Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 912

Capítulo 912: Battle of the sands(4)

With the Camel Riders of Azania finally breaking and showing their backs, which they believed no mere sea rat could threaten, the Scourge from the Sea erupted in triumph. Their roars split the green plains as if they had just climbed a mountain that existed only in legends.

“Come on! Is this all the best of Azania can do? I’ve seen more balls under a woman’s skirt!” one pirate bellowed, hurling his axe at a retreating rider.

He missed spectacularly.

The axe spun, hit the ground with a small his of sand shifting, and the pirate jogged after it while the rest of his band doubled over laughing.

“How the fuck did they kill the oil-fucker Emperor? Was he asleep?”Another asked, scratching the crust out of his eyes and leaning on the shoulder of a comrade who still smelled like last night’s ale.

A third man knelt beside a corpse, plucked the rider’s ornate helmet from his crushed neck, and plopped it proudly onto his own head.

“Honestly? That was underwhelming as shit.They are overrated if you ask me….still, they do have nice hats….”

“Don’t let it go over your head,” someone muttered behind him.

“What the fuck is that supposed t—”

He turned, saw who he was talking to, and turned as pale as the clouds in the sky.

“S-Sorry Cap’n, didn’t see you there,” he squeaked, nearly tearing the helmet off as he scrambled away to get out of the man’s nose.

In response, Blake simply exhaled through his nose.At least their morale was high; that was one victory of the morning.

He stepped away from the mangled masterpiece he’d carved earlier, wiping blood from his cheek with the back of his wrist.

Another pirate instantly became the second irritant of the day, boasting loudly about how he had scared the camels off, though Blake clearly remembered that same man pissing himself when the beasts first charged.

For a heartbeat, Blake half-expected the enemy to regroup. To wheel their beasts around for another crushing charge, to try to reclaim their honor.

But no, apparently they had no such pride to boast of. The sight of broken beasts and split riders had sobered them. They were done for the day.

A surprise but still a pleasant one…

He had expected more,much more, from a formation once whispered about like they were desert storms themselves…hell were they really the one that claimed the life of the War-Emperor himself?

He had an hard struggle and instead, the battle had felt like a knife-fight in a market stall. Brutal, short, messy.

And despite the cheering around him, he was sober enough to notice the truth in the dirt.

Bodies. Groaning, twitching, bleeding bodies.Azanian riders pinned under their camels.Confederate whose spines had snapped under hooves.Men clawing at crushed ribs.Men crying out for mothers long dead.

Quite a few of the slaves had bolted the instant the first skull cracked under a camel’s stomp. One even made it ten paces before a pirate behind him buried an axe between his shoulders, shouting:

“Forward means forward, you shitty little ox!”

After that, the rest realized running was simply a quicker way to die.

Even so, the casualties told a cruel story.For that tiny clash, the Azanians had drawn more blood than Blake cared to admit.

But he would not say that aloud.Not with the men cheering as if they’d slain gods.

Blake’s gaze drifted to a pirate who had dropped his trousers entirely, pissing a long steaming line into the sand.

“Drink piss, you camel-licking fucks!”the man shouted at the distant riders, shaking himself like a dog afterward.

Blake pinched the bridge of his nose.

Glory, he understood ,apparently came in all shapes and this time in the form of one pissing triumphantly toward the horizon.

The longer he studied the men he was meant to lead, the more painfully it settled in his gut that any army forged out of this collection of half-drunk, half-mad sea-scum was,by every possible measure,fundamentally incompetent.

He had been given a bad hand…

There had been a time, not even distant in memory, when he convinced himself that their loose, free way of living was precisely what gave them an edge over the land-tied fools who bent their necks to kings and nobles. He had truly believed their strength sprang from freedom and independence, that the absence of shackles hardened them into something superior.

But three campaigns of blood, mud, and misery had shown him just how fucking stupid that belief had been.

He was a fucking boy, young , inexperienced and one who believed men could all be dictated by reason and the understanding of the whole that they represented.

He was wrong.

They need reason or common sense, the masses had none, they needed a leash and a stick for them to do what was best in their interest.

The Confederates had not weathered the centuries because they were strong, or because they were proud; they had simply endured because no enemy had ever possessed both the motivation and the patience to end them properly.

They were fucking cockroaches, too bothersom to properly exterminate.

Destroying their fleets? Certainly possible, the Romelians had shattered them thirty-two years ago and it had given them quite the trouble. Fully conquering the Confederation? That was another matter entirely.

What noble-born general, after investing absurd sums to maintain a campaign army, would willingly hurl it into the thankless chore of subduing more than fifty scattered islands that could barely grow grain, whose people were perfectly capable of vanishing onto the waves for months at a time, and whose population was so thin that even a famine would struggle to notice it?

The truth, brutal and undeniable, was that the Confederation had not survived because it deserved to. It had survived because conquering it was a fucking waste of time.

How funny that their strongest defense was just how worthless their society was to conquer.

It was both underwhelming and humiliating, but it was still their truth.

And that truth needed to change.

Blake would be the one to make it change. He had no alternative; if the Confederates intended not merely to endure but to carve a place for themselves as an empire rather than a nuisance, someone had to drag them away from their antiquated, romanticized filth and forge them into something resembling a nation instead of a general congregation made of people who were regarded as basically pests.

They had been handed the best opportunity seen in generations, a great vacuum in the balance of power…someone had to take advantage of it and he refused to let his people not have someone to make use of that. Almost every nation had its time on the wheel of power, who said this wasn’t theirs?

His thoughts were broken by the sudden, almost physical tightening of the air around them, the way conversations faltered, the way shoulders stiffened, the way men who moments earlier had been laughing like drunkards suddenly stared past him with hollow eyes.

Blake felt the shift before he fully registered it, and when he lifted his gaze, he understood why.

The rest of the Azanian host was marching toward them. Not a mere detachment like the camel riders, not a probing force meant to test their lines, but the full, ordered, terrible might of an empire that had stood for half a millennium.

He could not count them, and there was no need; even a half-blind bastard with a sack over his head would have seen the truth, Azania’s numbers dwarfed theirs beyond measure.

He turned around to face his own men and found not a trace of earlier bravado left among them.

No one jeered.No one bragged.No one shouted taunts across the field.

The Confederates stood in the shadow of the oncoming host like men who had woken to find a mountain sliding down to crush them. Whatever fire the brief victory over the camel riders had sparked now guttered low, leaving behind only the cold, hollow understanding of what true war, one made by an empire, looked like.

They all understood what was coming, and they saw no victory in it.

And, if he were honest with himself, neither did Blake.

But that hardly mattered.Victory had never been their task.They did not need to win, they only needed to hold and buy time for the plan to work.

And so Blake slid the hafts of his axes onto his shoulders, and he let his gaze travel across the vast, disciplined tide rolling toward them, an army older than their whole Confederation.

Strangely, as he saw what most men would define as their death, Blake did not really worry much about it but instead wondered, surprising even himself for the first time in his life, what Cain was doing in that moment.

He truly had got a soft spot for the cripple.