Chapter 169: Border Incident
The first blood was drawn at Ashwall Station Fourteen — a garrison outpost on the fortification’s central segment, three kilometers east of the Verdant Pass, at exactly the fourteenth hour of a cloudless afternoon on the third day of Scorchend.
The engagement was not planned. Neither side had intended to start the war that day. What happened at Station Fourteen was what military historians would later classify as an "escalation incident" — a collision between forward elements that converted the tense non-combat of the mobilization period into active hostilities. The collision was produced not by strategy but by proximity: when two armies mass on opposite sides of a border, the distance between their forward elements shrinks, and shrunken distances produce contacts, and contacts produce decisions, and decisions under pressure produce violence.
Sergeant Hale Corren — twenty-six years old, Human, five years of service at the Ashwall garrison, promoted to sergeant eight months ago because his previous sergeant had requested transfer to a less exposed posting — was commanding the routine observation patrol along Station Fourteen’s southern approach. The patrol consisted of eight soldiers: six infantry, one Ordinist field priest, and one cavalry scout on a light reconnaissance mount. Their mission was standard: observe the neutral zone’s southern approach for enemy movement, report observations, and avoid engagement.
The Rootist patrol appeared at the tree line seven hundred meters south of the wall.
Twenty soldiers. Light infantry — the durable, Growth-blessed Rootist ground troops whose divine enhancement made them march without fatigue. They wore organic armor — hardened plant-fiber plates grown directly onto leather backing by Demeterra’s domain artisans. The armor was lighter than stonesteel, less protective, but self-repairing: cuts and punctures sealed themselves within minutes as the plant fiber regenerated. Their weapons were spears — two-meter shafts with stone-tipped heads, simple but effective, designed for the mass-infantry engagements that Rootist doctrine favored.
They were supposed to be south of the neutral zone. The neutral zone — a ten-kilometer strip of uninhabited territory between the Ashwall and the Accord’s northern border — was established by implicit agreement, not treaty. Both sides recognized the strip as a buffer. Patrols from either side occasionally entered the buffer’s edges for observation. Neither side crossed the midpoint.
The Rootist patrol was north of the midpoint. By approximately two kilometers. They were in the kingdom’s observation zone — the portion of the neutral zone that the Ashwall garrison considered its operational territory. The intrusion was either a navigational error (unlikely — Rootist patrols were domain-guided and navigated with the certainty of plants finding sunlight) or a probe (likely — a deliberate intrusion designed to test the Ashwall garrison’s response time and engagement protocols).
"Contact," Hale reported through the relay stone — the enchanted communication device that connected patrol elements to garrison command. "Twenty Rootist infantry, seven hundred meters south. North of the midline. No hostile action. Observing."
***
The response from Station Fourteen’s garrison commander — Captain Draeven Morath, a Human officer whose posting on the Ashwall was a family obligation rather than a career choice — was textbook: observe, do not engage, report to division command.
The Rootist patrol did not follow the expected script. Instead of withdrawing when they detected the Ashwall patrol’s presence — which was the established pattern for neutral-zone intrusions — they advanced. Not aggressively — the advance was measured, controlled, maintaining formation. But they were moving north, toward the wall, and the distance between the two patrols was shrinking.
Six hundred meters. Five hundred. Four hundred.
At three hundred meters, the Rootist formation changed. The column compressed into a line — a standard engagement front, twenty soldiers wide, spears lowered to the pre-engagement angle that infantry trained to recognize as *ready*. The priest blessed the front line — a pulse of Growth domain energy that shimmered across the soldiers like heat haze, strengthening muscles, accelerating reflexes, hardening the plant-fiber armor to its maximum protective state.
"They’re forming up," Hale reported. His voice was steady — the professional calm that the War College’s NCO training program beat into its graduates through repetition and drill. "Twenty Rootist combat formation, three hundred meters south. Request instructions."
"Hold position. Do not engage."
"Captain, they’re advancing."
"Hold position, Sergeant."
Two hundred meters. Hale could see their faces now — Human-stock, mostly, the Rootist population being predominantly Human-ancestry. They looked like his own soldiers: young, trained, doing what they were told by people above them who had reasons they might not fully understand. The difference was the color: green armor, green blessing shimmer, the viridescent palette of Demeterra’s domain saturating every surface.
At one hundred meters, the Rootist officer signaled a halt. The line stopped — twenty soldiers, combat-ready, one hundred meters from an eight-person observation patrol that was outmatched in every measurable dimension.
For thirty seconds, nothing happened. Two patrols separated by one hundred meters of wildgrass in the neutral zone between two empires that had been building toward this moment for seventy years.
Then a Rootist soldier — whether by order, instinct, or the particular nervous impulse that turned tense standoffs into violent incidents — threw his spear.
***
The spear hit Private Keth — a twenty-year-old Gnoll infantry soldier on his second operational patrol — in the upper left shoulder. The stone tip punched through his chainmail at the gap between shoulder plate and collar guard — the two-centimeter vulnerability that armorers couldn’t eliminate without restricting arm movement. The spear entered at an angle, driving through the trapezius muscle, nicking the scapula’s superior border, and lodging with the tip protruding four centimeters from the posterior shoulder surface.
