“It is a good feeling to have friends who are confident about you, but it is an even better feeling to possess that confidence for yourself.” - Old folk saying.

Alycea felt that she likely caught a big fish that day.

The way that none of the enemy soldiers came to the aid of the one woman who rushed towards her was telling. It meant that the enemy side had confidence in that woman, or respect for her to the point that they would not interfere in her battles. It was not too different from how the mercenaries treated each other on normal occasions, though they also had no qualms whatsoever about ganging up on an opponent when needed.

Whoever the enemy woman was, she was skilled, and definitely had the physical advantage over Alycea, who was somewhat below average in height and had a slight build. In comparison, her opponent had a strong, muscular build and was at least a head or so taller than her, yet without any stiffness or slowness, clearly someone used to applying her body to the utmost and eking out every bit of performance it had.

Fortunately, Alycea was all too used to being the physically weaker party in a fight. During her spars, both her father and her sister were much stronger than she was, as were many of her friends and compatriots. As such she was completely accustomed to not rely on physical strength and to make up for her failings in other ways instead.

When the burly woman swung her blade once more towards her, Alycea caught it with the shaft of her weapon like the previous time, allowing the flexible Willow Heartwood shaft to bend and flex under the force of the vicious blow. Then she injected a tiny hint of mana into the wood, a trick she learnt over the years of using it, that caused the wood to straighten and even flex back out in the other direction violently.

It was something she discovered by accident while training to wield the unwieldy Heartwood staff from a young age. Alycea was not gifted as a mage, like her father, but she still had minute amounts of mana in her that she could manipulate, and fortunately that was plenty to work with her Heartwood staff. She learned how to control the highly flexible wood using tiny bursts of mana at specific spots over the years, often masking it under sleights of hand, which would have led others to think that she did it purely through touch instead.

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She could also do it that way, but it was harder to do so accurately compared to using a bit of mana to get the flexible, magical Heartwood to do what she wanted.

This time her opponent reacted faster than the previous time and left no opening for Alycea to take, so she only swung a feint instead, to keep her foe on guard. To her surprise her opponent read her feint and instead pushed forward with another slash that Alycea judged might be too much to block the way she usually did. Her Willow Heartwood staff was highly flexible and extremely durable, but it still had its limits.

Instead, Alycea met the incoming blade mid-swing with her own glaive’s blade, side against side, and allowed her weapon’s shaft to bend to the left from the forces involved before she made it rebound back to the right, hard enough to push aside her opponent’s blade to miss her completely after a slight tilt of her body.

Alycea’s own glaive was still poised to strike, and descended down towards her opponent’s head. She made the shaft flex left and right as the blade descended to make it harder to predict, but somehow her opponent still read into her strike and blocked it with the concave metal fixing on the pommel of her own blade.

The two of them kept exchanging blows, Alycea making up for her lack of power with her weapon’s flexibility and attacks that came from tricky, unpredictable angles. Their subordinates were engaged in their own battles, with many of Alycea’s people taking on two enemies at once, so they were unable to help out, or perhaps some were unwilling to interfere as well.

Alycea was fine with that.

Her platoon’s role in reinforcing the third strike platoon – which also held up admirably despite bearing the brunt of the enemy offensive – was to buy time until more reinforcements could arrive from their side, and sure, enough, it had not taken that long for the tides of battle to shift yet again.

First came Alvaro and his Warforged, the platoon striking against the enemy army’s flank, clearly having swung around from their position further away on the other side of the third strike platoon. Their strike was measured, as it turned out, they were acting as the anvil of the maneuver, with the hammer being Mischka’s first strike platoon which looped around and struck the new enemies from the other flank shortly afterwards.

Reinhardt’s, Elfriede’s, and Erycea’s platoons also arrived in quick succession and charged straight into the foes Alycea had been dealing with, pushing them back as the enemy was already destabilized from the pincer attack between Alvaro and Mischka. Alycea could see the worry on her opponent’s face, and when the woman disengaged, she allowed her to do so, quickly organizing her people to join the push forward as well.

This time, however, their enemies did not break apart like the previous ones did, but fought back doggedly even as they withdrew step by step, towards where more enemy soldiers in shield formations were advancing. Since the Free Lances had pretty much used up the momentum of their strike already, it would be difficult for them to push much further into the enemy formation. There the fighting devolved to a stalemate when the mercenaries ran into the enemy’s new, clearly heavily reinforced, shield formations.

Until the end of the battle, they remained there, on a constant back and forth against each other, until the sun set and the horns that signaled the retreat were sounded from both sides.