"Behind the trees, everyone!" Damra aided Ludwig in ’herding’ his army.
Damra’s voice carried over the retreat like a whip crack, rough with urgency and loud enough to cut through panic.
He wasn’t trying to sound like a commander; he was one now, whether he liked it or not. He shoved shoulders, yanked arms, and physically turned bodies in the right direction when words weren’t enough. Ludwig let him.
Damra knew the mountain paths better than anyone here, and Ludwig needed his hands doing sothing useful besides swinging axes.
While Ludwig was the last to withdraw, he noticed that several stragglers, goblins mainly, had decided that they would be better off not falling back and shoot down so of the orcs with their darts.
They’d picked their spot like rats with experience, low brush, a slight rise, enough cover to vanish if soone looked their way too long.
The goblins were small, ugly little pragmatists, and right now pragmatism was worth more than pride. Their tubes lifted and dipped in quick rhythms, darts whispering out rather than flying.
You didn’t hear goblin fire until bodies started folding. Ludwig watched it while backing up, jaw tight, mind already calculating whether those idiots were about to die for nothing or buy him seconds that mattered.
So far, the goblins unbelievably have the highest kill record. In a war, it isn’t the one who’s at the front who gets to kill the most; it’s always the one who is picking his enemies from a safe distance.
It wasn’t unbelievable to Ludwig. It was the oldest truth in every battlefield, wearing new clothes. The man at the front got songs and scars. The one in the shadows got numbers. Each dart didn’t just kill, it made a red orc stumble, made another trip, made the charge bunch up wrong. A falling giant was an obstacle, and obstacles turned montum into chaos.
They continued raining darts at the enemy until there were no more darts, and since they were short-legged and small, if they were to run to the treeline, they would be stomped to death by the much faster and bigger counterpart, the red orcs.
The goblins seed to realize it at the sa ti, little heads turning, ears flattening, eyes doing that quick math they were born with. The tree line was safe, but safety was uphill and behind faster legs. If they tried to sprint, they’d be caught in seconds, crushed under boots the size of their torsos.
So, they did what goblins did best: they fully hid their bodies in the bushes.
They didn’t retreat like soldiers. They lted. One second, there were hunched shapes with tubes; the next, there was only grass and reeds and a few snapped stems. Even their breathing seed to disappear. Ludwig knew exactly what they were betting on: that a red orc’s eyes were made for hate and target, not for hunting small things in green chaos.
Ludwig knew that many of them would still be stomped to death, but that was a risk they took willingly. He couldn’t fault them; they did their job, and there were still many more goblins back at the tree line.
It was the kind of choice Ludwig respected even when it pissed him off. They weren’t brave. They weren’t noble. They were useful, and usefulness paid its own price. If half of them died buying ti, the other half would live to poison another day. Ludwig didn’t waste sympathy on arithtic like that.
"How are your mana levels?" Gale asked as he stood next to Ludwig, watching the charge right in front of the treeline.
Gale’s posture stayed calm, but Ludwig could hear the shift underneath it, concern wrapped in professionalism. The Knight King wasn’t panicking, yet. That almost made it worse. When Gale started asking questions, it ant the situation had teeth.
"Still not good enough, can’t halt them here. We’ll have to withdraw, play on a different field," he said as he noticed that the flas were no longer raging and began subsiding.
The wall of fire that had bought them breathing room was dying down into smolder and heat shimr. It didn’t spread like a natural blaze; it collapsed like a spell losing interest. Ludwig’s throat felt dry just from standing near it, and the orc’s body’s hunger and thirst were already clawing again at the edges of his focus. He hated needing water in a fight where the only water was poisoned.
For a second, he worried that the flas might catch and burn the whole mountain down, but these flas were rather magic-fueled and died once the supplier stopped feeding them.
The relief was brief. A burning mountain would’ve been catastrophic for everyone, friend, enemy, and whatever lived under those vines. But the Red King wasn’t trying to scorch the world. He was shaping it. And the mont the fire began to fade, Ludwig could almost feel the enemy’s second breath coming.
Once behind the tree line, Ludwig looked up. Several Trolls were already at a high point of the slope, and most of the army was around them. In front of the orcs were large boulders that they patiently waited to use.
The "safe" zone didn’t feel safe. It felt like a choke point pretending to be a refuge. Trolls lood above like ugly statues, thick arms wrapped around stone that looked too heavy to be lifted, let alone thrown. Ogres clustered near them, orcs lower down, goblins tucked wherever shadow could hide them, lizardn slipping into wet pockets near the river runoff. The whole position slled of damp earth and sweat, and that tallic tang that ant the next clash would be close enough to taste.
"Let’s go," Ludwig told Gale, who rushed up.
Ludwig didn’t linger. If they stayed flat at the broken tree line, they’d be the first bodies the wave hit.
He moved uphill, where gravity could be turned into a weapon, where boulders could speak louder than swords.
Gale matched him easily, long strides eating distance, Oathcarver’s weight riding his back like it belonged there.
Once the two of them made it halfway toward their army, the crash happened.
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