Chapter 178: Hero’s Call
Brakk arrived in Ashenveil on a cart.
Not a war chariot. Not a divine conveyance. A produce cart — borrowed from a farmer on the road between Ironstead (the newly renamed former Bleakstead) and the capital, a journey of approximately 180 kilometers that the Orc had covered in four days because the farmer’s donkey moved at the speed that donkeys moved and Brakk had not considered that alternative transportation existed.
The cart pulled through the Iron Citadel’s gates at midday, drawing the immediate attention of the Crown Guards — four soldiers who assessed the arrival of a two-meter, 130-kilogram Orc riding a produce cart with the professional suspicion that guards applied to anything unusual.
"State your business," the gate captain said.
"I am Brakk, Champion of Ironstead. I come to fight."
The statement was direct. Orc communication tended toward directness — the cultural legacy of a species whose rhetorical tradition valued clarity over nuance and whose historical experience with complexity had been that complicated things were usually someone trying to trick you.
"Fight what?"
"The green ones. The ones who come from the south. My god says there is a war. My god says I should go to the capital and fight in the war. I am here."
The gate captain looked at the Orc. Looked at the produce cart. Looked at the weapon — a massive war-hammer secured to the cart’s frame, its head forged from a single piece of stonesteel, its haft wrapped in leather that the captain’s experienced eye identified as kraken-hide (where had an Orc obtained kraken-hide?). The hammer’s head was the size of a man’s torso.
"Which god?"
"Orderian. The Forgefather. I am his Champion."
The gate captain’s expression shifted from professional suspicion to the complicated blend of deference and bewilderment that characterized encounters with divine Champions — individuals who had been personally elevated by a god to serve as that god’s mortal representative. Champions were rare. In the kingdom’s history, there had been fewer than twenty. The last Champion appointment had been Gharrek Fenward, Fenrath’s Champion in the Frostmarch. A new Champion, appearing at the capital in a produce cart —
"Wait here," the gate captain said. He sent a runner.
***
Marshal Boreth arrived at the gate in person — because when the gate runner reported that an Orc Champion of Orderian was requesting entry while sitting on a produce cart, the Marshal decided that this was something he needed to see with his own eyes.
Brakk was, by any standard of measurement, an improbable Champion. He was an Orc — a species that the kingdom’s racial diversity included but that had never historically produced military leaders of note. He was from Ironstead — a frontier settlement that the capital’s population would struggle to locate on a map. His equipment was a mix of crude and excellent: the war-hammer was masterwork stonesteel (the Forgefather’s personal blessing visible in the metal’s resonance pattern), but the armor was leather — ordinary, non-blessed leather, the kind that a frontier settlement produced from available animal hides.
And he was enormous. Not by Minotaur standards — the Minotaur race exceeded Brakk’s height and mass by comfortable margins — but by Orc standards, Brakk was a biological anomaly. His musculature suggested a lifetime of physical labor at an intensity that most training regiments would classify as extreme. His hands were scarred with forge burns — the marks of a smith who had spent years working metal. His face carried the particular expression of a person who processed the world slowly, thoroughly, and reached conclusions that were difficult to argue with once reached.
"You’re Orderian’s Champion," Boreth said.
"Yes."
"When were you appointed?"
"Eleven days ago. The Forgefather spoke to me while I was at the forge. He said the kingdom needs fighters. He said I am the best fighter in Ironstead. He said go to the capital and tell the Marshal that Brakk is here."
"The best fighter in Ironstead."
"Yes. I killed a Frost Wolf last winter. It was four meters long. It took three hits."
Boreth assessed. The Marshall had seen combat for thirty years, and his assessment capability was refined to the point where he could evaluate a fighter’s potential from stance, muscle distribution, and the way they held their weapon. Brakk held the war-hammer the way a master wielded his primary tool — not with the rigid grip of training but with the loose, confident hold of *familiarity*. The hammer was an extension of his body. The body was an engine designed for a single purpose: the conversion of muscular energy into kinetic impact through a focused contact point.
"Combat test," Boreth decided. "Training yard. Now."
The combat test was the Marshal’s standard evaluation for fighters of unknown capability — a sequence of engagements against progressively skilled opponents, designed to determine not just how hard the fighter could hit but how they thought, adapted, and responded to tactical challenges.
Brakk’s first opponent was a veteran infantry sergeant — a Human with fifteen years of experience and a fighting style built on the solid foundation of institutional training. The sergeant advanced with textbook shield-and-sword technique, probing for openings.
Brakk waited. The patience was surprising — Orc combat tradition was aggressive, favoring the initial charge. Brakk didn’t charge. He watched the sergeant’s footwork, his shield position, his blade angle, processing information with the agricultural patience of someone who understood that rushing produced waste.
The sergeant committed a thrust — a probing attack aimed at Brakk’s midsection, designed to force a defensive response that would reveal the Orc’s fighting patterns. The thrust was technically perfect.
Brakk sidestepped. The motion was lateral — 130 kilograms of Orc moving sideways with a speed that the mass shouldn’t have permitted. The hammer came around in a horizontal arc that started from behind Brakk’s hip and accelerated through a three-quarter rotation, building momentum through the rotational physics that made long-hafted weapons devastating: the head was at the end of a 1.5-meter lever arm, and the lever’s rotation multiplied the input force by the radius. The mathematical output was approximately 4,000 newtons of impact energy at the contact point.
The hammer didn’t hit the sergeant. Brakk stopped the strike — froze the rotation at the exact point where the hammer’s head was three centimeters from the sergeant’s temple. The control required to halt 4,000 newtons of rotational force at precise distance was not muscular. It was divine — the Forge domain’s blessing enhancing muscular control to a degree that permitted force modulation at the limits of physics.
The sergeant looked at the hammer’s head, which was close enough to feel the weight of displaced air on his skin, and yielded.
***
Boreth dismissed the remaining test opponents. Three opponents had been planned — the sergeant, a Minotaur shield-bearer, and a Storm Severance swordsman. The sergeant’s test had told Boreth everything he needed to know. Brakk’s combat capability was not standard. The Orc’s combination of mass, speed, divine enhancement, and tactical patience placed him in a category that the Marshal’s assessment framework labeled simply as "exceptional."
"You’ll fight at the wall," Boreth said. "Ashwall central sector. Integrated with the primary defense line."
"I fight where you tell me. That is why I came."
"You came in a produce cart."
"The donkey was available."
Boreth — a career warrior who had buried humor under thirty years of professional gravity — almost smiled. The kingdom’s Champion roster now included a frontier Orc who had arrived on a donkey cart and who could deliver 4,000 newtons of precision force with a hammer blessed by the Forgefather himself.
Brakk was assigned quarters in the War College’s guest barracks, given a standard military equipment issue (which he examined with the critical eye of a smith assessing another smith’s work), and told to prepare for deployment to the Ashwall within five days.
He spent his first evening in the capital sharpening a hammer that didn’t need sharpening — hammers don’t have edges — and looking out the barracks window at a city that was preparing for war with the institutional thoroughness that only a civilization built by a game-god could produce.
Brakk didn’t understand the game-god. Brakk didn’t understand the theory of power that Zephyr had applied to build the kingdom. Brakk understood that the forge burned and the metal answered, and that the Forgefather’s voice in his head — warm, resonant, carrying the particular authority of a divine presence that had been building things for two and a half centuries — had told him to go to the capital and fight for the people who lived there.
Brakk had a simple relationship with divine instruction: when the god who had improved his village’s forge, blessed his crops, and answered his prayers told him to do something, he did it. The theology was simple. The faith was total. The hammer was ready.