Chapter 86: Supply Lines Break
Gorvahn’s Frogmen came through the western corridor at dawn.
Three thousand amphibious soldiers in phalanx formation — shield walls of lacquered wood and compressed leather, spears leveled, advancing in a disciplined lockstep that impressed Harsk despite himself. The Frogmen wore bone-and-leather armor that covered their torsos and thighs, leaving limbs free for the fluid movement that made them dangerous in the kind of close-quarters fighting that corridors produced. Their skin — mottled green and brown, permanently damp — glistened in the early light.
Gorvahn had deployed them well. Three columns, spaced forty meters apart, advancing through the corridor’s widest approach to deny the defenders a single concentrated target. The flanking columns filtered into the stake fields and trench lines that Harsk had prepared, absorbing casualties with the mechanical indifference of an army trained to take losses and keep pushing.
From the first trench line, the Iron Covenant’s skirmishers opened fire.
Kobold crossbowmen — twelve teams of four, positioned in covered firing holes that Nix’s sappers had dug into the trench walls — launched the first volley at 200 meters. The stonesteel-tipped bolts punched through Frogman shields like awls through wet leather. The lacquered wood that had been sufficient against most conventional weapons fractured under the impact, spraying splinters into the faces of the soldiers behind.
The lead column buckled. Not a rout — Frogmen didn’t rout; Gorvahn’s training held them to a standard that made broken formations re-form in seconds. But the first thirty meters of the phalanx dissolved into a scattered mess of shattered shields, screaming wounded, and dead Frogmen face-down in the trampled grass. The smell hit the defenders before the sound did — the wet, copper tang of amphibian blood.
"Second volley. Same targets. Fire," Harsk ordered.
The crossbows reloaded in four seconds — a speed that came from six months of drills and the ergonomic redesign that Ashenveil’s weapon-smiths had implemented after the first field tests. The second volley struck the reforming column while the soldiers were still processing the first.
[ENGAGEMENT — Western Corridor, Day 1]
[Gorvahn’s Vanguard: 3,000 Frogmen — phalanx formation, 3-column advance]
[Defender Position: 1st Trench Line — 200 soldiers, 12 crossbow teams]
[Opening Volley: 48 bolts, 31 confirmed hits, 14 kills, 17 wounded]
[Enemy Shield Integrity: Critically compromised — stonesteel penetration exceeds specifications]
[Assessment: Hold first line for 3-4 hours before tactical withdrawal to Line 2]
***
The Frogmen adapted.
By the third volley, the lead elements had abandoned their shields entirely — the wood was a liability against stonesteel, creating shrapnel wounds alongside penetration. They switched to a spread formation, individual soldiers sprinting between cover points, closing the distance to the first trench with the amphibian agility that made Frogmen the most dangerous light infantry on the continent.
They were fast. Faster than anything Harsk had war-gamed against. The Frogmen crossed the 200-meter killing ground in under ninety seconds, leaping over stake fields with a fluid, low-gravity grace that made the obstacles designed for human-weight targets almost irrelevant. Their digitigrade legs — bent-knee, spring-loaded, evolved for swamp travel — gave them a vertical clearance that conventional infantry couldn’t match.
The first Frogman to reach the trench wall came over the lip like water cascading down a rock face. He hit the trench floor in a crouch, tongue flicking, bulbous eyes scanning for targets. A Lizardman veteran — one of Krug’s original Remnant, a soldier named Vassik — met him with a stonesteel short sword.
The fight lasted four seconds. The Frogman was faster. Vassik was armed better. The stonesteel blade caught the Frogman mid-lunge, entering below the ribs and exiting above the hip. The amphibian folded around the wound with a croaking gasp that sounded almost like words.
Vassik pulled the blade free and turned.
Three more were already in the trench.
The first trench line held for three hours and twenty minutes. Not four — Harsk’s estimate had assumed a conventional advance rate, and the Frogmen’s agility exceeded his projections by eighteen percent. When the trench position became untenable — too many Frogmen inside the wire, too few defenders to hold the full length — Harsk ordered the withdrawal.
It was clean. Controlled. Exactly the organized retreat that six months of training had drilled into the defense force. Squads disengaged in pairs, covering each other’s withdrawal through the communication tunnels, collapsing chokepoints behind them with pre-positioned rubble drops that turned the tunnels into dead ends.
The Frogmen took the first trench line. They found empty positions, spent crossbow bolts, and the steady drip of water from the collapsed tunnels. No supplies. No intelligence. Nothing to indicate what the second line held.
Gorvahn would have been pleased. His vanguard had taken the first position in under four hours — ahead of his timeline.
If he’d been able to count his casualties, he would have been less pleased.
[POST-ENGAGEMENT — 1st Trench Line]
[Engagement Duration: 3 hours, 22 minutes]
[Defender Casualties: 18 killed, 34 wounded (evacuated), 6 missing]
[Enemy Casualties (estimated): 290 killed, 400+ wounded]
[Exchange Ratio: ~1:16 (defender favor)]
[Result: Planned withdrawal to 2nd Trench Line — objective achieved]
[Note: Frogman agility exceeds projections. Stake fields ineffective against digitigrade physiology. Recommend deepening pit traps at Line 2.]
***
Behind the lines, the sabotage was landing.
The contaminated grain hit Gorvahn’s forward supply depot on the second day of the assault. Nine hundred soldiers — primarily the reserve companies rotating out of the frontline — developed severe gastrointestinal symptoms within six hours of consumption. Not lethal, but comprehensively incapacitating. Men who were horizontal with stomach cramps did not hold shields. Men who could not stop vomiting did not swing spears.
The timing was surgical. The reserves — the fresh troops meant to relieve the vanguard — were the first to eat from the contaminated supply. Gorvahn’s frontline soldiers, who had been issued rations from a different depot, were unaffected. The result was a vanguard that could fight but couldn’t rest.
At Farrow Crossing, Durnok’s first siege wagon — a fourteen-ton battering ram drawn by four dray horses — broke through the sabotaged bridge span at the ninth hour. The eastern supports, weakened to three-quarter depth by Tomek’s careful cuts, fractured under the concentrated weight. The wagon dropped eight feet into the River Veyl, dragging two minotaur soldiers and a driver with it. The horses screamed. The wagon’s oak frame cracked on impact with the riverbed. The supply column behind it stopped.
It took nineteen hours to clear the wreckage, pull the surviving horse from the water, and establish a temporary ford. During those nineteen hours, every weapon, every replacement shield, every barrel of arrows destined for the northern front sat in carts on the wrong side of the river.
Demeterra watched from above. Her territorial awareness — the Rank 5 passive that let her feel the pulse of her domain like a heartbeat — registered the disruptions as anomalies: supply chain delays, troop debilitation patterns, structural failures in infrastructure she hadn’t ordered inspected.
Individually, each event was explainable. Collectively, they formed a pattern.
Sabotage. Inside my own territory. He has people inside my territory.
The realization shifted something in Demeterra’s calculation. Not fear — gods at Rank 5 didn’t fear gods at Rank 4. But reassessment. The Grand Ordinator was not just defending. He was attacking. From inside.
She ordered a full loyalty sweep of the northern border zone. Every town, every village, every settlement within two hundred kilometers of the Ordinator’s territory. Root Speakers deployed house-by-house, family-by-family, prayer-by-prayer.
Find them. All of them.
The sweeps would take weeks. The war wouldn’t wait weeks.
She pushed Gorvahn forward. Take the second line. Break through. End this before the rot spreads deeper.