Chapter 46.2: 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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Oruks Out for Vengeance
Oruks were no strangers to danger. In fact, they welcomed it. They invited danger the way most species invited food, because chaos was what they lived for and conflict was the only economy they had ever fully understood. A fight was not a problem to an Oruk. A fight for them was just another day to draw blood and eat their enemies, that is why they are called Greedy Buta's (Pigs).
But there was one thing that Oruks hated with a depth of feeling that bordered on religious conviction, and that was sneaky, underhanded tactics. Ambushes from the shadows. Traps in the ground. Enemies who hit them and then were simply not there anymore when they turned around to respond. Oruks preferred the direct approach in all things, even when the direct approach was demonstrably the worse option. Especially then, actually. An Oruk who retreated from a frontal engagement was not viewed as someone making a sensible tactical decision in response to adverse conditions. An Oruk who retreated was a weak member of society, or should they say that day's potential dinner. The stronger ones ate the weaker ones, and that was how the problem of cowardice was managed within the Berdeng structure. It was a brutal system, but it had a certain internal consistency.
All of this was to say that the Berdeng Oruk war camp woke up angrier than it had gone to sleep, which had already been considerably angrier than its usual baseline.
By the order of their king, they spread out in all directions to find the cowardly bastards responsible for last night's attack.
They were going to find whatever had done this to them. They were going to find it, and they were going to eat it, and whatever remained after that would be ground into the dirt as an object lesson for anyone else who thought that sneaking around in the dark was an acceptable substitute for standing in front of them and dying like something with self-respect.
What none of them knew was that this decision, made in fury and broadcast through the forest in the form of five-person hunting parties fanning out across the surrounding terrain, was approximately the best thing they could have done for August's operational situation.
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Lookout Duty
The person currently holding the canopy observation post above the concealed base was Nilo Mak, one of the new Talon One members, rotating shift with Betty Snow-Stone beside him. Betty had drawn the same shift, which meant Nilo had ended up sitting in a tree at altitude in the pre-dawn with one of the founding members of the team, and had decided that this was either a great opportunity or a very uncomfortable one, depending on how the conversation went.
It turned out to be neither particularly great nor particularly uncomfortable. Betty ran lookout duty the way she ran most things — straightforwardly and without fuss, her eyes on the forest below and her attention distributed across the approaches the way it was supposed to be.
The silence held for a while. Then she asked, in the tone of someone making conversation without expecting anything dramatic from it, "So. How's training treating you so far, rookie?"
Nilo kept his eyes on the tree line before answering. He had grown up in the hunting community, second generation, his parents having arrived in one of the early settlement waves, and the Great Forest had been the landscape of his entire childhood. Sitting still in a high canopy position with eyes on the ground below was not a foreign experience for him. "I'm getting the hang of it, ma'am. I knew it was going to be hard, but it's actually keeping me motivated. Which I didn't entirely expect."
Betty absorbed this and found it acceptable. "Well, just keep doing what the commander and your mentors tell you to. It pays off in the long run. Not always quickly, but it pays." She shifted her position slightly to cover a different angle. "It's a bit sad that we are temporarily disbanding the original team, I'll be honest. But I understand why. August —" She caught herself. "I mean, the commander. He wants us to grow in ways that aren't just about getting better at hitting things. He is strict, yes. But he is also a visionary. He sees further ahead than most people bother to look."
Nilo looked at her for a moment, and his expression had that particular quality that came over new members when they were hearing something about August from someone who had actually been there for the long version of the story. It was not reverence exactly. It was closer to trying to assemble something large from references that kept coming back bigger than expected.
Then he caught movement below.
Around a kilometer from the base perimeter, something was spreading out through the forest in the careful, deliberate pattern of a search formation. Not beasts. Not random movement. Organized, spaced, with the specific spread of a unit that had been given a search radius and was filling it methodically.
He sent the message through the sub-channel without speaking aloud.
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Big'ungar
The detachment below was small by Oruk standards, which still made it a meaningful force by anyone else's. Five Hunter Warriors, three Blood Warhounds with their handlers and trackers, and at the front of it a Captain who moved with the confidence of something that had consumed enough of its competition to hold the rank without anyone disputing it.
"Big'ungar Boyz," the Captain said, in the particular register that Oruk commanders used when they were not quite speaking to anyone specifically and were mostly reminding the universe of their own presence. "I cud smell fear in these parts."
The Blood Warhounds looked up at him. He pointed forward. "Make shure the pupz smell our prey."
