The Whole Hog
A cracking sound reverberated through the sparse woodlands as a scout dressed in the blue and white livery of House Ilithia was pulled from his horse and thrown into a tree like a sack of potatoes.
Muroco looked down at the dead scout, the latter’s eyes widened in shock and terror. The tauren managed to catch the young, unshaven, inexperienced man off guard while he was trying to hunt an errant boar. He leaned down and pried the brass bugle still clutched within the elf’s fingers, gears working in his mind, then looked up and saw the boar trundling away.
He had volunteered to act as the leader of a diversion to draw away as many Ilithian soldiers as possible while his smaller, well meaning, but less physically intimidating elven colleagues in the Emberglades deliberated their next counter-offensive. Muroco had spent three days surveying the western marshes, woods, and mountains south of Kearn, anticipating where supply lines and reinforcements were coming from. It was not a difficult task, but the entire plan needed to be executed correctly, lest it have no impact.
Muroco watched the boar hobble up an incline and disappear through a treeline. He was surprised at the number of wild boars and hogs he had seen in the western Emberglades. Their population was likely a result of the difficult times brought on by the Scourge, the Burning Legion, and wars with the Alliance. While they were often docile, they could be dangerous when easily riled up.
The tauren looked back down at the bugle, and an idea formed in his head.
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“In all my life, I have seen so many changes to the world and have witnessed and experienced so many different things, but I will admit that this was the first time I was ever under the leadership of a tauren. I’d not known much about them, but I always assumed that, as a collective whole, they were peaceful in nature. Little did I know that the giant of a bull I fought under came from the most violent, brutal tribe their people had ever known.
When I met him, I assumed that he was some brute, a lumbering giant who only answered problems with his fists. The type of person who would pull out a blunderbuss on a mosquito who bit him. The type of person who thought that every problem was a nail, and he was the hammer.
I was wrong in that estimate. He was...an enigma, I suppose. From his reputation, I also assumed that he would be abrasive and belligerent, and would size everyone up for a fight. He seemed to keep his emotions under rein, but you could see the ferocity in his intense, blue eyes which rarely blinked. I was glad he was on our side during the war - while seemingly phlegmatic, he had a cunning brutality and a taste for war that very few people in the world could truly obtain, let alone understand.
The ambushes he had us perform against House Ilithia are...difficult to properly describe in writing. They seemed simplistic but were complicated in execution, like the creation of a flail. During the war, House Ilithia managed to use their influence to establish a strong supply line - even if they did not have the strongest warriors of our people, they compensated with a supply of food, weaponry, soldiers and militia.
On day one, Muroco insisted that we followed three principles of war. “First, we must fight scattered. Then, we have to surround the enemy when possible. Finally, should we be hard pressed, we must retreat, only to return when the pressure has eased.”
Despite our detachment being at full strength, Muroco had ordered a number of us to go out into the woods and capture as many boars as possible. It seemed a trivial task, but he insisted he had a strategy. For the rest of us, we performed lightning-strike raids on caravans on horseback, though Muroco had had his kodo beast bloody teleported to the Emberglades by some mage friend of his.
At first, I thought he would instruct us to leave no survivors, but that was not the case. He ordered us to be indiscriminate with eliminating our own people, but wanted us to leave at least one to three survivors. The first few caravans were lightly guarded; I assume House Ilithia did not expect combatants to be so far west of the province. There were two survivors - one fled to the north, the other captured by Muroco for questioning. When the soldier refused to speak, the tauren bound him, tied him to his kodo’s tail, then rode laps around the caravan’s ruins for an hour until he finally revealed when the next caravan would come.
To my surprise, Muroco let him go. I worked up enough courage to ask him why he insisted that survivors remain. He explained that some demoralized survivors would return to their comrades and speak of the horrors, but he wanted others to speak of vengeance. It was his intent to draw as many House Ilithia combatants as possible to us, and I felt a chill run down my spine; whether it was the prospect of facing so many, or his cool assuredness that they would all perish that gave me fear, I could not say.
For the next several days, we executed the same ambushes in different areas, always moving and never staying in the same location. Each raid was more dangerous than the last, with more and more soldiers guarding each caravan. The survivors always carried wounds from broadhead arrows. He pushed us to fight...we would fight to the point of exhaustion, and we would only rest when our horses became fatigued.
