Chapter 7
December 18th, 1663. Ebenenstadt.
Gaius Bestia Caprae could feel his comrade’s frustration.
They had been under near constant fire for days as skirmishers from Jagstadt came to unroot them. He had told his velites to avoid engaging with the enemy, and the few that went against his orders were swiftly killed. Brayherds made for very large targets, and even the mighty seven feet tall goatmen could not take a bullet to the head or heart.
Gaius stared at his rifle, a gift given to him by the Baron von Bickenstadt, and suddenly, he had an idea. He grabbed it and ran to the makeshift barracks they were using, a barn which was abandoned after it became clear that Brayherds were coming. He heard a bullet whip past but he paid it no mind. He was not ordained to die today. That honor would come in a few decades, at least according to the oracle he had consulted.
He burst through the door and held his rifle above his head.
“Men! We must abandon our traditional javelins! We will adopt the Imperial way of war and make it our own!”
The velites stared at Gaius curiously. They had seen how effective this weapon was firsthand, and they had lost many comrades to them while skirmishing with the Jagstadters. They moved from their spots and congregated around Gaius.
“Do you men understand how to use this?”
The crowd tended towards no.
“Well, it is fairly easy.”
He demonstrated how to load and fire his rifle, hammering the bullet in and filling the flashpan with powder before firing. One of the velites scrunched his bestial face in displeasure.
“That seems like it takes a long time to load.”
Gaius nodded.
“Yes, it does. About a minute at a time if you are used to it, longer if you are not. However, it’s range is ten times that of a javelin, and one hundred times deadlier! I could take a javelin to the chest, but a bullet will kill me just as easily as any human.”
The skirmishers murmured to each other for a little bit before Gaius clapped to focus attention on him.
“I am your commanding officer, so you will follow my orders! I am going to teach you how to use firearms, and you will use them with a smile on your face! Once you feel the power of a gun, you will wonder why you ever felt trepidation!”
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Brayherds velites walked through the fields of wheat, firearm in one hand, scutum strapped to the other arm. A Brayherd saw a flash and instinctively raised his shield. The bullet bounced off and the Brayherds all kneeled with scutums in front, resting their rifles on top for stability.
They scanned the field in front of them, watching for any movement of the stalks of wheat.
A Brayherd saw the tiniest movement and fired, causing the ones next to him to fire as well. Bullets ripped through the wheat and a scream could be heard.
Suddenly, men began to emerge from the wheat and fire, disappearing back down just as quickly as they came. A constant stream of lead slammed against the velites shields, and the hammering of bullets down into rifles could be heard echoing through the fields.
A bullet hit a Brayherd dead center in the face, splattering his comrades with brains and blood and dropping him like a sack of potatoes.
A velites steadied his rifle on the top of his scutum and held his breath. He waited for a Jagstadter to pop up and fired, watching him drop backwards as the bullet ripped through his chest. He cheered and shouted insults in Latine, the Brayherd language.
The two groups exchanged fire for a few minutes before the Jagstadters stopped popping up, seemingly retreating back wherever they were holed up. The velites all cheered and raised their rifles in the air, singing their war songs and chanting their war chants.
After waiting a few minutes with no bullets pinging off shields the Brayherds advanced to see how many they had hit. Dead and dying in the tall wheat stalks were just five skirmishers. The Brayherds had lost three velites. Even though they had killed two more skirmishers it was still an overall loss for the Brayherds.
Their velites were elite soldiers with decades of training and experience. While the Jagstadt skirmishers were at a similar level of veterancy and resources used in training, the Empire would always have more men than the Brayherds. Humans simply required less resources to raise than the brayherds.
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December 18th, 1663. Leibenstadt.
The Baron prayed over the body of a fallen soldier, a boy of just seventeen. He had bled out on the way to the medicine tent, and the Baron had to hold back tears as he repeated the Lord’s prayer. Next to him was a priest from the Fernandez Empire in the Assai’id Confederation, and the man who oversaw the Baron’s conversion to Christianity, Father Zera, an old friend.
