Day 79, 02:20 PM

"When in doubt, use brute force."

— Ken Thompson

There’s really only one path Arangel can take to reach Eaglegord. This continent’s dense forests and highly territorial griffons make troop movement predictable, obvious, and susceptible to ambushes. In short, marching is an army’s greatest moment of weakness, and well placed ambushes are devastating.

Vatten is naturally aware of this, so he positioned us in the forest a hundred yards away from the road.

Back on Earth, proper reconnaissance and experienced scouts were a major boon to a force, but here they are priceless. Yet, no matter how good your scouts are, you can’t expect them to comb the road hundreds of yards left and right on the off chance there’s an ambush; that is, unless you are expecting one.

And Nonovan Arangel believes his soldiers will march into a city that has surrendered, its citizens begging for forgiveness and mercy. A roadside ambush is the last thing on his mind. Still… Just in case…

“If things go south,” I whisper into Manny’s ear, “you run with your honor guard. I will block the enemy. I will either catch up with you, or we will talk things through two weeks ago.”

“It still very much confuses me when you speak of the past in future tense and of the future in a past tense. Fortunately, you rarely do that. Now, will you stop making plans which start with, ‘after I die’?” Her voice is calm and even, but I’ve got enough brains to know it’s just a tough front.

“We have agreed before that I will do my best to survive and triumph, but minor recklessness and death are acceptable outcomes.”

“I have never agreed to your death being an acceptable outcome of any situation.”

She’s got a point, she never agreed to that particular outcome, so I nod.

“But your death is definitely unacceptable. If you die, I will follow you.”

“And what if you are leaving an orphan behind that way?”

I open my mouth, then close it. I haven’t explored that option yet. There’s just the two of us for now, and life is easy, but things will grow complicated when there’s three of us or four or five.

“Speechless, are we? I know you have an amazing and keen mind. Could you focus your faculties on immediate and practical problems without acting on impulse? Please?”

I don’t think so.

“I don’t think so,” Blunt’s words escape my lips.

Manny turns around and glares at me from two inches away.

“Your problem is not the curse which makes you say things you think. Your problem are the things you think.”

She told me that four or five times already, and I agree with her, but changing the way I think is not a simple task, definitely not something I can accomplish in a day or two.

“You’re right,” I say, but her glare turns even fiercer, like she’s trying to laser her way through my skull.

I swear I will never understand women. I don’t even know whether she has agreed to run away with me protecting her rear, or whether she’ll order her personal guard to fight alongside me.

Hopefully, it’s the former. I’m not the only one with a child to worry about.

Half an hour trickles by in tense silence before I hear it, the batting of hundreds of marching feet, and the clatter of metal against stone.

They did bring cavalry.

Vatten guessed count Arangel would field a hundred horsemen, twenty heavy cavalry and eighty light. The only thing he wasn’t certain about was how many knights the count would bring.

Arangel family has three knight retainers as household guests, and Vatten painted the professional men of war just as scary as Phill. My stomach flips on itself, and my breathing quickens.

I doubt I can handle three of them in my current condition.

We have the mercenary cavalry of our own. They are five hundred yards away, and when the fighting starts, they will ride out onto the road and trample the enemy’s rear while our infantry tears into their flanks.

God, if they turn on us, we’re absolutely screwed.

I keep my worries to myself, and soon Vatten hears the enemy’s approach. Our soldiers creep through the forest, inching closer to the road.

“Kill!” hundreds of men repeat Vatten’s battle-cry and the fight begins.

Manny and I can’t see a thing, a hundred yards’ worth of trees and shrubs obscuring our vision.

“Ambush!”

“Protect the lord!”

“Escape the encirclement! Punch through!”

I prick up my ears, but the panicked screams of my men yelling treason don’t come, and some of the tension seeps out of me. A sudden thunder of hooves towers above the yelling and clash of metal before drowning in an ocean of screams.

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Good. The merc cavalry stabbed their back rather than ours. My final worry vanishes. We outnumber them, they are in a thin, marching formation, pincered between two charging groups of infantry, with cavalry cutting off their escape.

I recall what Vatten said about mercenaries, and the battle is proving him right. Not two minutes pass before cries for mercy and surrender fill the air. The only ones still fighting are Arangel and his personal guard, and by the sound of it, they are slaughtering whoever tries to block their escape.

“Ten crowns for Arangel’s head, a crown for each of his bodyguards!” Vatten shouts, and the fighting grows louder.

I take several moments to realize the fighting isn’t getting more intense, the enemy is drawing closer to our position.

“Take the duchess and run,” I hiss at Manny’s bodyguards, having the presence of mind not to alert a keen-eared enemy that our key figure is some fifty yards away from them.

Twenty veterans move immediately, forming a circle around Manny and moving in the direction I’m pointing, not deeper into the forest, but towards Eaglegord, in the one direction I’m almost certain Arangel would not go while fleeing.

The screams grow even louder and suddenly there’s a cheer.

“We’re out! Ride! Ride!”

Unfortunately for the heavy cavalry, we’re ready for them. The twenty vets assigned to me use the bushes to form an invisible wall of spears and impale the three frontmost horses.

The steel-clad beasts scream, and I step out from outside a tree, armed not with Batsy, but with a heavy ax.

