Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 923

Capítulo 923: Rat Catcher(6)

It was always the same story.Always.

Give a fish an empty pond and it immediately fancies itself the leviathan of a forgotten sea. Yarzat had that effect on criminals,its freedom, its looseness, its lack of any true orderin the low echelons of the pyramid, gave men illusions of grandeur.

There were no established families to appease, nohigher power to bribe, no great overlord demanding tribute, Laedio had taken care of all of them.

So..as long as you kept yourself tucked beneath the city’s awareness, you could pretend the world lay open before you.

Pretend to be the most important word of all.

Importance on pretend.

Because once you were found then the emptiness of the pond explained itself.The predators had already eaten everything else.

“Mercy! MERCY!” a man wailed, collapsing to his knees, hands spread in supplication, face contorted into whatever thing could incite pity, as if he had not been part of the rot that wanted to spoil the prince’s city. His voice cracked, broke, clawed at the air like he was reaching for salvation that had never existed.

Laedio answered him with an arc that ended with his mace across the man’s temple.

The sound was a short, wet tak, and the man folded, twitching, blood threading down the side of his face like spilled ink. He was not unconscious yet; his eyes still fluttered open, wide, glassy, pleading as he died.

“What did you expect?” Laedio murmured, barely sparing him a glance. “Milk and cookies only cause you begged?”

His voice was dry, almost bored, as he stepped past the man and surveyed the cavern.

The slaughter was unfolding exactly as he had predicted. At first, he had wondered if eighty men would be enough; the den was rumored to house dozens, maybe more, and cornered vermin sometimes fought with the desperation of the doomed. But one look around him showed how misplaced those concerns had been.

They had struck them mid-vice, mid-game, mid-rot.Dices scattered. Cards abandoned. Cups overturned. Half-drunk bottles rolling across dirt floors. A scene frozen at the instant of shock.

And criminals, big, loud, self-proclaimed predators, were now fleeing in circles, screaming, scrambling, slipping in their own panic as the disciplined line of guards carved its way through them.

Not a stand.Not a formation.Not even a coordinated shout.

Just bodies running from the inevitable.

There was a strange, quiet beauty in the efficiency of it. Something hypnotic in the way his troops moved. Laedio found himself drawn again and again to the violence, not for its gore, but for its order. The precision of it. The clean lines of an execution well carried out.

Even though he had never admitted it…he was envious of Egil, Jarza and Asag. He always wanted to lead men, so this sight was the bandage to his bleeding heart.

Still he would never say that aloud to anyone; he had a good thing going here, and he hated pity.

He caught sight of one of his men, the broad-shouldered manfrom the Stonewater district, who had a sister raped by a gang who avoided justice long before the prince’s arrival, locking weapons with a criminal who swung an axe in blind terror.

He was one of his best men, and even thought about giving him a promotion. The thought became intention once he saw him more.

The man caught the blow on his buckler as if brushing aside a child’s arm, stepped in with mechanical surety, and rammed his mace into the man’s flank with a dull crunch that sang of shattered ribs. The scream that followed cracked high, animal-like.

The guard gave no pause.Two more strikes fell in quick succession.One would have been enough.

But Laedio didn’t hire ordinary men for his elite units.

These were men who hated the rats even more than he did. Men who did not see criminals as people but as infestations that needed cleansing.

Laedio’s kind of people.

These men didn’t kill out of duty.They killed because they wanted the world to be cleaner than when they found it. It took time to make up the numbers for sure,many of them were not in the best physical state, but damns the gods if the wait had not been worth it.

For Laedio, watching them move through the den like a well-oiled machine of righteous destruction, could only feel pride at the sight.

The coarse rasp of breath, his own, or another’s followed by the heavy churn of boots grinding dirt, dragged Laedio back from that brief drowning of his thoughts. He surfaced back into the world in time to see death itself standing a finger’s width from his throat.

His eyes snap open, wide and glass-bright, just as an axe,its edge so near it feels like the ghost of a lover’s kiss licking his neck.

It luckily just cuts through the air where his neck had leaned only heartbeats before.

He has no moment to savor existence, no epiphany about the sweetness of life or the grace of survival. He registers nothing except the unnatural whisper of air sliding along the side of his throat. A breeze? Here? Impossible. They were entombed beneath the earth.

Then he understands.

Not a breeze.

A curse sparks between his teeth as he wrenches his buckler up just before the next blow lands, saving his head by a margin far too thin for comfort.

The blow still get his arm tingling as if ants were making nest under his skin.

The bastard had two axes, and he didn’t even allow him to breath.

Enormously broad as a barn door, thick-necked, muscled like a man carved from quarry-stone. A brute so hulking Laedio fleetingly imagines Jarza himself might have sized him up before deciding whether to wrestle him.

