There had never really been much doubt of how the fight would go, Silenos had known that from the moment he saw the incoming forces. The only question was how much damage the charging idiots might manage.

Apparently, not very much.

Finlay Baird was a primitive, like all in the New World, but he had actually managed to impress Silenos. In martial terms, at least. He ran Kaltan’s army in much the same way House Shaiagrazni ran its own, keeping a soldier class to be consistently trained, equipped and fed. Each man standing atop the battlements was moving guided by hundreds of hours of training, and every squad had at least a handful of combat veterans to further galvanise them.

Swap their quilted armour with poly-alloy scale, and their spears with bayoneted bolt-actions, and they might well have resembled his own people’s foot soldiers. They certainly fought like them, a credit to the not-so-delicate art of violence.

Of course such pinnacles of soldiering were still mere men, regardless, and Silenos could see the battle would not be an easy one, as he’d suspected. Orcs threatened human formation through simply bodily mass alone, and there were a handful of undead among them, no doubt giving aid due to flaws in their orders.

It was always a risk, having reanimates obey officers instead of the General. They’d be faster to respond to tactical changes, but susceptible to getting whisked along by an over-eager commander. Wasted.

Finlay Baird found out about Fomorian presence the hard way, seizing up as one caught him by surprise and skewered him with a spear. Silenos noted the stab did not go as deep as it might have earlier, judging by the length of steel disappearing into flesh it would barely have even reached his heart. Enough to kill the organ dead, in any case.

Baird hacked the offending arm off, then lunged forwards. Within moments he’d dragged his knives, now edged with nacre as a secondary aid by Silenos, along his enemy’s body scores of times, leaving it to fall as tendons were cut and tissues impaled. For a moment the Ranger stood, panting, then he moved on to continue killing.

Silenos’ lip curled at the man’s surprise. Had he really thought he wouldn’t have added a redundancy for his heart of all things? It was bad enough that natural selection had made such a moronic design as to only have one, a Senior of House Shaiagrazni wouldn’t be caught dead making such an error.

Baird continued hacking and slashing, his men continued thrusting and backstepping. There were documented accounts of Shaiagrazni Seniors turning the tide of such skirmishes single-handedly, crushing enemies by the thousands, even tens of thousands. Silenos’ own Master had, he had heard at least, once slain a million men by herself. But the New World’s phenoms were not so potent as that.

Fortunately, they had a sufficient substitute. Silenos reasoned he’d waited enough, and gave the command for his undead to pounce. Waiting hidden by the wall, they came on in moments, crashing into the swarm of scaling orcs just in the nick of time. All according to plan of course.

Silenos had made a few more smaller creations specifically for fighting on the battlements, and he took his chance to test them. Sending only two to flank the orcs pinning down Baird’s men, and leaving the rest to crash into the tide itself at the grapples. His enhanced vision showed the combat progressing nicely. Limbs gave way and tore free of torsos, skulls erupted like crushed eggs, and axes and clubs bounced from keratin armour like common human-wielded cudgels against rocks. Within moments a score of orcs were dead, within moments more their corpses outnumbered those still fighting upon the battlements.

Grapples were soon cut, climbers soon dropped, and Silenos made his way over to the wall, landing just as he saw the enemy horde below start to convulse and surge as half fought to continue climbing while the other tried to flee. He settled the debate quickly.

Silenos’ newer undead were possessing of considerable ranged abilities, using pneumatic designs within their bodies to hurl pre-made javelins- taken from Baird’s supplies- at appreciable fractions of mach speed. Orcs were durable, but they still died to exploding shafts and sprays of splinters as sheer velocity tore target and projectile both to pieces. Baird’s Rangers threw their own abilities into the mix, skewering orcs with their deadly arrows, and soon enough ordinary arches were helping too.

All of that clearly had the orcs wavering more, but it was Silenos who tipped the scales. He started with his cannon, letting the blunderbuss configuration rip bloody chunks out of the swarm of bodies, seeing little effect. Then he changed to his flamethrower.

Incendiary weapons were a growing controversy, geopolitically. Or at least they had been in Silenos’ world, before he’d left. Fire was an inhumane way of killing, causing undue suffering and anguish to its victims, or so the arguments went. House Shaiagrazni had no business with such trifling concerns. They would burn whatever they damned well liked, and if their enemies thought themselves above such things, they were welcome not to retaliate.

That moment, seeing the flames fall so closely upon enemy heads, he understood where the opposing sentiments derived their weight. It was a cruel, grim thing to see done to any creatures at all. The effects on his enemies were immediately felt and remarkably strong.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Orcs screamed, as burning things tended to do, and the crowd surged back. The smell of burning oil and carbonising matter mingled with cooking meat, almost disturbing for how similar it was to any other kind. Bodies fell crackling to the floor, skin splitting and hot fat dripping free to boil and pop upon the flames, dozens, then hundreds turned into their own funeral pyres. Silenos had plenty of material to work with, converting the slain enemies into more fuel for his weapon even as he emptied it out onto the rest, cleaning up the battlements one processed corpse at a time. Cleaning up the ground beyond the walls one score of blackened soldiers at a time.

