Chapter 255 — The Field Where Kingdoms Die III (Bonus)

Chapter 255: Chapter 255 — The Field Where Kingdoms Die III (Bonus)

The spearhead was getting thinner, and everybody could feel it.

It had started four hundred strong behind Team Zero and it was not four hundred anymore. Men who fell were not being replaced, because there was nobody behind to replace them with. A whole section had turned around and was fighting Crown troops in the corridor’s rear to stop it closing. Another had been dragged sideways into the monsters coming off the eastern flank and was simply gone.

Team Zero was still moving forward.

The army carrying them was being shaved off a meter at a time.

[CROWN SOLDIERS SLAIN — PARTY CONTRIBUTION]

[EXP GAINED: 2,140]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 47,675 → 49,815 / 63,000]

The closer they got to the centre, the better the soldiers became.

The plate got heavier. The formations stopped breaking after the first rank went and started reforming behind it. Officers appeared in numbers, and the officers were the ones giving orders that made sense, pulling ranks back rather than feeding them forward.

Then the smoke moved, and James saw it.

The royal stag, on a standard taller than the ones around it, with a cluster of heavier banners beneath it. Household companies drawn up in a square. And somewhere in the middle of that, a mounted figure with Crown elites around him in a ring.

Too far to scan. Too many bodies in between.

Raymond saw it in the same second.

He did not shout. His jaw set, and his hand tightened on the reins, and he lifted his sword and pointed it at his brother’s banner and the whole spearhead turned two degrees toward it.

**[RaymondWasRight]:** THATS BALDWINS BANNER

**[CrownLawIE]:** OH FUCK

**[ZeroFan]:** THEY ACTUALLY GOT THROUGH

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** not through. LOOK HOW MANY ARE STILL BETWEEN THEM

**[GalwayGoblin]:** HOW FAR???

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** ronans shield is taking a BEATING

Maeve had her hands out and her eyes half shut.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

"Not straight," she said. "Straight is their thickest. Left — forty degrees left, there’s a seam. Two formations, and the right-hand one’s been pulled sideways by something coming out of the east, they’ve got a twenty-meter gap and nobody’s filled it yet."

"How long?"

"Ninety seconds. Maybe less."

"Ronan," James said. "East. Now."

The spearhead swung. Finn broke the shoulder of the first formation before it understood the angle had changed. Cillian put lightning into the men trying to slide across and close the gap. James raised a fresh body behind the second rank and used it to pull three shields backward into the men behind them.

Raymond’s remaining veterans poured through the seam like water through a broken dam.

For four minutes they made better progress than they had made all day. They crossed broken ground carpeted with dead from both armies, and Baldwin’s standards got closer, and the pale walls of Caerleon rose higher behind them, and James let himself think, for the first time, that they might actually have found the road.

Then the Crown soldiers in front of them stopped fighting.

They did not break. They did not die. They stepped backward in good order, shields still up, keeping their line, and opened a clean lane straight down the middle of the corridor.

Finn slowed immediately.

Ronan brought the shield higher and stopped advancing.

Nobody had to say it. Armies did not open doors for you.

---

A man walked into the space they had made.

He was older than Vane by fifteen years and built broader rather than bigger, in dark Crown plate that had no ceremony on it anywhere — no gilt, no crest work, nothing but a career’s worth of scars in the metal, repaired and repaired again. He carried a two-handed war blade one-handed, resting the flat against his shoulder.

He did not look at Raymond. Raymond was a prince with an army and a claim, and the man walking down that lane did not spare him a glance.

He looked at James.

[LORD COMMANDER EDRIC MORCANT]

[LEVEL: 54]

[CLASS: ROYAL WARMASTER]

[TITLE: THE CROWN’S RIGHT HAND]

[HP: 38,000 / 38,000]

[ELITE BOSS]

Nobody in Team Zero said the number out loud.

Finn’s axes came down rather than up, which he only ever did when he had stopped thinking about attacking first. Ronan moved half a step across in front of James without appearing to decide to. Maeve stopped advancing entirely and put her weight back. The light on Cillian’s conductors went from idle to live.

Vane had been forty-six, and Vane had put James on the ground twice.

Morcant kept looking at him for one more second.

"You’re the necromancer," he said. "The one who killed Alwyn Vane."

James did not bother denying it. "I am."

The Lord Commander’s hand closed around the grip of the war blade, once, and released.

"You killed my disciple."

And then something screamed on their right.

---

It came out of the smoke to the east, and it was not a goblin.

An orc came through the press with a two-handed axe across one shoulder, and he did not push men aside so much as walk where they were and let them deal with it. Smaller orcs moved with him — and then stopped when he stepped into the open ground, hanging back at the edges, because even they were not standing next to him.

[ORC WAR-CHIEF KARGAN]

[LEVEL: 51]

[BOSS MONSTER]

[HP: 32,000 / 32,000]

Kargan looked at Raymond’s soldiers, and then at Morcant’s Crown line, and then at the five people standing in the middle of the road between them.

There was nothing in that look that took a side.

He had come down out of a pass and across forty miles of somebody else’s kingdom, and what he had found at the end of it was two human armies who had been kind enough to exhaust each other first.

Three interests in one lane. Team Zero going south. Morcant making sure they never got there. And an orc who wanted the field itself and did not care whose banners were standing on it when he took it.

Morcant did not turn to face him. He shifted his weight so he could see both, and kept the blade where it was.

Around all of them the war went on without pausing for any of it — Crown and Northern soldiers still killing each other forty meters behind the bosses, arrows still crossing overhead in both directions, a monster shrieking somewhere further east, and Raymond’s thinning veterans fighting on three sides to hold a corridor that was trying to close.

Kargan drove the head of his axe into the mud.

Then he roared.

It was not a battle cry. It came out low and went through the ground as much as the air, and men who had been fighting through arrow fire all morning flinched away from it. A Crown soldier in the second rank dropped his spear. Another put a hand over one ear.

[ORC WAR-CHIEF KARGAN — WAR HOWL]

[FEAR PRESSURE DETECTED]

Maeve had her focus up before the sound finished, and the pressure broke over Team Zero and did not settle on them.

"Held," she said, through her teeth. "That cost."

Kargan pulled the axe out of the ground.

Something began gathering along the blade — not light, exactly. The mud around the axe head cracked outward in a ring as the pressure came up through it.

Morcant lowered the war blade off his shoulder and levelled it at James.

Ronan planted the shield.

Finn separated his axes.

Cillian drew into both conductors.

James put both hands on Durendal.

**[GalwayGoblin]:** TWO BOSSES???

**[ZeroFan]:** LEVEL FIFTY FOUR

**[CorkClimber]:** VANE WAS 46 WHAT THE FUCK

**[RaymondWasRight]:** THE ORC ISNT EVEN WITH BALDWIN

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN HOLD

**[MaeveCallMe]:** MAEVE PLEASE

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THEY ARE STILL HUNDREDS OF METRES FROM BALDWIN

**[KarganEnjoyer]:** THAT AXE IS GLOWING

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

Kargan pointed the axe down the lane at every human in it.

"No one passes."

Then he bent forward, and one boot tore a trench in the mud, and the aura along the blade surged.

[ORC WAR-CHIEF KARGAN]

[SKILL ACTIVATED: BLOOD-AXE CHARGE]