Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 894

Capítulo 894: Battle of the Eagles(2)

“Hey… what do you think’s going over there?”

“Dir,” he waited until he turned his head ”shut the fuck up.”

“No, really do you hear that? Sounds like… hymns? Wonder what language it is…”

“Gods damn it, Dir, I said shut up! You wanna get us hanged?”

Dir shifted his spear from hand to hand, nervous energy leaking out of him like sweat. “Come on, don’t tell me you’re not curious. They’ve rounded up all the specials, fucking freaks. I swear I saw one, mouth wide open, drooling all over himself like a sick hound. You think the rumors—”

“Dir.” The other soldier turned, face white with fear, eyes darting toward the front ranks. “I am not joking. You are hearing nothing, do you understand? Nothing. You didn’t see anything. You don’t say anything. Not one fucking word, or we’ll both end up hanging by our tongues before the sun sets. If you love breathing, Dir, just….please shut up. For once.”

Dir licked his lips. “I still think it’s strange.”

The man beside him let out a quiet curse, but the truth was, he thought so too.Hell everyone did. From the greenest boy trembling behind his spear to the highborn knights gripping their reins too tightly, the unease ran through the lines like fever.

The hymns only made it worse.

They were horrible to hear and put everyone on edge, the sound of deep throats chanting in a language no one knew, syllables thick as mud. Then louder, pulsing, almost rhythmic, the words snapping against the drumbeat of terrified hearts.

When the hooded figure appeared and walked straight toward the line of “specials,” even the bravest men found excuses to look away.

After he started howling those words. Slaves rushed forward, carrying bowls of something that steamed and stank of iron, forcing the mixture into the open mouths of the Imperator’s special.

The smell was felt and unbearable even from far back, making more than one wonder how those freaks could swallow that substance…the disgust quickly turned into fear when the first scream came.

If nightmare was made flesh it would have looked like that.

It tore through the silence like a blade through silk. One of the “specials” convulsed, before he broke into a sprint ,straight ahead, toward the field, toward the enemy.

Another followed. Then another. Within moments, dozens of them were running, thankfully the rebels were gazing at their back , else they would have seen the foam around their lips.

Some of those destined to die, even lost their weapons as they ran, too far gone to remember what they were. Others clawed at their own faces as they ran, scarring and scratching until skin went away with red.

It was chaos incarnate.

And then, as if the gods themselves had decided to mock them, one of the Imperator’s chosen fell , his leg snapping like dry wood. He didn’t stop. He dragged himself through the mud, nails tearing from his fingers, leaving a trail of blood from his broken leg as he crawled forward bone sticking out.

The hymns had stopped.

Now only mindless screams filled the morning air.

And everyone from those standing on the back to the enemy that was to receive the charge all knew.

The battle had begun.

——————-

“Fire at will as soon as they’re in range!”

Alpheo caught the order echoing through the chill air as one of the bowmen captains raised his voice above the din, already drawing back his string and loosing the first shaft. The rest followed in a fluid motion,over a hundred and fifty bows bending as one, the snap and whistle of taut strings rippling down the line like a living thing.

They stood behind a web of trenches and palisades, improvised fortress stretching across the rise of the plain. Stakes jutted out like teeth, above trenches, and narrow gaps had been left deliberately open to shape the killing field. Those open corridors were the bait, the “safe” paths that the enemy would think to exploit,only to find themselves funnelled straight into the jaws of death.

It wasn’t pretty. But it would work.

At least, that was the hope.

When the enemy banners began to move, Alpheo straightened in his saddle. Dust swirled around them, a thick brown haze that half-swallowed their forms. He could hear their war drums and the answering cry of their horns. It was beginning.

But something was wrong.

Only a sliver of the enemy army was advancing. A single wedge, small and thin compared to the mass of bodies behind it.

Alpheo frowned, his fingers tightening on his reins.

That’s… odd.

He had expected the enemy to use their full might at once to crash against his lines in an overwhelming tide of steel and fury. That would’ve been the rational move. But this small, cautious advance….it just felt off?

What are they doing?

He studied their formation, searching for sense in it. Maybe an early Roman tactic, of swapping their lines midst fight? Perhaps they meant to test the defenses, or lure his men into wasting arrows.

But he quickly threw the idea away as he believed the enemy was not able enough to pull something like that from the chaos of battle, plus the numbers were too small to form an actual line to fight.

Then came the screams and the sights that reminded men that there were things they could not still explain.

They weren’t human , not entirely. They sounded like iron tearing through flesh, like something dragged out of the pits below and taught to mimic the agony of men.

It began as a distant wail, a raw, animal keening that grew and grew until it was inside each one, in the chest, ribs, teeth. Alpheo felt it that scream more than he heard it. It shuddered through his armor, vibrated in his throat, and left a taste like blood in his mouth.

And then , the second sound. The familiar one.The reassuring one

Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.

Arrows took to the air, the archers’ volley darkening the gray morning. They fell like rain on the shapes sprinting toward them. The impact was wet and solid , a sound Alpheo knew well , but it didn’t stop the things coming. and it sure as hell did not brought him any relief.

For a heartbeat, he thought the enemy had lost their minds. A charge like that, without shields which he had just realized in the very moment the arrow fell down, without pace, without order , it was suicide. They weren’t even in ranks, just a mob of stumbling, jerking silhouettes, kicking up clouds of dust as they ran.

“Fucking hell…” he muttered.

Their movements were spasms, erratic and convulsing, some even went rigid mid-run, falling to the ground with convulsions until death. Some had dropped their weapons long before reaching bow range. A few tore at their own faces as they screamed.

One man , if he could still be called that, had an arrow straight through his eye, yet he kept running, hands twitching, jaw hanging open, howling through it all in rage, if they still felt anything that was of the living.

The volley tore into them again, another wave of shafts slamming into pale flesh. Many fell , but just as many didn’t.

They did not stop.

They just kept coming.

Arrows stuck out of them like the spines of monstrous hedgehogs, in their legs, shoulders, stomachs. Some had half a dozen sticking from their bodies and still did not slow. One stumbled, crawled on all fours, then dragged himself upright again, slipping in the dirt made slick by the blood of the first rank.

“By the gods…” one of his guards whispered. “What are they?”

Alpheo had no answer to give him.

He had seen men burn alive and still scream for their mothers. He had seen soldiers with entrails spilling from their guts keep swinging until they dropped. He had seen the darkest corners of war , he had ordered many of them himself: mass looting, rapings , executions, he had ordered crimes worthy enough for hundreds, he had seen it and done it all, and yet this? By Gods he did not believe in, if that scared him to his core.

If hell was something that could be imagined, it would looked eerily similar to that.

The pit traps they’d dug across the field? They were but a shout in the wind.

Initially meant to cause disarray during the battle swallowed some of the creatures whole, but even there, the horror didn’t stop.

The ones who fell didn’t cry for help; they just flailed, thrashed, and clawed at the dirt walls, their nails probably breaking and tearing off in clumps of flesh. A few even tried to climb out using the bodies of their fellows as ladders, pressing their faces against the mud, teeth bared, grunting and wheezing like beasts, had he been there, he would have seen even as they started to bite on each other.

Alpheo’s stomach twisted when they got closer, and he finally entered into reach of the smell. It was awful and yet not even worth noticing out of all the horror that he was seeing, made it even worse by one simple fact.

He could give no explanation of what was going on or why.

He was still far too green to realize that in this world there were things that could be explained by reason,things he would have no choice but too meet, and this was barely his first taste of the whole course that he would be forced to feast upon.