Chapter 91: The Turning Point
The Hydra held. Damaged, diminished, two heads instead of three — but it held.
The Thornwyrm pulled back. Not because it was beaten — the living wood divine creature was still functional, its Growth-domain regeneration slowly sealing the burns and splits that the Hydra’s lightning and teeth had torn open. It pulled back because Siltjaw, the Frogman Warden, felt the shift in battlefield momentum and made the decision that professional handlers made when both creatures were spent: disengage, regroup, survive to fight again.
The Hydra didn’t pursue. Gorthan held the creature at the grassland position, two heads coiled defensively, golden eyes tracking the Thornwyrm’s retreat with the focused hostility of a predator that had been hurt and remembered it.
Through the bond, Gorthan’s pain was constant — the phantom sensation of a severed head, a limb that wasn’t there anymore, a gap in the creature’s architecture that the Warden felt as an absence in his own body. He didn’t speak about it. He adjusted his commands to account for two heads instead of three and filed the pain in the part of his mind where professional soldiers kept the things that would break them if they looked at them directly.
The divine creature standoff bought the Iron Covenant six hours. Six hours in which Demeterra’s advance stalled — the Thornwyrm’s withdrawal forced the infantry to push without divine creature support, and the infantry had been bled badly enough that pushing without support meant dying faster.
But Demeterra had more soldiers. She always had more soldiers.
At noon on the tenth day, Gorvahn reformed his remaining Frogmen — sixteen hundred, down from three thousand at the start — and launched a coordinated push against the third trench line. Simultaneously, Durnok’s remaining minotaurs hit the western junction. Human infantry filled the center. Beastmen raiders probed the flanks.
The third line buckled.
***
Thyrak’s moment came at the fourteenth hour.
The Herd Lord — Rank 2, vassal of the Iron Covenant, the god who had been conquered and stayed because the cage had better food — activated every Beast domain blessing he possessed simultaneously.
It was everything he had. Every blessing, every passive, every enhancement his domain could produce, poured through the divine infrastructure that Zephyr had built for him and deployed across the Iron Covenant’s entire fighting force.
Enhanced reflexes. Heightened senses. Aggression enhancement. Stamina surge. Pain suppression. The bestial edge that turned soldiers into predators and predators into forces of nature.
Two thousand soldiers felt it hit.
The Lizardman veterans in the trench lines felt their muscles tighten, their reactions sharpen, the pre-combat tremor in their hands replaced by a stillness that was hungry. The minotaur heavy infantry at the western junction felt the surge in their bloodstream — the primal herd-charge instinct that made minotaurs terrifying when they ran together, amplified by divine blessing until it felt like the earth was pushing them forward.
The Gnoll scouts felt their senses extend — hearing that picked up footsteps at three hundred meters, scent-tracking that could identify individual soldiers by the composition of their sweat, night vision that turned the overcast afternoon into a bright, detailed map of targets.
Even the human soldiers — the ranged units, the support teams, the militia reserves who hadn’t expected to fight today — felt it. A steadiness. A clarity. The removal of the fog that exhaustion and fear and eleven hours of battle laid over the mind like a wet blanket.
Thyrak poured everything into it. Not because he loved the Iron Covenant. Not because he believed in the Grand Ordinator’s vision. Because his minotaurs were on that field, and his minotaurs were dying, and the only thing Thyrak had ever valued was his herd.
Run, he pushed through the blessings. Not a command — a feeling. The bestial certainty that forward was the only direction. *Run. Fight. Survive. The herd does not fall.*
***
Krug led the counter-push.
He came through the third trench line’s center gap at the head of forty Ordinist elite infantry — soldiers who had been Fanatic-tier for years, fully blessed, armed with the best stonesteel the forges could produce. They were not the largest force on the field. They were not the most numerous. But they were the sharpest point on the spear, and Krug aimed them at the fracture in Demeterra’s line where Gorvahn’s Frogmen met Durnok’s minotaurs.
The junction was chaos. Frogmen and minotaurs fought within meters of each other but couldn’t coordinate — different speeds, different fighting styles, different commanders issuing conflicting orders through different divine networks. The Frogmen wanted to flow around obstacles; the minotaurs wanted to go through them. The result was a seam of confused violence where neither force could deploy effectively.
Krug hit the seam.
The Shepherd’s Stick blazed in his left hand — the red gem pulsing with divine energy, channeling the bond with enough intensity that every soldier near Krug felt the Voice as a presence rather than a concept. The stonesteel blade in his right hand was simple, functional, the same design that every veteran carried. The difference was the hand holding it.
He was Level 18. Zephyr tracked this from above — the progression system that measured a believer’s accumulated experience, service, and divine investment. Level 18 was exceptional. Level 21 was the threshold for Hero candidacy. Three levels away from a designation that would transform a mortal into something more.
Not today, Zephyr noted. But soon. Keep him alive.
Krug didn’t need divine instruction to do what he did next.
The first Frogman who faced him lasted two seconds. The spear thrust came in fast — Frogman speed, augmented by Gorvahn’s blessings — and Krug sidestepped it the way a man steps around a puddle. The stonesteel blade took the Frogman’s arm below the elbow. The return stroke took his throat. Clean. Professional. The kind of violence that came from fifty years of fighting and forty-seven years of divine blessing.
The second and third came together. Krug took them apart separately — one with a staff strike that cracked the Frogman’s jaw and sent him rolling into the minotaur behind him, the other with a blade thrust that found the gap between bone-and-leather plates and punched through to the spine.
Behind him, the forty elites poured into the gap. Stonesteel against leather. Blessed strength against numbers. The Thyrak-enhanced reflexes turning every parry into a counter, every counter into a kill.
Gorvahn’s line fractured. Not a collapse — Frogmen didn’t collapse — but a buckling, a giving-way, the controlled breaking of a phalanx that had been pushed past its structural limit. The Frogmen pulled back. The minotaurs, slower, heavier, couldn’t disengage as fast. They held for another forty seconds and then Durnok’s own lieutenants — the sub-commanders who recognized a losing position — gave the withdrawal order.
The western junction cleared. The third trench line held.
[ENGAGEMENT — Day 10, Counter-Push]
[Krug’s Elite Unit: 40 Fanatic-tier soldiers, fully blessed]
[Target: Frogman-Minotaur junction, 3rd Trench Line]
[Result: Junction cleared, enemy withdrawal, Line 3 stabilized]
[Krug Personal Assessment: Level 18 — 3 kills confirmed, flank held single-handedly for 90 seconds during minotaur surge]
[Hero System Note: Level 21 threshold not yet reached — monitoring progression]
[Thyrak Beast Blessings: Active — all allied soldiers enhanced]
[Estimated Enemy Losses This Engagement: 200+ (junction collapse)]
Momentum shifted.
Not decisively — Demeterra still had five thousand soldiers, still had the Thornwyrm, still had three vassal gods feeding her war effort. But the Iron Covenant’s defense had gone from reactive to active. The bleeding had stopped. The line held. And for the first time since the war began, Demeterra’s generals were looking at each other and asking the question that generals asked when the easy victory became expensive.
How long can we afford this?