"Oark!" came the response from the lower-ranking warriors around him, which was the Oruk approximation of an acknowledged order, delivered by creatures who had allocated most of their available cognitive capacity to combat function and found that this left limited room for linguistic development.
They spread into a wide search formation — approximately fifteen feet between each member, moving in a broad sweep, with other search units positioned every hundred meters to either side of them at intervals that covered the ground systematically without clustering. It was, in its way, a reasonably organized search pattern. Someone with tactical awareness had designed this. Almost certainly not Big'ungar, who was the kind of creature built to execute the plan rather than conceive it, but someone high up the chain of command.
What Big'ungar and his detachment could not know was that they had been under observation from the moment they appeared in the tree line below the canopy post, and that two members of the combined Talon force were currently making very precise notes about spacing, interval, and direction through the Party Chat while remaining completely still in the thick grass.
The grass here was good cover. Even the Grimfangs, lying flat against the ground with their considerable bodies pressed into the vegetation, were effectively invisible from the elevation the search party was working from. Toto was motionless beside Torin. Rexy had gone flat the moment the first Oruk appeared, which suggested the wolves understood the situation without needing it explained to them.
*[Ragnar: Well it seems they are looking for us. What are we going to do, Commander?]*
The response came back before the search party had covered another twenty meters.
*[August: Have everyone on standby. It seems we will be using Benethar's traps after all.]*
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Explosion!
The traps in question were the Uncontrolled Magma Explosive Balls — the version that did not require a person to be standing next to them to detonate, because they could be triggered remotely through an underground vein of mana that Benethar ran through the earth using his magma element. He had placed them the previous evening, distributed across the approaches to the base in patterns that made intuitive sense to something that was thought of carefully in terms of magma flow and geological structure. To anyone walking over them, the ground looked entirely ordinary.
*[Benethar: Acknowledged. Just tell me when and I'll make them explode.]*
*[August: Everyone give me eyes in every direction. Benethar, make the explosions stagger and non-uniform.]*
The reasoning behind the non-uniform detonation was straightforward: a row of explosions going off in neat sequence communicated where the mine field was planted at and allowed a responding force to read the pattern and adjust. Explosions that went off in irregular order, at varying intervals, communicated something considerably more unsettling, which was that whatever was happening underground did not have a predictable shape.
Within the next minute, as the Oruk search parties began stepping into the areas where the bombs had been placed, the ground started expressing its objections.
The explosions were not small. Each device produced a blast zone of twenty to thirty feet of effective radius depending on how Benethar had calibrated the specific unit — the trapped magma gases combining with the magma material itself in ways that "Professor"Benethar could explain in considerable technical detail and that everyone else simply accepted as something that worked and that they were glad was pointed away from them. The craters they left were real craters. The Oruks who were inside the blast radius when the devices went off became object lessons in what happened to things that stood in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The detonations rang through the woodland for five minutes, irregular and continuous, with no discernible pattern that would let anyone on the receiving end predict where the next one was coming from. Hundreds of Oruks, spread across the search area some five hundred meters away from the base, sustained injuries or died outright. The Blood Warhounds that had been ranging ahead of the search parties had their own problems, because the devices did not discriminate between Oruk and Warhound, and the blasts at ground level were particularly unkind to creatures running at close range to the detonation points.
Big'ungar, for his part, survived. Whether by instinct, positioning, or simply the statistical luck of large creatures who occupy space that explosions have not yet claimed, he was alive and standing when the ground finally stopped killing his people. He was also extremely angry, which put him in approximately the same emotional state as every other Oruk in the search formation who had managed to survive in the past five minutes.
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Tactical Withdrawal
The explosions had done damage, but they had also announced something that could not be walked back: there was a force in this forest that had prepared these positions in advance, and those positions were now largely spent. The concealed base was not going to remain concealed much longer. Smoke, noise, and the directional behavior of the surviving Blood Warhounds were collectively narrowing the geometry of where to look for their prey.
August made the call before the enemy could close it. Everything came out of the underground base in the time it took organized people who had trained for rapid displacement to pack everything organized people who had trained for rapid displacement needed to pack. The bunk furniture went back into the magical storage. The equipment went into the pouches. The medical section also collapsed efficiently, the Grimfangs came up from below and the eagles were already in the air.
They moved without any moment to waste.
The direction they chose was not back toward the Beastmen Chiefdom. That was the obvious route, and obvious routes in hostile territory were how you got encircled. They went north instead, curving around the mountain that sat in that direction, pulling the pursuing enemy away from the chiefdom's position rather than toward it. If the Oruks wanted to chase them, they were going to chase them away from the thing they were planning to attack. That was the strategic logic. The Oruks were going to hate every step of it, but they were also going to take it, because what the Oruks hated more than sneaky tactics was the idea of letting something that had done this to them walk away unchallenged.
