Chapter 46.1: War with the Oruks - Counter Strike
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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Assaulting the Oruks Hunting Parties
A day spent watching your prey was never wasted. August had learned that the hard way during his earliest operations in the Great Forest, when rushing in without information had produced results that were technically survivable but deeply unpleasant in getting there. He had carried those lessons forward, and he had applied them even now.
By the time morning came and the operations were ready to begin, he had a working picture of the enemy's patterns: where the hunting parties moved, at what intervals, how far they ranged from the main camp before turning back, and which of those routes took them through terrain that made the return trip significantly more complicated than the outbound one.
The combined force was divided into three assault groups, each a deliberate mix of old Talon One members, new Talon One members, and Talon Two personnel. The arrangement had a specific purpose. The newer members were still developing the kind of instinctive tactical judgment that only came from doing things under pressure with real consequences, and putting them alongside people who had been doing this for years meant that a slip in the wrong moment would not become a catastrophe. The veterans would catch what the newcomers missed, and the newcomers would get the field experience that no training exercise could fully replicate.
Group One was under August's command. Group Two was Erik's. Group Three was under Ragnar's.
Before they left the base, everyone put their gear on in the particular way that people put gear on when they understand what they are walking into. The specialized combat equipment that the village's craftspeople had developed for Talon One's operations was not decorative. The armors were custom-fitted and element-aligned, built to amplify each member's specific combat style rather than provide generic protection that served everyone adequately and no one particularly well. Betty Snow's gear was configured for fire artillery work. Bren's allowed for rapid aerial movement and close transition between sky and ground. Adam's was the kind of thing that made other people's attacks feel like a polite suggestion. Each piece had been made with the person in mind, which was why each piece actually worked.
The masks they wore were modeled after August's own — the Blurred Devil design, that beast-featured, predatory face that altered voice and appearance and had by now acquired its own reputation in the regions where August had operated. The versions the team wore were not identical to his. They were variations, each carrying its own design elements that reflected the individual beneath it while maintaining the unified silhouette of the ensemble. Different eye configurations, different finishing details, all producing different colored glows in the dark. The net effect, observed from outside the tree line, was a group of hooded figures in the shadows of the woodland, each with a pair of glowing eyes that had no business belonging to anything a sensible creature should approach.
They did not look like soldiers. They looked like something older and considerably less negotiable.
They moved out through the pre-dawn quiet without speaking aloud. The Party Chat handled what needed to be communicated. The three groups had established separate sub-channels so that group-level coordination did not bleed into the main channel and clutter it during moments that required clarity. It was a system they had refined over months of operation, and by now the experienced members could run full tactical exchanges through it without breaking stride. The newer members were still building that fluency, but they were getting there.
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Erik's Group
The first target presented itself approximately two kilometers from the main enemy camp, moving along a forest trail with the casual arrogance of a force that had not yet had a reason to expect trouble.
Ten Oruk Hunter Warriors formed the visible structure of the party. Hunter Warriors were a step removed from general infantry — where standard Oruks favored the direct collision of close-quarters violence, the Hunter caste had developed capability with ranged weapons, compound bows and weighted javelins that could reach distances that standard Oruk formations did not bother with. They moved with the specific confidence of specialists who knew they were more capable than the things they were sent out to catch.
Behind them, strung out along the trail in the way of beasts of burden that had not been given any reason to move faster, were approximately twenty Gobus and Gobis. The goblins were not combat personnel in any real sense. What they had were weapons, and what those weapons were was the problem: a collection of salvaged, hand-me-down, crudely repaired implements that ranged from crude clubs with bone spikes driven through them to fragments of larger weapons that had been broken and never properly replaced. The gear was terrible. But the danger they possessed was not zero. Goblin blood was toxic to most other species — highly toxic, contact through an open wound was potentially enough to paralyze a stronger opponent and outright kill someone with a weaker constitution. The weapons they carried were not going to win a fight with anyone who knew what they were doing, but one lucky cut from a poisoned edge at the wrong moment in a close-quarters scramble was the kind of thing that ruined an otherwise successful ambush.
Erik's group noted the formation from three positions in the surrounding trees and brush. The ten Oruks were forward and clustered, the goblins trailing behind in a loose line. The Leader Oruk — distinguishable by the additional bulk that came with rank in their structure, and by the way the others gave it slightly more physical space than they gave each other — was at the front of the warrior cluster.
Erik did not issue the order aloud.
The message came through the sub-channel at the same moment that Kirpy banked overhead and dropped out of his circling altitude.
The ambush opened from three directions simultaneously.
Kirpy hit the front of the column first, which had the immediate effect of eliminating the element of organized response before they could even begin to understand their situation. The Oruks who had been watching the forest on either side of the trail were not watching the sky, because nothing that had ever hunted them had come from the sky, and old habits do not adjust quickly when something is moving at the speed Kirpy moved when he was committed to a full dive. The Leader Oruk had perhaps two seconds of awareness before Erik dropped from above and the combat became personal.
