Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 913

Capítulo 913: Battle of the sands(5)

”O, fare you well, I wish you well!

Goodbye, fare you well; goodbye, fare you well!

O, fare you well, my bonny young lassies,

Hurrah, my boys, we’re homeward bound!

The billows roll, the breezes blow,

Goodbye, fare you well; goodbye, fare you well!

To us they’re calling: sheet home and go!

Hurrah, my boys, we’re homeward bound!

With whores on deck, we hail you well.

We’re homeward bound, and I hear the sound,

Goodbye, fare you well; goodbye, fare you well!

So heave on the caps’n and make it spin round.

Hurrah, my boys, we’re homeward bound!

With gold on deck, we hail you not bad.

Our anchor’s aweigh and our sails they are set,

Goodbye, fare you well; goodbye, fare you well!

And the girls we are leaving we leave with regret.

Hurrah, my boys, we’re homeward bound!

With shit on deck, we envy you all.

She’s a flash ship and bound for to go,

Goodbye, fare you well; goodbye, fare you well!

With the girls on her towrope she cannot say no.

Hurrah, my boys, we’re homeward bound!

With death on deck, we weep for life all.

To us they’re calling: sheet home and go!

Hurrah, my boys, we’re homeward bound!”

The song went on for another round as the wind blew against their ear.

Kroll loved every damned inch of the life he’d carved for himself.

The raging seas that tossed lesser men overboard like crumbs, the salt winds that slapped the taste back into your mouth, the cramped decks where a dozen bored bastards passed time by drinking, brawling, or scratching themselves raw, he loved all of it. That chaos was home. That stink was family.

He loved the way a man could point at any direction on the horizon and simply go, without needing the permission of some powdered noble whose greatest hardship was getting out of bed without face-planting on polished marble.

Freedom had teeth, and yes, it could bite off a limb or two, but at least the bite was honest. Land-dwellers bragged that they never had to endure storms that turned the sky black and the sea white, but Kroll knew they never had to beg the mercy of some fat merchant counting coins, and lords setting quotas so high a man’s back broke long before his debt did.

Kroll had made a living by raiding those pampered bastards. And there wasn’t a single treasure in the world he would trade for that life. Not kingdom. Not peace. Not even comfort.

But even he had to admit the sight before him now was nothing he ever expected to have a stake in his freedom.

Under normal circumstances he would have cursed the idea of dragging ships against such a flow, but Cain… damn it all, Cain had found a way to make it work.

The man was wasted rotting at home. He had been right

And Blake, that stubborn bastard, was finally seeing it.

To drag their naval craft upriver in the middle of a land battle… who in the abyss would have thought of that? Only Cain. Only that quiet, mouse-like bastard.

Of course, the task itself was hellish. The river fought them every heartbeat, pulling at the hull like a starving monster refusing to let go. Even with the wind blessedly at their backs, its push kept trying to slam them against the muddy banks if they didn’t correct for it every second.

Which meant the entire crew had to work as though they were two men each,hands blistering on the oars, muscles screaming as they rowed in perfect rhythm, backs arching and snapping forward like the sea itself was watching and judging their form. Every ten minutes the slaves were swapped out before exhaustion drowned them, the fresh ones shoved into place like spare parts in a machine.

And yet Kroll’s crew moved like a chorus. Not a single complaint. Not a stumble in cadence. They rowed the way they sang: loud, proud, and perfectly synchronized even through the grunts and curses.

Kroll found himself humming along, the rhythm sinking into his blood.

Gods, if those bastards could make a shanty out of a death sentence.

Still, as he watched the shoreline slide by, saw the camp fire smoke thickening ahead, and felt the strain of thousands of lives hanging on the gamble they were steering into place… he knew this was, without question, the heaviest sail he’d ever commanded.

Not the hardest, but surely the one with most at stake.

They had to hurry for only the Gods knew how hard Blake was having it as they sang and roared.

———————

He thought he could have wrung a little more amusement out of the fool who came screaming toward him, waving his chipped blade as though he might claim the honor of taking Blake’s head. The man barely had time to blink before Blake’s left hand shot out, fingers locking around his throat with a grip that felt more like iron than flesh.

The idiot’s eyes bulged, his mouth opening and closing like a fish torn from the water as he clawed at Blake’s arm.

He thrashed with all the desperation of a hog realizing what the butcher’s smile truly meant, legs kicking, elbows jerking, fists pounding uselessly against the sinew of Blake’s forearm. There was fury in him, but compared to the sea, that ancient beast Blake had battled his whole life, this man’s rage was nothing more than a summer breeze trying to topple a storm.

He grew bored the moment the man’s blows turned soft, when his limbs stopped flailing and instead draped pathetically against Blake’s side like wet cloth. Where was the fun in a kill when the fight had already died out of it?

