Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 768

Chapter 768: Battle of Apurvio(3)

The laughter from the Oizenian ranks came in bursts, short, barking chuckles from men nudging one another with their elbows, smirking at the sight of ladders bobbing and swaying above the heads of the approaching Yarzat line.It was the kind of laughter that made a man feel taller, braver, more certain of his own safety.

But laughter is a fragile thing on the field of war.

For when the Yarzat soldiers drew near enough, near enough for faces to sharpen and for the black gleam of their armor to burn in the sun, their strange burdens were suddenly no longer theirs to bear. In an act of sudden generosity, they shared them with the Oizenians, hurling the heavy wooden frames forward like gifts offered in wrath.

The laughter that had rung so confidently now choked and faltered, dying mid-breath, as those same men found themselves helping to carry the load.

It was, after all, a kind of teamwork. Just not the sort they had imagined.

The lances the Oizenians had trusted so blindly,those proud, gleaming spears that had kept enemies at bay in drill after drill, were suddenly their undoing. The ladders crashed in among them, the rungs catching perfectly in the narrow gaps between shafts. Each ladder’s iron-bound ends, designed for just this mischief, made them heavier, crueler, and far more hurtful when they fell.

Spears that only moments ago were tilted skyward in defiance, like a forest of steel declaring its mastery to the heavens, now clattered uselessly to the earth.

Unlucky men who failed to duck, or hesitated to free their hands, took the brunt of the blow. One poor sod caught the iron cap full to the skull; he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, never to rise again.

The shock rippled outward. Spears fell, bodies stumbled sideways or backward, and the neat, steel hedgehog of Oizenian defense warped into a potato skewered by some toothpick

Where once there had been an unbroken wall, now corridors yawned open, inviting death to walk in.

And like wolves sighting a limping rabbit, the Yarzat legions threw themselves forwards at the invitation.

The gaps became floodgates as Yarzat soldiers poured through, their shields smashing into startled pikemen before the Oizenians could reform. There was no graceful clash of lines, only the savage intimacy of men killing at arm’s length.

Steel found flesh with the wet, tearing sound of meat being butchered. A spear haft was deflected to the side quickly followed by an axe through a throat. Someone screamed, high and shrill, until a boot pressed down on his face and ground him silent into the dirt.

One Yarzat trooper ripped his blade free from an Oizenian’s ribs and barked a laugh in his victim’s face.

“Where’s your pretty lance now, eh? Looks shorter than you remembered!”

Another smashed the rim of his shield into a man’s jaw, sending teeth and blood in a spray across the trampled grass. “Smile for your prince, bastard!Come now where is the laughter?” he snarled, before driving a mace into the man’s skull, bashing it in and silencing the whimpering man.

There were no lines of spears anymore, only snarling knots of men, grappling, stabbing, clawing at one another in the blood-slick green plain.

Yarzat soldiers, now deep inside the Oizenian formation, were wolves in the sheepfold. The Oizenians had been armed for one purpose only , to hold the line with their long pikes. In the open field, that weapon was a wall of death, unmovable and unbreakable.

Here, pressed shoulder to shoulder and robbed of distance, it became a curse.

With no sidearms to draw, as they were never expected to make use of it, they tried to stumble backward to recover the reach of their spears in a bid to thrust at the sudden intruders. In doing so, they crushed the feet of the men behind them, tangled their shafts together, and snarled their own formation into a useless mass.

“Gods, you’re on my bloody foot!” one cried out, shoving uselessly at the man ahead.

“Hold the line, you idiots! Hold, ah, damn you, MOVE!” another snarled, jerking his weapon up only to have it locked against his neighbor’s shaft.

“Give space! Give us space, damn it!” a third bellowed, his voice half rage, half terror. He tried to carve out room by slamming the butt of his spear backward, heedless of friend or foe. The wood cracked into ribs and stomachs, drawing curses and cries.

“Watch where you’re swinging, you bastard!”

“You’re choking me with that shaft, lift it—LIFT IT!”

“No room !No bloody room! We’re packed like swine!”

Their shouts overlapped into a single din of panic, the crush of bodies and the snapping of discipline feeding into each other until the formation was nothing but chaos, men jostling, trampling, cursing at their own fellows as the threat closed in.

