Charging towards a mass of armed and armoured enemies on horseback is, objectively speaking, quite a heroic thing to do. Except that most of the actual Heroes who do that tend to refrain from screaming at the top of their lungs the whole time.

  Well, I didn’t do that the whole time. After a minute or so I ran out of breath, entered a coughing fit and re-emerged from it with nothing but my customary grin across my features. Morlo yelled something that I just barely interpreted as a warning to draw out my sword, and then we were joining the fray.

  If nothing else, charging with a Thaumaturge on your side is one hell of a way to enter any fight. We’d have been skewered on spears if it weren’t for Morlo throwing a blast of force ahead of us—he probably had a veritable buffet of the stuff to use, galloping along a mile of open ground as he did—and just blasted open the ranks of our enemies even as he leapt from his mount to engage them on foot.

  I did not leap from my mount, nor did I get to choose how I disembarked. I tried to swing on horseback, didn’t know how at all and ended up chopping the bloody animal’s ears off with an attempted warning-swing. The horse shrieked, bucked me off it and sent my stupid arse rolling and bouncing along twenty feet of hard dirt to smash right into the feet of several orcs.

  At the very least, my impromptu impression of a bowling ball was joined by their impersonating a set of pins. They fell down on top of me, and everything went dark.

  Not with unconsciousness though. I was still very much awake and mobile, or rather awake and mobile within the specific context of a few inches in any direction as probably half a ton beared down on me. I grunted, groaned, started shoving and shifting and managed to topple a writhing orc off me just as another swung for my head.

  Luck saved me, not skill or cleverness. The orc’s cleaver got lodged in the skull of the one I’d moved, sparing me and tying him up for long seconds spent trying to free it. All of my natural instincts took over at that and I started squirming my way free, getting an arm loose of the pile just in time to punch another orc right between his legs as he came to finish me.

  That was how I learned two new facts; the first, that orcs have balls, and the second that punching them hurts about as much as punching ours does.

  He folded over as I managed to drag my legs out, then scrambled off the pile. I slipped on something—blood, I hope—and fell, rolled, barely had the thought to start soaking up energy as my body tumbled, slowing myself, cushioning the impacts as hard stones jutting from the field hit me. I ended up on my back, staring up as an orc came at me with a hammer the size of a toddler.

  No leverage for me to strike, no time to move, I was fucked. Almost. I grabbed one of the stones, tore it free and threw it.

  Added some Thaumaturgy to the toss, too, and let me tell you that makes one hell of a difference. The stone caught my enemy right in his exposed face and just sort of destroyed it.

  While all the orcs were staring in confusion, Morlo interjected. He used his subtle and delicate mastery over Thaumaturgy to enter the fight with rather more deftness than I’d managed.

  Only joking, he cremated twenty of the bastards in a single jet of flame, so hot it would’ve blistered my skin if I’d been a yard closer, while laughing at the top of his lungs.

  “I AM MORLO THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE!” He roared, “FEAR ME, YOU SHITS!”

  Well I certainly feared him, enough that getting far away from whatever he happened to be focusing his powers on at the time seemed like my best option for more immediate survival. It was actually a difficult decision to even snatch up my sword from the death-pile, and more difficult still to keep a hold on it. The metal had heated up just from brief exposure to Morlo’s flame, even at the edges of it, and I ran away swearing and almost juggling it to keep my skin.

  Then another orc found me.

  By now the fighting around that area had already become entirely disorganised, nothing more than a bunch of disconnected idiots running around and almost coincidentally killing each other. Good for me, as I’d have quickly died otherwise.

  My first surprise, now that I was actually fighting instead of excavating myself while being attacked, was that this orc was actually more than a little skilled. He fought differently than tourney fighters, or me, clearly having learned some entirely unrelated style, which made any comparison hard. In terms of results, though, I found myself struggling to hit and struggling more not to be hit. His body was protected by full plate armour that looked thick enough for a human to struggle even moving, and more than once my blade just bounced clean off the heavy metal with barely a scratch left in it.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  If nothing else, it was good the magic edge kept it from being dulled or broken by such torture.

  My efforts to kite around the orc and slowly suss out his patterns of attack and defence were foiled when something—possibly an ally—smashed into me from one side and knocked me down again. Then boots came down everywhere, cracking the hard earth and clipping my body. I curled up, growled and focused on turning the jostling of my own body into Thaumaturgical power. I wasn’t as good at storing it yet, not able to hold energy for more than a few seconds, but enough of it kept coming that I had chance to blast it all out and clear a yard-wide space around myself.

  Orcs, everywhere. A wall of orcs, an ocean of orcs. I swung so fast I barely had time to register it once I was up.