With a grunt of disappointment, Blake brought his axe down in a single, efficient stroke. The body sagged. He let it drop without ceremony.

For a heartbeat he stood there, listening, not to the screams or the clash of metal, but to the deeper thrum that sat beneath it all. He didn’t know how long the clash had been raging. Time had dissolved the moment steel met bone.

He was most certainly having fun , but he had a work to tend to.

But judging by the state of the ground and by the ragged breathing of the men still fighting at his side, it had been long enough.

Too long.

The Confederates were holding, which in itself was something worth a drunken tale. They fought like devils cornered in their own hell, axes rising and falling with that vicious rhythm born from a lifetime at sea. And yet… he could see the truth even through the haze of battle. They were dying.

Not many at once, never in waves, but one here, two there, a man screaming as a spear found his ribs, another swallowed by a charging beast of some lord who thought it would be an easy enough fight against some rats….the last one Blake went out of his way to kill by throwing his axe, hence the reason he was having fun toying with people’s necks with his free hand.

They were suffering enough casualties that even Blake, so used to the chaos that he barely noticed wounds on his bodies, found himself counting them subconsciously.

The Azanians, by contrast, could bleed rivers and still have a damned ocean of bodies left to throw into the fray. They had numbers. Endless numbers. A luxury never afforded to the Confederates, whose strength was not in quantity but in the stubborn refusal to die quietly.

What did it matter if they were carving twice as many Azanians into the soil as they themselves were losing? Numbers didn’t care about honor. Numbers didn’t care about valor. Numbers simply crushed you beneath their weight.

A spearhead cracked against his breastplate, dragging him back into the present. Blake didn’t even flinch. He merely stepped forward, ignoring the weapon scraping along the iron as though it were an irritating itch. He saw the Azanian’s eyes widen, saw the moment the man realized he had failed, that he had brought a twig to a storm.

Blake buried his axe in the man’s skull, the crunch loud enough to bite through the din of battle.

He shoved the corpse aside and exhaled, feeling the heat of the fight wrapping around him. All around him his warriors howled and struck, but for the first time since the charge began, a whisper cut through the back of his mind.

We cannot hold forever.

And yet he had to. They had to.

He hated how thoughtful he was being. During the battle for Khairo, there had been no room for thought. He wasn’t stupid; he knew that frenzy hadn’t been normal, knew some force far greater than his own rage had sunk its claws into his spine that day.But he liked , so now he wondered where was that fire now.

Yes, he was fighting,breaking spines, lopping off heads, splitting skulls like overripe fruit,but the thrill wasn’t the same. The edge of it had dulled, and he felt it, irritatingly, unmistakably.

Why?This battle was certainly more chaotic, more vicious, more knee-deep in blood than the one before. If anything should have stoked him hotter, it was this.

Was he growing weary of fighting?No. Absolutely not. Five minutes ago he’d shattered an Azanian’s face by smashing it against his own helmet, felt the bones fold like wet clay. He’d enjoyed it well enough.

Maybe the issue wasn’t the fight.Maybe it was the one presiding over it?

His eyes drifted upward for a heartbeat, even though instinct told him to keep them down to the ground. But he stared into the sky anyway, wondering if the Red Fucker even cared how this day turned out.

The more he thought on it, the more the certainty crawled over him: the old hag was not to be trusted. Should he kill her after he claimed the crown? The thought had teeth, and it bit him every time it returned. He wasn’t fool enough to think a new religion shoved onto their Isles would make him beloved. But was he brave enough to risk inviting the wrath of a power he knew existed?

He grunted, shaking blood from his axe.Bah. No use thinking on that now. I still have this damned fight to carve through.

And yet the thoughts kept creeping back, slipping between his ribs no matter how many men he dropped into the great unknown. No matter how much meat he turned to ruin with his axe, the pit in his chest refused to close.

Only the sudden blast of horns,the deep, triumphant note rolling across the battlefield,cut through his thoughts.

Confused shouting rippled through the Azanian ranks. Heads turned.And soon lines faltered.

Blake exhaled all of his tiredness with a breath of air.

Kroll had done it.

After fighting the current, the wind, and sheer common sense, he had brought a quarter of the Confederation’s force around and smashed them into the undefended enemy flank.

Blake didn’t need to shout for his men to roar forward. They knew what was up….

And so they hurled themselves into the man-mande breach with a vigor no one would have expected from fighters who had been locked in the meat-grinder for hours. Their roars drowned even the horns for a moment.

He should have felt triumph.Pride.

But instead, as he watched the Azanian line buckle, as he saw fear spread like cracks through a shield, as the tide finally began to turn.

He only felt weary.

Had he not won?Why was he like this?