No matter how many times he watched his own men die he still felt pangs of guilt. He was leading these brave young men to their deaths, all to help a race completely different than them. He could support their families after their deaths, but he could never return their sons to them. Whenever he imagined Wolfgang dying he could feel his heart skip a beat, he couldn’t imagine actually seeing his cold, dead eyes staring back at him from beyond the grave.
A messenger ran up to the Baron and saluted hard enough for him to hear and turn around.
“Sir! Five hundred weirdly dressed men have arrived! I think they’re Tla-tlax…uh, Tlan…”
The Baron smiled.
“Tlanzomans, thank you, I will greet them immediately.”
The Baron stood from his spot and dusted off his poofy pants.
“Father, I will leave the rest to you.”
Father Zera nodded and went back to his prayers, rubbing his rosary beads between his fingers all the while.
The Baron walked through his camp, observing his soldiers milling about. Thousands upon thousands of men were going about their daily routines. Most of being a soldier was not actually fighting, the vast majority of it was waiting around, doing chores, and marching. A lot of marching.
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The Baron saw the Tlanzomans waiting to be let into the massive, sprawling war camp erected at the foot of the mountain. The first layer of defenses was taken, but it wasn’t exactly safe so the vast majority of the men continued to live and sleep near the base of the mountain.
A man wearing a Ichcahuipilli under a cape which depicted the Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli slicing a man in half, painted and embroidered with incredibly vibrant paints and dyes, stood tall at the front of the formation. On his head was a wooden headdress with massive plumes of multicolored, vibrant feathers on the top.
Behind him were five hundred men, about one hundred and fifty of them wearing jaguar Ēhuatl and carrying the signature weapon of the Tlanzoman empire, the Mācuahuitl, a long, wooden paddle with obsidian flakes sharper than any razer making up the ‘edge’. On their heads they wore wooden helmets carved and painted in the likeness of a jaguar, and their faces were covered with vibrant war paints.
Behind them were men wearing Ichcahuipilli and capes, though theirs were far more plain than that of the man at the front, as well as simple cloth loincloths. They carried a mixture of Quauholōlli, a type of mace, Tepoztōpīlli, a type of spear tipped with obsidian shards, and Tlāximaltepōztli, a type of ax. All of the conscripts wore the same hairstyle, a tuft of hair on the top of their heads.
The elaborately dressed man strode forward to meet the Baron, walking with his arms out in greeting. He spoke in Nahuatl, which, luckily, the Baron could speak and understand.
“Hello friend of the Tlanzomans! I am Yaotl Cocolotl, leader of these fine five hundred men, and hopefully five hundred more in the future, come to assist you in your conquest of the Empire!”
The Baron walked over and embraced the man.
“Excellent, we are thankful for your assistance. We will not forget this.”
He released Yaotl and gestured to the camp.
“Come, set up camp inside ours! What’s mine is yours, and vice versa.”
“Vice versa?”
“It’s a Brayherd expression, it means ‘The other way around.’”
Yaotl nodded.
“I see.”
He turned to his men and called for them to march into the camp and set up. Yaotl turned back to the Baron.
“When will we engage in glorious battle?”
The Baron bit his thumbnail in thought.
“...A few months for anything large, I would say. Until then we will be skirmishing and bombarding, softening them up. For the meantime I would like to have your men learn to communicate with mine, and vice…the other way around. Communication is essential for combined, coalition warfare.”
“Of course! An excellent idea, I shall have them begin immediately!”
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December 20th, 1663. Holenstadt.
Krysia Badeni watched her men crash against the walls of Fort Pfolze, kicking up the December snow as they rushed forwards. She was not very pleased that they were attacking, but her hands were tied. She needed to keep her men under control, and part of that was keeping them from going stir crazy.
Bszerci clambered over the crumbled walls and began to lay into the garrison with sabers, bayonets, and gunbutts, dying the snow red with blood. Krysia sighed as she watched men fall on both sides and sink deep into the Holenstadt snow, far more men on her side than she would like.
