Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 631: Goods (1)

Valen stepped carefully over the blackened remains of what had once been a thriving settlement of the Duskwindai. The scorched timbers groaned beneath his boots, smoke still curling faintly from collapsed roofs and broken beams. He believed this had been the heart of the Duskwindai people—what he did not yet know was that this was only one of several major settlements, and certainly not the last.

Ash clung to the air, bitter on the tongue, and every gust of wind carried the scent of blood and burnt wood.

As he walked the path through the ruined village, his gaze inevitably drifted toward the survivors—what was left of them.

They knelt in the dirt, bound with coarse rope, eyes downcast and faces streaked with grime and despair. Men with bloodied brows and split lips. Women with torn dresses and hollowed gazes. Children who no longer cried, too exhausted or too afraid to make a sound. The silence that hung over them was not peace—it was defeat.

The Chorsi warriors had made short work of reclaiming the hills that had once been theirs, hills the Duskwindai had driven them from years ago. Now, after just a week and a half of campaign, that humiliation had been avenged with brutal precision. Their vengeance was swift—and merciless.

Wherever Valen looked, the story was the same.

Chorsi soldiers jeered and barked commands as they beat captive men with iron-tipped rods, turning their backs into wet pulp. Others dragged women screaming into shattered homes or behind scorched walls, their shrieks piercing even through the thick, oppressive heat of the morning. The pleas for mercy had long since grown hoarse. And none answered.

Valen said nothing as he walked, taking it as the normal due of the victors upon the vanquished.

The battle that had decided this campaign had been won more through tactics than valor. A well-executed pincer maneuver by armored footmen had shattered the Duskwindai lines, forcing them into a chaotic retreat. Their will to fight had buckled like a rotten beam under the weight of steel and strategy.

But not all had fallen. Many of the enemy had slipped away into the hills and thickets, their retreat unchecked.

That failure haunted Valen as much as the victory satisfied him.

There had been no cavalry—no riders to run them down as they fled, no spears to stab their backs or swords to spill their guts in the dust. Had this been the Prince’s army, Valen knew, the rout would have turned into a slaughter.

Light cavalry, led by the Crown’s Hound himself,

would have swept in with disciplined fury, turning the Duskwindai escape into a nightmare of flayed bodies and butchered remnants scattered across the hills. No survivors, no regrouping, no second chances.

That was how true victories were won—not merely by breaking the enemy, but by making certain they never stood again.

History was not made by the battles won on the field, but by what followed after—the disarray, the fragmentation, the slow rot of communication among routed forces. An army rarely died standing. It died running, and it died when no one remained to call it back to order.

He looked once more to the captives, their limbs trembling, their bodies broken, their futures in this continent obliterated only waiting for that on the other one.

Valen had expected broken men and shattered spirits in the aftermath of the rout. What he had not expected was a second battle.

The Duskwindai, though beaten on the plains, had not dissolved as he assumed. Their leader—a boy, almost,in the chaos of retreat had managed to rally his fleeing warriors, drawing them back into the broken spines of the hills.

When Valen learned this, he could hardly believe it. The commander—lean, hollow-eyed, no older than Varaku’s son himself—had wrangled what discipline remained in his routed force and dug in. Not to flee. To fight again.

He did not believe that they would have that will to fight again.

It was not desperation. It was duty.

And, Valen supposed, the illusion of time.

The Duskwindai must have believed they could delay the Chorsi long enough to evacuate the last of their people.

The rearguard had planted themselves like stakes in the earth, drawing their blades not in hope of victory, but to buy an hour. Two, perhaps.

They didn’t get one.

The charge that broke them was not led by youthful ambition, but by old iron.

Veteran footmen, mailed from crown to shin, surged up the slope in a punishing advance.

They moved without flourish, without grace—only with grim purpose, shields locked, spears thrusting, maces, axes and short swords punching through desperate defenses. The Duskwindai lines, already fraying at the edges, held for less than a quarter hour before splintering completely.