  This was my first taste of what an actual battle looks like, because once I stumbled out of the orcs I ended up surrounded by humans. Halbers up, pikes over shoulders, grunting and roaring and maddened animal sounds that didn’t seem like anything a civilised throat could make. Everything was messy and scattered, chaos incarnate. There was only the feeling of resistance as my sword hit things and impacts as my armour stopped them, whistling overhead where cannon balls shot past and the reek of burning meat from Morlo’s work elsewhere.

  We were holding, at least. I couldn’t know how things were going elsewhere in the carnage, but at this spot the spine of our defence was sturdy enough that the enemy couldn’t break it. For the time being.

  They had numbers, though. Practically inexhaustible numbers. Sure, we could match them in pure volume, but the bulk of our forces were shoddy and half-trained compared to their seemingly all-veteran force. The slide towards defeat was inexorable and slow, and all the more agonizing for it.

  If Gruin was there, I’d have probably seen him having the time of his life. The Grynkori’s mood always seemed finest when things were looking grimmest. Mine was quite the opposite.

  Only my stupid fucking grin would’ve told anyone otherwise.

  The more we were pushed back, the wider I grinned. The worse things got, the more demented my smile. It took long minutes before a proper retreat was ordered, bought for us as a formation of arquebussiers—for some fucking reason acting without pikemen to supplement them—unloaded into the orcs and withered their ranks back for a moment or two.

  And then orcish cavalry smashed into them and hacked them to pieces, because some idiot had sent out a firing line without pikemen to supplement it.

  Things were not going well. In fact, on the spectrum of ‘winning a battle’ and ‘on our way to being eaten alive by orcs’, I’d have to describe them as being far closer to the latter end of things. But that didn’t mean all hope was lost. We still had Morlo, who—

  —a mace hit Morlo in the head and he went down. Fuck.

  It seemed a safe bet to me that the geriatric bastard’s skull had caved in there, so I operated on the assumption that we were alone.

  “RETREAT!” I roared, then cursed as precisely nobody seemed to hear me. The fighting was intensifying, thickening, death drawing closer, and here I was not able to even have everyone run away. I could make a break for it by myself, of course, but that seemed like a perfectly quick way to get singled out, bowled over and stabbed to death.

  No, I needed a different plan.

  “ATTACK!” I screamed, surging forwards and stabbing a big, rather surprised, orc right through his helmet’s visor. If I couldn’t get everyone to run, maybe inspiring a second wind would get them engaged violently enough that I’d have a chance to slip away. I was meant to be a Hero, right? Or thought to be one if nothing else.

  Well, it worked better than I’d have thought. Apparently I was a bit more audible and convincing as I called out to attack, because half the men alongside me did as I did right at that very moment. This wouldn’t have meant much on its own—if anything hastening us to death as our defensive line broke—if not for the fact that Morlo was, in fact, still alive.

  And pissed.

  “BASTARDS!” he shrieked, sending a wave of flames to roll right across the front ranks of our enemies. Scores of orcs died, instantaneously in some cases and more slowly in others as the fire managed only to take away top layers of flesh and leave the exposed meat below thrashing as it was cooked.

  Not just them, mind. I saw men beside me start thrashing around as the fringes of Morlo’s heat washed over us all, felt my own skin throb and prick with the early onset of blisters. Fortunately, all of us had something a bit more pressing to do than fall over in pain, and we weren’t getting nearly as large a dose of the Thaumaturgy as the enemies before us.

  Moments, that was all it lasted for. For several long moments the orcs were broken up and unorganised, desperately trying to bring back order to their formation in the wake of its savaging. We used those moments well.

  Frantic swings and stabs, then involuntary grappling as the men behind us drove the front rows forwards and pinned us against our enemy. I saw snarling mouths and tusks jutting just inches from my eyes, felt hot breath on my face and inhuman strength, mass throwing me one way and the other. Stabs turned to punches, to headbutts, to thumbs in eyes and teeth on skin and snarling, grappling, clawing animal savagery that saw skill disappear into nothing. We were just mad monkeys ripping bits off each other.

  Then another wave of fire unfurled, this time hitting our enemy’s back line.

  I didn’t fully realise what was happening until I’d already erupted, stumbling and swearing, through the rear of the orcs. I caught my foot on a fallen body, went down, rolled badly and suddenly felt the weight of my own armour as fatigue hit a critical level in my muscles. For a moment I lay there panting.

  All at once I remembered where I was and sat up with another surge of panic-strength, but by then things were already changing. Orcs breaking, running, moving back as our formation continued chewing up theirs and spitting out its bones. None of the fleeing enemies even took a moment to finish my dazed self off as I sat there staring at them.

  They just scrambled off to rejoin the larger bulk of their forces elsewhere.

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