Chapter 260 — The Road to Baldwin II

Chapter 260: Chapter 260 — The Road to Baldwin II

He came in low and put everything into the joint Raymond’s horse had opened.

[KARGAN — HP: 25,940 → 21,400]

The leg folded halfway and Kargan went down onto it and then tore his axe out of the horse and swung backhanded through the space where Finn had been standing, and Finn had to abandon the follow-up and throw himself flat to keep his head.

The Orc Chief got up.

He was breathing differently now, deep and ragged through his mouth, and he put almost all of his weight onto the good leg when he moved, and every swing after that came harder than the one before it rather than softer.

The smaller orcs that had been hanging back at the edges came in.

Four of them went for James and Maeve, because the ones at the back of a formation always know where the caster is. Two more planted themselves at their War-Chief’s damaged side, which was more intelligent than James had expected and considerably more inconvenient.

And Crown infantry was still working around behind all of it, trying to close the corridor, fighting the Northern Legion, fighting the orcs, fighting nobody’s plan but their own.

James killed the first orc that reached him.

[NECRO BLAST ACTIVATED]

He raised it before it stopped moving and put it behind Kargan.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON ACTIVATED]

It was not going to hurt a Level 51 boss. It was never going to hurt a Level 51 boss. It got two steps and clawed at the back of the Orc Chief’s thigh, and Kargan turned and destroyed it with one contemptuous chop.

And turning meant bringing his left shoulder round.

The one Cillian had burned open in the first exchange.

"Shoulder!"

Cillian did not repeat his largest attack. He had enough left for a handful of things and he was not spending a floor-clearing bolt on a target he could reach with less, so he put a tight controlled strike straight into the burn, and it went into meat that had no armour left on it.

Ronan came off his back foot into the ruined knee.

[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]

Finn hit the opposite side at the same moment, into the joint he had already opened once.

Three of them landing inside the same two seconds, on the two places the Orc Chief could not protect at once.

[KARGAN — HP: 21,400 → 15,600]

Kargan answered by dropping the axe out of his right hand, reaching down, and taking hold of Ronan’s shield.

Then he pulled.

Ronan came off the ground entirely, hauled forward two full meters by his own shield with his arm still strapped inside it, and for about half a second the whole weight of him was hanging off a shoulder that had already been driven into his own chest twice today.

The straps saved him.

They tore out of their mountings under the load, the top one first, then the buckle at the forearm ripping through the leather. And the shield went one way and Ronan went the other, and he came down into the mud on his back with the air driven out of him.

If those straps had held, Kargan would have taken the arm off at the shoulder and kept the arm.

They did not hold. What Ronan had instead was a shoulder that would not lift past his ribs anymore, a forearm with a strap burn opened down it, and a shield lying four meters away with nothing left on it to attach to a man.

Maeve was moving before she finished deciding to. She dropped the light she had been holding around Finn. He was bleeding, in reach of an Orc Chief, with nothing on him now. She put all of it into Ronan as Kargan’s boot came down.

The stamp hit her barrier instead of Ronan’s chest.

It still drove him another inch into the mud.

Finn had to abandon his angle to save his own life, took a swing across his back that would have opened him if he had been half a second slower, and came back in at the axe arm from the outside because that was all he could reach.

James found an anchor.

Not the good one. The good one was directly behind the Orc Chief and completely exposed, in the open, at the end of a step Kargan could take in half a second.

He took the one beside the wreck of a Crown supply cart eleven meters out on the damaged side, where the wheel and the axle would be between him and anything that swung at him while the world was still catching up.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

He arrived, and spent his blind second behind broken wood, and nothing found him during it.

Then he came out low around the wheel into the ruined shoulder and put Durendal into the burn.

[KARGAN — HP: 15,600 → 12,700]

The return swing nearly took his head off.

James felt the wind of it move his hair and gave up the position instantly, backing off rather than trying for the second hit that was sitting right there.

---

He caught a glimpse of the other fight while he was retreating.

Morcant had understood what Raymond was doing to him.

He had gone aggressive, hard, driving forward and trying to force the duel back toward the Crown ranks where there were still living men to work with, and Raymond simply would not be moved. Every time Morcant pushed toward his own line, Raymond gave him ground in the wrong direction and made him choose between the duel and the walk.

His movements had gone shorter. His breathing had gone louder. He had shouted twice at soldiers who were forty meters away and had their own problems.

Then he stopped trying.

