Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 946: Fog in the night(5)

The echoes of steel and death rose into the blackened sky, not as one single, grand avalanche, but as the thousand individual shouts of men meeting their end.

Each meaningful on its own, yet entirely lost and lonely in the vast carpet they now belonged to.

Something deep and ancient, a feeling inherited from the moment humanity first discovered fire and sharpened stone, rumbled in Edric’s chest.

He stood ahead of his legion, his hand resting on the hilt of his unsheathed blade.

Just like him, every soldier in the rank could hear the sounds of the assault , the horrifying thud of bodies falling down, and the primal screams of the Voghondai. And just like the beasts Edric had forged them to be, instead of shying away, they leaned in, trembling with a barely contained urge to join, salivating at the thought of the blood to be shed. It was as if they were hearing the most beautiful, intoxicating melody, yet were still prohibited from the dance.

Soon.

Yes, indeed, soon the leash would snap and ballerinas they would be once more.

He scanned the first rank of the dancers, meeting the eyes of each man. Every face, scarred or smooth, mirrored the same hungry fire he felt burning in his own gaze.

For five agonizing days, they had been held back. Their leash had been pulled taut while their ears were filled with the endless, pathetic sounds of lesser men failing the task. The Voghondai were brutes, yes, and brilliant shock troops, but they lacked the tactical grace that only the stubborness of the Ardita could muster. Now, finally, their neck was free. Their blood boiled for a proper, glorious engagement, a chance to prove the Fourth the only men fit to close a siege.

Edric took a deep, centering breath, dragging the foul, copper-and-smoke air into his lungs.

It tasted like flowers.

This war had taken a great, heavy toll.

He wished, more than anything, that he could have had one last, careless talk with Egil. Alpheo, had been there at the end, but he stood secretive about it. Distant. And, Edric had to admit, perhaps even more than sad? Alpheo’s recent habit of drinking until his words slurred during the evening certainly suggested that , guilt.

Edric never knew Egil’s last words; Alpheo never told anyone. But he knew, with a certainty that burned away the guilt of his own survival, that his old comrade would have truly loved this moment. The absolute, glorious madness of a final charge.

He did after all enjoy one.That mad bastard.

And so did Edric.Hopefully he would not die for it.

"I am come to you with good tidings, brothers of the Fourth!" Edric’s voice, though rough, carried the ring of pure fervor. "After a long, agonizing wait, our Prince has finally grown tired of the mistakes made by lesser men. So he rightly made the decision to let us correct them. What use are we in a cage? We are made to be left in the wild! So it is today. The Fourth joins the hunt!"

A throaty, hungry cheer, savage and demanding, erupted from the two hundred and fifty hardened men arrayed ahead of him.

"Calm down! I am not done!" he roared, his tone snapping with harsh authority, succeeding in silencing a group that not even a coastal storm could subdue.

"Today, we finally have permission to do what we know best! Because if you want shit done, you call the Fourth!Even the godsdamned winds know that.

While we cheer, while the Voghondai jack off with axes in hand, the spearhead has built the bridge we shall use to cut off the head of—"

He wasn’t fast enough. A long, mournful, yet undeniably urgent war-horn echoed over the ramparts, cutting his speech short. He closed his eyes, instantly recognizing the shape of the noise....it was one of theirs, signaling the final readiness for deployment.

"Fuck!" he cursed, slapping his thigh in frustration as his favorite toy was snatched away. "Not even half the speech done and I’m obliged to keep it brief! All right, I will make it quick! So listen up!"

He gave a sharp nod, and the decurii quickly moved along the lines, passing three crude pieces of paper to each man in the first rank.

"Look at it well and memorize it as if it were your wife’s name!

Caer Landoff, Willios Landoff, and Mavius Kantazoukenes. These are wanted lives. If they surrender when they meet you, you may choose whether to spare them or not. If they do not yield, you cut their heads off and piss on their skull. That’s the rule, do what the fuck you want about it, both cases you’ll get fucking rich out of it.

Time is short, so here is what’s up! We join the immediate fighting to solidify the breach, we win that fighting, and then we wheel toward the main gate. It doesn’t matter if all of Romelia’s gold is ahead of you; today we have a single mission. We must open the gate so that the Hounds may shag some necks with their teeth!"

He paused, letting the implication sink in, letting the old hatred fester. "You may have lost an uncle, but they lost a father. Fight and shed blood for more! Today, we avenge a legate!"

He raised his sword high in the air, catching the faint torchlight. The sight was intoxicating.

"Calidum et ignis!"

Two hundred and fifty throats ripped out the call, the ancient archaic tongue thundering across the broken ground. Edric slammed his face plate down, locking the iron mask onto his helm. With his legion in tow, he made a frantic, driven run straight toward the breach, not bothering to look if they following, only running where chaos reigned supreme.

