Interlude Three: Boredom
Johann watched as the great dwarven army of Fortress Fjord arrayed itself for battle. The worst part was that he had to act like he was interested.
Below him, just down the gentle hillside, huge blocks of infantry were neatly set, one next to the other, looking like so many steel bars arranged on a blacksmith’s table.
They bristled with metal, their halberds raised in precise rows. The cold steel axe heads and heavy steel mail casting brilliant reflections in the midday sun.
Their cavalry were arranged between their infantry blocks. Warhogs, boar bred over generations for battle, waited patiently. Their breath sent plumes of humid air trailing upwards from their snouts.
Their riders were less coordinated in their arms than the infantry, at least on an inter-unit scale. Each unit of warthog riders carried matching weapons, but no two units carried the same. It was a matter of fierce pride and competition among the cavalry riders as to which was most effective.
From where Johann stood, he could pick out the Glacier Hammers, and next along from them, the Avalanche Chargers with their long, flanged maces. The Boartusks, next, with their lances, and lastly, the Steelhoofs all with heavy battle axes. Johann thought the distinction pointless; one heavy cavalry charge was much the same as another.
One and all they wore thick plate armour, and their mounts wore it too. Tusks, steelshod and linked with spiked steel chains, collected dripping condensation.
Behind the front line sat rank upon rank of crossbowmen, all with their heavy apparatus held slanted in precisely the same direction. Johann ran a critical eye over his own unit, and gave a small grunt of satisfaction at finding not a single one a degree out of place.
He looked behind them, further up the hill, to their artillery divisions. Their engines of destruction, standing dormant, waiting for a word to spew fire and steel and hate at the enemy.
A mad marriage of enchanting and alchemy, the cannons: repeaters, and smoke-tubes, bolt throwers, and shrapnel guns, pepper-mortars and phos-lances, were one and all a relatively new addition to the Fortress Fjord’s army. Johann couldn’t help but grumble, the things had turned him half-deaf since their inception, half-blind in some cases, not to mention his poor nose, and the crazy engineers just seemed to keep making more. They were undeniably effective though, he’d give them that. And marginally interesting too, at least.
Sitting at the crest of the hill, to one side of the artillery, was one of their units of irregulars. As far as armies went, some manifested Ideals too unusual to be of any use in a standard formation. Those on the hill would be their siege-mages, an eclectic bunch of Idealists who’d all manifested multiple surge skills.
Another two units of irregulars sat at the extreme ends of their infantry line. Johann knew more would likely be utilising small unit tactics, or even operating completely independently.
Dwarves tended to be more homogenous in their manifestations than the other races. Elves trended towards fancy, frilly Ideals, though they liked to call them esoteric or arcane. Humans, well, they manifested anything. Not that any race couldn’t. But Johann privately thought that was why their armies were so …unusual.
Dwarves loved their metal, and stone, and strength, and toughness, and their Ideals sang of that same love too. Johann had Steel as a boy, and after years in the army he had manifested Tactics, and had been promptly promoted to Lieutenant and given his own unit.
He was of two minds about it. On one hand, his unit relied on him, which he hated. On the other, he got to sit back and watch more battles, and even engage in some strategy, which he loved. Overall, it would have been a net positive, if he hadn’t been in so many battles already. If it didn’t require so much time.
He was sick of it. All he wanted to do was play The Ideal of War. It was an old dwarven game, where players pitted armies of miniatures, made in excruciating detail, against each other. But not just that! Each army had their own rules, balanced and refined by cunning dwarven minds over generations. Each army had their own quirks. Each player could choose so many Idealists, allocate so many Ideals between them, he…
…He wanted this damn battle over with already! He swore he’d go crazy if he had to play Ideal of War a hundred times just with dwarves, but that was exactly what their general was making him do, more or less! Fighting over land that wasn’t useful for anything except marching many feet over so they could draw lines on a map and feel smug about it.
And all with such a boring army! And he couldn’t even properly control anything!
He glanced over to where their king and general sat with his honour guard, quietly seething at him. The king of Fortress Fjord, Dries Fjordheart, sat on a massive black warhog, an enormous axe resting across his legs as he surveyed the battlefield. His honour guard, armed in plate even thicker than dwarven standard, stood about, meticulously arranged, still as statues.
In their armour, they looked even thicker than a regular dwarf. Dwarves, on average, were only very slightly shorter than humans, but were markedly more solid. Definitely shorter than the more willowy elves, though.