There were no war cries. Only the sound of steel smashing bone and the dull thump of bodies rolling downhill.

The last stand was no more glorious than the first defeat. By the time Valen reached the summit, the final resistance had been reduced to corpses in shallow trenches and men too wounded to lift their weapons.

It was over.

Valen paused atop a ridge of splintered timber, the smell of smoke and blood thick in the air. His boots crunched through the blackened earth as he turned—drawn by a sound he did not wish to hear, yet could not ignore.

The Duskwindai chieftain still lived.

The young leader hung by his wrists from a wooden frame, rope biting deep into raw, bloodied skin. His legs dangled uselessly beneath him, pierced in a dozen places by jagged knives and spearpoints. Warriors gathered in a loose circle around him—Chorsi men, their faces smeared with soot and triumph—took turns flinging stones. Some laughed as they threw. Others spat. One drove a blade into the chieftain’s calf with a sickening crunch.

The boy roared in agony, a sound that rattled Valen’s teeth.

Valen’s jaw tightened. There was no honor left in this, nor any use, it would have been better to hold him hostage.

But that was how things were done across the seas, here there were other laws and other traditions.

He turned away from the screams .

Behind him, footsteps sounded—steady, deliberate over the charred rubble.

Valen glanced back, hand drifting instinctively toward the hilt at his hip, only to stop when he saw the boy approaching.

Vanash, first son of Varaku.

He was a tall youth, not yet grown into his frame, but already carrying himself like a warrior born. His face bore none of the mirth or rage that danced among the other Chorsi. It was carved of cold purpose, his gaze fixed.

He resembles much Lord Jarza, he noted in his mind thinking back at the commander he had not seen in nearly half a year.

Vanash stopped a few steps from Valen and looked to the side—where two translators stood waiting.

Vanash spoke a single sentence.

The sentences passed between the two translators before it reached his ears

"He says... the chieftain is calling for you."

He looked once more toward the broken figure bound and bleeding under a sky still choked with smoke. The chieftain hung there like a man nailed to the world itself, barely held upright by what little will remained.

Valen gave a slow nod. "Take me to him."

As he said so the Govern of Salthold walked in silence, the rhythm of his boots broken only by the occasional crunch of debris or bone beneath his heel. Around him, the settlement breathed its last in wheezes of smoke and the ragged cries of the vanquished.

But Valen’s mind was elsewhere.

His eyes swept over the chaos—the burning huts, the bound and kneeling captives, the Chorsi warriors shouting in triumph—and he felt satisfaction settle in his chest.

This... this was more than retribution for a displaced people. More than blood paid for the insult of flight. This was profit. Dominion.

The fulfillment of a campaign that had begun as a backwater concern and now, with the Duskwindai crushed, would blossom into something far more lucrative for the realm, his realm.

His Grace’s investment would be well repaid.

The Duskwindai hills were no mere cluster of scattered hamlets. They were bordering with the mountains that separated the tribes from the Great Azanian Sultanate.

The prince would see it.

He would understand that with it , the tribes would soon become raiding-slavers, leading raiding bands onto the other side of the mountains, bringing as loot slaves that would then be sold back to them.

Valen allowed himself a small smile, the kind he rarely indulged in.

Yes. This would please His Grace.

And more importantly, it would please him enough.

Because it had to.

Valen had been granted that post by surprise, and he of course knew that he governed now not by birthright, but by usefulness. Results.

And results were the only shield he had against being replaced.

So he would keep bringing them.

Stabilized trade routes, improved walls , a bigger port and of course more settlers.

Whatever the prince required—Valen would deliver it.

He had no illusions. He never truly held power. His grance only lent it to them . And the rent was always due.

His grip tightened on the hilt at his side as he followed Vanash deeper into the wreckage; this war was almost finished.

But his work was only just beginning.

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