The experienced Talon members engaged the Oruk warriors. While the newer members, who had been assigned to target the Gobus and Gobis specifically, moved in from the rear.
The Oruk warriors who were still alive fought back. That was expected. They were not creatures that surrendered the option to fight while they were still capable of it, which was philosophically consistent if not particularly tactically sensible given what was coming at them from three directions at once. They were also, regardless of their arrogance, actually capable fighters at the Hunter Warrior tier, which meant the exchanges were not one-sided enough to be trivial. Several of them managed to return fire before they were neutralized. A couple of the newer members took hits from the goblin end that drew them off balance and were injured and required immediate attention — it was not from the poison edge of the blade thankfully, because they had the awareness to avoid the worst of it, but from the simple impact of goblins charge.
The entire engagement lasted under three minutes. The Oruks were all dead by the end of it. The Gobus and Gobis that survived had managed to scatter into the underbrush, which was not ideal from a security perspective but was also not the team's priority right now. Chasing every goblin through a dense forest was not a good use of the ten-minute operational window they had given themselves.
So they moved on to the next target.
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Six Parties in Ten Minutes
The three groups operated simultaneously across the enemy's hunting range, and the operational window of ten minutes was not arbitrary. It was the time August had estimated it would take for the absence of returning parties to register as a pattern rather than a delay, and for the camp to begin sending something to investigate.
Within those ten minutes, across three concurrent operations, six hunting parties met the same conclusion as the first. Some engagements were cleaner than others. A couple produced complications that required improvisation on the fly. One of the newer members took a hit from a Goblin-tipped blade that managed to slip pass from one of the lesser protected areas of his armor and required the field medical kit the moment they were clear of the area, which was applied efficiently and without drama because the people around them had been trained for exactly this kind of scenarios.
When the time limit expired, all three groups broke contact simultaneously and disappeared back into the woodland.
The Oruks who had survived the morning's hunting range — the ones who had been far enough from the targeted parties to not be included — returned to camp with dead silence where six groups of their comrades should have been. The response was immediate and loud. The Oruks' anger was not a subtle phenomenon.
Their Blood Warhounds came out next.
They were purpose-bred creatures, these things were large, dark-coated, built for tracking rather than fighting, with scent capabilities that had been specifically developed over generations of selective breeding by a species that genuinely understood how to make something optimally useful for a single function. They ranged out from the camp in the directions the attacks had come from, moving fast along the forest trails with their handlers struggling to keep pace.
When they found the sites of the ambushes following a strong trail of blood. They found the bodies. They circled and ranged and worked the air with everything they had.
But they found nothing else that could track the attacker's location.
No scent trail continued beyond a certain point. No tracks led away from the attack zones in any consistent direction. The team had covered their withdrawal with the same methodical attention they had applied to the approach, removing what could be removed and disrupting what they could not. The Blood Warhounds reported back to their handlers in the only language available to them, which was agitation and the specific body language of animals that have searched thoroughly and come up empty.
The report that reached the Oruk commanders was not one they received with good humor.
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The Night Raid
The hunting party ambushes had been the daytime operation. What came in the evening was something different in character and considerably more dangerous in execution.
A team of five — drawn from the experienced members of the old Talon One — moved in on to the main camp after dark, with Benethar on standby some distance outside the camp to activate the explosives they would place in the storage area.
The Berdeng Oruk war camp at night was not a place that invited casual approach. The perimeter was tight, maintained by soldiers who had been on alert since the afternoon's losses, with the kind of watchfulness that came from having already been embarrassed once and having no intention of tolerating a second time. The Blood Warhounds were still circling the outer perimeter in rotating patterns. The approach required patience, precision, and a willingness to be genuinely still in ways that most people found difficult when they knew what was on the other side of the darkness.
They had managed to make it through the security.
Navigating an enemy camp's interior without being detected is different from navigating a perimeter. Outside the walls, the challenge is detection. Inside, it is identification — the need to move as though you belong somewhere you absolutely do not, at speeds that do not suggest urgency while covering ground fast enough to accomplish something before the window closes. The five of them moved through the interior of the camp in the deliberate, unhurried manner of people who had practiced this in one form or another for years.
The supply stores were the target. Not the weapons. Not the command structure. The food and fuel that kept ten thousand Oruk warriors operational in the field — the stores that the enslaved Gobus and Gobis managed and moved and maintained. Destroy enough of that and the force's operational timeline began to compress regardless of how many weapons they carried or how capable the warriors were.
They found the storage area and they did what they came to do, they began to plant Benethar's Uncontrolled Magma Explosive Balls — version one, which could be activated from a distance only by Benethar or it could be triggered by another explosion which would then cause a chain of effect.
