Officer Corpse - Rotney

His job was easy. That's why he liked it, and it was the only reason he'd accepted Captain Seventeen's promotion

This whole invasion thing?

Not easy. And for that reason, he was very much looking forward to it being done. If the invaders could just... wake up and figure out that this was all a pointless exercise and go back home, then he could go back to lackadaisical days of light training and days spent reading in secret while he was supposed to be working.

Or maybe he could spend another day enticing some of the city strays close enough for him to pet? That had been a nice afternoon.

Rotney yawned, then made a guttural groan as his jaw clunked off his chestplate and thumped onto the sandy ground. He knelt down, picked it up, and slit it back into place. Just as he finished standing back up, an arrow lodged itself into his neck.

Had he been a little slower picking up his jaw off the ground he might have avoided that one, but alas it wasn't to be.

At the moment he was standing on the outer edge of a battlefield.

A small one, admittedly, but a battlefield nonetheless. His forces included three hundred zombies with mixed arms. Poles, a few swords, some shields, and plenty of weapons that they'd cobbled together from what they found laying around.

That meant a lot of shields made from doors and clubs made from table legs.

All in all, his army was far from impressive, but what they lacked in equipment they also lacked in manpower and overall strength.

The living human army clashing ahead of them was ripping through his soldiers with ease. They had long polearms with wicked axeheads on the end, or narrow, pointy spears that could easily punch through their makeshift shields.

Rotney sighed. "Seventy-second rank, pull back," he said. "Seventy-third rank, brace!"

This battle had started at sun-up.

The army had crested a hill, still a day's walk from Yu Xiang, and had discovered a line of a hundred zombies standing in their path.

A cultivator had leapt ahead and decimated them.

Then a second rank of zombies rose from the ground ten necrometres back and charged in. Hidden amongst the zombies were a few surprises, of course. Some wights and skeletal warriors, a few abominations buried in the sandier parts of the ground.

Enough that weaker cultivators turned into dead cultivators.

And so the army had stepped up and took matters into their own well-organised hands. Men with spears formed ranks and poked his undead compatriots to re-death. The bodies were pulled aside and tossed onto fire pits that were quickly dug and lit.

Then the army advanced, took out the next rank, then the next, then the next. Then... the next. It took until mid morning for the army to run out of fuel for their pits. For them to start dismembering the undead instead, then for them to give up on that entirely and just toss the bodies aside.

Laziness.

Rotney had been counting on it, because he had crews of sneakier undead, as well as a few undead sand worms, ferrying zombie remains out from behind the army and all the way around to a field medic tent of sorts where they were reassembled.

For every hundred zombies lost since the early afternoon, they gained enough parts to recreate ninety.

Yes, that meant a great deal of attrition, but zombies were the lesser of all undead. Those that had burned in those firepits? Well, they'd have the good fortune of being raised as skeletons later. Some of those were already being mixed into the ranks.

"Rank Seventy-Three, fall back!" he ordered.

He was some hundred necrometres away from the front line, sitting on the back of a cart pulled by a pair of undead mules. The cart was covered in stray arrows and ever a single spear that had gotten stuck into the wood.

The enemy knew that he was a commander of some sort. They'd sent some outer-disciple cultivators at him already.

They'd joined the ranks of zombie warriors soon after, and he was now waiting for someone to decide that he was worthy of being killed by an innner disciple.

Or maybe they'd leave him alone? So far he was simply giving retreat and regroup orders.

Rotney glanced up. The sky was turning that particular shade of purple that came when the sun was well and truly on its way to setting.

A full day of this and the enemy losses barely added up to the triple digits. Serpen Tine's traps all along the route had cost the enemy army more than his ranks on ranks of zombies. But that was okay.

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Rotney's job wasn't to kill the enemy. Just as it wasn't Serpen's job to kill them either.

Serpen's task was to keep them awake and stressed. Rotney's task was to keep them tired.

Those almost-a-hundred losses the enemy had suffered? They'd mostly occurred in the last few hours. The troops at the front stabbing into his zombies were sweaty messes. They were being rotated, of course, but only once an hour or so.

He imagined that those being spears of theirs must be feeling pretty heavy right about now.

It would be so much easier to just not swing as hard, to allow the soldier next to them to do a bit more effort to take care of the monster ahead.

Laziness was the bane of many an army. Rotney knew it, and he counted on it too.

Tonight the army would make camp. They'd post watches, but those same watchmen would be the men who'd spent the entire day fighting an army of the undead that seemed endless.

They weren't going to be given a restful night's sleep. The sun dipped lower, casting long shadows across the road-turned-battlefield. Rotney sighed, then stood up straighter, grabbed the side of his mule-pulled cart, and lifted himself up onto the back of it so that he could see from a slightly better vantage.

Ranks Seventy-Three had pulled back and folded into Rank Seventy-Five. "Seventy-Four, pull back!" he ordered.

This was shifting the tempo of the battle. Rank Seventy-Four had barely been reached by the living army and they were already pulling back.

He waited until his troops had formed a much thicker line than usual. So far they'd been keeping about four ranks going, with a fifth constantly forming from a trickle of undead. Whenever a cultivator deigned to leave the centre of the formation to wipe them out, they'd just reform four more ranks a hundred necrometres away and start it all over.

Now...

"Rank Seventy-Five.... Hold."

The humans were exhausted, and yet they hadn't been ordered to stop for the night just yet. It wouldn't make sense for them to. At the moment, they were at the bottom of a slight dip in the terrain. Their visibility wasn't ideal. But the road rose up just ahead, and from atop that hill they'd be able to see the faint lights of Yu Xiang in the distance and have a commanding view of the area as well. It would be the perfect place to camp out for the night. Had they not been harassed by Rotney, the army would be at the top of that hill already. Trenches dug, latrine pits filling, tents erected before the sun dipped below the horizon.

Now, they were pulling out torches all along the formation to better see the encroaching darkness.

"Yeah, this'll do," Rotney decided. A last hoo-rah before he could finally slink back into the city and say that his part was done. "Rank Seventy-Six... charge!"

A new order, one that hadn't come yet.

The seventy-sixth rank, still a little rag-tag and disorganised, jumped to it. Zombies shambled ahead, the slight incline in the terrain giving them a bit of a boost before they slipped through the Seventy-Fifth rank. By then, they were in an all-out sprint, or as much of a sprint as a zombie could manage.

It was enough. The army saw them coming, barely, and raised spears to skewer the undead, but some slipped past as soldiers struggled to raise heavy spears after a long day of exertion. The Seventy-Sixth rank crashed into the front of the living formation, grinding their slow and constant advance to a halt.

The rows of soldiers behind, unable to see into the dark, ended up bunched together while sergeants and officers shouted for order.

Rotney started to yawn, but this time he held his jaw in place. Oh... he'd forgotten about that arrow lodged in his neck. He tugged it out and tossed it onto the cart.

"Seventy-Seven... retreat," he said simply, and the last rank of his zombies started to shamble away.

The moment his cart crested the hill, he turned and waved ahead. The wave was carried on by a staggered line of wights and ghosts to the city in the distance.

Rotney squinted as the distant crack-choom of trebuchets firing carried out across the empty plains. A boulder larger than he was hummed past overhead then came crashing down. It missed the army by about a hundred necrometres. They were way off.

The next missed by half as much.

The third came crashing down near the front ranks, and soldiers pulled back, screaming.

Yeah, the army wouldn't be resting on the hilltop. Not tonight. In fact, the army wouldn't be resting tonight at all.

***