Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 899

Capítulo 899: Battle of the eagles(6)

It was not every day that a lord stumbled into the medics’ tent of the White Army , and certainly not the commander of the Hounds.

The tent’s air was filled with the reek of blood, sweat, and boiled water. But even all that stench was drowned out by the voice of Agalosios, head of the White Army’s medical corps.

“Hold the lord down!” he barked, slamming his tools on the table.

Egil blood-soaked, pale, but still glaring like a cornered wolf , snarled back, “Hurry up, damn you! I don’t have time for this. Can’t you hear the battle outside?”

Agalosios didn’t even look up. He was already pouring burning alcohol into the wound, clearing the blood enough to see what he feared.

The artery…it was slashed.

“By the gods…” he hissed under his breath, but there was no time to curse fate. “Tourniquet! Tight, tighter, I said tighter!” he snapped, grabbing an assistant by the collar and dragging him into place. The boy went white as he twisted the strap until the lord’s thigh turned the color of ash.

He had to apply ligature.

The surgeon’s hands moved fast a hooked needle in one hand, a line of silk in the other. His brow was dripping, not from fear but from the brutal concentration it took to find the exact thread of life inside the mangled flesh.

And through it all, Egil didn’t move.

The man lay still as stone, his jaw clenched so hard a vein pulsed in his temple. Blood trickled down the sides of the table, pattering softly on the dirt floor, almost calm if compared to the chaos screaming outside.

“How long?” Egil growled between his teeth. “How long until you’re done?”

The physician gave a dry grumble without looking up. “How long until you’re done, you mean. You’re finished, Egil. The artery’s cut,five minutes later and I’d be sealing your eyes, not your leg. You’re lucky you dragged your sorry hide in here at all.”

“Lucky?” Egil rasped, fighting a tremor in his leg. “The bastards are tearing our line apart , what luck is that? In what damned world am I done?”

“In the one where you live to die an old fool,” Agalosios said, tightening the ligature with a snap. “Now shut up and let me work. ”

The tent fell quiet but for the crackle of lamps and the muted clash of battle outside.

Egil said nothing more , not a groan, not a word. He simply looked past the surgeon, locking eyes with the two soldiers pinning his arms to the table. Both were Hounds , their braids which had become the hairstyle of their unit, falling either to their back or chest.

To them Egil gave only a look, and they understood immediately.

The matter in fact was not over.

Agalosios worked, ignorant of the silent exchange. When he finally reached for fresh bandages, the two soldiers tensed. One nodded once and the other later, blissfully ignorant of what they would be getting into.

If they did , they wouldn’t have so readily accepted

—————-

It was mesmerizing to watch , the way a man could take another man’s life with such dreadful grace.

Mesha had never seen anything like it. The sight pulled at him, morbid and beautiful, as though he were watching the most beautiful of women dance bare in front of him.

The front line was a dance of steel.

The Third Legion, armed with the long gleaming weapons called halberds, fought like craftsmen at their art.

The long blade came down in wide arcs, shearing through shields, bone, and limb with the same ease as a knife cutting through soft pastry.

They used the long shafts to keep their enemies at bay, to hook, pull, and break their guard in way , and when an opening appeared, the thrust came, precise and final, before the movement ended with a savage flourish of the blade’s edge.

On the right, the Voghondai of Torghan were the complete opposite.

Where the Legion fought like sculptors, they fought like storms. No elegance, no restraint, only fury and raw strength. They cared nothing for defense, letting enemy blades glance off their armor as if it were no more than rain.

Each swing of their massive axes came with a roar and a shower of blood, cutting down men as if they were weeds. They didn’t parry , they absorbed the blow, twisted with it, and repaid it tenfold. It was brutal, barbaric, and utterly efficient in scaring the shit out of men.

Mesha had foolishly thought that eight hundred against three-four thousand meant they would be playing defense. He realized now how wrong he had been. The Fourth Legion and their allies were not holding , they were advancing, pushing the enemy back step by step through sheer audacity.

Still, even he could tell it would not last. Flesh had limits, and even gods would tire when outnumbered four to one.

Luckily fate for once went their way as above the screams and the clash of iron, came a new sound , hundreds of them.

Mesha turned his head to finally see the golden griffon of House Vox rising against the sky.

For a heartbeat, Mesha dared to smile.

Reinforcements. At last.

But the smile died just as quickly as it came.

