Chapter 187: Iron Vanguard
[Campaign Day 5]
The secondary wall at Verdant Pass fell on the war’s fifth day.
Demeterra’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 displacement reached the tipping angle — approximately seven degrees past vertical for a seven-meter stone wall — and gravity completed what divine force had begun. The wall fell inward, away from the breach, into the kingdom’s defensive perimeter, 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-meter gap in a wall, but a hundred-meter-wide corridor of rubble connecting the outside of the Ashwall to the kingdom’s southern interior. The kill zone’s geometry was erased. The flanking platforms that had supported the flame 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 deployment 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 equipment, training, and divine enhancement represented the full output of 250 years of institutional military development.
The Vanguard had been held in reserve throughout the first four days — a strategic decision that had consumed Boreth’s patience but preserved the kingdom’s most valuable military asset for the moment when the defensive infrastructure failed and the war transitioned from fortification defense to open-field engagement.
That moment was now.
The Vanguard’s assembly was itself a spectacle — twenty thousand soldiers rising from concealed staging positions in a coordinated movement that transformed 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 fragments — twenty thousand individual reflections that merged into a continuous glitter across the deployment zone, like a field of grey stars settling into formation. The sound was the sound of metal: plate against plate, blade against scabbard, boot-heel against packed earth. Twenty thousand individual noises that merged into a single tectonic hum — the vibration of organized violence preparing to engage.
The deployment was rapid. The Vanguard’s four divisions moved from their staging positions two kilometers 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 movement, the Growth-blessed troops navigating stone rubble that their domain enhancement couldn’t accelerate through — and the Vanguard arrived at the engagement line before the Rootist main body cleared the breach.
***
The clash at Verdant Pass was the war’s first full-scale infantry engagement.
The engagement front was approximately 300 meters 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 engagement devolved into a fragmented 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 equipment. Stonesteel weapons cut through the Rootist infantry’s wood-and-vine armor with an efficiency that demonstrated why metallurgical superiority was the kingdom’s foundational strategic asset. A stonesteel sword edge penetrated vine-wrapped wooden shields at full extension — the blade’s molecular alignment, 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 enhancement meant that Rootist soldiers who suffered minor wounds — cuts, punctures that didn’t sever arteries or damage organs — healed within minutes of disengagement. A Rootist soldier who retreated fifty meters from the engagement line with a non-critical wound could return to the line ten minutes later, healed and re-equipped. A Kingdom soldier with the same wound required evacuation to a medical station, treatment by a healer, and hours of recovery.
The attrition mathematics were unfavorable. The kingdom killed Rootist soldiers at a rate approximately three times higher than the kingdom’s own loss rate — the equipment advantage was decisive in individual engagements. But the Rootist army’s regeneration capability meant 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 engagement from a command position 500 meters behind the front, recognized the implication immediately.
"We’re winning the exchange. But we’re winning at a rate that exhausts us before it exhausts them. General Weylan — what’s our replacement pipeline?"
"Current casualty rate: approximately 300 per day from the Vanguard. Replacement rate from militia promotion approximately 50 per day — we can promote militia soldiers to Vanguard-equivalent equipment, 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 replacements could fill numerical gaps but not capability gaps.
***
The engagement’s first major tactical development came at the nineteenth hour.
A Rootist assault group — approximately 500 infantry under a Growth-blessed field commander whose divine enhancement exceeded the standard infantry level — pushed through the rubble corridor’s eastern edge and broke through the kingdom’s engagement line. The breakthrough was narrow — approximately fifty meters wide — but it placed 500 enemy soldiers behind the Vanguard’s primary fighting position.
Boreth committed his immediate reserve: one company of heavy infantry, 200 soldiers, plus Brakk.
The Champion had been redeployed from the marsh engagement back to the Ashwall after the secondary wall’s fall — Boreth judging that Brakk’s presence was more valuable at the primary engagement than at the flank action where the Frogman advance had been slowed to a manageable pace.
Brakk’s engagement 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-hammer didn’t sprint, but a ground-covering lope that carried him into the enemy formation at approximately fifteen kilometers per hour. The Rootist infantry saw him coming — a single figure, massive, moving with the ponderous inevitability of something that geography couldn’t redirect.
The first Rootist soldier to engage Brakk died from a single horizontal hammer swing that struck the left side of his rib cage and destroyed the structural integrity of every bone the hammer’s head contacted. The impact force — calculated by the Forge domain’s enhancement 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 meters laterally into three additional soldiers, disrupting their formation.
The second and third kills came from a single overhead arc: the hammer 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 centimeters apart. The hammer’s head, at thirty centimeters width, struck the first soldier’s right shoulder and the second soldier’s helmet 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 something that their numerical advantage could not overcome.
The 200-soldier reserve company advanced into the space that Brakk’s engagement had created. The breakthrough was sealed. The engagement 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 time, and the war was producing crisis points faster than a single Champion could address.