The man, with all his fears and worries, was gone. Welcomed, instead, was the iron, which knew nothing but its single glorious purpose it was made for.

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It was his liege, who had made use of black magic to win the field. And yet, ahead of Willios, battling on the very brink of the breach, there were things he could only honestly call monsters.

It was not merely how big they were, or how savage they appeared to the eye, wielding those great, heavy axes that fell with sickening precision, each swing claiming the life of a defender. It wasn’t their skin of tree bark or the pearly white teeth that smiled with red blood every time they killed.

They were simply... disgusting when they went about their work.

Even in the deafening, swirling chaos of the breach, where Willios himself had to be acutely aware of every shadow and shifting mass to avoid a sudden, violent death, the Voghondai had no care for their surroundings.

They took their sweet, unnerving time with death, never once glancing over a shoulder. Not that many were courageous enough to interrupt any of them who was methodically cleaving through the limbs of dead bodies and tossing the pieces carelessly into the mud. Willios had even sighted one tribesman scalping a downed soldier, fortunately dead already, without being bothered by neither man nor monster.

Even the hardened Marshal could not hide the thin, bitter line of fear he felt. They were horrible to look at and terrifying to meet.

He had poured every available man into this breach, knowing the ferocity the fighting would demand. He would never have expected that just a few dozen of these axemen could yield so much sustained chaos against hundreds of trained defenders. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

It was so endearing to watch... less so to experience.

He felt the sudden, metallic coldness wash over his bones, even before the foreign shout rose above the din:

"Fegisarnas hövding. Jag kräver ditt huvud, Oslo, benbrytare."

Willios didn’t understand a single word of the demand. But turning around and seeing the pearly white smile of the massive tribesman running toward him, with all the joyful eagerness of a child running toward a long-promised toy and all the monstrosity of a demon, gave him the only translation the words needed.

A head was to be claimed today.

He looked down at his own intricate, custom-forged armor, the markings of the Landoff household etched into the expensive steel. He understood the reason for all that singular, terrifying interest.

He should have worn something simpler.

The monster covered the distance in three monstrous strides, its movement devoid of the elegant, measured footwork Willios had spent a lifetime perfecting. There was no feint, no guard, only mass accelerated by pure, concentrated fury.

The warrior raised the head of the axe high, the steel a brief, terrible reflection of the weak light, and brought it down with a speed that cut the very air while the haft was still behind its shoulder.

Willios had watched these horrors fight , he knew there was no style behind this: no schools, no masters, no intricate series of parries and thrusts. It was a terrifyingly efficient algorithm of brute strength leveraged to incite maximum fear.

He took an involuntary, desperate step back, his foot skidding slightly. The backward movement was pure instinct, a soldier’s mistake, a flicker of panic.

The monster saw it. And then, impossibly, it stopped. The axe, already committed to its downward arc, snared itself mid-fall. The Voghondai warrior didn’t rely on the momentum; it used its sheer muscle to arrest the blow, then smoothly rotated the weapon in its grip, turning the head around for a second, immediate, back-hand blow with the back and unsharpened part of the axe.

Willios had not expected that.

He barely managed to raise his shield. Had it been the thin, regulation wooden shield of the levy, the blow would have shattered the wood and claimed his shield-arm.

But the Marshal’s personal shield was reinforced with a heavy steel rim, and the axe struck it with a shriek that ripped through the air, sending a paralyzing vibration up Willios’s arm but failing to bite through the metal.

The monster stumbled back a half-step, rage boiling off it like steam for having his kill denied. It bellowed, and charged again.

But Willios had learned the lesson. He knew the cost of backing away. Instead of yielding ground, he went straight in. He sidestepped the next massive, wild swing, diving under the monstrous arc and the monster apparent mindlesness of the higher art of killing.

He kept his feet low, driving the plant of his foot straight into the back of the Voghondai’s exposed knee.

No matter how much muscle he had the giant still went down with a heavy, grunting crash, collapsing to one knee. Willios was already moving, flowing around the monster’s massive torso, ignoring the flailing, frantic arms.

Like a ballerina with music in tow, he danced around the monsters.

Then when the time was right he struck.

He drove the blade deep.

Burying it right into the soft seam at the back of the tribesman’s neck where the collar of the iron cape met the spine.

The Voghondai gave a final, choking gargle of surprise before going rigid and a moment later collapsing onto the ground, its body down with the now useless iron.

He only had a moment to observe the result of his work, that slight feeling of joy he felt? It quickly went down the drain as soon as he turned his head away from his prize and back to the breach where they had fallen back.

There he stared death straight into the eye. As on that black day he witness it coming down among the not-soon living in the form of one of the Southern Prince legion.