Chapter Text
Protect the archers.
That was the order Warchief Thrall gave to Rapshak’s troop and so he was going to carry that damn order out, despite his hesitancy about the purpleskins.
Having been on the receiving end of their arrows, he knew that the frail-looking creatures were not to be trifled with. So it was reassuring to have their bows pointed in the same direction as him instead. As reassuring as was possible under the circumstances anyway, what with them fighting demons and the undead and all.
He didn’t quite understand what they were doing on this mountain, but if the Warchief and the human mage and the purpleskins agreed that it was a good idea… well, it probably was. Rapshak wasn’t much for thinking and more for swinging his axe around.
Their troop leader - Oghuz - lined them up in 3 rows, the archers doing the same behind them. The third row of grunts was to stand their ground and fill the ranks as needed. Rapshak was in the front line.
Eh. Might as well. It’s where all the fun is. He turned around and gave the guys behind him a conspiratorial wink. “Try to catch up, ya buncha peons. You won’t get much action out there in your safe space . Har!” They laughed and a few gave him half-hearted punches in the stomach. He spied the archers behind them giving each other uncertain looks.
The battle began with a trickle of ghouls feeling out their positions. They had no problems hacking them to pieces. But the trickle never stopped - more and more came, some made up from orcs he may have recognized if he didn’t learn long ago to never look too carefully.
The crypt fiends came next, and here the archers in the back came in handy, peppering them with arrows. In the breaks in the fighting, Rapshak and the rest of the frontline grunts would pluck the arrows out and pass them back to the purpleskins.
And then everything exploded.
The fiery rock landed directly into their column, flattening several of them into pancakes and throwing Rapshak and the rest many feet away.
“Infernals! ” he heard Thrall’s bellow as he spat out dust and leaves out of his mouth and stood up. His head spun, but the adrenaline in his blood was starting to kick in and overriding whatever weakness his body showed.
The infernal that slammed into his group was busy smashing at the few orcs that were coming to their senses. He saw the third line engage, hacking away at the fiery rock and the volleys of arrows from the purpleskins behind them. Normally, those arrows wouldn’t even make a dent, but their Priestess’s enchantment made them stick into the stone and weaken the demonic creature. Still, it wasn’t a fair fight.
Protect the archers .
He ran towards the infernal, intending to cut the creature off from the purpleskins, grabbing his axe tightly with both hands. Hacking at rock with steel was hardly productive, but what else could he do? He was given his orders - he’d carry them out.
The creature smashed a grunt’s face in with a massive rocky fist and turned to him menacingly. A few arrows struck its left eye, but it didn’t seem to care.
Let this be my Hellscream moment .
He charged the creature, screaming on top of his lungs, ducked under a slab of rock aimed at his face and swung for the creature’s torso. Time slowed as he saw the glint of his steel in a ray of the sun before he landed the blow.
He felt cold. The axe reached its target. There was a sound of glass breaking…
And the infernal shattered into a thousand icy pieces.
Rapshak stared at his axe, now motionless in the empty air, stunned, until a dainty figure passed by him, carrying an ice storm with her.
Jaina Proudmoore. Well that was damn fortunate.
“REGROUP!” That was Oghuz returning to the troop of archers. He was still alive, although his right arm had bone sticking out of it in a number of places and he was carrying his axe in his left. Far fewer orcs were there to answer his command than there were at the beginning of the battle. The archers seemed to have lost a few of their own as well.
“Protect the archers, you idiots!” Oghuz shouted and was prominently cleaved in half by a doomguard’s sword.
“On me! Get behind him!” That was Kutuz, the Second War veteran from Hellscream’s army. He wasted no time in taking charge and Rapshak rushed to obey, dashing under the doomguard’s elbow just as the creature sprouted a number of black-feathered arrows.
He swung for the back of its thighs and felt axe cleave flesh and shatter bone (much easier than cutting rock) and the doomguard bellowed in pain, falling to its knees, then collapsing altogether under a volley of axe blows and arrows.
Things started to go really crazy right then. A dead gargoyle fell out of the sky and nearly landed on top of him. He turned to see the purpleskins fighting off a horde of ghouls, some of the archers resorting to using their blades in close quarter combat. He dashed back towards them, chopping the head off a risen Oghuz on the way, and clearing the path through the ghouls back to the night elves.
Ice shards fell all around them, corpses flung from the meat wagons landed into the archers, exploding in a stinking fountain of meat and gore, the earth shook as more fiery comets smashed into it, unfurling as giants made of rock. Rapshak hacked off a limb from a dead night elf, spun to shoulder check a ghoul, and dealt a vicious uppercut with his axe to a crypt fiend about to devour one of the archers. He was just in time to pick up that archer and spin her around to take a blow from an abomination’s gigantic metal chain onto his pauldron. He danced out of the way of its cleaver and sliced at the already half-opened belly to usher forth a deluge of guts. Two arrows landed directly into its functional eyeball and the creature collapsed, pus oozing from its wounds.
Then there was a hum of magic and the battle disappeared.
He found himself standing in the middle of the orc encampment as Thrall rode by, shouting for their troops to regroup, Proudmoore and the Priestess hot on his heels.