Within two minutes of the team breaking from their former position, the Blood Warhounds had the scent. Within two hundred feet of the pursuit, the hounds were gaining. Whoever had thought Oruks could not move fast had not seen how an angry Oruks move.
Benethar had some of his prepared bombs. So he used them now, they helped him plant it on the route behind them during the initial base construction as a precaution that had seemed moderately paranoid at the time and now seemed extremely sensible. The detonations went off as the pursuit ran into them, reducing the pursuers numbers and buying them more distance, but the pursuit did not stop. They were not dealing with a force that valued its own survival in the way that convinced most military units to reassess a situation that was costing them this much. The Oruks were fully committed to the chase.
The team fought back when they had to. When the pursuit closed the gap to a point where bombs and distance were no longer doing the job alone, the people in the rear turned and bought time the direct way, and then moved again. August was at the back more often than not, because the situation where an Oruk force was closest to catching someone was consistently the situation where August needed to be between that force and the people it was trying to catch. He used what was appropriate to the moment and did not reach for more.
The day was long in the way that a day that is essentially one continuous tactical problem with people trying to kill you at irregular intervals tends to be long. The forest around them was also not neutral. The beasts that lived here had their own responses to the noise and disruption, and several of them took offense to what was moving through their territory — which meant that at various points, the team was dealing with pursuit from behind while simultaneously also fighting with the local wildlife that had decided they were also a problem. Some of those beasts turned their attention to the Oruks instead, which was helpful, but some did not make that distinction, which was less helpful for their situation.
After a full day of this, the Oruk force that had started the pursuit at over a thousand strong had been reduced to a few hundred. Bodies marked the route behind them across roughly twenty kilometers of forest floor, some from the bombs, some from direct engagement, some from local wildlife that had been equally unhelpful to both sides. The remaining Oruks had finally stopped their meaningless chase.
August confirmed the halt through Finnester's eyes before he confirmed it through his own.
The team also stopped moving after gaining a bit more distance.
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After the Marathon
They were fifty kilometers from the chiefdom. Thirty kilometers from the Oruk base. Somewhere in the middle of a mountain curve in territory that none of them had mapped in advance.
Everyone was alive. That was the all that mattered first, before any other concerns could be raised. Everyone was alive, though what everyone looked like after a day of running, fighting, and running again through dense forest while carrying full gear and being pursued by angry creatures with excellent noses was a different matter. The armor had absorbed most of what the Oruks had managed to land on them during the direct engagements — the enchantments held, the materials performed, and the craftsmanship of the village's armory people proved its value in real conditions in the way that nothing else fully proved it. What the armor could not do was prevent exhaustion, and exhaustion was very present in a quantitative manner.
They were tattered in enemy blood and their own, splattered across surfaces that the armor had not covered or where hits had found the gaps that every set of armor had. Potion stocks were low. Bomb supplies were significantly reduced close to nothing. Food that could be eaten while running — because stopping to eat had not been an option for most of the day — had been consumed. Even the Grimfangs were showing the particular body language of wolves who had done considerably more than they had expected to do today and were making no effort to conceal their feelings about it.
Finnester landed in the canopy above them and looked down with the expression that large raptors had when they were also tired but were not going to be the ones to say it first.
August took stock of it without editorializing. They needed to rest, they needed to recover, and they needed to move back toward the chiefdom at a pace that injured and exhausted people could actually sustain. Two days. Maybe three. That was the honest estimate for reaching the chiefdom's walls in their current condition.
What he also knew, and said to the group in the same even register he used for everything, was what the Oruks were going to do with that time.
They had been pulled away from the main force, and the main force had taken significant casualties and lost roughly sixty percent of its supply stores to the previous night's raid. An Oruk King sitting on a depleted supply chain with a damaged force and a timeline that was now working against him had one rational option available, and it was not to wait. It was to attack now, while the force could still move, before the supply shortage became a significant problem for them.
The Berdeng Oruks were going to march on the chiefdom. And with rough measurements they would arrive at the walls within a day.
"Right," said August, looking at the assembled faces around him in the failing light. "We rest tonight. We move at first light. No complaints."
There were no complaints indeed. Because there was not enough energy left for any complaints either.
They made camp and went to sleep fast even with their aching bodies and sore feet, because people who have run a full day through a forest with an Oruk army trying to eat them tend to sleep quickly when they are finally given permission to stop.