Laedio shifted himself to counter when again the phantom wind brushes his spine.

This time the impact follows.A fist-sized explosion of pain hammers between his shoulders, pitching him forward.

Something clattered to the dirt behind him.

It seemed the world was truly out for his head.

There was an archer at his back.

His instincts screamed, look, look, look, the urge as primal as flinching from fire, but he forced it down. There was no space, no breath, no margin: the giant refuses him the luxury of turning. Any movement not devoted to survival would have cost him his head.

Laedio sidestepped, retreated, and then angled himself, positioning the brute directly between him and the bowman.

With his line of sight cleared just long enough, he saw the archer’s face twist in frustration. The man mouthed a curse and sucked in air to shout at his companion.

Probably a curse to telly him to get the fuck out of the way.

He didn’t get the chance.Laedio would have been a goner if not for his second in command who had just cut off the little shit’s head without even breaking a stride.

Still, there was no time to cheer at that as the giant moved against him.

Clang.

Laedio caught one axe on his buckler, sliding backward through the dirt, letting the impact bleed safely into the ground rather than into bone. He gave ground deliberately, granting Hypathio room to close in.

He had no desire to finish this fight alone, so he bought time.

The brute realizesd too late what is happening as the kill that claimed the archer’s head was done in silence. His eyes flick from Laedio to the incoming gallant knight, and something like animal panic cracked across his face. Had he been trained, had he spent even one season among soldiers, he might have known how to pivot cleanly, how to deny the trap tightening around him.

But he was not trained. He was only strong.

And strength was rarely enough.

With another raw, gut-torn howl, he abandoned Laedio entirely and barreled toward Hypathio, thinking to find easier meat in him, swinging an axe with a force that could cleave a horse in half.

For a heartbeat Laedio truly believed his friend to be done.

His mind stuttered, unable to reconcile the reality of the blow with the expectation that Hypathio should already have been crumpling beneath it.

But Hypathio instead stood .Steel meeting steel.

And the scream that erupted was not his.

It was the giant’s. One of his arms buckled at the elbow with a crack like a snapped branch.

The brute dropped to one knee in shock, flailing behind him in a desperate blind swing as he surveyed the arm that stood linked with his forearm with just a strip of flesh.

It just cut empty air.

Laedio who had just taken the bastard’s arm with a swing, was no longer there.

The brute’s eyes found him at last.

They widened, not with rage,not in surprise, but with the dawning knowledge of what was next, as both men closed in at the same time.

Thuck

In a single clean motion, Laedio arced through the space between them.

The giant’s head tumbled free, rolling through the dirt with a heavy bounce, while the neck sent up a violent fountain, gouting upward as if the earth itself was spitting him back out, refusing to keep such a creature within its soil.

The body knelt a moment longer, swaying.

Then collapsed.

They breathed heavily at that, the two of them, their eyes moving away from the Goliath they had just killed and toward each other.

“Shiiiiiit…”Laedio let the word escape on a long, exhausted groan as he tipped his head back, chin lifted, eyes closed. His neck popped loudly when it settled against the damp wall of packed earth. “That,” he muttered between breaths, “was some mad shit.”

“Mad doesn’t begin to cover it,” Hypathio agreed, flexing his right arm with a painful wince. “Bastard swung like he was trying to chop down a temple column. I swear the fucker was carved from ox meat.”

Laedio snorts, still not bothering to open his eyes. “I could feel the breeze off the bastard’s arrows while the axe tried to chop me up. I should start praying to the gods.”

“How polite of you,” Hypathio said dryly, rubbing at the dent on his vambrace.

Laedio finally cracked an eye open and gestures vaguely toward the carnage echoing around them. “How’s it going with the others? Any trouble?”

The moment the words leave his mouth, he realized how idiotic the question is, because all he had to do is actually look.

So he does.

The scene before them was as one-sided as a butcher’s ledger. The criminals were now scrambling like frightened chickens, tripping over each other in their desperation to flee Laedio’s advancing line. Some attempted to fight, but they were put down quickly. Others drop to their knees, sobbing, hands raised in surrender.

Laedio’s men grant no gentle receptions.

A thief who dares surrender get a mace to the kneecap and is left howling in the dirt while the guards move on to the next target. A man trying to crawl away gets shoved face-first into the mud by a shield and trampled as the line advances. The air is filled with shouts, cries, and the dull rhythm of metal striking bone.

“I think you can see for yourself,” Hypathio answers absently, watching a fleeing counterfeiter get flattened beneath two shields. “They’re handling things.”

He pauses, squinting ahead.”There’s a fork further down.”

Laedio lowered his head, rolled his shoulders, and let out a thoughtful hum. Which way were they to go?

“Hypathio,” he said slowly as he turned to his saviour, “how do you feel about leading a squad, my dear friend?”