[Campaign Day 7–10]
The construct vanguard’s destruction in Whitefell Pass cost Morglith approximately 2,400 of his 3,000 front-line reanimations. The remaining 600 — those that had been positioned at the column’s rear, outside the deepest cold zone — retreated beyond the Pass’s entrance and rejoined the Blightkin infantry lines.
The cold was absolute — divine cold, Fenrath’s domain projected through the Frostmarch’s frozen substrate, a temperature that existed because a god willed it and that no fire, no shelter, no thickness of fur or wool could fully resist. Breath crystallized before it left the mouth. tal conducted the cold through gauntlets and into fingers with the efficiency of a punishnt designed for the specific cri of touching weapons in sub-zero conditions.
Morglith adapted within hours. The god of Stone and Decay had fought wars before — smaller campaigns against rival gods, territorial disputes that his 3,000 believers had waged on his behalf for decades. He understood that the Frostmarch’s cold was a defensive weapon, not a universal one, and that the solution to an environntal defense was operational patience.
The Blightkin infantry advanced on the eleventh day — bypassing Whitefell Pass entirely.
The bypass route was forty kiloters longer than the direct approach through the Pass. It followed the Frostmarch’s eastern ridgeline — terrain that was cold but not supernaturally cold, outside the zone where Fenrath’s environntal manipulation could reach the minus-forty temperatures that had shattered the constructs. The ridgeline was difficult: steep, rocky, exposed to winds that stripped heat from unprotected bodies at rates that would incapacitate regular infantry within hours.
The Blightkin were not regular infantry.
Morglith’s worshippers were products of the Blight Wastes — a territory where the Decay domain’s divine influence had altered the environnt, the ecology, and ultimately the physiology of the mortal population. The Blightkin’s bodies carried the Decay domain’s hardiness: reduced tabolic needs (they ate approximately one-third the calories of standard human soldiers), enhanced cold tolerance (the Decay domain’s suppression of pain sensation extended to temperature discomfort), and a skin pigntation that had shifted to a dull grey, the surface tissue partially calcified by prolonged Stone domain exposure. They weren’t undead. They were alive — but alive in a way that was adapted to conditions that would kill other mortals.
8,000 Blightkin traversed the eastern ridgeline in twenty-two hours, arriving at the Frostmarch’s interior valleys — south of the Pass, beyond the primary cold-defense zone, and within striking distance of Frosthold’s agricultural hinterland.
Gharrek responded with the Howlist doctrinal counter: the hunt.
***
Pack hunting doctrine was an ecological strategy adapted for warfare, not a military formation in any conventional sense.
The Howlists didn’t form battle lines. They dispersed into sixty independent packs, each pack operating as a self-contained combat unit with its own scouts, its own wolves, and its own tactical autonomy. The packs deployed across a thirty-kiloter front, occupying the terrain between the Blightkin column and Frosthold, using the landscape’s features — ridges, tree lines, frozen streams — as concealnt and approach routes.
The wolves went first.
Twenty wolves per pack — 1,200 wolves across the entire front — deployed as the leading sensory elent. The Pack domain’s shared awareness ant that each wolf’s perceptions were available to its bonded handler, creating a distributed surveillance network that covered the entire engagent zone. Every Blightkin soldier, every camp, every supply cache, every patrol route was observed simultaneously by dozens of wolves whose pale fur blended with the Frostmarch’s snowfields and whose movent produced no sound that human senses could detect.
The intelligence picture was thorough and imdiate. Within two hours of the Blightkin column’s arrival in the interior valleys, Gharrek knew their exact disposition: the column was dispersing into company-sized elents of approximately 200 soldiers each, establishing a broad advance front designed to sweep the agricultural districts and push the civilian population northward toward Frosthold, where starvation and capture would convert the civilian refugees into strategic leverage against the garrison.
Gharrek’s counter-strategy targeted the column’s structure. Eight thousand soldiers deployed in forty companies of two hundred. Each company was isolated from its neighbors by terrain and distance — the broad advance front that was designed to sweep territory also diluted the column’s concentration, making each company vulnerable to the localized superiority that pack tactics were designed to create.
"Wolves identify the most isolated companies," Gharrek ordered. "Packs converge. Engage and destroy before the neighboring companies can close the distance, then disperse and reselect."
