IDWTBTHQ Chapter 111- The Battle of Treval Part 1

With his ears still ringing from the explosion, Yasen quickly flew to the eastern side of the walls to assess the situation.

It was bad. Really, really bad.

Debris and bodies were scattered around while screams and whines could be heard all around. An entire section of the wall had been blown from the ground up, creating a ten meters wide breach that could be used to enter the city. Worse still, most of the debris had been launched forward and into the moat, creating some sort of crossing that the attackers could walk on. And the orcs were approaching quickly, so that it would take only a few minutes for them to get there.

Yasen grimaced, but his determination didn't waver. Even though the walls had been breached, the soldiers of Treval could still hold them and maybe turn that gap in their defenses to their own advantage. After all, now Yasen knew where the orcs would attack, and that breach was pretty much an ideal choke point. All he had to do was to organize a suitable defense.

Looking around, the captain saw the soldiers in the vicinity were either standing completely still in shock or running around like headless chickens, so the first thing to do was to restore order.

“Attention soldiers!” Yasen cried with a confident and imperious voice, and everyone turned towards him.

“I want three squads to take the wounded to the infirmary asap.” The Aura Master ordered. “The rest of you, prepare some barricades around the breach.  We've got to hold this position.” He turned to the cannon crews still on the walls. “Aim the artillery to take down the orcs once they are preparing to traverse the moat, and gather all the grenades you can find. We're going to make the orcs pay in blood for every single step they take towards our city!”

Having received clear instructions, the men got a hold of themselves and started getting to work. As they did so, Yasen quickly flew to the square where the reserves were waiting, under the command of his lieutenant Ludd.

“What happened, sir?” The officer asked once the captain landed next to him.

“The orcs have somehow managed to blow up part of the eastern walls.” Yasen replied. “I intend to hold that breach, so I’m going to need half of your men there.” He paused and then added: “Also, I want patrols all around the city. I don't know how the orcs have managed to get us, but I don't want it happening again.” He stared grimly at his lieutenants. “If anyone is acting suspiciously, stop them. I don't care if it's your mum, the king or even the Emperor himself, if they look like they do not belong you must apprehend them!”

“Yes sir!” Ludd saluted, and Yasen immediately flew back to the breach, just as the cannons started firing.

The orcs had started their charge about four kilometers away from the walls, and after about two minutes they entered within range of the city's cannons, which fired almost all at the same time, causing the ground the orc army was marching on to explode. Dozens of orcs died, blown up to pieces, but the overall casualties were actually rather light thanks to the humanoids’ loose formation. However, they had no way to retaliate, and as the cannons kept firing at regular intervals the casualties kept piling up, so much so that once the orcs arrived within one kilometer from the walls they had already lost more than a hundred soldiers.

Then the guns and crossbows started firing as well.

Both the muskets and the crossbows proved less effective than it might have been expected, since they had been made to be used against humans rather than orcs, but the sheer volume of fire was enough to kill or cripple at least two hundred orcs with a single salvo. And by the time they reached the walls every gunman and crossbowman had enough time for at least another three discharges, leaving more than a thousand orcs dead in the fields around Treval.

That was when the true onslaught began.

The orcs gathered in front of the moat but in doing so they became an easy target for the defenders, who started shooting in the crowd without even bothering to aim. A couple of Aura Archers even started trying to snipe every ogre they could see and managed to kill quite a few of them, causing chaos and panic among their underlings. Their army, however, had gained too much momentum to stop, and those who slowed down were pushed by those who came behind them, so despite dropping like flies the orcs just kept advancing and some of them started crossing the moat.

The defenders let them proceed for a few meters, and then started throwing dozens of grenades over the crossing. Recognizing the danger, a few attackers tried to save themselves by diving away and getting under the water, but when the bombs exploded they still took a huge toll, leaving only a few orcs still on their feet who were quickly dispatched by the gunsmen on the walls.

The rest of the attackers hesitated visibly after watching their vanguard being completely annihilated like that, and the defenders took advantage of it by pouring even more shots against them.

But still, the orcs, encouraged and threatened by their ogre officers, didn't retreat, and instead tried a different approach.

A group of heavily armored orcs led by a particularly brutish-looking ogre emerged from their ranks and started trying to cross the moat. Those orcs were larger than average and had a bluish hue to their skin, and they also carried huge metal shields, big and heavy enough to protect them from both bullets and crossbow bolts. Because of their weight they moved rather slowly and even with all of their armor a few fell to the concentrated fire, but they simply ignored those casualties and kept advancing, seemingly unstoppable.

Unluckily for them, the defenders had a way to counter them.

A few people in ceremonial robes, clearly priests and clerics, and some others wielding weird instruments appeared on the walls and conjured bolts of pure lightning, hitting the waters the attackers were walking in. The blue-skinned orcs started twitching spasmodically as they were electrocuted to death before dropping like puppets with their strings cut off, while a nauseating smell of burned meat rose into the air. Only the ogre remained on his feet, smoke rising from his skin but still alive and angry, and with a furious roar it charged alone, trying to reach the defenders and simply ignoring everything that hit him. The humanoid actually made it to the breach and was about to launch itselt inside of the city when he was suddenly decapitated by a blade of pure wind. Its headless body somehow took a few more steps, actually getting inside of Treval before dropping to the ground, in the middle of a semicircle of improvised barricades the defenders had built around the breach.

Inside of the walls, Yasen lowered his glaive with a grim expression on his face. All around him, his soldiers were cheering at his display of strength, but he himself was far from happy. The orcs were proving to be more tenacious than he'd have thought, and that ogre in particular had been a nasty surprise, since it had actually come close to engaging the defenders in melee and would have probably succeeded if not for the Captain's intervention. That could have been a disaster, since most defenders were mostly irregular militia armed with ranged weapons, so it was imperative to keep the enemy away from them. If the attacks included more ogres that would have been difficult though, so Yasen needed to change his tactics a little.

