The sun hung like a dying ember over Ashthorn's blackened walls.
The lower bailey was a graveyard now — charred bones and shattered masks littering the stone, soaked in oil and blood. The fires had burned low, but the stench of roasted flesh clung to the air like a curse. Ashthorn had survived the morning, but the defenders knew better than to hope.
They could all feel it — the shift.
The Skarnlings were no longer howling, no longer charging like mad dogs. The war drums had gone silent. The enemy was no longer moving like a horde.
They were moving like an army.
⸻
Thorne stood atop the highest surviving tower, his battered armor caked with soot and grime. His eyes, bloodshot and unblinking, tracked the enemy formations gathering beyond the scorched outer wall.
The warlord had arrived.
He was a different beast entirely.
A giant of a Skarnling, draped in spiked iron plate and bone charms, his helm crowned with the twisted horns of . He stood tall, axe resting on one shoulder like a blacksmith sizing up soft iron. His warband — two hundred of the strongest, most disciplined Skarnling elites — formed around him like a living spearpoint.
Osric joined Thorne, cradling a bandaged arm against his chest.
"He's here," the old soldier rasped. "About damn time."
Thorne said nothing.
⸻
Tactician's Pulse: Active
Enemy Morale: Fanatical. Disorder: None.
Commander Detected: Skarn Warlord Varkhul the Flayer.
Battle Projection: Direct siege assault. Estimated casualties: 100% (Defenders).
⸻
The numbers were simple.
Ashthorn's defenders: 93 souls.
The enemy? Over 200 hardened killers. The last of the Skarnling war host, led by a warlord who'd survived twenty years of conquest.
No traps. No fire barrels. No walls left to hide behind.
Only one move left.
⸻
Thorne's voice was iron-flat.
"Gather the men. Strip the great hall. Prepare the vault powder. Today we burn the keep."
Osric blinked, stunned. "The great hall? That's—"
Thorne cut him off, already moving.
"We can't hold the walls. Let them break through. Let the warlord lead them in. Everyone fall back to hall now"
His voice sharpened into a blade.
"When they think the heart of Ashthorn is theirs, we crush it around them."
⸻
By sunset, the last defenders of Ashthorn stood ready — shields strapped tight, weapons drawn, faces pale but unshaken. Every door, every stairwell, every broken archway had been rigged for collapse.
The warlord wanted the keep's heart.
Thorne would hand it to him, splinters and all.
The final assault began without a roar, without the wild, animal shrieks that had marked the Skarnlings' earlier charges.
This was different.
The warlord's warband advanced in perfect silence, shields raised, axes gleaming, iron boots stamping the earth in unison. Like a single living creature — patient, precise, merciless.
From the keep's remains, Thorne watched them move. His pulse barely stirred, though the sight alone was enough to break lesser men.
The Skarnlings had learned.
No more reckless waves. No more overconfidence. Now, it was cold, disciplined extermination.
⸻
The great gates were little more than splinters, the walls cracked and blackened beyond recognition. Thorne had ordered his surviving men to fall back, abandoning every position but the last: the inner keep itself, the great hall.
His soldiers — all ninety-three — stood ready inside the stripped, hollowed bones of Ashthorn's heart. The hall's grand stone pillars had been chipped and undermined. The vaults beneath the flagstones were stuffed with barrels of black powder, soil bags, broken masonry. Enough force to collapse the keep on itself.
The plan was brutal. Simple.
Let the enemy win.
Let them take the hall.
And bury them under it.
⸻
The Skarnlings poured through the broken courtyard like a black tide, but their steps slowed as they reached the keep. Caution. Even the wildest of them could smell the trap.
Varkhul the Flayer led the charge himself, his horned helm cutting through the smoke like a dark crown. He raised his axe, gesturing forward, and his warriors answered in perfect discipline.
Thorne stood just inside the open hall, armored, sword sheathed.
No shield. No defense. A bait.
(Hall can fill 500 people in it , 93 defender stood in cover waiting for their doom)
⸻
Osric's voice whispered through the hidden speaking tube behind the broken tapestries.
