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Over on Voro's front, he had just pulled his short sword out of a Frozen Fang tribe warrior when the horn sounded from the Frozen Fang army, signaling their retreat for the day.
As for how Voro was doing, on top of his broken ribs, multiple small cuts and bruises, he was now sporting a make-shift eyepatch over his left eye due to catching a slash to the face. After checking, the medicine man told Voro that only time would tell if he ever got his vision back for his left eye.
When Voro finally took a look at the sky, he now realized why the Frozen Fang tribe called for a retreat. The sun was setting, and it was only now that he was not frantically shouting commands and cutting down enemies that he realized that night was almost upon them.
As he dragged himself off the wall and back to his tent, he struggled to singlehandedly undo the knots holding his armor together without aggravating his broken ribs. When he finally got out of his armor, one of his commanders entered the tent, and without even looking up, Voro asked, "What's the damage today?"
"The defenses leading to the top of the right side of the ravine were breached earlier in the day, but we managed to push them out and reestablish the defenses," the commander reported.
Voro sighed as he faintly remembered hearing a lot of shouting about that subject, but he was too busy defending the ravine entrance to pay much attention. And as glad as he was that the breach was rebuffed, he knew that performing such a feat cost the lives of his men.
"How many?" Voro asked again.
"We lost forty-six men today." the commander replied, but was leaving out an important detail that he knew Voro needed to know, but he did not want to burden Voro just yet.
But Voro asked anyway. "Does that number include those too injured to fight?"
Being caught omitting information, the commander sighed and answered, "No. There are another twenty more too injured to fight."
Voro buried his head in his hands as he released a massive sigh. A total of sixty-four fewer men to defend the ravine, and that was just today. Over the weeks they had been holding the ravine, the numbers had been piling up, and only a small percentage of those who were too injured to fight recovered enough to pick up a weapon and return to the fight.
Voro was doubting whether he could hold the ravine any longer. If the casualty rate continued at this pace, he mentally calculated that he had three days, at most four, before he'd have to follow Orin's example and perform a fighting retreat to stall the enemy as long as possible until his father arrives… if his father arrives in time.
***
Since then, two more days of brutal fighting to hold the ravine continued. Voro and his men may have killed many more of the enemies besieging them, but every man lost on Voro's side was a lot more valuable.
It was noon again as Voro was chopping heads and trying to scale the walls, blocking arrows with a shield in his other hand, held up despite the agonizing pain shooting through his ribs that had yet to heal. The only thing making the pain manageable was the adrenaline rush of battle.
Throughout the past few days of fighting, there was one major concern for Voro. It was a crack was forming in the center of the main barricade of the ravine. Day after day, the Frozen Fang army would send battering ram after battering ram to attack one single spot and only retreat when his men forced them to.
But yesterday was the day when everything changed. After days of hammering the same spot on the wall with roughly crafted treetrunk battering rams, they managed to crack two of the logs forming the barricade wall. As soon as the cracks appeared, both sides erupted into a violent frenzy. The Frozen Fang side seemed to catch a second wind, fighting fiercely to protect the battering ram regardless of their losses, while Voro and his men did the same, trying to destroy the battering ram and anyone holding it.
At the end of that bloodier-than-usual engagement, Voro and his men managed to beat back the enemy and destroy the battering ram, but once again, at great cost.
As for the cracked barricade, Voro wanted to replace the two cracked logs, but he could not do it even if he wanted to. There was now a crack in the barricade obstructing the Frost Fang army, and they knew it. If they so much as looked like they were going to unearth the cracked logs to replace them, Voro knew that the gap would immediately get rushed.
When Voro looked out at the enemies in the distance, just out of bow range, they were openly staring at the crack in the barricade, and so were the multiple strike teams behind them, ready to strike the moment a gap appeared.
So Voro did the next best thing and braced multiple logs against the other side of the cracked logs in the hopes that it would absorb enough of a beating for backup to arrive.
That brings things to the present, and things were not going well. The Frozen Fang warriors took advantage of something the bedragled and exhausted Rock Claw warriors overlooked. That may have braced the cracked logs from the back, but the cracked part of the logs was pounded and splintered, making the damaged area look very much like kindling.
