Forge Camp: Mageddon is not a camp.
The word "camp" implies impermanence — tents, cook fires, something you pack up and move when the situation changes. Mageddon is a permanent industrial installation on a dead planet, built by a species that does not recognize the concept of withdrawal. The forges burn with fel fire that cannot be extinguished by normal means. The machinery constructs Fel Reavers, those house-sized mechanical predators that Jezarman has already had one near-fatal introduction to and has no interest in repeating.
The chain of operations assigned here is called Cruel Intentions, which is either someone's idea of humor or an accurate operational assessment. Possibly both.
The Razorsaw encounter happens at the intersection of three problems: an armored demon commander, a squad of his close support, and the Fel Cannon mounted behind them which fires projectiles the size of a gnome at anyone foolish enough to stand still within range.
Don't fight the bodyguards near the cannon, Jezarman learns, the hard way. The cannon does not care about target selection.
He survives. He files the lesson under environmental awareness and continues.
Earth Shock, it turns out, sends things underground.
Not literally — this is magic, not engineering — but the visual effect of a direct Earth Shock on a lesser demon is that they stagger downward, as if the ground beneath them has briefly decided they don't deserve to stand on it. They drop to one knee. They stop casting. They make a sound that does not have a translation in any living language.
They sink, Jezarman observes, watching the third one fold. Like the ground is taking them back.
This is philosophically interesting on a planet that has very little ground left. Draenor — what used to be Draenor, what is now technically called Outland and might more accurately be called aftermath — was shattered by the same magic that the Burning Legion uses as fuel. The earth here doesn't just hold grudges. It remembers.
When Jezarman's Earth Shock lands on Legion soldiers on this particular world, he is summoning the anger of a planet at the species that destroyed it. This is not a small thing to do.
He does it ten more times before he has to stop and think about whether it's a small thing, because there are more targets.
Arix'Amal requires documentation as a lesson in persistence.
The assignment: eliminate the Forge Camp supervisor, use his key to overload the portal, deny Legion access to this particular strategic node. Standard sabotage protocol. Jezarman executes the approach, engages Arix'Amal, works through the standard rotation — Flame Shock to prime, Lava Burst to convert, Earth Shock to interrupt the inevitable desperation cast — and Arix'Amal falls.
Then Arix'Amal stands up again.
Not metaphorically. Not in the sense of the mission not being complete. Physically. Corporeally. He respawns at the camp's entrance while Jezarman is still mopping up the remaining sycophants, walks back to his position, and looks at the shaman with the specific expression of a demon who has just returned from a brief administrative inconvenience and intends to continue what he was doing.
Jezarman kills him again.
Some people, the internal log notes, don't know when to stay dead. There are entire organizations built on this principle: the manager who should have been removed three restructurings ago, the process that everyone agrees is broken but nobody has formally cancelled, the meeting that has been running for four years without producing a single decision. The only solution is the same as Arix'Amal. You kill it twice.
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Both bodies are confirmed down. The portal overloads on schedule.
My people used to live here.
This thought arrives without prompting somewhere between Forge Camp: Rage and the Pools of Aggonar, while Jezarman is standing on a ridge looking at the permanent red horizon and trying to connect the dead landscape with the concept of home.
The orcish people came from here. Not from Durotar — that was a destination, a place they were given by a world that had already taken everything else from them. Before Durotar, before the internment camps, before the Second War and the Dark Portal and the blood of Mannoroth that Gul'dan handed out like poisoned medicine — there was this. Draenor. Forests and grasslands and a sky that didn't burn.
The Burning Legion didn't just attack the orcs. They consumed the entire planet. The ground Jezarman is standing on used to be jungle. The floating rock formations used to be mountains. The red dust used to be soil that grew things.
Chromie sent him here to understand the present. The present Horde — the post-Cataclysm Horde, Garrosh's iron-and-chain Horde — grew out of a people who came from this. Who watched their entire world get shattered, who were then handed demonic fury as a consolation prize and called it strength.
No wonder, the internal log runs. No wonder we build things out of metal. No wonder we fortify everything. When your original home got blown into orbit, you stop trusting anything that isn't load-bearing.
He files this under context and keeps moving.
The Pools of Aggonar are beautiful in the specific way that things are beautiful when they should not exist.
The water — if it is water, if the word still applies to a liquid that glows green and produces no reflections — pools in depressions across the landscape, still and luminous in the dead-planet light. The name comes from a Pit Lord whose essence seeped into this ground during some earlier catastrophe, corrupting the water table into something that registers as aesthetically striking and physically dangerous in approximately equal measure.
Green, Jezarman thinks, standing at the edge of one pool. Everything here is either red or green. The red is what the Legion burned. The green is what the Legion left.
He is here for Azzius the Deceiver, an eredar sorcerer who has made this toxicity his home and drawn enough power from it to become a legitimate strategic problem. The john wick calculus applies: identify target, engage cleanly, do not pause to appreciate the ambiance.
The ambiance is genuinely something.
He engages. The elementals answer — not with the desperate static of Azeroth's post-Cataclysm chaos, but with the specific focused fury of three elements working in concert on a planet that has reason to want Legion dead. Lightning opens the distance. Lava crosses it. Earth closes it permanently.
And then a paladin appears.
This is the part that the operational logs never quite capture correctly: sometimes another person is simply there, doing the same job, for their own reasons, in their own way, and the outcome belongs to both of you even though neither of you planned the collaboration.
The paladin — Alliance, presumably, operating out of Honor Hold, technically an entity the Horde has been at war with across multiple campaigns — has been working Azzius from the other side. By the time Jezarman arrives at the final engagement, Azzius is already most of the way to dead, and the last Earth Shock is administrative rather than strategic.
In a group, the internal log notes, you don't have to do everything. Sometimes your job is to show up at the end and hit the thing that needs hitting. The paladin didn't ask for help. Neither did Jezarman. They just both showed up, and it was enough.
The Terrorfiends go 10-0, because at this point the elementals are working efficiently and the Pools have no more surprises. Somewhere in the damage logs, Lava Burst and Earth Shock have overtaken Lightning Bolt — the tools that required setup have surpassed the tool that required only pointing.
You start with what's available, the internal log summarizes. Then you learn what's possible. Then you use that instead.
?? END OF LOG — SESSION STATS
- Time Played: 3h 43m 03s
- Level: 11 → 12
- Gold: 6g 47s → 14g 06s
- Zone: Hellfire Peninsula — Forge Camps / Pools of Aggonar
- Key Completions: Cruel's Intentions, The Agony and the Darkness, Forge Camp: Mageddon, Cannons of Rage, Doorway to the Abyss
- DPS Breakdown: Lava Burst 28% / Earth Shock 28% / Lightning Bolt 20% / Flame Shock 10%
- Reputation: Thrallmar — Friendly (3685)
- Unit Status: Two dead planets, three elements, one question that won't stop asking itself.
Next log: Hellfire Peninsula has five more quest chains. The planet keeps giving.