Orc Defense After the Merge

Story Started and Finished in Thread #2 https://desuarchive.org/k/thread/40277244/#40283671

>All this fucking /pol/ in here

You guys have no idea how to deal with the neighbors, and I have no idea what some of you assholes are complaining about if you live in a green zone that's so stable the worst you have to worry about are political correctness re-surging and schoolyard gang fights.

>Be me
>Shitty mountain town
>The kind that made it through the initial chaos relatively unscathed
>Enough HAM in the population that we didn't fall apart in redneck anarchy afterwards
>Hutterite, Amish, Mormon
>Community pulled together decently
>Started at "band together against the feral orcs"
>Worked our way up to paying the county road guys in firewood and eggs to get back on the job
>Took like a year and a half for services to come back on
>Local economy is still half barter
>Costs two fucking weeks worth of ration vouchers for a tank of gas
>Can't really complain, we made it through in much better shape than a lot of places around here
>Half thanks to pic related
>When it first went down I was holed up with prepper buddies on a friends family farm outside of the main town
>Pretty defensible little township, between mountains and the river
>Got to go into the main town to trade without having to deal with politics or pressure to donate food to the community pot
>Arrangement with the old farmer and his neighbors, room and board for security
>Unfortunately a horde of ferals was working its way down the highway from Canada
>Places would get surrounded and sieged until they just ran out of ammunition
>Horde so huge they lost more Orcs to starvation than bullets
>Thinking about having to pull out and withdraw back to town if they swung our way around the pass
>Suddenly Wizards
>Apparently humans never fared very well in the alter world
>Except the few with the Spark
>Wandering clan of magic users and family appear, trying to figure out where the hell they are
>Only good thing that had happened for at least eight months

>Magic helps with the language barrier
>You cannot imagine the joy at realizing they'd stumbled onto a human-dominated world
>Or the rage at Orcs coming down the road to fuck it up
>Orcs overwhelm opponents on flat ground
>Elves outmaneuver and outrange you in mountains and forests
>When they both take your land, there's nothing to do but pick up and move
>But that shit is over
>Quickly establish common cause, gear up
>Get as many trustworthy townies together as possible and head for a chokepoint on the highway
>Pick up recruits along the way
>Semi-friendly elves refuse to help, bug out
>Wizards help us broker an alliance with some local Giants though
>Set up defense in depth
>Literally exhaust our materials for making homemade claymores and pipe bombs
>When the horde hits it's a fucking slaughter
>Bodies piled ten deep
>Still would have been overrun if it weren't for magic support
>Come to find out that slave goblin shamans and Orc witch-warriors were fucking with human defenses unopposed more than we realized
>Line is holding, rarely comes down to CC and when it does we have sword-swinging squibs who grew up doing this shit and giants for when it gets really hairy
>Horde starts to get smart
>Waves of Goblin slaves
>Formation of fucking cave trolls shrugging off small arms, repelled with fireballs and molotovs
>Orc witches come out turned up to 11
>Fueled by blood sacrifice and demon pacts
>Burning their life force to enhance battle magic
>Basically suicide bombers who can keep self aiming and exploding all day
>Fight /ourguys/ to a standstill
>Wizard Patriarch has to call in a favor from a fucking Dragon
>Holy shit is i awesome to watch
>Other races use magic, dragons fucking ARE magic incarnate
>technically not invincible, I saw it bleed, but my fucking god I would not want to be the fighter pilot
>When it looks like they might finally just settle for dragging their dead away to eat, a second fucking horde appears

>Smaller but better organized and equipped
>Shield walls and archers in real formations
>Using captured human guns they looted from the wake of the first horde
>Shoot like Al-Quada, but still
>Very fucking quickly wipe out the first horde
>Look at the field of bodies and pull back
>"oh look they got scared and ran off! yay us!"
>Come back light, armor and shields ditched, advance tactically on us with javelins and bows
>"Fuck"
>Repel the first attack, way less intense but somehow much scarier
>Then a lone Orc rolls up unarmed
>Time for peace talks
>Bring up town councilors on the negotiations
>Orcs use us as intermediaries, since we have their respect
>Also translators
>refer to us and Wizards as a single entity and no one really objects
>Don't quite know how we fit into the picture with the town government though
>Wizards translate us, roughly, as mercenaries
>Chief asks for our rates

That was the start of shit starting to slowly improve, although things wren't really stable until the military pushed back out to the borders and we started seeing air strikes and special forces guys again. There was a pretty hairy time when a fucking wave of undead hit the area, but magic helped a lot with that. If I'd known then that Orc bounties would be a thing I would have a small fucking fortune in scalps to my name, but we were still pretty cut off aside from emergency alerts and the HAM radio network. I'm almost glad I didn't though, bounty farming always turned my stomach and just seems to be making Orc-Orc and Elf-Orc violence worse, on top of Elves and Ogres causing almost as many problems from what I've seen riding convoy security down south.

I suppose if there is a moral, it's this:

>Negotiate with Orcs from a position of strength, or they won't bother to negotiate at all
>Gain and maintain magical superiority
>Don't run out of ammo