Chương 90: Chapter 91: War

Joining a guild takes more than just saying "yeah, sure," apparently. We had to go to the guild hall and meet with the guild master, swear an oath of loyalty, and get leather guild badges. All guild quests are currently war quests, but the girls were able to immediately turn in one for helping to build up the defenses, and I was able to turn one in for getting a count of the orcish army, getting me 20 renown and 10, 000 experience. At least I'm under six digits for my next level.

After all that, we were assigned command not of a tower, but of the space between two towers. We'll have thirty soldiers under our command, and we have only one job: to hold the wall. Hold against the orcish invaders. We barely get back in time to meet our troops before the orcs arrive. I don't even catch everyone's name. We just break them into three groups of ten and make sure they have plenty of arrows and spears to switch to when the time for shooting ran out.

Ash addresses the thirty two of us as the sound of the orcs grows nearer.

"Today we fight to defend our home," she says, looking out at all of us.

"We fight against an invasive force that doesn't have the numbers to defeat us. A force that doesn't have the strength to defeat us. A force that doesn't have the will to defeat us." She lets that hang in the silence for a few seconds.

"Some of us won't make it through this fight," she says.

"But those who fall will be remembered as heroes. And for every one of us that falls, a dozen of them will meet their end. We will not allow them past the wall. We will not allow them to bring the horrors of war to our families, to our friends, to our children. We will not allow them to bring fire to the great tree. We will not allow them past our wall. Here we stand! Here we stand against the horde, and here we will be standing when they tuck tail and run. We will be here, and we will be victorious!"

There's a cry of support from among the soldiers, and it soon becomes a rallying cry. And then I get a notification. You have been inspired! You gain +10% HP. Duration: 3: 59: 58. A four hour buff that adds to our hit points. I didn't know Ash could do that. Why hasn't she been doing that before? Whatever the case, she did it now. And it's going to help us in this first battle. The orcs are going to test our defenses, but might do so by throwing everything they have against us. I'm not sure what their tactics are.

I watch them gather at the edge of the tree line, not moving out into the open space between them and the wall. They won't come out into the killing field until they're ready to fight. I just hope that they are ready to fight, and we're not in for a long siege. I mean, we can withstand a siege pretty much forever. While Elmspire does get a lot of its food from hunting, the people can survive on the mushrooms and plants grown in and around the city.

And there are herds of animals grazing in the clearing around the great tree, and some of them up the great tree, that there won't even be a huge problem getting meat for quite some time. Not to say that a siege won't work eventually, but it would take months, at least, before we started to starve. And a good siege is all about starving the inhabitants out. The orcs might just lay siege for now, though.

They might not attack, waiting for the elves, humans, and dwarves to join them before they start attacking in earnest. Or they might try to take the city for themselves before their allies arrive. I'm not sure. I know we've got a bit of a heavier than normal force on this side of the wall, but soldiers are waiting to be redistributed when the other army arrives. Elmspire's defenses are surprisingly well organized. I really expected there to be more chaos, more scrambling to try to get things ready.

Especially before the orcs got here. They're half a week ahead of the other army, giving us a lot less time to prepare than we expected to have. The orcs are starting to move. They're walking into the newly open field with shields raised above their heads. Huge shields. Effectively tower shields. They interlock, forming a platform above the heads of the orcs that make them almost impossible to shoot at.

The ones in front keep their shields down and in front of them, making it even harder to shoot at the phalanx as it moves across the field. That doesn't stop arrows from raining down on them. Maybe one in a hundred will get through the shields. I think it's a waste, but no one asked me. I hold my shot, and so does everyone else under our command, including Ash and El. I guess I'm in charge while we're shooting.

"Aim for the edges," I say.

"And for their feet. The shields can't cover everything." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Then I spot my target, activate Sniper Shot, and let loose. The arrow flies forward and pins an orc's foot to the ground, dealing 1, 498 damage. I follow up with a Rapid Shot at the one walking next to that orc, turning his boots into pincushions and dealing 2, 782 damage.

Once I do that, everyone else starts shooting at will, and we pepper the front of the line until they lower the shields to practically scrape along the floor. They manage to close the gap at the top without exposing anyone else to our shots. I switch from arrows to Fire Bolt, watching the fire splash off the shields and hoping that maybe something will get through. Then I switch to Magical Dart. I've never been a huge fan of that spell.

