Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 623: A new dawn(2)

Down the hill they came, not as a disciplined army, but as an avalanche of wrath. Warriors of the Duskwindai, their honor wounded and their pride sullied, charged like a herd of enraged bulls loosed from their pens.

Dust rose in a thick, choking plume around their feet, their boots pounding against the earth with such force that the very ground trembled beneath them. No formations. No order. Just roaring, spitting fury — a tidal wave of gleaming axes and low-slung shields.

They screamed like beasts, their throats raw with howls of vengeance, faces contorted with fury. Spittle flew from their mouths as their battle cries tore through the valley, not as the disciplined songs of warriors, but the guttural barks of men who felt their dignity crushed and now yearned to crush in return.

High above their heads, the sun glinted of their weapons.

But they didn’t realize what they were charging into.

They didn’t see the trap—only the bait.

Standing between them and the rest of the Chorsi host were no more than fifty youths, still unblooded, their cheeks barely touched by the shadows of beards. These were the brave fools who had hurled the dung with trembling arms and shouted insults through chattering teeth. They had done their part, and now... they faced the storm they had summoned.

For a moment, the line of young warriors stood firm — then the sound of the oncoming horde reached them: the thunder of thousands of feet, the metallic shriek of weapons vibrating in the charge, and above all, the inhuman roar of vengeance. Fear painted itself across their faces as they retreated behind the main lines.

Like a man waiting for that final blow of the axe to cut the trunk of the tree, the clash between the two sides finally came.

The unbloodied of the Chorsi stood shoulder to shoulder, their legs trembling but planted firm into the dirt like young trees in a storm. Their knuckles were white around spear shafts and wooden shields, sweat already slick on their brows despite the cool wind rushing down from the hills.

Then it came — not a charge, not a battle line, but a howling flood of flesh and iron.

Formation meant nothing. Cohesion was forgotten. This was no disciplined engagement — it was a riot of wrath, a storm of bodies crashing together with the sound of bone and steel and desperate screaming.

The first to reach the Chorsi didn’t even bother to slow down.

Some of them slammed bodily into shields, with such force that they bounced off like sacks of meat, only to rise and hurl themselves forward again. One warrior, a barrel-chested brute with braided beard and a wild grin split by missing teeth, leapt at the last second, his axe raised high above his head.

His body hit a shield like a battering ram, the axe dropping a heartbeat later, biting through a young Chorsi’s collarbone and splitting halfway down his chest, a spray of blood drenching his comrades in a hot, iron-scented mist.

The lines collapsed inward, howls mixing with wet impacts. The unbloodied, wide-eyed and panting, stabbed and pushed and screamed. Some held, some didn’t.

One boy tripped on a body and fell back, only to be dragged forward by a bearded warrior who sank a hatchet into his stomach, twisting it as the boy shrieked and tried to push the man away with shaking hands. Another had his shield ripped aside by a snarl of fingers before teeth sunk into his neck, chewing for blood rather than the kill.

Axes rose and fell. Limbs flew, fingers were crushed, eyes gouged with thumbs as fighters crashed together in the most animalistic form of violence imaginable.

The Chorsi line buckled — but it didn’t break.

This was their chance.

If they fled now — if they turned their backs and ran like dogs — they would never live it down. Their names would be cursed in the longhouses, their fathers would refuse to look them in the eye, and the women of their tribe would spit into the dirt at the mere mention of them.

They would find no wife, and have no sons.

But if they stood... if they could land just one kill, a single strike that felled an enemy, they would pass from boyhood into manhood. They would be warriors. They would earn the right to braid their hair, to sit beside the fire with blooded men, to take a wife and be called by name in the stories.

So they did not break.

For they could not

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The raw chorus of war rose from the valley — a thunderous, dissonant hymn of clashing metal, shouts, screams, and the wet percussion of flesh torn open. It was a sound Valen had missed, though he would never admit it aloud.

He sat mounted far from the fray, perched on a dark, sleek gelding atop a small ridge, flanked by a handful of his guards. From there, he watched the chaos unfold between the Duskwindai and the Chorsi, his sharp, gray eyes drinking in the mayhem with a growing sense of revulsion.

His lips curled into a sneer.

It was carnage masquerading as war.