"They're in. Eighty inside. More closing."
Thorne waited.
[Tactician's Pulse: Active]
Enemy Density: 87% capacity.
Enemy Formation: Clustered. Optimal kill radius achieved.
The warlord's heavy boots echoed across the stone as he stepped forward, staring Thorne down from the far side of the hall.
"You fight well, little lord," Varkhul growled, voice like grinding stone. "Die like the last one."
Thorne's fingers brushed the small flame torch hidden in his gauntlet.
"Wrong warlord."
⸻
The gunpowder flared.
Leading to last explosives places in the halls pillar
The world shattered.
A deafening crack tore through Ashthorn, and the great hall collapsed in a wave of fire, stone, and shattered timber. Pillars crumbled like rotted trees. The vaulted ceiling caved inward. The warlord's elites were crushed, buried alive, burned and broken in an instant.
The last of Ashthorn's strength had leveled its own heart.
(There were people 293 present in the hall )
Skarnlings were buried alive, crushed beneath falling masonry or consumed by the roaring flames.
But not all of them.
When the dust began to settle, Thorne's circle of survivors stood amid the shattered center of the hall — a patch of open stone deliberately cleared, the only safe place when the trap was sprung.
Smoke clawed at the air. Screams pierced the ruin. The trap had worked — but the warlord's iron discipline had saved many. Varkhul the Flayer had survived the collapse, rising from the rubble with his horned helm cracked but his axe still in hand. Around him, over a hundred Skarnling elites staggered upright — bloodied, burned, but far from broken.
125 killers.
93 defenders.
No walls left. No tricks. No retreat.
The true battle had only begun.
Varkhul's voice split the smoke, a savage bellow.
"Kill them all!"
"Shields! Lock step! Tight line!"- Osric commanded
The defenders closed ranks, blades and spears gleaming in the firelight.
The Skarnlings surged forward, their formation less an army now and more a tidal wave of fury. Their war cries overlapped in a chorus of madness — the sound of things that lived for battle, things that felt no fear, only bloodlust and the deep-rooted hunger for slaughter. Their eyes burned, reflecting the fires still licking along the fractured hall, and their weapons rose as one, crude axes and hooked blades gleaming red and gold in the shifting firelight.
Thorne stood at the heart of his thinning shield wall. He drew his sword at last — not as bait, not for show, but as a soldier bound to this earth by duty and resolve. His blade gleamed, slick with dust and smoke, as he raised it high above his head, his voice cutting through the chaos with the steadiness of iron.
"Shields! Lock step! Tight line!" - Osric commanded the men again
shields overlapping with grim discipline, spears leveling forward like a forest of iron thorns. Their faces were hollowed by fatigue, blackened with soot and streaked with blood, but their hands held firm, knuckles white, grips unyielding. They would not break. Not yet. Not here.
The clash wasn't a skirmish — it was an eruption.
Axes slammed against shields with bone-jarring force, steel scraping and shrieking as the defenders absorbed the initial blow, their legs bracing against the ground as if the earth itself might give way beneath them. Spears thrust forward in tight, brutal rhythms, finding gaps in armor, punching through chainmail, splitting flesh and cracking bone. Skarnlings dropped, twitching and snarling even as life left their limbs.
The defenders were outnumbered. The trap had shattered the enemy's strength, but it hadn't broken their will. The Skarnlings fought like rabid wolves, clawing and hacking, biting, shoving, using their bulk to overwhelm the wall, trying to split it apart at the seams. Bodies began to stack at the defenders' feet — human and Skarnling both — until the floor ran slick with blood, turning the stones treacherous, turning every step into a test of balance and nerve.
Thorne fought with the cold precision of a man long past fear. His sword moved like an extension of his will, every swing sharp and efficient, every block a perfect angle, every kill quick and merciless. His mind hovered somewhere above the fray, riding the edge of exhaustion, detached from the pain in his limbs, from the burning in his chest, from the weight of his sword-arm. His body obeyed without question, muscle and memory doing the work his mind could no longer track.