Partially because it's based on the skill rather than on an attribute when it comes to damage, partially because I didn't see the benefit of always hitting when it came to magic. I don't have many experiences with my spells missing. I guess I've never really had this situation come up before. But now, though it only does 70 damage, I can see the benefit. Nothing else is getting through their shields, but Magical Dart does. I'd still like it to do more damage, but it's at least something.

Back to the bow, I prepare a Power Shot, taking aim at one of the shields in the center. I figure the shields are thicker the closer you get to the center, so I aim for near to the edge, and let the arrow fly. It grows into a much thicker arrow and slams into the shield, then shrinks, leaving a fist-sized hole in the shield. I shoot another Sniper Shot through the hole, doing another 1, 498 damage. Then I try Killing Blow, sending another arrow through the little hole.

Luck is with me; the orc is reduced to zero hit points and falls over. As soon as he falls over, there is a huge gap in their phalanx. A gap that is quickly filled with arrows, as both I and several of the soldiers under my command unleash Rapid Shot into the hole. The phalanx starts to collapse as more bodies fall, taking their shields with them.

They can't fill in the gaps, and the whole phalanx ends up shattering just twenty feet away from the wall, each of them trying to rely on their shields to protect themselves, no longer moving slowly in a group. I keep shooting as they get to the wooden palisades built on top of the earthworks wall. I shoot between spikes even as the soldiers around me swap out bows for spears and prepare to deal with the orcs trying to climb over the spiked wall.

If they get over the wall, we'll meet them head on and cut them down pretty quickly. But that's not what I'm actually worrying about. I'm worried about the people who are not trying to get over the spiked palisade, but rather those that are using axes to try to cut the wall down. One or two industrious orcs that climb over the wall we can deal with. Ash and El are ready and waiting for their first victims. But the orcs who stay on that side of the wall and just chop at the wooden poles, those ones worry me.

Because if they're successful, if they manage to get the palisades down and destroyed, there really won't be anything at all to protect us. The earthworks wall will be more of a hill than a wall, and the orcs will be able to just climb right over that, en masse. So I keep an eye on those with axes in their hands.

I try using Disarming Strike and Trick Shot to get the axes out of their hands, using Sniper Shot when it comes off cooldown every 30 seconds, and Rapid Shot when it comes off cooldown every minute, and I pepper them with arrows if they look like they're even considering chopping at the wall. Horns sound, and the orcs start to make a retreat, hiding behind their shields as they go. I get a few more shots into boots and occasionally bare feet, but we don't seem to have killed all that many of them.

Of the fifty or so who charged our little fortification area, we only killed six. The rest were wounded, but they'll heal up. It's another thing that's different about a war in this world versus a war in my old world. On Earth, if you wounded an enemy soldier, that was a good thing. It was, in many ways, better than killing them. If you kill a soldier, you eliminate one enemy from the field. If you wound a soldier, you eliminate three. The wounded one and the two who carry him off.

Wounds fester and get infected sometimes. If nothing else, wounds take people out of the battle for a good length of time. No one gets shot on Earth and goes right back out into the battle a day or two later. Maybe if the bullet just grazed them, but not if it they get actually shot. Here, it's a different story. Maybe it's the mana that infuses the air, maybe it's just the way biology works here. But every wound will heal on its own, given enough time.

I don't know how fast the natives heal, but even if they only heal one hit point per hour, they'll still heal faster than humans normally do, or normally did. And players heal even faster. I don't have a special regeneration for my hit points, and I still regenerate one per minute. Granted, if I were down far enough, that could be a really long time. It would take almost a week to regenerate 10, 000 hit points. So I suppose that would take me out of the battle for a while, magic notwithstanding.

The point is, all those orcs that we wounded will probably be fine tomorrow. Unless they really do heal one hit point per hour. Then we've bought some time. But not all that much. And definitely not as much as if the wounds healed at a normal human rate. They'd need doctors and nurses to help them get healthy, and they'd need to do physical therapy to get the use of their feet back, or to learn to walk again. That's not the case here.

Those orcs are going to pull my arrows out of their feet with a grimace, and then they're basically going to walk off the damage. I don't think I did more than a few thousand damage to any given orc, unless I killed them. But unless they really do heal at a rate of one per hour, which I don't think they do, those guys will be back in the fight in a manner of days. Wounding them did very, very little in the grand scheme of things. In this world, if you don't kill your enemy, you essentially just slow them down.