There were no formations. No signals. No command hierarchy. Just a swirling mess of men hacking at each other like rabid dogs, each one chasing a moment of personal glory — hoping their swing would be the one remembered in song, no pride nor duty to fight for a higher cause.

He saw warriors throwing themselves forward with no regard for those beside them, smashing against the enemy like waves on stone, only to fall and be trampled under the next.

It wasn’t a war. It was a drunken brawl scaled up to thousands.

Valen’s contempt sharpened, feeling any sense of relation to the tribesmen evaporate in thin air.

He had hoped, perhaps foolishly, to find some sense of kinship — the universal language of warriors, even across cultures. He had hoped to feel that ancient respect that passed silently between those who understood the true nature of battle.

But this?

"Deplorable," he spat, voice low and disgusted. He wiped a fleck of dust from his glove, as if the mere sight of such savagery had dirtied him.

He thought of the prince — his prince, who drilled his soldiers until their movements were a language of their own. Who spoke of ranks, and flanks, and tactical cohesion as if they were sacred truths. Whose armies moved like living machines, hard and unrelenting, not this tangle of shrieking men.

What use could they possibly be to him? These fools who are given axes?

Valen imagined a line of his prince’s steel-clad infantry standing shoulder to shoulder, impassive and deadly, as these tribal warriors threw themselves upon their spears like children charging a wall.

They would not be allies.

They would be tools — fodder, meant to break the enemy’s rhythm with their bodies. Distracting fire to draw arrows. Blood to soak the soil before the true warriors arrived.

He gave one final glance to the chaos below — the shrieking, scrambling, stumbling mass of bodies — and turned his horse away as he waited for the Great Chieftain to wrap things up.

One of the guards leaned slightly forward in his saddle, eyes narrowed on the distant melee where bodies clashed like waves against a rocky shore.

"Commander," he asked, voice tight with barely restrained eagerness as he too apparently missed the sound of war, "are we to join the fighting?"

Valen didn’t answer at first. His gaze remained fixed on the battlefield — on the snarling, foaming madness of the Chorsi line as it bent under the hammer-blow of the Duskwindai charge. He watched warriors fall, saw shields splinter, heard the echoes of steel striking bone even from their distant vantage.

Then he turned his head slightly, just enough to give the man a sidelong glance, and shook his head.

"No," Valen said, calm but firm. "We stay where we are. They made it quite clear: they don’t want outsiders meddling in their wars."

He paused, and then added in a quieter, sharper tone, "Though they don’t seem to have any qualms about using our weapons when it suits them."

The guard gave a grunt, a mix of agreement and irritation, but said nothing more. freēnovelkiss.com

Instead, Valen lifted a hand and gestured to the scene below.

"Watch," he ordered, his voice now cutting through the air like a commander’s blade. "Look closely. Learn what you can. These are the men you might one day face across the field maybe as allies marching together , or maybe as enemies."

The warriors exchanged glances, the fire of unspoken tension passing between them.

One of them, younger than the others, finally broke the silence.

"You believe we’ll fight them, commander?"

Valen didn’t answer right away.

He sighed, his breath thin and cool in the wind, and looked once more to the chaos unfolding below. The battle line was a mess — more brawl than war, still — but the Chorsi were holding, barely. Blood slicked the grass in dark rivulets, and bodies littered the ground in crooked heaps. Their formation sagged like a wet rope under the pounding weight of the Duskwindai, who were ferocious and fast, but not organized. Not sustainable.

"I don’t know," Valen said at last, his voice distant, thoughtful. "That depends."

"On what?" the guard pressed.

"On how far the prince’s interest extends into these lands... and how the tribes choose to respond to our presence."

His answer was honest. Calculated. And yet even as he spoke it aloud, his thoughts drifted inward, his brows furrowing.

When? he wondered silently. When will Varaku spring the trap?

From what he could see, the plan had not yet taken shape. The flanks lay still, waiting. The forest had yet to come alive with movement. Varaku, the great chieftain who promised subtlety, had done nothing yet.

And the Chorsi front line?

It was bleeding. Too quickly.

They were young, eager, untested — but they were not invincible. And if this storm wasn’t turned soon, their line would break under the weight of Vhomo’s fury and iron.

Valen’s jaw tightened.

You said you would strike like wolves in the brush, Varaku. I see no teeth yet. Only blood.

He gripped the reins a little tighter.

And did the only thing he could , he waited.

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