CAIUS: Crown of Threads and Shadows

King Alden’s center was drowning in a sea of crimson rage.

Though the eighty thousand human infantry outnumbered the thirty thousand orc berserkers nearly three to one, the unholy ferocity of the Red Moon Slaughter Art had locked the frontline in a brutal, stationary vice. Every human soldier who stepped forward to fill a gap in the shield-wall was immediately dragged down by dying fanatics who used their last breaths to crush helmets and shatter armor.

Alden reined in his warhorse, his face drenched in sweat as he surveyed the meat grinder. ”Keep the center braced! Reinforce the vanguard!” he shouted, waving his broadsword. ”They are throwing away their lives! Once these madmen exhaust themselves, we push forward!”

He did not realize that the thirty thousand berserkers were never meant to win the battle. They were merely the anvil.

High on the terraces of the Obsidian Citadel, war horns forged from dragon bone blared across the valley. The heavy, rhythmic brass tone cut cleanly through the deafening din of slaughter.

In the valley below, the thirty thousand fanatics opened their chaotic ranks just enough to alter their momentum, pulling the human center even deeper into a curved, overextended pocket.

Then came the tread of the true army.

From the left and right slopes of the valley, emerging from the dark tree lines like twin storms of black iron, moved the Combined Orc Legions. Thirteen thousand disciplined, heavily armored elite shock-troops marched in textbook echelon formation.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

Their heavy boots and obsidian-reinforced plate shook the earth in a terrifying, synchronized cadenced rhythm that drowned out the screams of the dying.

”Left flank! Enemy movement on the left ridge!” a human scout screamed from the western rise.

”Right flank! Wargs! Thousands of them!” echoed a desperate yell from the east.

Alden’s head snapped sideways, his blood turning to ice. ”What?! Where did those formations come from?!”

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On the western flank, five thousand heavy infantry of the Second Orc Legion lowered an impenetrable wall of interlocking obsidian tower shields. Behind them, Orc Shamans raised their bone staves, chanting guttural incantations that wrapped the legion’s weapons in crackling dark lightning. Orc Archers unleashed coordinated, arching volleys of heavy black-iron shafts that rained down with armor-piercing velocity, shattering the light auxiliary troops holding Alden’s left flank.

Before the human line could even shift its spears, the First Orc Legion, consisting of eight thousand heavy shock-infantry, charged down the eastern slope straight into Alden’s right flank.

Positioned at the absolute tip of the eastern spear were two thousand Orc Warg Riders. Mounting dire wargs clad in spiked chitin armor, the riders surged forward like a torrent of ravenous beasts.

SLAM!

The collision was catastrophic.

The Warg Riders slammed directly into the exposed, unbraced flank of King Alden’s army. The massive dire wolves leapt over human light-infantry, tearing throats and crushing ribs under their weight, while the orc riders swung massive obsidian broadaxes that cleaved through steel breastplates like parchment.

”Form a line! Form a...” A human captain’s order was cut short as a warg clamped its jaws around his shoulder, ripping him from his saddle and dragging him under a wave of iron-hoofed terror.

The left and right wings of the human host collapsed inward. The sheer, organized weight of thirteen thousand disciplined orc elites, combined with the wild panic of the flank breach, forced the eighty thousand human soldiers into a dense, suffocating knot. They were packed so tightly against one another that archers couldn’t draw their bows, and swordsmen couldn’t raise their arms to strike.

”They’re encircling us!” King Alden roared, his eyes wide with horror as he realized the tactical nightmare unfolding around him. ”Pull back the flanks! Secure the command tent!”

Far in the rear, surrounded by his ten thousand high elven troops, High Lord Lorien watched the human army get squeezed into a hopeless slaughter-box.

Lorien’s fingers dug into the reins of his war-charger until his knuckles turned white. His golden core throbbed with a dull, sickening ache, his calcified pathways still refusing to channel the grand solar magic that could save his allies.

”High Lord!” an elven lieutenant panicked, pointing toward the high ridges behind the dark elf lines. ”The human front is buckling! The green-skins are sweeping around their flanks toward our position!”

Lorien gritted his teeth, his pride warring violently with the cold realization that the human army was being systematically butchered.

And high above the valley, standing in absolute composure on the Citadel’s high terrace, Caius looked down at the trapping maneuver. Beside him, the two thousand shadow-clad warriors of the Quick Reaction Legion waited in silence, their obsidian scale armor glistening like dark glass.

”The jaws have closed,” Caius murmured smoothly. ”Now... let us cut off the head.”