Keth screamed. Not from fear — from the purely physical response of a body experiencing penetrating trauma. The scream was short — his training reasserted within three seconds, converting the scream into controlled breathing, as the War College’s NCO program taught: *breathe through the pain, stay on your feet, communicate your status*.
"Hit!" Keth gasped. "Left shoulder. Mobile."
The Ordinist field priest was already moving — hands glowing with the warm amber light of Order domain healing, running toward Keth with the low-profile sprint that field healers used to minimize target exposure. The priest reached Keth in four seconds, placed hands on the wound without removing the spear (field healing protocol: stabilize before extraction, because extraction without preparation converted a puncture wound into a bleeding wound), and began the healing process — divine energy accelerating cellular repair, reducing blood loss, managing the pain response that could incapacitate a soldier more thoroughly than the wound itself.
Hale made the decision. Not the decision that protocol recommended — protocol recommended withdrawal under contact. The decision that the situation *required* — the decision that a twenty-six-year-old sergeant made when one of his soldiers was hit by a thrown spear from a force that was standing on his side of the line.
"Return fire. Controlled engagement. Hold this position."
The six combat-capable infantry formed a defensive semicircle around the priest and the wounded Keth. Crossbows came up — the stonesteel-reinforced crossbows that the Ashwall garrison used as their primary medium-range weapon. The bolts were standard military issue: iron-tipped, 300-gram projectiles that the crossbow’s mechanical draw launched at approximately 80 meters per second. At 100 meters, a crossbow bolt would penetrate standard chainmail and lodge in the body beneath.
At 100 meters, the bolts would also penetrate plant-fiber armor. The organic material’s regenerative properties repaired cuts and punctures — given time. A crossbow bolt arriving at 80 meters per second did not give the armor time. It gave the armor approximately 0.002 seconds of contact before the tip breached the fiber matrix.
Six bolts flew. Four hit. The Rootist line took casualties — two soldiers dropped immediately, bolts in the torso. One staggered, bolt in the thigh, leg buckling. One took a bolt in the shield — the wooden buckler that Rootist infantry carried for exactly this kind of exchange — and the bolt buried itself in the wood rather than the soldier behind it.
The Rootist officer reacted with the instant decision-making of a commander who recognized that the engagement had escalated beyond its intended scope. He ordered a charge — not because charging an entrenched position was tactically sound, but because standing at one hundred meters exchanging missile fire with stonesteelcrossbows was suicide. His troops’ advantage was numbers, blessing enhancement, and close combat speed. The charge would close the distance before the crossbows could reload.
Twenty soldiers — minus three casualties — charged. Seventeen blessed Rootist infantry, closing one hundred meters at enhanced speed.
Hale’s six soldiers fired one more volley — four more bolts hit, two more Rootists dropped — and then the distance closed and the engagement became melee.
The first Rootist to reach the line met Hale’s sword. The sergeant’s stonesteel blade — forge-blessed, War College standard issue, maintained to the edge precision that institutional armory oversight demanded — intercepted the incoming spear-thrust with a deflective parry that redirected the spear’s momentum past his left hip. The energy of the deflection flowed into Hale’s riposte — a rotation of the wrist that converted the parry’s outward motion into a descending cut. The cut took the Rootist across the forearm, the stonesteel edge shearing through plant-fiber and flesh beneath with the resistance profile of an axe through green wood.
The Rootist’s arm dropped. The spear fell. The soldier staggered back, his arm’s wound regeneration beginning immediately — the Growth blessing accelerating cellular repair — but the arm was combat-useless for the thirty to sixty seconds that the regeneration required, and thirty seconds in melee was an eternity.
A second Rootist engaged from Hale’s right — a spear-thrust aimed at the gap between Hale’s helmet and gorget. Hale couldn’t parry — his blade was committed to the downward cut. He ducked instead — dropping his center of gravity by thirty centimeters, letting the spear-tip pass over his right shoulder — and drove his shoulder into the Rootist’s chest. The impact — Hale’s 85 kilograms in motion against a lighter-framed Rootist infantry — drove the soldier back two steps, opening a gap that Hale exploited with a rising cut that caught the Rootist beneath the chin.
The engagement lasted ninety seconds. The Ashwall garrison’s reinforcement arrived — a rapid-reaction squad of twenty soldiers from Station Fourteen, responding to the relay stone’s contact report — and the surviving Rootists withdrew south, carrying their casualties, leaving behind four dead and the spear that was still lodged in Private Keth’s shoulder.
Sergeant Hale Corren looked at the blood on his blade — his own reflection distorted in the iron and stonesteel alloy — and understood that the war had started. Not because a general had ordered it. Not because a god had commanded it. Because a nervous soldier had thrown a spear, and a sergeant had done his job, and the thing that neither side wanted had begun anyway.
The dead Rootists lay in the wildgrass. Their armor was already regenerating, the plant-fiber plates sealing the wounds that the crossbow bolts and sword cuts had inflicted — a final act of divine blessing that served no purpose on a corpse. Growth could heal armor. Growth could not return life.
The first blood was drawn. More would follow.