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Unto the Ages: Chapter 119
🕑 Added 2024-08-04 11:45:09 +0000 UTCDays passed, and Grud’s forces strengthened their hold on the surroundings of the Blazebringer’s village, and now it has turned into a true siege.
Day and night, Grud’s forces would launch probing attacks, shooting flaming arrows on and over the walls in an attempt to catch something on fire. This approach was met with limited success, yet they continued anyway due to the pressure it put on the Blazebringer forces and their morale.
And speaking of morale, the Blazebringer forces were facing an impending morale and very tangible problem in the form of their rapidly diminishing food supplies.
In their rush to ramp up man and fighting power in a short amount of time, they had absorbed all the nearby small villages, the only problem with that, was that while the Blazebringer village had a nice stockpile to tide them over in case they got sieged, they had only calculated to account for themselves.
As for the smaller villages that were absorbed, they did not have the luxury of having such big food stores that the Blazebringers had and were quickly uprooted from their villages with what limited amounts of non-perishable food they could carry.
So after consolidating all the food the Blazebringer and press-ganged villages had, and considering the increased number of mouths there were to feed, needless to say, they could not last long. Their only saving grace is their access to water in the form of wells, so at least they would not go thirsty.
As for Grud’s forces, they had all the time in the world and access to the bounty of the land, so while they were technically in no rush to stop the siege and could win by just starving the Blazebringers, there were murmurs of discontent starting to rise from some of the more hotblooded hunters, especially those who had their friends or relatives killed.
And while all that was happening, Grud was in his tent meditating as he tried to break or get around the hex that was continuously suppressing his mana.
‘It has been days, how are they keeping my mana suppressed? Are they taking shifts to suppress my mana?’ Grud thought to himself, and little did he know how right he was.
Back in the Blazebringer village they had their Witch Doctors on rotation to feed mana to the hex. At first, they thought it would be no issue keeping Grud weakened, but when Grud started trying to break or bypass the hex, the blood sample taken from him started burning up and mana cost to maintain the hex skyrocketed.
Lucky for them, they had multiple blood samples they could use to keep the hex going, but as Grud continued to fight against the hex, more blood samples were burnt up. But after much tinkering with the hex by the Elder Witch Doctors of the village, they managed to make a compromise, they managed to preserve the now very limited blood samples at the cost of decreasing the hold they had on the Grud’s mana.
There were times they were tempted to just stop the hex and restart it when they needed it, but with the speed and strength of the resistance Grud was showing, the Witch Doctors were worried that if they reapplied the hex after stopping, it would not stick.
Soon after the restrictions on the hex lightened, Grud managed to cobble up enough mana to push into his eyes and saw the tendril of mana leading to the Blazebringer village and growled in annoyance.
After spending a few more hours trying to fight the hex and getting now here, Grud decided that it was better than nothing and to get this fight over and done with as soon as possible.
After getting the chieftains together to get updates on progress made so far, they started planning on how to breach the walls or gate. After many back and forth, and Grud’s demonstration that he still had his superhuman strength, even if not empowered by mana, they decided on a simple and straightforward plan.
Walk up to the gate and knock, hard, with a big fuck off axe. So in order to facilitate this plan, trees were cut down in order to make shields that could cover more than a man’s height and width, and for the big fuck off axe they were planning, the crafters sacrificed ten copper weapons to be smelted into an axe head before Grud deemed it hefty enough to ‘real damage’ to the gate.
After a couple of days of Grud and a few selected men practicing their formation to move while sheltering him, Grud was finally satisfied and called his forces to arms.
At first light the next day, Grud and a squad of men, all fully armored, walked by Grud’s side carrying their oversized shields while Grud had an oversized copper axe slung over his shoulder.
At first, the warriors on the Blazebringer walls were just at attention and ready for any engagement that happened while Grud was recovering, but as Grud and his shieldbearers got closer, Grud could hear shouts of alarm start coming from the wall, calling him things like “Monster!” and “Evil Spirit!”
Shortly after the commotion on the wall, there was a sudden increase of archers on the wall where Grud and his men were approaching, and a few minutes later, they actually brought up something that looked like a ballista but without the gears and cranks, it was essentially just an oversized bow with a guiding plank mounted perpendicular where the arrow should be, and from what Grud could see, they readied arrows the size of short spears. It seems like the sort of thing they use for big beasts or monsters that threaten their village.