It did not take very long, in the end, for the enemy’s impromptu attack to falter, then crumble. Orcs practically scrambled over one another to flee, scurrying back along the landscape, heading towards their half-finished siege camps like a pile of dust blown away in sudden winds.

Smiling, Silenos surveyed the sight. Individual combat was rather a barbaric thing, he maintained, but there was a certain satisfaction in claiming such a crushing victory with it. He could see why so many of House Shaiagrazni’s Named chose to direct their magic into more direct and immediate powers than his own.

For an hour or so, all focus was on recovering from the attack. It had been unexpected, though not unforeseen by the wall’s scouts, and though fighting had proven fierce only a scant fourteen men had died, none of which were Rangers. Silenos watched Baird go about his business of ordering ammunition stockpiles refilled, guard shifts rotated to account for the injured, weapons replaced and maintained.

His own undead helped somewhat, whilst others did their work of hauling off slain orcs and- with Baird’s permission- humans to process into further weaponry and constructs. All in all, Silenos considered the incident rather an effective stroke of luck. It had bolstered their power considerably to gain so many new undead, even if the city’s iron ores had long since been exhausted past the demands of Silenos’ more exotic materials.

By the time Baird finally came to speak with him, demonstrating the sense to make his way over to Silenos rather than inappropriately requesting that he go to him, the sun was rather near to the horizon once again. The Governor was a vision of health, even by the standards of men who had not been stabbed through the heart. His body seemed more animated than it had been when they first met, and his eyes were alert as ever.

Silenos’ Fleshcrafting had invigorated the man. Now he would see what that physical vivaciousness would do for his wits.

“A word.” He asked, without asking. Silenos could respect the courage there at least.

“You wish to ask about the battle?” He guessed, and Baird did not bother confirming.

“Your undead took their sweet time in joining it, why is that?”

Silenos had decided before the conversation even began that he’d be open with Baird, simply because gaining his cooperation- which he believed was more than possible- would make the fruits of his plan far quicker in ripening.

“I decided to delay them deliberately, until such time as it became clear your defence was starting to lose ground. Not waiting for casualties to mount, but sending them to arrive precisely during a momentary loss of momentum to give the illusion of being saved by your soldiers. My plan was that this would improve trust and cohesion in my undead among them.”

Baird was not surprised, not even in the slightest. He looked like a man who’d just heard several of his own deductions confirmed, in fact, subtly satisfied and already prepared with an answer for what he was hearing.

“Good, I’ve been telling my men that your monsters were busy preparing other fortifications to explain their early absence. Next time don’t leave details like that for me to hammer out.”

Silenos was rather surprised to find himself without even the slightest urge to behead Baird, after being spoken to like that. It was, he realised, proper. This was a man more experienced in the martialing of soldiers than he, whose knowledge of military matters came far more from hands-on practice than Silenos’ largely book-borne understanding. It was quite appropriate he be chided for falling short of such a man’s standards.

“I apologise.” He replied, amused by the sheer novelty of finding himself exceeded by a primitive of all things. Baird seemed quite mollified, and extremely surprised, but said nothing of either fact.

“That your first time fighting orcs?” He asked. Silenos nodded, surprised once more by the man’s guess. Baird just grunted. “Yeah, looked as much. I guessed you were experimenting with how they reacted to fear, switching from that bloody dart gun to the fire spell you used.”

Dart gun? It made sense, Silenos supposed, that a primitive would compare elongated bullets to those of all projectiles.

“I know now where their threshold for panic is.” Silenos replied. “It is…Surprisingly far from human.”

“Orcs tend to go wild when they fight, it’s what makes them so dangerous. They don’t use formations as well, barely even possible to teach a proper shield wall, but most of the time you can consider their morale infinite. It’s almost as much of a factor in their effectiveness as the sheer strength they have.”

Almost. Silenos could imagine that, though their prowess was hard to compare with.

“The information has been noted.” He replied, finding himself rather stung to have erred so completely in the first place.

“Good. Good.” Baird grunted, seeming suddenly tired. Something was gnawing at him, Silenos saw, and he imagined no good could come of anything severe enough to draw such disquiet from Finlay Baird. By all he’d seen the man was remarkably resilient.

“What is bothering you?” He prodded, then found himself surprised as the Governor simply shook his head.

“Nothing.” He grunted. “Just…Men, I lost men today. Always find myself in a foul mood when I lose anyone at all, even in a winning battle with few casualties.”

Silenos was almost completely sure he was being lied to, but he could think of no way in which he might draw the truth from Baird without starting an incredibly inconvenient war. Instead he just nodded, began to move elsewhere, then paused as a messenger hurtled towards Baird, face sheet-pale with fear and voice tight with haste.

“Governor!” The man gasped, his words escaping as hot things, made bitter and sharp by lactic acid. “It’s- your son, Governor, your son has returned. He’s wounded.”

Baird was instantaneous in heading off to the place gestured by the messenger, and Silenos wasn’t long after him.