Not everything went according to plan, because it never did. Operational security in a camp that had been freshly alarmed was not the same as operational security in a camp that had been lulled by routine. They were moving toward extraction when the situation changed.
Benethar's contribution to the exit strategy was the Controlled Magma Explosive Balls — version two, which he had refined following their initial deployment during the Kirka Village operation. The improvement was in the trigger mechanism: it could be activated by mana other than himself, it could be set to detonate on a timer of three to five seconds, which gave the thrower enough time to clear the immediate blast radius while still ensuring the target did not have enough time to react. He had several on him, and he did not treat them as a last resort.
When the camp's interior began generating pursuit in their direction, the first ball went through the air toward a concentration of structures that included a secondary supply cache they had not been able to reach directly. The explosion was not small. It produced a secondary explosion in what it hit, which produced confusion across a wide section of the camp, which produced exactly the kind of noise and movement that a force already on edge interpreted as an attack from a different direction than the one the escape was actually happening in.
They threw those magma balls while running. The results were both effective and aesthetically impressive.
And elsewhere Benethar activated the ones they had planted on the storage area, creating even more confusion to the enemy camp.
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The Generals (Warlords)
The problem was that not everything pursuing them was a standard Oruk warrior.
Five of the figures that came out of the camp's interior in response to the explosions were not the rank-and-file that the ambushes had dealt with throughout the day. These were General or Warlord-class Oruk, and the difference was immediately apparent to anyone who had spent any time understanding what the cannibalistic tradition of the species actually produced over time. Massive frames, additional density of build, the particular coloration of something that had consumed enough of its own kind to have changed from where it started, Red. These were creatures that had been eating their way up the hierarchy for long enough that the ordinary physical laws governing what a body could do had been renegotiated on their behalf.
They were also very, very angry.
August managed to understand what they were the moment they emerged from the firelight and made his assessment. He was not going to be overwhelmed by them. That was not a question. But he also was not going to come out of an extended engagement with five General-class Oruks without taking something for his trouble, and the extraction window was closing and he had four other people who needed to get clear before he could start making personal decisions about any other acceptable risk.
He used one of his skills: Flame Burst.
The skill did not require finesse. That was its nature — it was a destructive tool without much technical complexity, built for output rather than precision, releasing fire that burned until its fuel was gone or August's mana was cut. The area-of-effect extended wide, catching multiple targets within its range, and the fire that stuck to the targets that were caught in it did not simply stop when the initial burst was done. It continued until it consumed the fuel. That was its feature. The fire's burning effect compounded damage over time in a way that was catastrophic against targets who could not extinguish it through magical means or simply get far enough away from the source.
He followed it again with one his skills: Lightning Volt, directed at the sections of the pursuing group that had been partially shielded from the Flame Burst by the camp's structures around them. The lightning's conductivity scattered from its primary impact point to targets within range, and the paralyzing effect on those it hit bought the seconds needed.
The five Generals had managed to shield themselves by releasing their own elemental defensive buffs. Magical defensive skills activated in the fraction of a moment between registering the type of attack and the moment that attack arrived. They had been doing this long enough to have good instincts for self-preservation. The skills they threw up saved them from the worst of what August was sending their way — saved their arms and probably their lives, in the accounting of what would have happened if the fire had held contact a second longer or the lightning had hit without a barrier absorbing the initial shock.
All five were injured. Not critically, not fatally, but injured enough that the calculus of pursuit changed.
The Generals ordered the chase to be stopped. Whoever that was that managed to injure them, they had established, was not something you would send your remaining forces after in the dark without knowing what else it was capable of. That was how you lost more people.
August and his four teammates collected themselves on the other side of the tree line, breathing harder than they would have preferred to admit, and began the systematic business of covering their tracks back toward base.
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Retreat Back to Base
Erik summed it up when they were clear, his voice carrying the mild tone of someone who had survived the evening and had already moved past the emotional portion of that experience.
"Well, that went better than expected. Though I doubt we can repeat what we did at that camp. The element of surprise in there is gone." He paused to check that the Blood Warhounds were not able to follow their tracks. "With the significant damage to their supplies though. This will buy the chiefdom more time."
August agreed with the assessment without saying so, which was the kind of agreement that looked like silence and was received correctly by people who knew him.
The first day of Operation Hit and Run was finished. The supply damage was real, the hunting losses were real, and the Berdeng Oruks were now fully aware that there was something in the forest around them that was bold enough to attack them and the Oruks could conclude that it was not the beastfolk Chiefdom, they could not be tracked by their hounds, and had already cost them considerably more than the probe attack had cost the day before.
What that awareness would produce in response was the question that would determine how the rest of this went.
August had a working theory about what Agroba da Kill Mongar would do when the morning's full damage report reached him.
He was not optimistic about it being something that would make the enemy retreat back to their territory.