He was a brutal tactician, and he drove us hard, but he was one of the most effective leaders I had ever fought under.
Eventually, Muroco pulled my cousin and me aside to speak to us about the final parts of his plan. He produced a bugle and handed it to my cousin; it was unbeknownst to me at the time, but he had instructed her to hide in the woods during every ambush and observe not only Ilithia’s marching formations, but to study and memorize the signals they used with instruments whenever they were attacked. He then turned to me and had me follow him to a makeshift pen where we had corralled the boars we had captured. At the time, there had been an infestation of boars and hogs in the province due to a high reproduction and lack of hunting to quell their numbers. They were pests but typically docile, but dangerous when angered; in fact, they looked agitated from not being fed properly.
“The biggest convoy yet will be coming through the marshes tomorrow,” Muroco said to me, “and this is what we’re going to use to put a stop to them.”
I stopped myself from knitting my eyebrows together in consternation. Boars? What, I thought, was his plan? Feed the soldiers to death?
“How so?”
In his hand he held what appeared to be some sort of gland, about as large as my fist. Its coloration was odd - brown and yellow with a few red spots. “This,” he said, “is the venom gland of a particular wind serpent from the Stonetalon Mountains. My...former tribe...considers them to be sacred animals. Watch.”
Muroco held it out in front of the pen and slightly squeezed it, and as he did I could see the boars begin to rustle and squeal, their nostrils flaring at the scent. I felt the hairs on my neck rise, as if a jolt of lightning went down my spine.
“So you’ll put them in a frenzy,” I said, to which Muroco nodded. “What do I have to do?”
“You’re going to lure them on horseback with the gland.”
“Very well, but how do I stop them from goring me?” I asked.
“They’ll be attracted to the scent, maybe the horse, but not by you,” he responded, pulling a jar of fluid from his cloak. “Apply this to your skin and clothes, and it will mask your scent.”
I felt my heart drop. I already had a feeling what it was, but I asked anyway. “What is that?”
“Kodo urine,” said Muroco.
*
The following evening, the final stages of his plan were set in motion. I reeked of the urine I had begrudgingly doused myself with - it had taken a week to finally get the smell out afterwards, but to the tauren’s credit the boars did not seem to notice me, only the gland I held on horseback. As instructed, I squeezed the gland as hard as I could, its venom seeping over my thick leather cavalry gloves, The pens to the gate were broken, and the boars chased after me, grunting and squealing, their eyes filled with a bestial frenzy. My poor horse ran ahead of them, galloping through the sparse woods to keep away from the drove of boars chasing after her. Up ahead, the rest of my comrades began their ambush against the convoy. The Ilithians had gotten wise of our basic stratagems, which is what Muroco intended. Their spearmen held their shields at the front while archers and arbalests attempted to fire on the moving horsemen.
What they didn’t know, however, was that the arrows we fired were wrapped in cloth soaked with wind serpent venom.
The marsh made it difficult for the Ilithians and their wagons to traverse. I feared they would realize that the stampeding boars were coming for them, but these were not the soldiers our people boasted during the zenith of our kingdom, only a patchwork of provincial soldiers with token discipline. My cousin, who had taken her place north of the convoy, used her bugle to mimic the signal of an impending attack. The Ilithians readjusted their lines to face an oncoming threat that did not exist.
Leaving their backs exposed.
I tossed the gland towards them and veered off to the right, muttering a thanks to Belore that the boars continued their path. By the time the Ilithians realized what was happening, it was too late. The boars charged into the exposed lines, goring and biting the Ilithians who reeked of venom. Their lines were disrupted, folding and snapping like a banner in a gust, and our guerillas surrounded their convoy, firing shaft after shaft into the dismayed soldiers. Their sergeants and captains tried to shout orders over the din of chaos to no avail. Muroco charged in with his kodo, smashing aside the remaining semblance of resistance, soldier and boar flying through the air as his beast flailed its horns and spiked tail in every direction.
The Ilithians were completely broken that day, and that night I ate more roast boar than I ever had in my entire life.
@retributionpriest @thepilgrimofwar