Johann found his frustration draining away as his mind wandered to thoughts of his newest game pieces. He had a squad of elven irregulars commissioned with his last pay, including a showpiece riding a stag mount. He felt a tinge of guilt at playing elves, but their skirmish, hit-and-run tactics were just so much more engaging! Maybe Luuka had finished them, and they would be waiting for him when they were done here. He could finally…
A small cough from his sergeant brought his thoughts back to the present. His crossbow had dipped slightly out of place. He glared at the man. He was a Lieutenant! He was surveying the state of the army! Obviously he couldn’t maintain perfect parade discipline whilst doing so. His sergeant weathered the glare with a long-suffering expression.
Johann wondered idly what the general’s plan was for today. It had been a few years since their hated enemies had marched down from the northern mountains. Perhaps he’d devised something new to greet them with. That would surely make this less of a trial for him. Johann knew the enemy definitely wouldn’t have innovated. The only thing more boring than a dwarven army was a mountain giant one.
The thought brought his attention to where the enemy gathered, across the plain that swept out from the bottom of the hill. Their army was both massive and miniscule, each giant in it at least three times the height of a dwarven soldier, and yet only a hundred had come down from their mountain lair.
Each enormous giant was covered in warpaint, soot taken from their holy mountain smeared liberally in crude patterns over scarred, ashen skin. They wore great heavy skirts of thick, pleated ox or mammoth hide, sometimes barded with crude sheets of pig iron. They carried great clubs, or crude hammers and axes - Johann even saw a few that looked to have just ripped trees from the ground whole.
Just as the dwarves, they arrayed themselves for battle. Unlike the dwarves, however, their arrangements were not so …neat. The giants, famously foul tempered, squabbled and fought like children as they decided who got the honour of standing where in their loose battleline.
They formed up in small groups of three or four, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Several giants goaded their battle mammoths into a semblance of order, a herculean task. They would not be able to keep them under control for long, not with this much tension on the wind, and soon, they would unleash them straight at the dwarven line.
Their chieftain, who called himself Rotmouth, stood in the centre of the giant army. The singularly massive creature glared raw, unadulterated hatred at the dwarven king. Fjordheart sat his massive warhog, glaring straight back.
It was an enmity as old as their races, born thousands of years ago, forged before living history, and tempered in countless bloody battles.
It was so, fucking, boring!
He hoped someone other than Kaylo was available to play tonight. The man played a giant’s army, for crying out loud. Johann thought he might scream if no one else was at the games hall.
Johann’s mind wandered, seeing the giant army looked the same as it had the last fifty times they’d fought. His gaze followed the glacial plains, sweeping dramatically before them, until it reached the sudden, sheer slopes of the Frostbite mountains. Blacktooth, the tallest peak in the range, loomed behind the giant army. Even so far in the distance, it was imposing. Its granite slopes lay bare all year round due to the massive volcanic action in its core. A thick column of smoke oozed from its shattered crown.
It was where the giants lived, from where they staged their regular raids down into the civilised lands, terrorising the Fjords, stealing cattle, spreading wanton destruction wherever they went.
All of a sudden, drums began to beat. A few overly muscled giants had oversized bass drums strapped to their bellies. Their drumsticks could crush a bull’s skull, and would be difficult for a regular person to even pick up. They managed a tidy rhythm though, something which Johann had always found idly fascinating.
The entire giant line began to charge, and Johann felt tremors in his boots. The battle-mammoths began lumbering forwards as well. One and all, they were slow. But he knew they wouldn’t stay that way. More importantly, by the time they reached the dwarven line, they would have built up incredible amounts of force.
The tremors grew bigger and bigger, and soon, even the famous discipline of the Fortress Fjord army was shaken loose. Not by much, maybe a slight drop of a halberd here, a fractional adjustment of footing there, but they were shaken all the same. Johann fought to stifle a yawn.
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Dwarven horns rang into the air, long and low, from some signal from Fjordheart. Artillery crews began rushing about, setting fuses, stopping wheels, calculating wind speed, adjusting counterweights and sights and payloads.
Johann fumbled lazily about in his pocket and came out with two wax plugs. He got them stuffed in his ears just in time.
A series of explosions sounded from behind him, and Johann could see the crossbowmen collectively flinch, ever so slightly, at the titanic noise at their backs. But it was the giant’s line Johann was interested in.
Let’s see if they’ve got anything new for us today, he thought.
A cloud of shrapnel, all sharp, twisted scraps of enchanted metal, created a momentary cone of glittering spray. The giants ran through it, not a single one falling. Johann knew from long experience that the initial impact was not the true danger of them, though. The scraps were enchanted with all manner of debuffs and poisons and damage effects. This was purely to soften the giants up.
