Krug fought for eight hours.

The Accord’s response to the Hero’s presence evolved through three phases — Denial, Adaptation, and Acceptance — that mirrored the psychological stages of any force confronting a threat that exceeded its doctrinal framework.

Phase One — Denial — lasted approximately ninety minutes. During this phase, Durnok’s commanders attempted to force the corridor by weight of numbers: three successive company-strength assaults, each approaching the Hero from a different angle within the 2.4-kilometer gap, each attempting to overwhelm a single combatant through simultaneous multi-axis engagement.

The attempts failed identically. Krug’s combat methodology was not martial artistry — it was industrial. He fought the way a forge processed ore: systematic, repetitive, each strike producing a specific outcome with minimal energy waste. The warhammer’s divine enhancement meant that every swing carried area-effect capability — the shockwave from a ground strike disrupting formation cohesion within twenty meters, the lateral strikes producing kinetic transfer that sent armored soldiers flying at velocities that made landing lethal regardless of armor quality.

Casualties during Phase One: 214 confirmed kills across three assaults. Accord forces spent: approximately 800 soldiers committed, 214 dead, 340 wounded, 246 withdrawn. Kingdom casualties: zero. The Hero sustained no damage because no attack reached him — the combination of divine-tier speed, Hero physical enhancement, and the denial radius created by the hammer’s shockwave meant that the closest any Accord soldier came to landing a blow was approximately four meters, at which point the next hammer swing intervened.

***

Phase Two — Adaptation — began at the third hour and represented the Accord command structure’s first competent response.

Gorvahn — the Mire Lord, the coalition’s most tactically patient commander — recognized what Durnok’s officers had not: the Hero could not be overwhelmed by conventional infantry because conventional infantry operated within the system’s combat parameters and Heroes operated above them. The solution was not more soldiers. The solution was to change the terms of engagement.

Gorvahn dispatched the Marshtide — his elite Frogman assault unit, 200 warriors specifically trained for asymmetric warfare in conditions where conventional tactics failed. The Marshtide’s approach was not a frontal assault. It was a siege.

The Frogmen deployed in a ring around Krug’s position at a radius of approximately 500 meters — beyond the hammer’s shockwave range, beyond the psychological denial radius, but close enough to maintain observation and to restrict the Hero’s movement options. They didn’t attack. They waited.

Simultaneously, Gorvahn ordered the corridor bypassed. The gap stretched 2.4 kilometers wide, and Krug could deny passage at only one point within it. The other 2.3 kilometers? Wide open.

The bypass began at the fourth hour — Accord infantry streaming through the eastern and western edges of the gap, maintaining 600-meter separation from the Hero’s position, moving into the kingdom’s interior along routes that Krug could observe but could not interdict without abandoning his central position. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

The adaptation was effective. Krug was forced to choose: hold the center and allow the flanks to pass, or pursue the flanking elements and open the center.

He chose the flanks.

The eastern flank — he couldn’t split to both, that would have divided his combat power and allowed the center to collapse. He chose the eastern flank — the route closest to the secondary defensive lines, the route that threatened the kingdom’s fallback positions most directly — and moved to intercept.

The movement transformed the engagement from a static denial into a mobile pursuit. Krug covered the 800 meters to the eastern bypass column in approximately forty seconds — a speed of seventy-two kilometers per hour, sustainable for less than a minute at sustainable FP cost, but sufficient to close the distance before the column could react.

The eastern column was 2,000 infantry — a mixed formation of Crushist heavy troops and Rootist auxiliaries. Krug arrived while the column was still in march formation, optimized for movement rather than combat. A well-trained force needed roughly ninety seconds to transition from march to battle formation.

Krug gave them six.

The hammer’s first ground-strike hit the column’s center. The shockwave disrupted a fifty-meter section of the march — soldiers falling, formation collapsing, the ordered march dissolving into a chaotic mass of prone and staggering bodies. The second strike — a horizontal sweep at chest height — caught six soldiers in a single arc, the divine-enhanced weapon’s kinetic transfer launching them into their comrades with force sufficient to cause secondary casualties through impact.