The Yarzat counteparts wasted no time.

They moved like predators that knew the kill was theirs. Maces smashed through ribs with a muffled crack. Axes bit into collarbones and spines, dragging men down screaming. Heavy shields shoved forward, turning gaps into corridors through which more Yarzat poured, widening the breach with every push.

On other points of the field, where ladders had not opened the way, the assault was no less cunning. Soldiers sprinted the last few yards, then dropped low at the final heartbeat, sliding under the bristling hedge of pikes. They burst up between the legs of the front rank, blades flashing up in a bid to deliver as much damage as they could from their positions while adrenaline still pushed on their veins, the excitement of the actions providing them with dangerous dopamine.

The first Oizenians to feel it barely understood what had happened. One man looked down in disbelief as a short sword tore through his groin; another stiffened as cold steel slid up under his chin and into his mouth.

The last thing he heard was a crude and vulgar joke about using his mouth, one of those overly used jests that one would easily find in a common tavern, where imagination was the last prerequisite for a conversation.

Others had their breastplates driven in by upward thrusts aimed at the unprotected gaps beneath the arms.

The dead were then yanked by the murderers backward and dumped, their bodies becoming stepping stones for those behind. Each man felled left a hole, and into each hole the Yarzat came , fast, eager, relentless , their war cries mingling with the choking gasps of the dying as wolves howling against the yelping of the lambs.

What had once been laughter on their lips now curdled into fear. Wherever they turned, death was already waiting.

To their right, a man knelt in the mud, clawing desperately at the ground as if he could anchor himself to life, red froth bubbling from his mouth with every breathless gasp. To their left, another stumbled in circles, both arms wrapped around the soft coils of his own intestines, sobbing and whispering to himself as he tried in vain to push them back into his torn belly.

Death was everywhere and everything. And those soldiers in black and white were its herald.

The Oizenians had taken the field in confidence, their weeks of drilling convincing them they were an unbreakable wall, heirs to the myth of invincibility.

Where was that invicibility now?Where was that optimism ? They all wondered as they looked down at what their hubris had brought them.

Now, face-to-face with the real thing, they understood. They saw how small they were, how foolish their hope had been.

The truth was as cold and final as a blade across the throat and the price of that enlightenment was death. It was a bad bargain, but there was no backing out of it now that they shook that cursed hand.

“Thanks, brother,” a Yarzat legionnaire grinned, smashing the skull of a kneeling man with a single downward stroke of his mace, thanking the man who had opened the hole he had gotten in. He didn’t even look at the ruin he’d made , just nodded to his comrade and moved on.

“Got my fucking pinky stepped on,”the one being thanked growled, flexing his left hand. The fingers were curled tight around a dagger slick with blood, the same blade he’d just rammed up between the legs of the man who’d done it. The body was still twitching when he stepped over it.

Without pause, he wrenched his shield up, knuckles whitening on the grip, and roared to the sky, “PRIMIGENIA!”

“PRIMIGENIA!” came the answering howl from another of the First, shouting the nickname given to their legion, honored as being the first.

The caller took an Oizenian’s head almost clean off with a single swing to give moment to his shout. Blood sprayed across his cheek and into his teeth. He spat it out, grabbed the corpse by the collar, and hurled it like a sack into the next rank. Two men went down in a tangle of limbs and pikes, and the wolves fell on them before they could even scream.

“Holy shit! Did you see that?” he barked, turning to a nearby comrade, eyes wide, chest heaving, grin feral. The fight had him drunk on adrenaline, his whole body singing with the thrill of killing.

The other man hesitated, then nodded awkwardly. He hadn’t seen a thing, but there’s a certain kind of guilt in disappointing a comrade in the middle of slaughter. So he played along, even as his own axe dripped with the blood of a boy who’d been begging for mercy on the ground moments before.

“Uh—nasty,” he then muttered snorting as a warm pool of piss spread out from the corpse and soaked into the mud around his boots.

He gave the body a kick, wiped his boot on it, and without another thought brought his axe down on the chest of another Oizenian who was trying to leave, the crunch of breaking bone loud even over the screams.

Bone cracks. Air leaves lungs in a wet cough.

The same thing, over and over…

And for some….. the realization was that it was really getting boring.