Boring.
Alchemical gases made great clouds as their vessels shattered amongst the running giants. Once more, they ran through, heedless of the danger. The mere moments they were breathing the gases would be enough to cause at least a few of them troubles, but it wouldn’t be apparent for some minutes yet.
Boring.
Ballista-sized bolts, sizzling with fire or electricity, soared through the air. One took a giant in the thigh, and it tumbled, throwing up a great furrow of earth as it fell. Even those that missed still discharged deadly energy into nearby foes.
Boring.
Here the phos-lances cried, and Johann clamped his eyes shut. Even through closed eyelids he could see bright streaks, and he knew that burning streaks of phosphorus had been discharged at the hated enemy. These were more interesting, being the most recent addition to their artillery, or would be, if they didn’t require him to block his sight or be blinded for minutes.
The giants came thundering on. As they always did; as they always had. As they always would. Johann sighed, seeing the distance closing, and barked at his unit to ready arms.
Light cavalry units swept around their flanks, their warhogs bred for speed and agility more than ferociousness and resilience, all lightly armoured and charging at a good clip.
Their job was to harass the battle mammoths, try and distract them, steer their charge from the dwarven line, force them to veer off. Their javelins and slingstones were liberally enchanted with pain and fire runes, the best combination for getting the irascible behemoths’ attention.
The units split, and split again, picking out the charging mammoths and dividing them between them with the fluid efficiency born of thousands of hours of drilling. Soon, the mammoths had turned, angered by the biting wasps nipping at their flanks, and were milling about trying to exact their vengeance.
The giants, as always, came on.
As one, the first line brought their crossbows to shoulders, sighting down them at whichever giant was closest. They would loose and then crouch to reload, allowing their squadmates in the second row to aim and fire.
A tried and true method of whittling down the giants. Incredibly tedious, too.
He judged the distance just right, and gave the order to fire. A painful whine filled his ears, and hundreds of enchanted bolts sizzled through the cold midday sky. Giants roared in pain, blistering wounds opening up all over them, some falling, but still, they came on.
In the back row of the giant charge, their cunning plan was enacted. If you could call it that. The great lumps had used the exact same strategy every single time they’d fought, with only a few minor variations.
A handful of giants, lagging behind, hefted huge boulders and, still running, hurled them straight at the dwarven line.
Johann wearily gave the order to fire at will as he watched the huge chunks of stone rocket through the air towards the infantry.
So pedestrian. Any second now…
Right on cue, one of the rocks wobbled, and suddenly crashed into the dirt before the line, chewing a long gouge in the soil. Another shattered, then the shards shattered again, and again, until only harmless dust was left. Yet another crashed into an enormous, shimmering panel in the air and dropped to the ground, its energy spent.
Teams of defensive Idealists were always kept in each infantry squad for exactly this reason. They would combine their skills to stop the thrown boulders by any means necessary. The alternative was to-
Johann’s eyes widened in surprise. One of the boulders had not been stopped or deflected, but surely the king had some plan, maybe-
The boulder slammed into the central most infantry block, crushing men and sending others tumbling into the comrades, or sailing through the air. Two giants met the unit a moment after, and where usually the shuddering impact would be dispersed among many Idealists and even more bristling halberds, this time their momentum sent them smashing through the unit like a child kicking a pile of leaves in autumn.
Johann felt a moment’s fear. This was certainly out of the ordinary. If the giants broke the middle of the line… well, he had played enough games where he’d done exactly that to his opponent to know the outcome. Even if they managed to avoid a rout, they would take heavy losses stemming the gap. He made a quick decision.
“Unit Seven!” he roared at the top of his lungs. “Ready bolts!”
His men, paused to watch the carnage, lept frantically into action. As they worked, Johann saw one brave dwarven soldier sacrifice himself to injure one of the giants. He swept his halberd around with considerable might, and sunk it into the giant’s ankle.
The big bastards had skin like tough leather, but their feet and lower legs were always a weak point. The giant roared in agony, turning and punting the dwarf into the air in retaliation.
Johann breathed a prayer. His crossbows were ready. This had better work.
He gave the order to fire on the giants wading through the infantry unit. His men gave him confused glances, unsure of what he meant. It was madness, they would hit their own soldiers! He railed at them, shouting at them to fire, activating Stalwart Command from Tactics. The skill nudged them over the line, and their discipline won out. They raised their bows and pulled their triggers.