He found Kutuz grinning widely from bloodlust, along with Gurz and Aurog, both looking pale. Rapshak’s own knees wobbled a bit and he had to rest his axe on the ground as he realized that his muscles were beyond tired from all the fighting. He didn’t even want to look at the bruises and cuts he had suffered. No other grunts arrived.
Five night elf archers joined them. Frail they might have looked, but they wore fierce scowls and looked in far better condition than the orcs. Rapshak always enjoyed the fierce females among his own race and looking at these purpleskins now felt that perhaps he judged them wrongly. If I survive this, I wouldn’t mind making an acquaintance or two. Heh.
It seemed that they had a little time before the Legion reached them at this base, so Gurz and Aurog lay down in the still-pristine grass. Kutuz sat down and set to sharpening his axe with a whetstone. Rapshak was about to sit down as well when a pair of eyes shining silver appeared in front of him.
“Sank oo,” she said in her strange musically-accented Common. Rapshak recognized her as the girl he shielded from the abomination’s chain. “Aye ded eef nowt oo.”
It took him a moment to make out what she was saying. Thank you. I’d be dead if not for you.
He shrugged in response. “It’s what I do, moon-girl. Just don’t die out there, you hear me?”
She smiled. It was a pretty smile for a face that didn't have tusks, a protruding bottom lip, or the right skin color.
“Oo too. Nowt die.”
“Har! I’ll do my best!”
Kutuz was a good leader. Better than Oghuz. He deftly maneuvered the now small group of 4 grunts and 5 archers in and out of combat, picking off poorly-defended abominations, doomguards, and meat wagons, then retreating in good order to relocate to a different part of the front line. When he could, he used the archers to pick off enemies from afar, or have them cover fire while the grunts came in close for the melee.
By the time Thrall bade them retreat, Rapshak’s sword was dripping green and the archers were all out of arrows. They’d lost Aurog to a banshee who possessed him, necessitating a prompt dispatch of his old friend and another archer to a freak shard of rock to the groin from a shattered inferno. Her screams of agony were awful to hear until one of her fellow archers gently kissed her on the forehead and sliced open her throat to end her misery.
These purpleskins sure were tough.
The night elves used the few minutes of respite to acquire more arrows while Rapshak, Kutuz, and Gurz sat around a massive tree and panted from exhaustion.
Rapshak’s armor was destroyed, more dents and holes than metal anymore, and his weapon was now more saw than axe from all the notches. It broke his heart to see it like that and he promised to himself that he’d get it back into proper shape once the battle was over. Bruises and cuts covered his skin, blood - his own and not - had soaked what was left of his clothes. He probably wasn’t the most handsome orc in all of Azeroth at the moment, but he figured it was a fairly good trade for being one of the 3 grunts left out of a troop of more than 50.
The night-elf girl appeared in front of him, as if condensing out of the shadows of the forest. He grinned at her.
“Oo layf,” she said and offered him her hand. He grasped it and she pulled him to his feet with unexpected strength for someone so much thinner than him. “Good.”
“Yeah, I’m still alive.” He looked her over, noticing a big patch of blood on her shoulder. “You hurt?”
It was her turn to grin. “Gool blud. Nowt mine.”
“Har! You keep your blood inside yourself, moon-girl.”
She winked at him slyly. “Oo too!”
Spirits but did that wink warm his blood up a touch . He grinned like a fool as she returned to her comrades and the battle horn sounded.
The rest of the battle went by in a blur.
For all his skill, Kutuz caught a corpse from a meat wagon in the face early in the battle, collapsing with a femur bone protruding from his throat. Rapshak took the lead from there, trying to mimic their tactics from the orc camp, but with Archimonde right there and infernals coming down like rain, it was hard to be of much use.
He kept closer to Thrall, Jaina, and that night elf Priestess, picking off enemies where he could, retreating where he couldn’t. The night elf archers were on their home turf and seemed to be reinvigorated by it, so he leaned on them heavily for cover.
And then Archimonde was on top of them, undead and demons pouring from every direction. Gurz exploded in a flash of fel and he heard screams from the archers behind them.
An abomination slammed into them and all he could do to avoid its cleaver was fall to the ground and roll. Jumping to his feet, he swung with all his might to separate one of its legs, and then slid to the side as it crashed to the ground, bellowing.
He came face to face with the moon-girl, kneeling on the ground, her right leg twisted unnaturally and her face contorted in pain. She was the only one from his troop that he could see. In fact, she was the only one from the entire army that he could see. All around them swarmed the undead - Thrall, Jaina, and the Priestess were all retreating in the distance.
With no time to think twice, Rapshak swung the moon-girl onto his shoulders and made for their retreating army, raining down blows with his axe anywhere he could see.
“KEEP SHOOTING!” he screamed at the night elf on his shoulders and heard the thrum of her bowstring in response.
There were too many undead around them. He could feel several of their blows cut through his armor and the warm trickle of blood down his torso and legs. His vision turned red. He ran, swung his axe, and screamed obscenities in every language he had ever heard.
And then, just as he could finally make out Thrall’s features up ahead, something slammed into the back of his head with enormous force.
All went dark before his face could even hit the ground.