“Trap!” A man in dark-gray full plate armor shouts while falling off his dying destrier.

The cavalry behind him stops, their mounts rearing and neighing. Among them, a man wearing a crimson and gold cloak stands out. The massive horned helmet conceals his features, but I’m fairly certain he is Arangel. Moron. His conspicuous getup is exactly why I dress like common rank and file.

Kill him, and this first stage of the war is as good as won.

I heave and hurl the heavy ax. There’s barely twenty feet between us, but the ax’s flight is odd, its center of mass much different from a dagger or a sword. The whirling shaft strikes a branch and instead of cleaving the count in half, the ax smashes into his shoulder. Metal screams and bends, then a severed arm soars through the air, blood spraying the armored man-of-war standing to Arangel’s right.

“My Lord,” the man shouts, and count Arangel sways in his saddle, dead silent.

“Protect the Lord!”

I focus on the swaying count, and information floods my mind.

Unconscious. Critical condition. Massive hemorrhaging, shock due to trauma and limb loss, staunch the bleeding as soon as possible.

Huh? How did that happen?

It doesn’t really matter right now, but I file it for later consideration. What’s important right now is that Arangel is dying, and unless a miracle surgeon materializes out of thin air, he’s as good as dead.

The cavalry company panics. They turn left, away from Eaglegord, and protect their lord with their bodies, abandoning the three men who lost their mounts.

Spears find two of them before they pick themselves up from under their armored horses, and dying screams, with which I have grown so familiar with, echo in my ears. The third man, however, does not die. The soldiers stabbing him jump back, their spears reduced to stumped poles. He stands, shield in one hand, big-ass-sword in the other.

“Retreat,” I shout, immediately aware he would slaughter common soldiers. I am unarmed, unarmored, facing a fully armed, fully armored, and completely enraged knight.

“Fetch me my staff.” I stare at the terminator who stood up after falling off a horse then parried three attacks simultaneously like they were nothing.

What crazy skills do knights get? What’s his level? I am in awe and envious, yet I wouldn’t trade Select Principal for the world.

The knight ignores me and turns to follow after his comrades, but I move, and his steel-plated face instantly turns towards me.

“Are you, by any chance, interested in surrendering and serving a new lord?” I give it a shot, but the steel can before me doesn’t move a finger. “Guess not.”

Somebody passes me Batsy, and I know I’m fucked. Initial Staffsmanship is useless, since I can’t wield her like a staff. The best I can do is swing her one handed, like a club, and rely on her toughness, my stats, and passive skills to overwhelm the juggernaut before me.

I could just let him go. He’s armored, we could hound him and wait for him to fall asleep.

For some reason, I’m not really sure that’s wise. I have a feeling he will ditch his armor as soon as possible, and become twice as deadly as he is right now.

I swing Batsy at him. He doesn’t budge at my faint as the staff misses him by half a foot. Finally, I understand everything Phill told me about knights, the level of danger they pose to me, especially when I can’t fight properly.

“Your lord is dead or will be in the next five minutes. Why not—”

“Fight or move out of my way.”

I want to argue I’m not really in his way, and that he can go if he’s willing to expose his back to me.

“I’m not in your way,” Blunt says. “You’re heading that way.”

It even points towards the general direction in which count Arangel’s escort had fled.

The knight grinds his teeth so loudly it makes it past the helmet, then shouts and rushes towards me.

My instincts tell me to run, my wisdom tells me it would be bad for the soldiers’ morale and that running around until I tire him out would harm my reputation. So, I stab at him with Batsy, using her like a really really long, really really dull short spear.

She’s neither short nor speary, but she strikes like an adder, and the knight has no time to use his shield. He swats her with the flat of his sword, his blow strong enough to disarm a normal man. I’m not a normal man. Batsy hardly shifts to the left before hitting him in the breast. The armor clangs, my arm shudders, but doesn’t budge, and the running knight staggers back, spinning, his momentum adding to my blow.

Thanks Phill! Who would’ve guessed getting used to hundreds of pounds smacking against you has real-world applications outside psychological torture.

I raise Batsy, then smash down. Any other man I fought so far would have ended up with his head pulverized, but even dazed, the knight raises his shield in time. Batsy smashes into it, and he grunts. I hit him again, and again, and again, finding a rhythm and suppressing him completely. My fighting style is no different from an angry gorilla pounding away with a steel bar, but that should be fine. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to challenge an angry gorilla wielding a steel bar.

Suddenly, he steps to the side. I stagger as Batsy meets no resistance and whistles towards the ground. The bloody steel terminator jumps towards me, sword slashing. I panic and spin on instinct, dragging Batsy with my chest into a sweep.

Ironwood squeezes my left arm before striking the knight’s exposed flank and sending him flying into the tree, shield, armor, and all. Dark bark bursts as he slams into the trunk like a boulder, bouncing off it, and landing face-first on the ground.

After my experiences in Garacia, I don’t have a chivalrous bone in me, not that I ever believed in a fair fight. Batsy slams into his helmet, burying his face into the ground. I hit him over and over until the back of his head is level with the forest floor.

Finally, I heave a breath and look up, several dozen men staring at me in shock before someone cheers, and everyone picks it up.

“Oorah!”