Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 922

Capítulo 922: Rat catcher(5)

No one spoke as they took their positions.Not a jest passed between teeth, not a sigh slipped into the air, not even the faintest sniff betrayed a trembling nerve.

It was the kind of silence that pressed on the eardrums, allowing each man to feel his heartbeat.

Laedio would have felt pride at their discipline, had his mind not been entirely swallowed by the task at hand.

It had taken time, something that he did not have at leisure, time his temper did not want to spare, but at last Sherman had folded into the plan. And gods, had it proven worthwhile: the two carpets in the tanning room, the ones they had dismissed as mere clutter, hid the very prize they’d been hunting for months.

A hatch.Flush with the floor, and the more they gazed upon the more they realised how damnedly clever it was.

No handle.No hinge.No grip.

A door meant to be opened only from below, unless one of course had a trembling shoemaker with a hostage at stake and no more room left for cowardice.

Without Sherman, the only way in would have been to smash the slab open, announcing themselves like fools and chasing shadows through the tunnels again, giving the rats enough time to vanish into dirt and drainage. Another failure. Another month of sleepless rage. Another corpse or two floating up in the river.

Not today.

They pressed into position, tight against the walls, clustered in a ring around the hatch. Any man peering up through the hole would see only Sherman, pale, sweating, alone, and never the semicircle of blades and boots waiting in the dark ready to pounce like wolves on a deer.

The shoemaker stepped forward, kneeling by the lid. His hand hovered uncertainly, shaking so hard his nails scraped the wood.

He cast a desperate glance at Laedio.

Laedio offered him the smallest nod, barely a tilt of the chin, barely a ripple of expression.

Whether the encouragement truly reached the man or whether fear simply squeezed the breath from his lungs, Sherman drew in a trembling gasp and lifted his fist.

He knocked twice.

Two dull, heavy thuds.

A voice drifted up from the deep thick, muffled, impatient.

“What is it?”

Sherman swallowed, nearly choking on his own tongue.”It-It’s me. Sherman. I—I’m at a bit of a loss here. Vior… Vior left the place and told me to tell you of it once he was away…”

Silence.Horrible, clenching silence.Laedio’s grip tightened around the rope wound in his palms.

Did they realize the problem?Should he order his men forward with axes?

Fear overtake him. Then it blooms away like leaves on winter when a rough voice resume from below.

“What do you mean he left the place?”

“He says…he actually gave no explanation. He just left and told me to report it.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“No. Yes. No. I… I’m sorry I am lost myself.”

“Damn the gods, I cannot understand you idiots.”

Metal scraped against metal, the sound of heavens it seemed to Laedio’s hear , a thick iron bolt grinding free of a bracket.Then the heavy, suffocating groan of hinges buried deep beneath earth.

The hatch lifted.

A sliver of light gleamed from below, and a head rose cautiously into view, dark hair, greasyeyes squinting.

“I’ll be beatin—what the fu—”

The man’s face barely had time to register confusion before the rope hooked across his chest. Confusion cracked into panic as the tension snapped tight. The noose bit upward, jerking violently. His throat slammed into the edge of the hatch with a hollow, choking thud.

Not enough to knock him out, not that Laedio had ever counted on something so merciful.

He could have kept the man pinned there, dangling, choking, thrashing like some hooked river fish, , until the fight inside him guttered out. It would’ve taken less than a minute. A leisurely minute. Laedio had done it before.

But time was the one luxury they did not possess.

So the instant the rope cinched tight, the guard standing beside Laedio, one of the many, stepped forward and dealt with the man as they would with a fish out of water, striking the back of the man’s skull .

It came with a sickening thump followed by a brittle crack that silenced the strangled whimpers still trapped in the dying throat.

The body went limp.

Laedio loosened the rope, letting the corpse slump forward. It tumbled down the wooden steps leading underground, skidding past Sherman, who flinched away, eyes bulging, witnessing death for the second time in the span of minutes.

No one spared the shoemaker a glance. His usefulness had run dry.

The eighty guards Laedio had brought slipped into the hatch one after the other, shadows pouring down a throat of earth. No metal clinked, no voice murmured, no breath came louder than a whisper. They descended unseen, unheard, and this time unexpected.

When the last man’s boots vanished below, Laedio followed, lowering himself into the pit with the slow, measured grace of a man stepping over his hell.

The smell was certainly that.

The tunnels greeted him like a lung of packed soil: damp, narrow, tasting of mildew and stale iron. Barely two men could walk shoulder to shoulder and even then they would brush, scrape, collide.

The hardest part was done. Now came the part he lived for.

“It’s dark here… torch,” one of the men whispered from the front ranks.

A second guard pressed the wooden shaft into his hands. He struck a dagger against a flint.

One spark, then another, then a third catching. A bloom of fire sputtered to life, coughing light into the cramped dark. The flame flickered over their faces pupils shrinking against the glow.

Then silence again.

They were not dressed as city guards. No proud breastplates. No helmets gleaming like river-pebbles. Armor was a liability for stealth, nearly a hundred men in full panoply moving through the capital would have drawn attention before they made it halfway across a street.

Up here, silence mattered more than steel.

So they wore only chainmail and buckler shields of the Yarzat garrison behind normal cloth. It wasn’t elegant, it wasn’t prime, but it was enough.

It would have to be.

They pressed deeper onto the maw of the earth

The ceiling dipped so low Laedio had to angle his head, one hand brushing against the rough walls that had been carved by inexperienced men.

I wonder how they took care of the dirt…there must have been tons down here

As he moved, as the darkness pressed against his cloak and the torchlight danced over the tight-packed backs of the men before him, he found his mind straying, if only for the briefest moment, to the words spoken to him seven years ago.

Words that had sunk into him like a nail.Becoming his motto.

This city is rotten, Laedio. I will not have it.Cleanse every inch of it.

Even now, the syllables still kindled a fire in him.That was after all the first time he was given a reason to live.

Even now seven years after those simply vocals were uttered, the fire that pushed Laedio forward was still there, unabated and always eager for more.

He had learned to find pleasure in that.

And there was no more joyous thing than a man who found happiness in his daily toil.

They spilled out of the tunnel like a ruptured artery, bursting into the underworld’s chamber with a violence that shattered the stale quiet that had lingered there for gods know how long. Cornered pests, jolted awake from the illusion of safety they had built around themselves.

They had made an heaven from shit , but now hell had finally arrived.

Laedio was far at the rear of the formation, and it took a good while before he stepped far enough into the open chamber to see anything beyond the packed bodies of his men. He felt no frustration at missing the first moments of slaughter; he had lived those scenes too many times before. Once you have witnessed the first, you know them all. The patterns change, but the essence never does.

There was no reason to mourn missing the opening act.Especially not when the finale promised so much sweeter spectacle.

Still… the sight before him as he finally emerged into the cavern was reward enough.

His troops were fanning out from the narrow throat of the tunnel in a rush of motion, pouring forth like a burst pipe, not a gentle spring but the violent surge of a river freed from stone. They crashed across the den in a broad wave, shields up, maces low and then up, swallowing anything unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. Some of the vermin tried to flee deeper into the warren; others froze; a few attempted hopeless resistance. It made no difference. The river ate them all.

It did not matter how much effort it had gone to make this possible, for as soon as he laid eyes on the first panicked voice and his hears were blessed by the first screams, he believed it all to have been worth it.

He inhaled deeply, savoring the combined scent of fear, sweat, and churned earth. He may have not had the honor of leading men in battle to glory,as it was the case for his other friends, but he believed this to be compensatory enough.

He had spent so long preparing the field.

Now… it was time to harvest the rewards.