Of the two thousand five hundred that had routed, barely four hundred returned. The rest were nowhere to be seen.

Worse, no matter how close they came the armor of the Patriarch of House Vox, was also like the rest of the army nowhere to be seen.

Mesha’s stomach turned cold once more from the little light of that candle.

He said nothing of it, knowing better than to look the gift in the horse’s mouth. He simply gestured to a nearby rider, giving him orders that would finally relieve men that had fought like giants and revitalized a battle that had seemed lost.

Still it was a good news, who know? Perhaps things were finally looking good for them.

————

Things could not have looked worse for them.

The front was holding, barely, and the enemy was being pushed back, though not enough to matter. Alpheo knew that no miracle counter-charge could turn the tide now. Even if he drove the dagger in, the blade would chip before it pierced the heart.

Their only hope was to let the enemy exhaust itself against the fortified lines, to bleed its morale dry, and when it faltered, strike the killing blow with a counter-charge, that even then no one knew would even work.

That required time. And time was the one thing the gods had denied them that very day.

Reports came like hammer blows, one hammering his head after the other.

The Right flank had fallen, Egil was down, struck in the leg and now under the surgeon’s knife. The cavalry on the far left was collapsing, the riders losing spirit without their head-hound at the lead. On the flank where the enemy was attempting his flanking manuever, things were no better.

The levy lords’ men, soft farmers turned soldiers, would have been breaking faster than any shield could be raised. The numbers too great for the fortifications to truly matter.

Alpheo had to hold this together himself.

“Hold the line! Your prince commands it!” he roared, spurring his horse along the front, the silver falcon of Yarzat whipping behind him. His voice was raw beneath the Iron Helmet, and every word struck at the hearts of the men who still listened.

The air was filled with steel and death, the groaning of men mixing with the heavy ring of iron. Inside his helm, the noise echoed like war drums against his skull. For once, victory did not rest on his sword or his tactics, it hung on whether men still believed in him.

And that terrified him.

To have no control whatsoever.

He watched the carefully built chokepoints widening with every push. The trenches, once their greatest defense, now funneled death inward. He could almost see the line cracking beneath his feet and him falling there.

“Alpheo!” a voice shouted through the din. The prince turned, and there, armor splattered with dust, was Shahab.

“We both know it’s not going our way,” He said grimly the words unpleasant to Alpheo as much as they were to him. “We’ve done all we can. We should cut our losses while we still can and order a retreat. We got no reason to die in this field”

A bitter laugh almost escaped Alpheo at that . Losses? They had no losses left to cut they would not bleed later.

“There’s no chance beyond this field,” he said, meeting Shahab’s weary eyes. “If we retreat, Romelia falls to the bastard, and if it falls, Yarzat is next. Our best chance…” He let the word hang, heavy as a blade’s edge. “…is to win here, or die trying. If we run, we die slower, that’s all.”

Shahab’s jaw tightened. There was no arguing with truth dressed in despair. ”We are losing slowly and yet still losing”

“Then let’s slow it, don’t you think?” Alpheo said without mirth,without smile, without hope.

“Fill every gap you can. If we are to break, we’ll break buying minutes that others might turn into hours.Our best chance is the front…. I will hold them to charge.”

He knew what that meant, he had just hoped his earlier evaluation would not meet reality.

He spurred his horse again, riding through the blood-slick mud, shouting, pointing, breathing the fire of command into whatever remained of the line.

Ordering them to charge, even though he knew that would luckily failed. And yet what choice did they have?

Thruthfully he was at a loss.Every battlefield he had fought, the outcome was decided and molded by his hands, this time it was out of them.

He hoped for the best but expected the worst.

But then, as if summoned by the gods themselves, the wind changed.

It began as a small as a whisper, then a rising roar.

Dust erupted from the far horizon, a vast and churning cloud big enough to swallow the edge of the world, or so it seemed to him at that moment.

Alpheo and Shahab turned toward it, their eyes reflecting the same terrible light.

For a heartbeat, neither spoke.

They both knew what that dust meant and yet did not know what it would bring.

In it rode the answer to every prayer and every curse whispered since dawn. Whether it carried salvation or their graves,they could not tell, it could have been the enemy as much as ally. But one truth filled both their hearts as the ground began to tremble beneath the charge.

Whatever came from that dust would decide the fate of them all.

That , in all its truth, was no longer on their hands.