The Game Where I Was Rank One Became Reality Chapter 187: Iron Vanguard

[Campaign Day 5]

The secondary wall at Verdant Pass fell on the war’s fifth day.

Deterra’s sustained earth-shaping — four days of continuous divine manipulation applied to the secondary wall’s foundation — achieved its objective at approximately the sixteenth hour of the fifth day. The wall didn’t collapse dramatically: it tilted. The foundation’s lateral displacent reached the tipping angle — approximately seven degrees past vertical for a seven-ter stone wall — and gravity completed what divine force had begun. The wall fell inward, away from the breach, into the kingdom’s defensive periter, producing a rubble field that destroyed the tertiary positions directly behind it and killed fourteen soldiers who hadn’t evacuated far enough.

The central breach was now open — not a forty-one-ter gap in a wall, but a hundred-ter-wide corridor of rubble connecting the outside of the Ashwall to the kingdom’s southern interior. The kill zone’s geotry was erased. The flanking platforms that had supported the fla channelers were buried under the secondary wall’s debris.

The Accord’s central assault force — 40,000 Rootist infantry, the main body that had waited for four days while the cavalry spent themselves in the kill zone — advanced.

Marshal Boreth’s response was the deploynt he had prepared for since the war’s first hour.

"Iron Vanguard. Deploy."

The Iron Vanguard was the kingdom’s professional heavy infantry — 20,000 standing army soldiers, stonesteel-equipped, domain-blessed, trained to War College standard. They were the kingdom’s best ground troops: the soldiers whose equipnt, training, and divine enhancent represented the full output of 250 years of institutional military developnt.

The Vanguard had been held in reserve throughout the first four days — a strategic decision that had consud Boreth’s patience but preserved the kingdom’s most valuable military asset for the mont when the defensive infrastructure failed and the war transitioned from fortification defense to open-field engagent.

That mont was now.

The Vanguard’s assembly was itself a spectacle — twenty thousand soldiers rising from concealed staging positions in a coordinated movent that transford the rear area from empty farmland into an army in less than ten minutes. The stonesteel caught the afternoon light and threw it back in fragnts — twenty thousand individual reflections that rged into a continuous glitter across the deploynt zone, like a field of grey stars settling into formation. The sound was the sound of tal: plate against plate, blade against scabbard, boot-heel against packed earth. Twenty thousand individual noises that rged into a single tectonic hum — the vibration of organized violence preparing to engage.

The deploynt was rapid. The Vanguard’s four divisions moved from their staging positions two kiloters behind the Ashwall to the central breach’s tertiary line in approximately ninety minutes. The Rootist infantry’s advance through the rubble corridor was slower — the debris field constraining their movent, the Growth-blessed troops navigating stone rubble that their domain enhancent couldn’t accelerate through — and the Vanguard arrived at the engagent line before the Rootist main body cleared the breach.

***

The clash at Verdant Pass was the war’s first full-scale infantry engagent.

The engagent front was approximately 300 ters wide — the span of the rubble corridor where the Ashwall’s debris had settled. The terrain was atrocious: broken stone, collapsed wall sections, crater formations from the secondary wall’s collapse. Neither side could deploy in conventional formation. The engagent devolved into a fragnted battle — dozens of simultaneous squad-level fights across a rubble landscape that broke sightlines, disrupted command, and converted strategic doctrine into tactical improvisation.

The Kingdom’s advantage was equipnt. Stonesteel weapons cut through the Rootist infantry’s wood-and-vine armor with an efficiency that demonstrated why tallurgical superiority was the kingdom’s foundational strategic asset. A stonesteel sword edge penetrated vine-wrapped wooden shields at full extension — the blade’s molecular alignnt, enhanced by the Forge domain’s crystalline restructuring, maintained cutting force through materials that would have blunted conventional iron. The Rootist infantry’s weapons — iron spears tipped with stone points, functional but unblessed — bounced off stonesteel plate armor without penetration, producing impacts that bruised but did not wound.

The Accord’s advantage was numbers and sustainability. The 40,000 Rootist infantry outnumbered the 20,000 Vanguard two-to-one. The Growth domain’s biological enhancent ant that Rootist soldiers who suffered minor wounds — cuts, punctures that didn’t sever arteries or damage organs — healed within minutes of disengagent. A Rootist soldier who retreated fifty ters from the engagent line with a non-critical wound could return to the line ten minutes later, healed and re-equipped. A Kingdom soldier with the sa wound required evacuation to a dical station, treatnt by a healer, and hours of recovery.