So in this current assault, the Frozen Fang warriors fought their way to the broken barrier while protecting someone with a torch in one hand and a waterskin in the other. Voro and his men shot what arrows they managed to salvage and threw rocks at the group of shield bearers protecting the man with the torch, but he was not willing to send what was left of his men into the meat grinder at the base of the barricade. Whatever the enemy planned to do, he decided it could be handled later.
When the man with the torch reached the barricade, the shield bearers accompanying him braced their shields directly against the barricade to defend themselves and hide whatever they were doing.
Within a minute of lobbing stones on the shields, smoke started seeping through the gaps in the shield wall, and Voro could smell the scent of burning animal fat. 'They are making a stronger fire with animal. But why are they still staying there when the fire has already been lit?' Voro asked himself.
Having more important things to think about, Voro just called for water to douse the flames when a possible solution came to him. He looked over the wall again and saw that even though the smoke was getting thicker and he could see the glow of the flames through the gaps in the shields, they did not move from where they were standing. The only thing Voro observed was that, besides the arrows and rocks bouncing off the shields and making them shake, every shield was trembling as if they were all shouting in pain and at each other in some mambrace way of hyping each other.
"Crazy bastards! They are sacrificing themselves to let the fire build!" Voro said to himself in an effort to convince himself of what he was seeing, but he did not have time to convince himself whether the act of self-immolation was a symptom of his fatigued mind playing tricks on him or not, he had to act on what he saw and made the decision to send men to their deaths to stop the fire on the baracade before it truely got out of control.
As buckets of water ineffectively poured from the wall to douse the flame, only for it to splash off the shields, Voro shouted the command, and the men of his tribe and even those from other tribes who joined up with them jumped from the wall, falling upon the shields protecting the flames.
When the shields were knocked aside by the weight of the men who fell upon them feet first, it revealed steaming men who looked to be wrapped in damp cloth, pushing and striking at the Rock Claw forces and trying their best to buffer themselves between the Rock Claw warriors and the growing fire.
As for the Rock Claw warriors who jumped down from the barricade, they were fighting on two fronts: one to try and reach the fire, and the other to keep the former's backs clear. Seeing the situation the men who answered his call were in, he knew he was looking at dead men and could only pray to the ancestors that their deaths would be swift after completing their mission.
Amid the chaos of fighting and watching his men at the base of the barricade die one by one, he was interrupted by a scout coming up from behind and shouting, "Commander! Help has arrived, they are wearing our colors!"
Hope blossomed in his chest, and he sent the scout to bring reinforcements to the front immediately. If they arrived in time, with the help of some fresh warriors, some of the men he sent to their deaths might still be saved.
When the reinforcements came up on the wall, he was expecting muscle-bound, armor-strapped, weapon-toting men ready to split some heads. Who greeted him instead were many of his siblings, and not the warrior type. These were his brothers and even sisters who took up the role of shamans. Not exactly the kind of help he needed.
Seeing the situation, Voro's shaman siblings jumped into action without his command and started performing something he had never seen before. With a few shouted commands from one of his shaman older brothers, the rest of his siblings started waving their hands in front of them in convoluted patterns. And just as he was about to shout them off the wall for their own safety, he saw something materialize between their hands.
What took shape between their hands was mostly fiery red symbols, while those near the burning part of the barricade had blue symbols and were the ones to finish whatever they were doing first.
Tendrils of water gathered before them, and with a gesture of their hands, the water slithered down the barricade like it had a mind of its own, seeped past the shields, and flowed into the burning wood, creating huge plumes of smoke as the fire was being extinguished.
Just as Voro was about to ask his siblings how and what they had done, the rest of his siblings with the fiery red symbols were done with whatever they were doing and pushed their hands forward.
As one, jets of fire fell upon the Frozen Fang warriors near the baricade, while balls of fire were lobbed butcher afield, bursting and spreading flames out in a small radius upon landing on anything.
Voro looked on in awe at the level of destruction his shaman siblings had wrought upon their enemies as they retreated in confusion at the fire raining down upon them.