Chapter 49: Pack End
The final volley went out at twenty yards, and Beorn tracked the timing as the front rank fired. The air between the line and the pack filled with bolts, a dense spread that should have reduced numbers before impact.
Several monsters folded mid-stride, their front legs collapsing under momentum, and their bodies hit the road hard enough to disrupt those behind them, pulling the following monsters sideways.
That helped, but it wasn’t enough. Most of them still crossed the remaining distance, and the men who had fired had less than two seconds to transition before contact.
The sound was dull, heavy, and wrong in many ways. The front rank buckled in three places at once.
"Hold the line!" Harr’s voice cut through the noise with intent. He was already on the nearest break, pushing his own man back into position with both hands, then drawing his sword in a single motion.
The militia responded as trained. In the next five seconds, the second rank stepped forward to seal the openings left by the first. The crossbowmen behind the melee shifted to the flanks without waiting for orders, establishing new firing targets.
Two animals broke through initial contact and moved toward the cart line, but the reserve squad assigned to that scenario moved to intercept. Beorn tracked each section, noting where his military doctrine worked and where it incurred cost.
"Mag, right side!"
"On it!"
An animal went down under two sword strokes. The first had been poorly placed and failed to stop it, forcing a second strike. The man adjusted immediately, coming in low and fast.
His execution showed experience. He had trained for targets that did not stop when they should, and he compensated without hesitation.
Beorn’s horse sputtered at that moment.
The animal moved sideways without warning, something in its hindquarters locked up, rejecting further movement toward the noise and scent of the fight.
Beorn lost balance and came off to the right, hitting the road shoulder-first with a sound that indicated more force than he wanted. He rolled clear immediately to avoid being stepped on.
The horse moved three steps toward the verge and stopped, reins trailing, its hindquarters shaking.
Beorn got his feet under him during the turmoil.
In his previous life, transport vehicles didn’t made independent decisions. A car didn’t throw him to the ground.
He snickered at the comparison, then discarded it. The engagement was ongoing, and he was now on foot.
He moved behind the rearmost cart and selected a position with clear sightlines to both formation and pack. He kept his sword at his hip. He had not trained with it.
That limited his viable actions.
From ground level, visibility changed. The melee obstructed clean lines of sight in ways horseback had not.
The formation had not broken. It had bent in two locations and recovered both times. The crossbowmen on the flanks were placing shots into the rear of the pack, targeting animals still in approach.
Each successful hit reduced the load on the melee line.
An animal detached from the fight’s end and moved along the outside toward the carts, to Beorn’s direction. Its acceleration was low and fast.
Godric stood thirty feet away, focused on a break in the right flank, his back turned.
On its third stride, the animal’s right foreleg misloaded. There was a hitch with no visible environmental cause, a brief interruption in momentum.
It recovered almost immediately, but the lost half-step broke his timing. Godric caught the motion in peripheral vision and reacted.
He turned and closed from the left as the animal completed recovery, then drove his sword into the base of its neck.
The animal dropped.
Godric stepped back once and looked at the point on the road where the stride had broken. Then he shifted his gaze to Beorn.
He said nothing and returned to the formation.
Beorn said nothing.
The melee continued for another four minutes. The key variable remained unresolved. These monsters did not degrade under damage the way animals should.
A wolf with three bolts would be dying. A Hollow Hound with three bolts continued lunging until he actually died.
"Rear rank, push through!"
"It’s moving, Seb, the leg, the leg!"
"Down! Get it down before-"
The last voice cut off mid-sentence.
One man on the left was bitten on this throat. In the center, another was dragged before the squad leader intervened and forced the animal to release.
The man did not stand. On the right, a third fell and remained still as the line closed over him.
Beorn watched in silence.
The last animal died under Harr’s sword. It required two strokes. The first failed to find an effective cut.
Harr corrected without visible reaction and completed the kill. Then he stepped back and watched the field around his squad.
Five men were down and not moving.
Harr observed them briefly, then shifted focus to the living.
"Check your injured. Then check ours."
After the final kill, the formation was in a disrupted state. The men had been fighting at high intensity and had stopped abruptly.
There was no cheering.
Godric reported when he reached Beorn.
"Five dead," he said. "Eleven injured, requiring attention. Three of those can continue. Eight cannot walk without assistance."
"The eight go back."
"Harr’s second squad can escort. That’s the maximum I can allocate while keeping the forward group."
"Is Harr himself fine?"
"He is."
"He stays forward, then."
Osen emerged from behind the cart line and approached the nearest Hollow Hound carcass. He crouched and examined the jaw size without making contact.
Then he stood and scanned the road in both directions.
He moved to Beorn.
"We had a pack den in the eastern shaft about four years ago," he said. "Before it flooded."
He glanced back at the bodies on the road. "These are larger."
"They’re all larger than expected for this area," Beorn said.
Osen stopped with that conclusion for a moment, then returned to check his workers.
The scout returned while the injured were being organized. The route ahead was clear. No additional pack activity between their position and the mine entrance.
Beorn accepted the report and considered the remaining militia. The formation was reduced but structurally intact. The engine carts were operational. The workers were still present.
The operation could continue.
He located his horse near the verge. It had stopped shaking.
He led it forward, guiding it past the nearest carcasses before attempting to mount, with eventual success
He brought it back into the column.
The engagement was clear to his mind.
The pack had numbered roughly eighty. After three disciplined volleys from trained crossbowmen, the remaining force still reached melee range and forced close engagement.
The cost was five dead and eight removed from the line.
The failure point was not human error. Their strength was simply not enough.
A crossbow bolt at range penetrates, slows, and eventually stops a target.
A sword kills within a distance where the wielder is also inside the target’s effective response range.
Those two conditions was where losses occurred.
He already knew the solution to that problem. There were far stronger weapons humans could create.
The constraint had been material. The required substance formed as salt deposits on rock walls in enclosed environments, caves and old mine workings where organic buildup and atmospheric conditions matched over time.
There were three such cave formations noted in early surveys south of Ashmark.
That required revision. The records were in the office. He would retrieve them on return.
"Form up," Godric called.
The convoy reorganized and resumed movement north toward the mine.