Alrighty our first official bit of action where our baby Diana actually contributes something lol…

Hope you guys are enjoying this!

There will still be a quite a bit of action scenes before we can return to fluff land!!!

Chapter is late today since Uni dorm applications opened up...

I'll see if have time to write more, but if not, probably only one chapter today.

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D1C14 - Rally

As we went on our merry head-whacking hole-making way, my mom used more and more of her arrows. Whilst she was often able to use her tails to recover arrows from fallen enemies or grab quivers from fallen archers, her rate of sustained shooting was simply too much and eventually she ran out of arrows in her quiver and the quivers her tails had scavenged from the dead bodies.

After using up all her arrows my mother made annoyed sound as if she was irritated by the fact that she could no longer kill from a distance. She slung her bow across her shoulder and began the process of looking irked. Looking at her displeased countenance, I couldn’t help but want to solve my beautiful mom’s dilemma. Perhaps it was just me who thought that red and white made a startling nice contrast of colours. Sigh, I am beginning to think that Miss Rational may have had a point.

A few meters away from us, I spot a few javelins impaling the bodies of several men. Perfect. I tried to draw my mom’s attention to them but I forgot that my hands were bounded tight. With nothing else I could to do, I softly cried out and my mother cranes her neck to look at me. The moment she did, I stopped and gave her a meaningful look and then stared at the javelins, not that my face was very meaningful looking but my mom got the point. It was like that phenomenon where two men can communication with their eyes. In this case, it was two girls? Girl’s telepathy? A woman’s intuition? Wait, does that even work on weapons of mass murder?

Whatever, my mom followed my gaze and she spotted the javelins, as she did, she gave a cry of delight, went over and separated the bodies from the treasures. Patting my head with one of her unbloodied tails she muttered something to me. Although I was unable to understand her words, somehow, one way or another I got the gist of it. It was something like “You’ll make a fine Audacia someday”. Huh… strange, I was more under the impression that my mom would be somewhat weirded out by the fact that her baby girl is nodding at a bunch of dead guys impaled on javelins. Looking back at the trail of dead bodies, I felt a slight bit of fear. Not for the first time, I wondered who my mother truly was. However, now was not the time for such thoughts, the fighting was far from over.

Several more idiots charged at my mother, With a flick of her tails, she sent all 6 javelins at them. All 6 of the poor fools ended up with a stick through their hearts. I guess they didn’t read their horoscopes today. It probably would’ve said something like avoid the woman with 9 tails.

I wondered why they were all so intent on attacking my mom. It was a bit ridiculous that every enemy we came across didn’t even hesitate to immediately charge on the offensive. My mom walked over to the dead men and whipped out the javelins , then she continued on as if we were just a normal mother taking her baby for a stroll in the park. It was probably this air of self-confidence and arrogance that led them to attack but hey, if you can’t be arrogant on the battlefield, where can you be arrogant?

In any case, mom continued to throw the javelins and retrieving them, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Unlike her arrows she didn’t run out of them which made her slightly happy. As we continued walk in the valleys of the shadow of death, or more precisely HER shadow of death, we began gaining a following of guards. Quite of a few of our guards had been saved by a timely arrow from my mom and they reciprocated by joining her side. Although I say “side”, it was more like a few meters back where her tails had a large clearance. And when I say few, I meant 10. Nobody dared to get in my moms way. Eventually, it seems like my mom had become a rallying point of sorts. Which wasn’t unexpected considering the fact that being next to her probably raised your chances of living.

Our guards came over in droves and soon enough the footmen and the knights were working together to repel the attackers. The foot men would form a shield wall trampling over the enemies while the knights would ride on their fearsome birds cutting down enemies. More often than not, the knights were only wearing half their armor properly since they had been taken by surprise without much time to don their armor. As a result, I could constantly see knights dismounting their birds to properly wear their armor and remount afterwards. This kept happening as more and more knights rallied to us.

However, even though we had become a rallying point, at no point did my mom stop walking. Somewhere, somehow, she had gotten a quiver of arrows from someone and has unslung her bow and began loosing arrows again. The guards following us grew to a sizable amount and our progress sped up and more guards joined and more enemies were defeated. in due course, we had rallied enough numbers that most enemies would run at the sight of us. Although no one escaped, thanks to the arrow lodged in the back of their heads, courtesy of my mother and our fellow bow-toting footmen.