“Spearmen!” He cried. “Get ready to defend the barricades!”

About sixty men, all armed with long pole weapons, advanced to the frontlines, hiding behind the barricades.

“Stay on guard on the walls too!” Yasen continued giving orders. “The ogres may climb up there too! Aura Users, defend everyone else.”

And just as he finished giving these orders, the enemy launched their next offensive. As the captain of the Royal Knights had predicted, this assault was performed by two groups of ogres who approached the walls in different ways. Some of them, heavily armored and extremely bulky, charged over the moat to reach the breach, stepping over the dead bodies of their own companions, while a few others who were thinner and had long, frog-like legs, simply jumped over the moat with a huge leap. The defenders unloaded everything they had on them, from gunfire and grenades to offensive spells, but the armored ogres didn't even slow down while the frog-like ones jumped over the walls, landing amidst the defenders on the battlements, while the armored ones charged screaming through the breach.

Thanks to Yasen's order, though, the defenders reacted swiftly, and the frog-like ogres on the walls quickly found themselves facing multiple Aura Users each. Similarly, the armored ogres on the ground quickly found out that there were Aura Users mixed together with the spearmen defending the barricades, which turned some of the weapons pointed at them from an annoyance to a lethal threat, and not being able to tell which was which confused them enough to stop their charge. Still, a few humanoids still managed to get past the barricades, forcing the Aura Users in reserve to intervene, and while all this was happening, the orcs took advantage of the confusion to charge through the breach, following their evolved kin's lead.

For a brief moment, things were pretty balanced. The invaders pressed with unbridled ferocity, threatening to break through the barricades, while the defenders doggedly refused to let them pass.

Then Yasen decided to intervene.

The Captain of the Royal Knights threw himself against the enemies like a storm, gusts of furious wind accompanying his every swing. He cut down an ogre who was about to jump over the barricades and then plowed through the orcs massed behind it as if they were a pile of leaves. Many soldiers and Aura Users followed their commander's lead and launched a counterassault which left the orcs panicking and trying to run away, only to crash against their companions that were still coming, causing both to stop in their tracks. The defenders took advantage of this chaos, launching grenades and spells against the mass of orcs that crowded the breach and the moat and killing dozens of them.

The orcs then decided they had enough. As one, the invaders started fleeing, their morale completely broken, leaving only their dead and dying behind, while the humans cheered wildly.

Yasen, knowing the importance of keeping a high morale, let his soldiers shout for a few more seconds before restoring order.

“Keep firing!” He shouted at the men on the walls. “Don't let the orcs rally. And pick up the wounded and get them to the infirmary!”

The soldiers obeyed, and the captain used this moment of respite to fly up in the air, in order to get a general view of the battle.

From what he could see, things weren't going that bad. Apart from the breach, the orc army had concentrated their attack on the two gates as well, but luckily the defenders seemed to be holding well for now, though there was some fighting on the walls, especially on the western side, on the opposite side of the city. Still, Yasen wasn't too worried about it though, because if the orcs hadn't managed to get through the breach, with the best conditions they could possibly get, then it was highly unlikely that they had managed to break in somewhere else. The ones on the wall were probably some of the frog-legged ogres, and the Aura Users of Treval could easily take care of them. The only one that could possibly make a difference was the Blue Terror, but the oni was currently overlooking the assault at the breach, surrounded by his orc bodyguards, and for the moment he didn't seem intentioned to directly intervene in the battle.

It was this passive behavior that actually made Yasen suspicious. Why hadn't the oni led his forces in the attack against the breach? His presence could have tilted the balance of the fight in the invaders' favor, but instead he had chosen to let the assault fail, losing hundreds of orcs and dozens of ogres in the process.

Something wasn't right. Not even a regular orc would have been that stupid.

As he studied the Blue Terror, trying to find anything that would give him an inkling of the humanoid's intentions, he saw one of the Aura Archers of Treval's garrison aim at the oni to try and snipe him down.

The Aura User focused, concentrating his aura in his arrow, before shooting at the enemy commander with uncanny precision. Flying at supersonic speed, the arrow flew directly towards the Blue Terror's head, but the oni somehow managed to sense the impending danger and duck at the very last moment, so that the projectile missed and instead hit an orc behind him, making its head literally explode. The Blue Terror then kept its head down, and moving with a slight limp he retreated behind the cover of his heavily armored bodyguards.

It took but a moment for Yasen to notice what had been wrong with that.

“Wait, why is he limping?” He wondered. “He healed from lethal wounds in a matter of seconds, so what kind of injury could make him limp?”

A suspicion started to form in Yasen's mind. In order to confirm it he needed to have a better look though, so he landed on the walls and asked:

“Does anyone have a spyglass I can use?”

Most men shook their head, but a member of a cannon crew actually took out a spyglass and handed it to the captain, who took it and immediately used it to check on the Blue Terror. He then cursed, because that wasn't the oni, but rather the female-looking ogre he had met once before, wearing her leader's plate armor and having changed her skin to a blue hue.

Why she had done this was clear to Yasen. She was supposed to be a decoy to keep the defenders' attention on the breach, while the real Blue Terror would attack somewhere else.

And judging by the fact that the fight on the western wall was seemingly getting more and more hectic, the Aura Master had a good guess about where the oni might be.

“I have to go now.” He said to the soldiers around him while giving the spyglass back. “Keep holding your position as you did in my absence.”

And with this order, he flew away to the west, determined to stop the Blue Terror once and for all.