Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 896

Capítulo 896: Battle of the Eagles(4)

It was like being in an oven. Heat rolled off the in shimmering waves and pooled at the base of Mavius’s mask.

it was a good thing he had exchanged the mask from iron to ceramic pre-battle….

Still, he could feel it warming against the blacked skin at his neck and with every breath, the thing on his face felt more like a cage.

He wanted to rip it off and feel wind on his cheeks. He wanted, stupidly and persistently, to remember the shape of his own mouth without a stranger’s stare curling on the servants’ lips. But the mirror of memory that came in mind betrayed him: every time a maid’s eyes met his, the same ripple passed over her face, the same impossible disgust. Beauty had been a currency; he had spent it and come away with ash.

He missed the voice more than anything,the smooth, easy sound that had once opened doors and women and wine. Now speech came in gravel and coughs, thick as sand. He had bled blood of his for this. He had paid what the old rites demanded.

He had given the thing no father would spoke of aloud.

Was it worth it?

He told himself it was. He said it aloud with the calm of a man making bargains with devils and refusing to admit the reward he got for his soul was lacking, after all, what was the other option?

“You know, my lord,” he said to Landoff, voice rasping through the mask. He turned his head, the idiot smile he had once practiced so often it had become a mask beneath the mask present, even though clearly useless. “After all that… I can say I am glad my preparations were not wasted.” He drew in an exaggerated breath, as if savoring some imagined perfume he once loved. “It would have been a pity to let such work go idle.”

Landoff did not answer. The older man’s mouth worked, a thin line. For a heartbeat, Mavius thought he might continue with his previous argument that he had crossed a line that should not have, would he ever get tired of that?

Or…Perhaps, who knows, had come to regret too the very same thing Mavius did.

The Imperator’s hands tightened, he hated that silence, and above all he hated the card he had been given.He hated his face, he hated his voice and he above all hated the sourness that persisted in his soul.

He imagined fingers closing on the shaman’s throat,the responsible of it all. He was the one to blame, and he would pay for the crime.

He promised himself, again and with a new ferocity born of sleepless nights, that when this was over he would make the shaman feel the same terrible burn that had hollowed him out. Burn him, strip him, leave him nothing. If the rites had saved his skin, they would not spare the old decrepit’s.

He had promised him something, he had delivered his part and yet did not receive results that evened the cost.

That was a crime in his book.

Before he could go on and on about anything he dreamed of the future, while still living in the present , a rider appeared from the wind, a blue ribbon looped on the top of his staff.

Delivering the boon that fate had finally given him for all his sacrifice.

——————-

“Stand your ground! By the Name of His Imperial Majesty, stand your ground!”

Croxiatus bellowed the words until his throat scraped raw, until the veins in his neck burned. But the wind took his commands, shredded them, and flung them back in his face. The field was breaking like glass, and his flank, his flank, the proud banners of House Croxiatus, were dissolving into a screaming tide of men running for their lives.

It made no sense. None.

The reports he’d heard moments ago , madness, men who felt no pain, who refused to die , they looked more like the ramblings of a drunkard than a military report. And yet… how else to explain it? Four hundred of them. Barely four hundred. And they’d torn through two thousand trained soldiers as if the gods themselves had cursed his banner.

It could not make sense.

“Deserters! Cowards!” he screamed, spittle flecking his beard. He swung his sword down at the back of a fleeing levy, splitting helm and skull in one furious stroke. “You’ll face worse if you run! Back to the line!”

They didn’t hear him. Or worse they did and chose to ignore him, preferring the danger of the future than that of the present.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

Croxiatus had spent half his life , playing all the games, arranging marriages, bleeding his coffers dry so that his daughter’s son might one day wear the crown. And now? Now instead of seeing a grandson on the throne, he saw his legacy buried beneath the mud, his name dragged through the gutter, his head mounted on a pike outside the enemy’s camp.

“No… no, this cannot be how it ends!”

He struck down another man, just to feel something other than dread. The soldier’s body fell limp, another corpse among hundreds of his own. The act did nothing. The fear remained.

Then a voice pierced through the chaos ,hoarse, panicked.

“My lord! My lord, look ahead!”

Croxiatus turned and for the rest of his days, if he had any left, he wished he hadn’t.

He watched as the enemy, no, not soldiers, things , ran down his fleeing men with a hunger that no human could possess. They didn’t strike cleanly; they leapt, claws of flesh and bone dragging men to the ground. They wrapped arms around their prey’s legs, pulled them down into the dirt, and then the daggers came , stabbing, plunging, sawing.

They were like beast given a sword.

Even with wound that would have killed a man, they kept moving, he saw some of them keep on running even with a spear in their gut. Fingers still clawed at faces. Teeth still snapped at air. One corpse bit into a man’s calf as it died, and did not let go.

He saw a levy trip, begging for help, eyes wide with terror , only to have one of those things seize his head with both hands, putting his fingers on the man’s nose and pull. Flesh tore. Skin gave way.

Those without anything to stab with simply bit and started chewing.

And they didn’t even spit it out.

Croxiatus felt his bowels loosen as he stared, his sword lowering inch by inch. The wind carried the stench. Around him, men wept and prayed as they fled.

Any other man, upon witnessing such horror would have broken and joined that rout. Any other man would have abandoned the field, tossed aside his command, and fled for the safety of the hills, praying that the gods were not deaf that day.

But Croxiatus was not any other man.

Where other hearts would falter, his burned hotter.

He forced his trembling hands to still, tightening his gauntlets.

He was a soldier, and as such he had a duty.

The scene before him was damnation itself.But amidst the ruin, his gaze locked on something,hope, however thin and fragile.

The enemy, in their frenzy, had pursued. They had chased his broken men into the open instead of holding the trenches.

The fools had abandoned their ground.

That was something. At the very least not something against them.

Croxiatus turned sharply to one of his guards ”Ride to the Imperator! Tell him our flank has broken, but the enemy pursues,they’ve left their fortifications empty. Tell him I accept full blame, and that I’ll buy him time to strike where they’ve left themselves bare. Go.Ride!”

The guard saluted once and vanished into the maelstrom, hoofbeats swallowed by the screams,perhaps happy to get out of that hell.

Croxiatus then turned to the lord who had called his attention earlier. “Lord Tivinio,” he said, his tone grim and steady. “Take my banner. Rally as many as you can. Beat the drums, call my name do everything to get them back”

The young lord hesitated. “And you, my lord?”

Croxiatus reached out and took the fallen banner himself, pressing it into Tivinio’s grip with iron resolve. “I will relieve the men of their burden. Someone must buy them the space to breathe.I shall take responsibility with my life, if need arise”

He turned to his household guard, thirty men , perhaps less, each one bearing the proud crimson griffin of Croxiatus across their shields. Thirty men against four hundred monsters. The odds were blasphemous.

But they did not tremble.

Croxiatus drew his sword, the steel glinting like a shard of sun through smoke. He raised it high, so all his men could see. “Do not fear what comes,” he shouted. “Smile, men of Romelia! Smile, for the gods themselves will remember this day. We ride not to live, but to buy victory!”

He lowered his visor with a final, metallic click, sealing himself into the embrace of death.

“FOR ROMELIA!” he roared.

And the cry thundered back from thirty throats, echoing through the slaughter, defiant and pure.

“FOR ROMELIA!”

They charged as one.Into the screaming tide.Into the snapping teeth and clawing hands.Into a nightmare that no man could wake from.

They rode knowing the river would swallow them whole but still they rode, spears levelled, banners snapping, hearts alight with one final truth:

If they were to drown, they would make the river red.