Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 552: A Parley(1)

Beneath the afternoon sun small contingent of horsemen began their descent from the high hills.

There were less than twenty of them. Not enough for a charge, not enough for a battle. Just enough to speak, to gamble with words rather than blades. Their horses picked their way down the slope with slow, deliberate steps, as if even the beasts knew the weight of the moment they carried on their backs.

At the forefront rode the men whose names had already been etched into infamy at least in books of the loyalist.

Niketas, the golden lordturned-traitor, wore a breastplate untounched dust or blood , but his eyes still burned with that old, dangerous clarity—the kind that had rallied thousands behind him in the early days, when rebellion still tasted like hope rather than desperation.

Beside him, Gregor rode heavy in the saddle. His broad shoulders hunched forward. He looked less like a man riding to a parley and more like a butcher inspecting the livestock.

Then there was Lysander—young, cocky, charming in that way that made betrayal seem like a philosophical position. Then there was Eurenis which had nothing much to be said about him, as he had nothing worthwhile to be told.

And finally, the priest—Elios. Draped in layered cloth of brow. He carried no weapons, making him look like the average priest found in a temple. But none of the royal host watching from below would doubt that he was the most dangerous of the lot, as he was the one who lit the blade of rebellion.

Alpheo would have certainly laughed at the thought that his once hopeless situation had been caused by a man of the cloth, however, months of warfare deprived him of that, supplanting it with just the simple tiredness of a war that had lasted too long along with the desire of a father to meet his boy.

Together, the rebels descended like a procession of doomed kings, parading themselves before the walls of a world they failed to overthrow.

They came not as victors, nor yet as the defeated. They came to parley, one requested by Alpheo , the architect of their ruin. They came hoping—some perhaps foolishly—that one final conversation might stave off the inevitable.

But even the wind, curling around the spears and tents of the royal camp, seemed to whisper that they were far too late for that.

The confrontation that the rebel leaders had expected—a roaring tide of steel and flesh crashing uphill in desperation—simply never came.

For six long, maddening days, they waited atop their fortified heights, watching with sharpened nerves as the royal host did... absolutely nothing offensive. No dramatic charges. No thunderous drums heralding an assault.

Nothing, pure silence.

Instead, the enemy calmly spread like ivy across the base of the hills. Camps were erected. Ditches dug. Palisades raised. Banners planted. All without so much as a single blade lifted in anger. The rebels had braced for war; what they received was silence.

It didn’t take a tactical genius among them to piece together the grim reality: they were being closed in. Alpheo —crafty, frustratingly disciplined —wasn’t here to throw his men into the jaws of the hilltop fortifications.

No, he intended to starve the rebellion where it stood, he had after all the time and the patience.

And worse still? The rebels had no cavalry to break the noose tightening around them. Their horses, per their last orders, were roaming in the lowlands far behind the royal host, waiting for the signal to hit the enemy’s rear in the chaos of an uphill charge. But that charge never came, and now their riders were effectively useless— while their other allies cut off, out of position, and unable to stem the slow encirclement.

Of course, they understood what was happening. They could see the jaws closing. But to sortie now, to commit their infantry and push downhill against a numerically superior, better-fed enemy entrenched in solid camps? That was suicide by pride.

They had fortified the hills to be the one on the defense not on the attack..

They tried to provoke a battle . Gregor and Lysander oversaw troops shouting insults day and night—jeers about the prince’s honor, the parentage of his, their courage, their manhood. They even sent heralds with messages wrapped in scorn. The prince’s reply? Silence. Or, on rare occasions, a courier with blank parchment.

They used words filled with poison, yet what was that to a man, who had waited years in preparation for his plan to escape the yoke of slavery?

They watched the enemy camps spread in three directions, like creeping roots. They’d noticed the distant columns of wagons coming and going to the royal host’s rear, meaning their supply lines remained unbroken. And they had no cavalry to ride out and harass those lines, because their riders—following orders set in stone—were positioned to attack the rear of an enemy assault, not prevent an enemy siege.

Their cavalry, in essence, had become ghosts—useless and unreachable waiting for a battle that never came .

As of yet, the royal banners did not so much as flutter in reply.

Alpheo did not stir. Not even when some of his own lords grew restless, demanding action, urging him to strike. He merely listened, and promptly ignored .

As at the end of the day his power was absolute, and what good was it if not used whenever wished for?

No matter what taunts the rebels shouted, or what provocations were lobbed from the hilltops, they may as well have been screaming at statues. Alpheo would not be baited. Not by rage. Not by pride. Not even by the goading of his own war-hungry nobles.

What had drawn them from their fortified heights wasn’t some grand ultimatum or blood-soaked challenge. Just a single parchment, sealed with wax the color of dried blood, bearing nine simple words that cut deeper than any blade: "Let us speak, before the sun climbs too high."

No threats. No demands. Just an invitation to their own surrender, wrapped in the courtesy of a dinner invitation.

Each rebel leader had privately imagined different scenarios as they rode - negotiation, deception, perhaps even reconciliation. But the bitter truth settled in their stomachs like spoiled wine: they were riding to meet the man who had outplayed them without ever drawing his sword. The architect of their ruin who had built their prison from patience rather than steel.

Waiting below stood the royal retinue - twenty lancers positioned with geometric precision, their polished armor making them look like a row of silver nails hammered into the earth by some divine hand. Above them fluttered the royal standard: a falcon in mid-soar against azure silk, encircled by ten clenched iron fists. The symbol seemed to mock them now

And at the center...

Him.

The rebels reined in their mounts, the dry grass crunching beneath hooves like the bones of their ambitions. Two years ago at his wedding feast, they’d seen a boy playing dress-up in noble silks, his smooth cheeks flushed with wine. The figure before them now was different in ways that went beyond the sparse beard clinging stubbornly to his jaw, or his tired eyes, now sprinkling with a tiny bit of pride and arrogance.

The cruelest cut wasn’t that they’d lost. It was who they’d lost to. Not some grizzled warlord.

But to this... this barely-grown princeling who still looked like he should be sneaking past his tutors to flirt with kitchen maids rather than commanding armies.

And that faint, infuriating smile. Not a victor’s gloating smirk, but the quiet amusement of a chessmaster who’d seen the endgame from the first move.

The five rebel leaders—Niketas, Gregor, Lysander, Eurenis, and the priest Elios—kept silent as they rode, their thoughts loud in the hollow stillness between them. None dared speak the truth that festered in each of their hearts: How did it come to this?

They had stood as three mighty heads of a beast, roaring defiance from all corners of the realm. Three armies strong, three banners high in the sky , three forces raised on their cause—or so they told themselves. And yet now, two of those heads had already been lopped off. Crushed under the heel of the same boy-prince they had once toasted at his wedding with smirks and hollow blessings.

That same boy now waited for them. Too young to be the architect of their ruin. And yet here they were, brought to the brink by a lad .

It burned. Gods, how it burned.

Once, they had hope. Not just hope—confidence. The kind that swaggered and strutted, the kind that sharpened blades on dreams of victory. That had been a month ago.

Now?

Now, hope was ash. No fresh wind stirred in their chests. No rallying cry reached their tongues. All that remained was the weight of inevitability pressing down on them like a funeral stone.

One month ago, they thought they had a chance.

Now they were only wondering when the hammer would fall.

For they were truly lost