In a way, Grud felt some pride in them bringing out a weapon meant for foes many times his size, “Form up men, I don't like the look of those big bows, I think they may be able to reach us well before we get into normal bow range.” Grud said, and the men around him hefted their oversized shields to cover the top, front, and sides of Grud.
And just as Grud expected, there was a loud thud that came from a few meters outside the shield formation and one of the men holding the lift side shields shouted, “They are firing at us! With… Spears?!”
“Hold steady and keep advancing! Trust the plan!” Grud encouraged as they marched onward.
A couple of dozen meters behind Grud’s shield formation, there were eight groups of men keeping pace with Grud’s group, but they did not have the full shield formation, instead, the front row had the same shields as Grud’s group, but everyone else behind did not, what they did have, was a bunch of archers carrying what looked like a pre-made wooden wall.
Soon, Grud came within bow range and all noise was drowned out by arrows pelting the shield formation, and a few seconds into the pelting of arrows, there were two shouts almost simultaneously as a coupe of arrows slipped through the cracks between the shields.
Fortunately, the two men who got hit did not get an arrow anywhere important, “Tighten up the formation, interlock those shields!” Grud shouted. That was when the first “ballista bolts” hit the shield formation.
It hit dead center in the front row, just in front of where Grud was standing, it punched through the shield and the head of the man holding the shield, immediately killing the man. Reacting quickly, Grud took over and held up the shield, and broke off the tip of the ballista bolt to let the man’s body slump to the floor.
Soon after, there was another shout of pain as another ballista bolt penetrated a shield and stuck someone in the gut, while another bolt struck the top of the shield formation and bounced off, but not before leaving a nasty crack that split halfway down a shield.
Seeing the power of the ballistae they had mounted on the wall, Grud had to make a decision, pick up the pace and risk a higher chance of gaps opening in the shield formation, or keep steady and potentially get picked off by the ballistae to the point that he may not have cover by the time he reaches the gate.
As Grud’s mind was racing for an answer, an answer came in the form of a shout as the man holding the shield at the back right corner of his formation got cleanly taken out and pinned to the ground by a ballista bolt.
“Huddle up and pick up the pace on my go, front row, set the pace! Go!” Grud shouted and the men closed in on each other, making it a bit squeezy for Grud, but he was in no position to complain.
As Grud’s shield formation double-timed it to the gate, the eight other formations following behind Grud’s started taking some of the agro as they got into range to fire back at the Blazebringers on the wall.
When they got into a comfortable range, the eight formations brought forward the pre-made wooden wall and deployed the kickstands that were held together with rope to brace the pre-made wooden wall. And when that was done, the archers that set up the wall started providing suppressive fire on Blazebringer’s wall-mounted ballistae to keep the heat off of Grud’s formation.
With some of the agro taken off of Grud’s formation, they eventually reached the gate and had a few more casualties. When they reached the gate, Grud got to work, he aimed for the center of the door where the two halves of the gate met and started hacking.
With great bestial strength, each blow Grud delivered made the gate shake and wood chips fly, and while Grud was getting busy on the gate, the Blazebringer defenders were starting to panic.
They could not aim their ballistae at such a steep angle and normal arrows were not getting through the shields, so they started throwing whatever they could get their hands on down at the shield bearers in the hopes it tilted the shield enough for some arrows to slip through.
Soon, one of the defenders had a bright idea and called for boiling water to be brought up and poured onto Grud’s position.
When the first shower of boiling water hit Grud’s shield formation, said formation was thrown into chaos as the hot water poured between the gaps and onto Grud and his men. It was not so bad for Grud as his position had the most overlapping shields, but those around that the hot water slid off to got the worst of it.
This caused many of the men to flinch as they tried to do something about the hot water scalding their skin, this opened up gaps that many arrows slipped through to strike the men inside the formation.
But as effective as the boiling water defense was, it was too little too late as Grud managed to open a hole in the gate just behind the reinforced beam barring the gate, and despite the spears that tried to strike at Grud through the hole he made, his axe made short work of the spears and reinforced beam.
The moment he chopped the reinforced beam in two, Grud signaled the men defending him, and one of them unsigned a bow and shot a whistling arrow that screamed across the sky. The whistling arrow was replied with a warcry from his forces on standby that shook the ground as they started charging toward the Blazebringer village gate.
And while Grud’s main force was charging, Grud was engaged in a contest of strength with the warriors on the other side of the gate as Grud and his men were trying to push the gate open.
Comments
Hildisvini
Nice!