Eleven seconds. Fourteen dead. The eastern column’s rear elements reversed direction.

But the western column — 1,800 soldiers — had passed through the gap while Krug engaged the east. Gorvahn’s adaptation had worked: the Hero could kill with devastating efficiency, but he could not be everywhere.

***

Krug fought for four more hours across the gap’s full width — moving between eastern and western approaches, intercepting columns, breaking formations, killing with the mechanical consistency that 179 years of Hero existence had refined into something that was less combat and more natural law.

The statistics accumulated:

[HERO DEPLOYMENT — RUNNING TOTAL]

[Duration: 8 hours]

[FP Expended: 400,000]

[Confirmed Kills: 847]

[Estimated Wounded: ~2,200]

[Formations Broken: 14 company-strength assaults repelled]

[Corridor Status: CONTESTED — eastern and western bypasses partially functional, central corridor denied]

[Accord Troops That Passed Through Gap: ~4,200 (via bypass routes)]

[Accord Troops Denied Passage: ~12,000+ (via central denial and flank interceptions)]

Eight hundred and forty-seven dead in eight hours. An attrition event, pure and simple. Krug did not win the gap. He could not win the gap — one entity, however powerful, could not permanently deny passage through a 2.4-kilometer corridor against 40,000+ soldiers. What he did was impose a cost. Every unit that passed through the gap did so under the threat of Hero interdiction — and the threat was sufficient to slow the passage from a flood to a trickle.

The 4,200 soldiers who had bypassed the Hero and entered the kingdom’s interior were a problem. But they were a manageable problem — a force that Boreth’s secondary lines could engage and contain. The 12,000 soldiers who had been denied passage were a victory — twelve thousand troops stuck on the wrong side of the gap for an additional day, their Phase Three timeline compressed by the delay.

At the eighth hour, Krug’s manifestation approached its FP budget ceiling. The amber fire that burned in his eyes — the visible indicator of divine energy sustaining his physical form — had dimmed from bright amber to a muted copper. His movements, while still devastating, had lost the explosive acceleration that the first hour’s combat had displayed. The hammer’s shockwave radius had contracted from twenty meters to approximately twelve — still lethal, still decisive, but measurably diminished.

[SOVEREIGN → KRUG]

[Deployment Time: 7:58:00. FP Remaining in Budget: 8,000]

[ORDER: Withdraw. Mission accomplished. Return to Forge.]

Krug received the order. For a moment — 2.3 seconds, which was not a long time for a mortal but which was a very long time for a Hero whose every action was measured in fractions of combat efficiency — he stood in the gap and looked south. Toward the enemy. Toward the army that was coming. Toward the war that would continue after he disappeared.

He was 298 years old, counting both his mortal life and his Hero existence. He had been a priest, a champion, a father, a grandfather, and a legend. He had walked the earth four times since his death, each time for a specific purpose, each time returning to the Forge when the purpose was completed.

This was the fourth time. The war was not over. The wall was gone. The enemy was coming. And the god who had found him in a swamp 251 years ago was spending 50,000 FP per hour to keep him manifest because the kingdom that Krug had built from twenty-three survivors was fighting for its existence.

I could stay. Fight until the fire goes out. Kill until there’s nothing left to kill.

The thought existed for 1.7 seconds before the discipline of 179 years of divine service overrode it. Heroes did not choose when to fight. Heroes fought when the Sovereign deployed them and withdrew when the Sovereign recalled them. That was the covenant. That was the system. That was what made Heroes weapons rather than individuals.

Krug turned north. The amber fire contracted — the warhammer cooling, the scales losing their metallic sheen, the massive body beginning the dematerialization process that would return his consciousness to the Eternal Forge.

The soldiers on the secondary line watched him walk toward them — not retreating, not fleeing, but withdrawing, the purposeful movement of a weapon being resheathed.

Before the dematerialization completed — before the amber light consumed his form and pulled his consciousness back to Paradise — Krug raised the hammer once. A salute. To the soldiers who would hold the line after he was gone. To the kingdom that existed because he had carried a stick from a swamp and refused to stop walking.

Then the light took him, and the gap was empty, and the war continued.