The attrition mathematics were unfavorable. The kingdom killed Rootist soldiers at a rate approximately three tis higher than the kingdom’s own loss rate — the equipnt advantage was decisive in individual engagents. But the Rootist army’s regeneration capability ant that the "killed" rate was actually a "killed-plus-permanently-incapacitated" rate, and the Growth domain’s healing reduced the permanently incapacitated proportion by approximately forty percent.

The net effect: the kingdom was destroying Rootist combat capability faster than the Accord was destroying kingdom combat capability, but the Accord regenerated a portion of its losses and the kingdom did not.

Boreth, directing the engagent from a command position 500 ters behind the front, recognized the implication imdiately.

"We’re winning the exchange. But we’re winning at a rate that exhausts us before it exhausts them. General Weylan — what’s our replacent pipeline?"

"Current casualty rate: approximately 300 per day from the Vanguard. Replacent rate from militia promotion approximately 50 per day — we can promote militia soldiers to Vanguard-equivalent equipnt, but the training differential is significant. At current attrition, the Vanguard’s combat effectiveness drops below operational threshold in approximately forty days."

Forty days. Weylan’s sixty-day sustainability ceiling was now forty days for the professional army — the militia replacents could fill nurical gaps but not capability gaps.

***

The engagent’s first major tactical developnt ca at the nineteenth hour.

A Rootist assault group — approximately 500 infantry under a Growth-blessed field commander whose divine enhancent exceeded the standard infantry level — pushed through the rubble corridor’s eastern edge and broke through the kingdom’s engagent line. The breakthrough was narrow — approximately fifty ters wide — but it placed 500 enemy soldiers behind the Vanguard’s primary fighting position.

Boreth committed his imdiate reserve: one company of heavy infantry, 200 soldiers, plus Brakk.

The Champion had been redeployed from the marsh engagent back to the Ashwall after the secondary wall’s fall — Boreth judging that Brakk’s presence was more valuable at the primary engagent than at the flank action where the Frogman advance had been slowed to a manageable pace.

Brakk’s engagent with the Rootist breakthrough force was the war’s first demonstration of what a divine Champion could accomplish against regular infantry.

The Champion entered the breakthrough gap at a run — not a full sprint, because 130 kilograms of Orc carrying a stonesteel war-hamr didn’t sprint, but a ground-covering lope that carried him into the enemy formation at approximately fifteen kiloters per hour. The Rootist infantry saw him coming — a single figure, massive, moving with the ponderous inevitability of sothing that geography couldn’t redirect.

The first Rootist soldier to engage Brakk died from a single horizontal hamr swing that struck the left side of his rib cage and destroyed the structural integrity of every bone the hamr’s head contacted. The impact force — calculated by the Forge domain’s enhancent at approximately 5,000 newtons, higher than Brakk’s earlier performance by twenty percent due to the combat-state amplification that the Champion blessing produced under sustained threat — was sufficient to launch the soldier’s body two ters laterally into three additional soldiers, disrupting their formation.

The second and third kills ca from a single overhead arc: the hamr rising above Brakk’s head, pausing at the apex for approximately 0.15 seconds as the Orc adjusted his aim, then descending in a controlled trajectory that struck two soldiers who were standing approximately sixty centiters apart. The hamr’s head, at thirty centiters width, struck the first soldier’s right shoulder and the second soldier’s helt simultaneously — the radial output sufficient to destroy both targets in a single downstroke.

In twelve seconds, Brakk killed seven soldiers and disabled four more. The breakthrough force — 500 infantry — recoiled from the breach’s eastern edge. Not because Brakk had killed an operationally significant number of their troops. Because Brakk had demonstrated, in twelve seconds of violence, that the breach’s eastern edge contained sothing that their nurical advantage could not overco.

The 200-soldier reserve company advanced into the space that Brakk’s engagent had created. The breakthrough was sealed. The engagent line restabilized.

Boreth watched from the command position. The Champion was a weapon — the most effective individual weapon on the battlefield. But a weapon that could be deployed to only one crisis point at a ti, and the war was producing crisis points faster than a single Champion could address.