This was why Johann loved The Ideal of War. It was a game of strategy, of tactics. It was gentlemanly, and it was cunning. It was a game of sweeping charges, daring assaults, and brave final stands. Each army, perfectly balanced against the other, with nothing but their general’s wit to see them through.
But there was always one wildcard. One, game-changing factor. One thing that added an element of luck to every single game. It was what made The Ideal of War so great. Even the best laid plans could go awry, turning on a single factor.
Idealists. They were strong individually, monstrous when used in tandem with others, the backbone of any army. Ostensibly balanced, and yet, a single Idealist could still turn the tide.
With enough luck.
As the bolts snapped from their locks, Johann felt the buzzing of the enchantments, heard the humming of strings, the whistling of pierced air.
He reached out with Steel, pushing his control skill to the limit, harder than he ever had before. Mostly, he just used it to nudge his little game pieces around the table without his hands, showing off. Today, he grabbed hundreds of metal boltheads, all travelling at hundreds of feet per second, and nudged them instead.
He had but a moment, but an eternity stretched, as he tweaked and pulled, prodded and poked, cajoled and coerced, going cross-eyed as he tried to focus on both giants at once. They passed out of range of his skill, and he prayed.
The uninjured giant had broken from the back of the unit and reached the crossbowmen in the centre, and was busy laying about itself with a club. It swung, turned a dwarf into a bloody smear, and twitched. Not twitched - shuddered. Like a slack sail cloth in a high wind.
Fifty steel bolts, dwarven-forged and dwarven-enchanted, unerringly found the giant. Its head, its heart, its armpits and groin, all so feathered with bolts they looked black. It toppled slowly to the ground. Johann could feel the shake from its fall all the way from where he stood.
The other, injured, giant, fared only slightly better. It had been turned away from him, when they fired, but its back and neck bristled with bolts sunk deeply in a neat line. It almost looked like it was wearing a long braid.
Johann breathed a sigh of relief. It had worked! A flash of excitement followed. He glanced to his left, to where the king had been preparing his honour guard to charge, hoping to save the unit and steady the line.
As one, they were looking back at him, gaping in amazement. He returned their looks stoically, but on the inside, he was burning with smugness.
At least the day had had some excitement, he thought to himself. The rest of the infantry had repelled the giant’s charge, the cavalry and irregulars were mopping up the mammoths, and apart from the one shattered unit, the losses had been light.
Johann watched as the surviving giants trundled back across the plains towards the Blacktooth, alternately hurling insults at them in their deep, baritone voices, or bickering with their fellows.
Fucking. Finally, he thought. Get me back to the damn games hall. I’ve got proper interesting battles to fight.
His mind immediately began conjuring thoughts of his new elven showpiece charging about the table on its stag.
Green, or blue, for its cloak? Or purple? And which Ideals? Hmmmnn…
His thoughts were interrupted by his unit falling to their knees. He turned, slowly, feeling a sense of impending dread.
King Dries Fjordheart was approaching. His great bushy black beard was resplendent in the sun, and Johann could feel the buzz of the mana from his enchantment-encrusted armour press upon his skin. He wore a serious expression on his face. His great black warhog, bedecked in enchanted armour too, gave a loud snort from where he had dismounted. Johann immediately fell to one knee, bowing his head.
He heard boots stomp on grass, stopping just in front of him. The seconds dragged out, long enough that his thoughts almost began to wander back to The Ideal of War. Almost. Suddenly, the king broke the silence.
“Johann Janssen,” the king pronounced, his rich voice raised for all to hear. “You have acted today with singular decisiveness and courage. Where others stood by, you took action. And in doing so, you may have saved us all.”
The king paused then, letting the moment play out.
“Lieutenant Colonel Brouwer was tragically killed today.” the general paused once more. “But I feel I speak for all of us, every dwarf, when I say we have found a competent replacement!
“Rise, Lieutenant Colonel Janssen!” he shouted.
Johann found his feet, and was immediately dragged into a manly arm-clasp with the king, as was the fashion with dwarves.
King Dries Fjordheart clapped him on the shoulder and brought him close.
“Goodness man, but that was a feat! I’ve never seen the like!” He began to lead Johann away, over the hill, and back towards Fortress Fjord.
“We’re going to have much need of you in years to come. A man of your reputation, you’ll do well in the upper command. Now, we have a debrief tonight, and daily meetings at…”
Johann couldn’t bear to listen any more. All he saw was his free time - his precious, precious, free time for playing games - draining slowly away.
Fuck, he thought. Fucking. Fuck.