The barbarians reached the town of Kellsworth on the eighteenth day of their southward march and Kellsworth taught them that not every soft target was soft.

The town's garrison commander was a captain named Merritt who had been reading the dispatches from the northeastern campaign with the attention that survival demanded. He had read about Fort Harken's fall. He had read about the Snowe dominion's defense. He had read about the earthworks that General Snowe had built using techniques adapted from the orcish army that the kingdom had been fighting on the eastern front. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Merritt had three hundred soldiers and a town whose stone walls were twelve feet high and not designed to resist thundermakers. He had four days before the barbarian column arrived. He used the four days the way Snowe's dispatches suggested they should be used.

He dismantled the stone walls.

The garrison soldiers and the town's civilian population worked for four days removing the stone blocks from the walls' upper sections and rebuilding them into the timber-framed earthworks that Snowe's dispatches described. The stone blocks, packed between timber frames with earth fill, created the layered construction that absorbed thundermaker impact rather than cracking under it. The stone walls' upper eight feet became the earthworks' core material. The walls' lower four feet became the earthworks' foundation.

The thundermaker balls struck the earthworks at dawn on the fifth day. The balls hit the timber-framed construction and the construction bent. The timber absorbed the impact's energy and distributed it across the frame. The stone blocks within the frame shifted but did not shatter because the earth fill between them provided the cushioning that solid stone walls did not.

"It holds!" A garrison soldier shouted from the firing position behind the earthwork, his voice carrying the specific relief that defenders produced when the thing that was supposed to protect them actually protected them.

The barbarian assault force hit the earthworks at the second hour and found the garrison's boomsticks firing from positions that the timber-framed construction protected. The garrison's ammunition was limited. Every ball fired was a ball from the town's armory stockpile, the stockpile that the dwarven trade's severance had fixed at the level it had been when the trade was cut.

Captain Merritt counted ammunition the way General Snowe counted ammunition: charge by charge, ball by ball, the arithmetic of finite resources applied to the defense of a position whose survival was measured in the number of shots remaining.

* * * * *

The barbarian shamans arrived at the third hour.

Two shamans, their chanting synchronized, targeted the earthworks' timber frames with the vibration that the shamanic tradition used for material disruption. The timber creaked. The frames' joints loosened. The earth fill shifted as the timber's structural support weakened.

Merritt's single battlemage, a junior practitioner named Lenn whose academy graduation had been three months ago and whose combat experience consisted entirely of the past four days, attempted the counter-magic that the senior battlemages used against shamanic disruption.

The counter-magic was redirected. The shamans' field absorbed Lenn's spell and turned it against the earthwork's northern section, the redirected energy accelerating the timber's deterioration rather than reversing it. The northern section's frame buckled.

"Stop casting!" Merritt grabbed Lenn's arm. "Every spell you throw, they turn against us. Stop feeding them."

Lenn's face carried the specific expression of a young practitioner whose training had not included the scenario where casting spells made the situation worse. "What do I do?"

"Nothing magical. Pick up a boomstick. You learned to shoot at the academy?"

"Third in my class."

"Then shoot. The boomstick's ball does not get redirected by shamans. The boomstick's ball goes where you aim it and stays there."

Lenn picked up a fallen soldier's boomstick, loaded it with the automatic precision that the academy's weapons training provided alongside the magical curriculum, and fired at the shamans' position. The ball struck the rock beside the nearest shaman and the shaman flinched. The flinch disrupted the chanting for two seconds. The timber stopped creaking for two seconds.

"Again," Merritt said.

Lenn fired again. The second ball struck closer. The shaman moved to a different position. The chanting resumed from the new position but the disruption had given the garrison's engineers four seconds to drive reinforcing stakes into the buckled frame's weakened joints.

The defense of Kellsworth lasted six days. The earthworks held because the timber-framed construction absorbed the thundermaker fire that stone walls could not. The shamans' magic damaged the frames but the garrison's engineers repaired the damage during the pauses between shamanic assaults. The boomstick ammunition ran out on the fifth day and the garrison fought the sixth day's assault with swords and spears and the determination of soldiers who had been told that the alternative to holding was the burning of the town behind them.

On the seventh day, the barbarian chieftains assessed the cost of Kellsworth: six hundred dead barbarian warriors against a town that should have fallen in two days. The assessment produced the same conclusion that the Snowe dominion's assessment had produced: too hard. The column swung east, bypassing Kellsworth, moving toward the softer targets that the agricultural belt's remaining towns provided.

Merritt watched the barbarian column bypass his town from the earthwork that had held for six days, the earthwork that was built from the dispatches of a general who had learned to build from watching the orcs.

"Snowe's dispatches saved this town," Merritt said.

"The orcs saved this town," Lenn said. "The orcs taught Snowe. Snowe taught us. The orcs saved this town and they have no idea they did it."

Merritt looked at the junior battlemage turned boomstick shooter and considered the observation. The observation was accurate. The chain of adaptation that had produced Kellsworth's defense ran from the orcish camp at Ashwell through General Snowe's dispatches through Captain Merritt's four days of preparation to the earthwork that had held for six days against twenty thousand barbarians.

"Don't tell the orcs," Merritt said. "They'll want credit."

"The orcs don't want credit. The orcs want the kingdom to acknowledge what happened to their people. That's what the entire war is about."

Merritt looked at the battlemage. Three months out of the academy and the young man understood the campaign better than the council.

The chain of adaptation that Kellsworth's defense represented was the chain that the campaign had produced across four months of continuous engagement: orcish defensive engineering observed by Threian commanders, adapted by General Snowe, transmitted through dispatches, implemented by garrison commanders who had never seen an orc but whose survival depended on the engineering that the orcs had developed. The chain was the specific consequence of the campaign's intensity, the consequence that occurred when two forces fought each other long enough that the best practices of each force became available to both through the osmosis that combat produced.

The orcs at Ashwell did not know that their engineering was saving Threian towns from barbarian thundermakers. The orcs did not need to know. The engineering existed because the engineering worked, and the engineering's effectiveness did not require the engineers' awareness that their work was being adapted by the people they had been fighting against.

The irony was the campaign's persistent quality: the kingdom that had tried to destroy the orcish people was being saved by the orcish people's methods, adapted through the chain of combat observation that the destruction attempt had produced. The destruction had created the orcs' military capability. The capability had been observed by the kingdom's commanders. The observation had been transmitted. The transmission was saving towns.

The chain was unbroken. The chain connected Yohan's forge district to Kellsworth's earthworks through four months of warfare that had produced the mutual education that warfare's survivors carried forward into whatever came next.