Around him, his men stood shoulder to shoulder, faces grim, jaws clenched, holding the line inch by inch, heartbeat by heartbeat, against the tide. Their formation bent, but did not break.
And slowly, as the minutes bled away into hours, and the dead piled higher, step by bloody step — the defenders held.
Then warlord break into shield wall ....therone challenged him to one on one death battle , his soldiers running to close and firm the wall opening…
Varkhul the Flayer did not fall easily.
Even with half his ribs shattered and black powder burns seared deep into his flesh, the warlord fought like a creature beyond death. His horned helm hung cracked and crooked upon his skull, one eye blinded, blood leaking from the gaps in his iron plate. But his axe — that brutal slab of iron and bone — still swung with the weight of a siege ram.
Thorne met him in the heart of the ruin
Varkhul the Flayer bled like an ox, but the beast refused to fall.
The warlord towered over Thorne, his massive frame swaying under the weight of a dozen wounds. His black-iron armor was torn open at the chest, ribs crushed inward from rifle shots and blade strikes. But still his war axe swung — slow now, but each blow heavy enough to break a man in two.
Thorne danced along the edge of death, each step a heartbeat away from the end. His blade was chipped, his body aching from the glancing strikes that had nearly caved him in. He had no shield. Only his sword, and the cold, honed instinct of a soldier who had fought for too long to let it end here.
Varkhul let out a guttural snarl, froth and blood spilling from his lips, and raised his axe for one final, overhead swing.
Thorne didn't wait for it.
He surged forward, ducking beneath the warlord's guard, boots skidding on blood-slick stone. His blade flashed upward, slicing through the gap between Varkhul's plates — clean through the exposed throat.
The warlord froze, his axe still hovering in the air like a forgotten promise.
A single, wet breath rattled from his chest, and then his massive body slumped forward, forcing Thorne to sidestep as the giant collapsed onto the ground with a sound like falling stone.
For a long moment, the battlefield stilled. Skarnling raiders who moments before had fought like demons stared at the corpse of their warlord, the reality of his death cutting deeper than any blade.
Varkhul the Flayer was dead. And with him, the spine of their horde had snapped.
At the end skarlings warlords fatal injuries due to trap led to his demise in the clash
Thorne raised his sword, voice cutting across the courtyard, sharp as a drumline.
"Loose formation! Pursuit line! Shields front, pikes follow."
His men obeyed without question — not because of numbers, but because of him.
A broken army follows a man, not a flag.
And Thorne was still standing.
Defender fought till the end killed all of the skarlings present in the ruins of the great hall…
At last only 20 defenders were left but the foes were none
⸻
Thorne lowered his sword, chest heaving.
It was over.
He turned to the ragged survivors — his soldiers, now forged in blood and fire into something more than they'd ever been.
"You held. That's all that matters."
And for the first time in three days, the wind over Ashthorn carried no drums. Only the slow cry of crows, and the quiet breath of men still alive.
The wind dragged smoke across the broken stones, a low, restless breath whispering through the ruin of Ashthorn Keep.
Thorne stood alone atop the highest fragment of the inner wall, battered armor still strapped to his frame like old bones, watching the field below. The earth was a graveyard — littered with shattered spears, rusting iron, and corpses bloated under the sun.
The wind carried the scent of blood and ash. The price of victory.
He didn't blink. Didn't flinch. He only stared.
The sun dipped behind the clouds, dimming the world into a cold gray. For a long moment, the world seemed to hold its breath.
And then — it came.
A pale white light, quiet at first, like frost spreading across glass, unfurled from the horizon. The smoke stilled, the crows froze in mid-flight, and sound itself seemed to break. The ruins, the corpses, the sky — all lost their color, drained into monochrome.
The light wrapped around Thorne, washing away the world.
His heartbeat slowed, heavy and distant, as if his own blood questioned him.
A voice, without sound or shape, echoed inside his skull.
[SYSTEM EVENT TRIGGERED]
Subject: Nerion Ophirein
Condition: Siege Survival Achieved.
Probability of Victory: 0.02%
Margin of Success: Exceeded expectations.
Final Judgment: Qualified.