“Leading from the front is the riskiest part of any military maneuver, and the typical method in this day and age is to assign a sufficiently courageous field officer to do so. Some armies even made such practices entirely voluntary.
On the other hand, amongst mercenary troops such a practice more commonly sees the commander in charge of the whole company or at least part of it spearheading said assaults. Unlike regular armies, mercenaries often needed to lead by example, as many wouldn’t be satisfied with listening to someone who just gave commands from the safety of the back lines.” - Excerpt from “War: Past and Future” by Woden Songvst, scholar from the Gulski Jarldom, circa 419 FP.
As the flames lit up the night sky in the distance, Erycea led her platoon out from their concealed position in the jungle and led them in rushing towards the Anduillean encampment.
By the time Avila and her fliers were in position to deliver the “distraction”, the rest of the mercenaries and Levainian volunteers from the first two base camps had gathered in the jungle. Despite their close proximity to the enemy camp, they were undetected, as it was nearly impossible to see anything in the depth of the jungle in the darkness of the night for most.
As such, they only had a rather short distance to cross before they left concealment and reached the enemy camp. Erycea spearheaded the charge of her platoon, which had grown from the original seventy or so people to just over a hundred in the intervening years. She and her closest compatriots were in the lead, as they always spearheaded any charge the platoon participated in, while Hakim and Malika led the rest of the platoon who followed closely behind Erycea’s group.
A bit further back from her platoon were a couple hundred more Levainian volunteers who would further make up their numbers for this night attack. Erycea’s group was positioned to lead the charge against the frontmost elements of the enemy army and to wreak as much havoc as they could while simultaneously minimizing risk to themselves.
She knew that further to the north, Mischka’s platoon led another charge, with Lars and his platoon following behind them, backed up by another couple hundred volunteers. They had the hardest task, as they charged deepest into the enemy lines and needed to hold their ground to prevent the enemy from reinforcing their vanguard.
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Then again, both Branka’s second archer platoon and the Levainian archers were also raining arrows on the enemy army to support them.
As for doing the actual damage to the enemy, the task fell to the group that included Elfriede’s and Fatimah’s platoons in between Erycea’s and Mischka’s prong of the assault. Where Erycea and Mischka partly needed to corral the enemy forces, Erycea knew that her mother would be going in for the kill instead.
The Anduilleans had erected some crossed wooden stakes tied to a longer rod to serve as a makeshift fence for their camp. It was enough to deter wild animals, but against a determined enemy force, they were little more than speedbumps. Erycea quickly ordered Vladislav, Tasha, Vera, and Gustav to uproot those makeshift fences and throw them out of the way.
They did just that and the platoon rushed through the created opening without missing a beat.
Many of the enemy soldiers were still rousing themselves from where they slept on the ground. Few of them were prepared for the assault, as the sentries who were supposed to warn them had been taken out while they were distracted by the fire further away. One of the soldiers saw the incoming attack and was about to raise his voice when a crossbow bolt suddenly went into his mouth and turned his scream-to-be into a gurgling noise.
Aurora just yanked the hand lever of her crossbow to reset the string to a firing position and calmly placed another bolt on the groove as she ran alongside Erycea near the front of the platoon. The girl’s hand crossbow was something her parents had ordered from Hogarth himself and gave her as a birthday present on the year she joined the Company, and was designed cleverly so that even she could operate the crank and lever with a single hand despite how the crossbow delivered a lot of force in its shots.
On Erycea’s other side, Ayrie ran along with the group while holding her long-knife in her left hand. Her right hand was busy flinging throwing knives at any enemy soldier in sight. Not every throw was a kill, but even for those who were only injured, suddenly having a knife stick out from their faces couldn’t be a pleasant experience at all. As for the ones with bad enough luck to take a knife somewhere fatal, they were too busy dying to care.
Valeria and Beth kept guard with their large shields and provided cover for the others to hide behind when needed, while Erycea herself was at the front and center of the charge with the twins. Erycea struck down enemy soldiers that crossed her path with her truncheons, the blows shattering bones even when they didn’t outright kill her victims on the spot, and the sleepy, surprised enemy soldiers started to panic.
As a result, and the bulk of her platoon and the volunteers following behind spread out and started the slaughter, the resistance they faced were light and disjointed at best. Erycea and her group had drawn the attention of the majority of the prepared enemy soldiers, which left mostly the unprepared ones for the others to mop up.
This time, they were not going for a quick strike, but aimed for the greatest damage possible instead, as the Levainian volunteers who were at the back of the pack hurled lit torches at anything that looked like it might catch on fire, causing a blaze to erupt behind the advancing platoon. All too often, the fuel for said fires were piles of dead Anduillean soldiers strewn on the ground.