Eventually we were able to reach the outlying area of our bivouac. All around there were dead bodies, some burnt to mere ashes and bones, others crushed by gigantic boulders which I did not know where they came from. Others were frozen and had been shattered into pieces. Our two carriages and supply carts lay here defended by around 15 knights and 50 footmen who were in a shield wall surrounding the wheeled vehicles in a circular formation.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

They were besieged by 150 or somewhere thereabout enemy troops. I say troops because I wasn’t sure exactly WHAT they were. They were too well armed to be bandits but at the same time, they seemed too untrained to be any kind of professional fighting men. Most of their armor consisted of leather pieces, rarely did I spot any metal, however, leather it may be, but it did look as though it provided decent protection. Nevertheless, it didn't help them much since they weren't able to exploit the protection offered. They fought with no formation, no better than a horde. Vaguely I was reminded of the barbarians of Gaul clashing against the Legions of Rome. It was no wonder that our handful of guards had been able to hold out for so long.

The 150 or so felt like a band of extremely green mercenaries. Which to be fair, they probably were. Most likely, if they were an experienced mercenary band, they would not have taken on the commission to attack us. No seasoned mercenary band would attack a well armed caravan escorting a VIP. The risk of failure was high and wrath of the VIP was likely, cutting off future employment opportunities. No, I come to the conclusion that whoever had hired these fools hadn’t told them of our identities and had probably lured them with promises of a large reward.

Either that or these nutheads were actually the men who worked under the person behind the attack. Personally, I felt like the former was more likely than the latter but both outcomes were ideal, the first because it meant an easy win, the second even more so because it meant an easy win and the chance to obtain information on whoever had sent them.

Suddenly, all thoughts of their identities was blown away as I realised what I had just witnessed.

Burnt bodies. Crushed bodies. Frozen bodies.

It’s MAGIC!

Ohmahgawd, there are fucking mages here. MAGES. I am so hyped to see one in action. WOOT!

MAN. Today is mah luckay day.

Luh-Luh-Luh-Luckeyyy~

I look around frantically and my mom smiles as she notices my antics.

Sadly, I cannot see any visible signs of the mages anywhere. No gouts of flames blazing away in the night sky. No gigantic boulders of rock solid earth mashing humans. No pillars of ice rising into the sky. The disappointment is real. Dang.

For a moment, I am slightly miffed but then I realise I will be seeing them soon anyways! With so many enemies present, there is no way that they won’t show themselves. Unless they are dead. Which isn’t really possible considering the amount of magically destroyed bodies littering the ground.

Seeing their fellow guards under siege, many of the rallied men had their spirits all fired up. They were just itching for a fight, to save their comrades. Even though we could see the enemy they had yet to see us, mom had passed the command to mount a counter-attack to break the encirclement. She told everyone to lay down on the ground and begin crawling and sneaking towards the 150 or so men. As my mom moved, at times I was able to spot the rallied men who were following behind us. I did a quick estimate of the headcount. Being so white, my mom was natural target for the enemy so the two of us stayed back with a bunch of knights.

There were 40 knights that had been told to hang back by my mom, although what she planned on doing with the was something I had yet to figure out. There was another 40 or so footmen with crawling in the dirt, slowly but surely inching their way to the besieged troops, concealed by the veil of night. In total, those that were missing or killed numbered around 15 knights and 30 footmen. Of course all these numbers were just rough guesses so I wasn’t sure of the real tally. In fact, in all honesty, I would have expected far more wounded from a night-raid. We weren’t taken by surprise and the enemies were unskilled but that still didn’t explain our low casualties. Our enemies outnumbered us by quite a bit.

There was no concept of vitamins in the medieval times so Nyctalopia or night-blindness was actually something that was relatively common amongst soldiers as they lacked their vitamin A. Of course, it wasn’t like they didn’t know about the cure for night-blindness, even back in roman times, they ate liver as a supplement for night-blindness. It was just that they had an unbalanced diet due to the bad resource management and lack of widespread knowledge on the topic. The soldiers here ate their rations and hunted game, but because there was no concept of nutrition, rations were mostly bread, meat and biscuits. Even the hunted game, only possesses one liver per animal. As a result, most soldiers were lacking in certain vitamin and minerals.

To a soldier having night-blindness, night combat would have been been equivalent to a death sentence. Which is why I am slightly surprised at the number of guards still alive. Upon further thought, I realised that this was the force multiplication of heal potions taking effect. Bleeding out did not happen as much and shallow cuts or wounds that hindered combat potential could be healed, preventing fatal mistakes like a slip of the foot due to pain, from happening as much.

If I were to talk about it in terms of modern technology, having a potion was almost akin to having kevlar body armor and a combat medic by your side at all times. That thought made me reconsider the value of these potions, they may have been common as dirt, but that possibly only applied to elite troops like the ones currently guarding us.

I doubt that such miraculous liquid could be mass manufactured to the point where each cannon fodder had one, it just felt too unlikely.