[LORD COMMANDER EDRIC MORCANT]

[SKILL ACTIVATED: KING’S EDGE — A-RANK]

The first cut opened Raymond’s shoulder above the older wound. The second came across at an angle that knocked his sword line completely out of position. The third was already travelling before the second had finished, at the join of neck and shoulder.

It was going to kill him.

Raymond did not try to stop the third one.

He turned with it inside , rolling his whole body along the line of the blade so the edge went past his ribs instead of into his neck and came up inside the reach of a two-handed war sword with a shorter blade in his hand and thirty years of knowing exactly what that meant.

He put it through the gap under Morcant’s arm and drove it in to the crossguard.

[MORCANT — HP: 27,900 → 10,000]

Baldwin’s Lord Commander took a step backward.

It was not tactical. It was the involuntary movement of a man whose body had just informed him of something, and it went south, toward his prince, without him choosing it.

Raymond did not say anything. He did not have a line for this and he did not want one; he came forward and kept the pressure on, because his brother was still six hundred meters away and this man was in the road.

Morcant made one last attempt to make the battlefield work for him. He gave ground toward a knot of Crown infantry — six or seven men fighting Northern veterans thirty meters off — and started calling them.

Raymond reached them first.

He killed two before Morcant covered half the distance and put a third down with a boot to the knee, and what arrived at the Lord Commander was not a formation. It was one wounded man with a long sword.

Morcant fought to the last with everything he had. He was magnificent about it and it did not matter. Raymond parried the desperate attack, cut across the inside of his weapon arm, and when the war blade came down four inches, he put his sword through Morcant’s throat.

[LORD COMMANDER EDRIC MORCANT SLAIN]

Raymond pulled the blade free and stood there for a moment with blood coming out of his shoulder and his side, breathing like a bellows.

Then he turned south and looked for his brother.

---

Baldwin was closer than he should have been.

James saw pieces of it, between bodies, through smoke, in the gaps between formations.

A knot of Northern Legion soldiers went at him and he did not stop for them or call his guards forward. He rode into them, knocked a spear away from his horse’s chest with the flat of his sword, killed the man holding it out of the saddle without appearing to change pace, and came out the other side still moving.

Later and later was only forty seconds, and James hated how little ground that had taken an ogre came through Baldwin’s own line and put itself in his path.

It was a real one, not a wounded thing crawling at a standard. It came at the horse with a downward swing that would have folded the animal in half.

Baldwin took the horse around it. Inside the arc, close enough that the swing went past his shoulder, and as he passed he opened the back of the ogre’s leg.

Then he did not stop underneath it, which was what the ogre wanted. He rode a wide circle instead and let the leg take the creature’s weight for four or five seconds while it turned to follow him, and when it committed to the second swing on a leg that could not brace properly, he came back inside and killed it.

Then he kept riding north.

James got about two seconds to watch that, and spent both of them getting steadily colder.

On the broadcast, the Irish feed had spent the last minutes in absolute uproar over Raymond, a fifty-level NPC dismantling Baldwin’s Lord Commander with a shoulder wound, the charge, the counter under King’s Edge, all of it. The chat had been so loud that the moderators had gone to slow mode twice.

The mood changed as the camera kept catching the other thing. Somewhere in the middle of celebrating Raymond, the Irish audience noticed how far the Crown standard had travelled, and what Baldwin had gone through to move it, and how little of him appeared to have been spent doing it.

The celebration did not stop so much as thin out.

---

Kargan had stopped chasing people.

He could not, anymore. The knee would not carry a lunge and everybody in that mud had worked it out, so the Orc Chief changed what he was doing entirely and started using the axe to own the ground around himself, huge circular sweeps at knee height and chest height, one after another, turning a ten-meter circle into a place where nothing could stand.

It made him slower and it made him more dangerous, because now the only way to touch him was through the axe.

Then he planted his good foot and pulled his head back.

[ORC WAR-CHIEF KARGAN — WAR HOWL]

[FEAR PRESSURE DETECTED]

Maeve got her focus up.

She held it and this time James could see exactly what holding it cost. Her hands shook visibly through the casting. Her left knee buckled and she caught herself on it and straightened by force, and when the pressure passed she needed a full second before her stance came back, standing there with her jaw set and her weight not quite where she wanted it.

Kargan watched her do it.

He had roared twice on this field and twice the humans in front of him had not broken, and he was not a clever creature but he was not a stupid one either, and his eyes went to the woman who kept being upright afterward.

Then he charged her.