She watched a Bszerci warrior reach the top of the crumbled walls and fly back as multiple shots ripped through his chest, tumbling down and laying still on the ground. She shook her head and spoke to her aide.
“Never lead the charge, boy. I want you alive.”
He nodded.
“Of course, ma’am. Wouldn’t dream of it. Watching from a distance is good enough for me.”
She smiled.
“Good boy.”
The Bszerci pushed deeper and deeper into Fort Pfolze, killing and maiming anyone they could find. A Bszerci aimed his musket at a soldier and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired, exploding in his face. When he regained his bearings the Bszerci thrust his bayonet forward and he was parried by an Imperial, who ran his bayonet down the length of the Bszerci’s musket and stuck it in his throat, twisting and ripping it out before moving onto the next man.
Krysia continued to shake her head as she watched the combat devolving into a wild melee, any semblance of formations long since forgotten. Sabers flashed and bayonets thrust as the battle turned into little knots of death, leaving dozens of men behind lying on the ground, their blood pooling into every nook and cranny of the destroyed fort.
“Our men need to work on discipline.”
“Should we have them do more drills, ma’am?”
Krysia nodded.
“Yes. I hear it is what makes the Baron’s men so formidable. They drill hard for something like eight months out of the year.”
The boy’s eyes widened.
“That’s a lot!”
Krysia nodded sagely.
“Yes, that is why we haven’t adopted his methods. Our men just don’t have that sort of discipline. Yet.”
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After hours of fighting the garrison had been pushed back into the inner sanctum of Fort Pfolze, and Krysia had ridden closer to get a better idea of the carnage. Bszerci and Imperials littered the ground and walls, their blood flowing freely and covering every inch of the courtyard and turning the December snow a deep, dark red.
Sabers and muskets lay abandoned by their former owners, far too dead to carry them any longer. They would need to be collected, cleaned, and maintained. Blood was highly corrosive, and muskets could get very tempermental if treated a little too poorly.
She watched maimed and injured Bszerci being dragged out of the fort, even as she heard the fighting continue. A screaming man was dragged across the stone floor, leaving a long trail through the blood.
Krysia shook her head solemnly.
“I knew this was a mistake. It’s just a bloodbath with no purpose or strategic gain. The artillery helped, but not nearly enough. The Imperials know we slaughter them down to a man, so they fight hard.”
Her aide nodded.
“Yes, this does seem to be pointless.”
Krysia sighed heavily.
“At least the men will calm down after this. A pyrrhic victory is still a victory, but it means they’ll want longer to lick their wounds.”
The boy looked like he had something to say, so she gestured for him to speak.
“Ma’am…would it not be a good idea to stop killing every Imperial down to a man? If they know they won’t die if they surrender, won’t more men be willing to surrender?”
Krysia considered her words carefully.
“...we operate on our reputation. If our reputation is for brutality, men will be less likely to fight us in the first place. We don’t want prisoners, our food supplies are already strained after losing access to the grain from Ebenenstadt, so feeding them would be a waste of resources.”
“I see…I guess that makes sense.”
He didn’t look satisfied with her answer. Krysia smiled and ruffled his hair.
“When you take over, you can experiment all you want.”
The boy smiled brightly.
“Thank you!”
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The garrison had been slaughtered down to a man, a common occurrence in Bszerci warfare. Bszerci doctrine held that leaving any enemies alive was a mistake, unless, of course, they were worth more alive than dead, such as in the case of knights and other aristocratic warriors.
Men piled the dead on top of each other in mass graves, not giving the enemy the burial rights that the principles of Imperial warfare declared was essential for a respectful battle. The Bszerci did not care for those ideas, as they came from Imperials, not Bszerci. They didn’t deserve proper burials, as they had been oppressing the Bszerci for decades.
Fort Pfolze was in complete ruins, and Bszerci were running around looting and breaking whatever they could find. It was cathartic for them, but it angered Krysia greatly. She really, really, REALLY hated how little discipline there was in her ranks.
That’s it, they’re drilling eight months out of the year.