The first attack hit a Blightkin company encamped in a shallow valley four kiloters east of the main advance line, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day.
***
Three packs converged on the isolated company — 120 warriors and 60 wolves against 200 Blightkin infantry.
The wolves struck first, from three directions simultaneously. The Pack domain’s coordination produced an attack that was less a military assault and more a predatory event — wolves erging from snowdrifts at a dead run, covering the final thirty ters at speeds exceeding forty kiloters per hour, their divine enhancent providing the acceleration that natural wolves could achieve over short distances but that these animals sustained over much longer approaches.
The lead wolf — an alpha female nad Ashfang whose pack-bond with Gharrek himself gave her enhanced tactical awareness — hit the Blightkin sentry line at full stride. Her jaws closed on the sentry’s right forearm — the arm that held his weapon — with the 400-kilogram bite force that the Frost domain’s jaw enhancent provided. The forearm broke. The bones failed catastrophically: ulna and radius fracturing simultaneously, the hand releasing its weapon as the reflex response to structural failure overrode the Blightkin’s enhanced pain tolerance.
Ashfang released the arm and pivoted. In the ti the sentry’s weapon took to hit the ground — approximately 0.6 seconds — she had already acquired her second target: the sentry’s partner, who was turning to respond to the attack.
The turning response took approximately 1.2 seconds. Ashfang’s bite took approximately 0.3 seconds. The difference was not close. Her jaws closed on the second sentry’s right calf — a soft tissue target below the knee armor, accessible because the pivot exposed it — and she pulled. The sentry fell. Ashfang released and circled, positioning for a third engagent.
Two sentries down in 1.8 seconds. The alarm was raised, but the alarm was late the other fifty-eight wolves were already inside the periter.
The warrior packs followed the wolves by six seconds — the calculated delay that allowed the wolves to disrupt the sentry line and draw the defensive response outward before the warriors struck the camp’s interior. The Howlist warriors fought with paired weapons — a short sword in the primary hand and a long knife in the secondary — and moved in coordinated pairs, each warrior fighting beside a pack-bonded wolf whose sensory input provided the warrior with awareness of threats outside their visual field.
The Blightkin fought with the stolid toughness that the Decay domain provided. Their pain tolerance was exceptional — wounds that would incapacitate normal soldiers produced reduced physiological responses in Blightkin, the Decay domain’s suppression of biological alarm systems allowing them to function with injuries that should have been debilitating. A Blightkin soldier with a severed hand continued to fight with the stump for approximately forty seconds before blood loss produced unconsciousness.
But toughness was poor compensation for lack of agility. The Blightkin’s calcified skin and reduced tabolic rate produced a combat profile that was durable but slow — their reaction tis approximately twenty percent longer than baseline human, their movent speed reduced by the tissue stiffness that the Stone domain’s calcification produced. Against conventional infantry, this trade-off was acceptable: the Blightkin absorbed damage and delivered damage in a war of attrition that their durability usually won.
Against wolves that struck at forty kiloters per hour and warriors who fought in coordinated pairs with shared sensory awareness, the attrition exchange was inverted. The Howlists killed faster than the Blightkin could absorb.
The engagent lasted fourteen minutes. 143 Blightkin killed. 57 routed into the surrounding terrain, where the wolves pursued them individually. Pack losses: 8 warriors dead, 4 wolves killed, 11 warriors wounded.
The packs dispersed before the neighboring Blightkin companies could converge. By the ti the reinforcent company arrived at the valley, they found 143 dead and no enemy.
The pattern repeated. Three more companies were hit over the following twelve hours — each ti by three-to-four converging packs, each ti the engagent lasting less than twenty minutes, each ti the packs dispersing before reinforcent arrived.
Morglith’s response on the twelfth day was to consolidate his companies into larger formations — battalions of 800 that were too large for three packs to overwhelm. The consolidation sacrificed sweep coverage for mutual support, slowing the advance’s breadth to a fraction of its intended scope.
The northern war beca a contest between the Howlists’ mobility and Morglith’s mass — packs circling the consolidated battalions like wolves circling a herd, looking for stragglers, vulnerabilities, the isolated elents that the pack could cut from the formation and devour.
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