attackers: the shield held on the left arm covering the warrior’s front, the sword held on the right arm and pressed against the stairway’s outer wall where the outer wall’s curvature provided the wider arc that compensated for the inner position’s disadvantage.

The first barbarian defender met the ascending Yurakks at the stairway’s first turn. The defender’s hand axe struck from above, the axe head descending at the angle that the stairway’s elevation difference provided. Drenn’s shield caught the axe. The impact drove Drenn backward one step. The warrior behind Drenn braced against Drenn’s back and prevented the backward step from becoming the backward fall that the stairway’s geometry would convert into the tumbling descent that incapacitated ascending warriors.

Drenn’s sword thrust upward past the shield’s top edge. The narrow blade found the defender’s knee, the joint exposed by the stairway’s elevation difference that placed the defender’s legs at the height where the ascending warrior’s sword reached. The blade entered the knee’s side at the joint’s hinge point and the knee’s structural ligaments parted and the defender collapsed onto the stairway’s step with the specific fall that a destroyed knee produced in a standing warrior.

The second warrior behind Drenn stepped over the fallen defender and drove his stabbing sword into the defender’s neck. The kill was the kill that the stairway-clearing technique prescribed for fallen defenders: the thrust to the neck while the defender was on the ground and the defender’s armor’s gap was exposed by the ground position’s specific geometry.

The stairway continued. The second defender was at the stairway’s second turn. The engagement was the same engagement: axe from above, shield from below, sword through the knee, kill on the ground. The technique’s repetition was the repetition that the stairway’s consistent geometry produced in the combat that the geometry hosted: each turn the same dimensions, each defender the same elevation advantage, each attacker the same shield-and-sword response.

The third defender was at the upper floor’s landing. The defender stood at the stairway’s exit with two hand axes, one in each hand, the dual-weapon stance that the highland tradition’s close-quarters fighters adopted for the specific scenario of defending a stairway’s top against ascending attackers.

Both axes swung simultaneously. The left axe targeted Drenn’s shield. The right axe targeted Drenn’s exposed right shoulder, the shoulder that the sword arm’s extension past the shield’s edge left unprotected.

Drenn ducked. The shield rose above his head, catching the left axe’s descending arc. The right axe passed over Drenn’s ducked head and struck the stairway’s wall behind him, the axe head embedding in the stone at the depth that the warrior’s Fifth Realm striking force produced.

The axe was stuck. The warrior pulled. The axe did not move. The warrior’s right hand was committed to the stuck axe and the warrior’s right side was exposed by the pulling’s posture.

Drenn’s sword found the right side. The narrow blade entered the gap between the warrior’s hip armor and the warrior’s rib armor, the gap that the pulling posture’s lateral stretch had widened from the standard gap’s two inches to the widened gap’s four inches. The blade entered at four inches’ depth and the warrior’s pulling stopped and the warrior’s body folded around the blade’s entry point.

Drenn pulled the blade free. The warrior fell. The upper floor was clear.

"Building clear!" Drenn’s report carried through the building’s interior to the fire team’s rear element who relayed the report to the warband master at the street’s command position.

One building. Four barbarian defenders dead. The block contained twelve buildings. The block’s clearance would require the technique’s repetition across twelve buildings’ doorways and stairways and upper floors, the repetition that produced the block-per-thirty-minutes pace that the Yurakk advance sustained through the capital’s northwestern district.

The advance continued. Building by building. Doorway by doorway. Stairway by stairway. The stabbing sword’s narrow point finding the gaps that the gaps existed to be found through, the rectangular shield’s coverage providing the protection that the boomstick fire and the hand axes demanded, the Yurakk warriors’ discipline sustaining the technique’s repetition across the hours and the blocks that the capital’s northwestern district contained.

"Zug zug," Drenn said, between buildings. The word meant acknowledged. The word meant understood. The word meant everything was proceeding as expected. The word was the word that warriors spoke when the fighting was the fighting and the fighting’s rhythm was the rhythm that the warriors had been trained to sustain and the sustaining was the thing that the warriors did because the sustaining was the thing that produced the result that the sustaining existed to produce.

The result was the capital’s clearance. One building at a time. One doorway at a time. One stabbing sword thrust at a time.

The wolf advanced through the streets. The wolf’s advance was not the open-field advance that the Rakshas’ spear wall produced. The wolf’s advance was the urban advance that the Yurakk warbands produced: precise, methodical, building by building, the specific application of close-quarters combat capability to the specific terrain that close-quarters combat capability was designed for.

The capital fell. Not in the dramatic collapse that thundermaker bombardment produced. In the systematic clearance that thousands of disciplined warriors produced when the warriors applied the techniques that four months of continuous combat had refined to the urban terrain that the techniques’ specific design addressed.

One building at a time. The wolf advanced. The barbarians retreated. The capital’s control shifted from the force that had conquered it to the force that was clearing it.