Edwin turned around, stretching his neck to see over the heads of his comrades to find the newcomers. What he saw made his blood run cold.
Out of a small valley on 5th division’s flank appeared something he had never seen before. Dozens of pennants flew above their heads, the blood-red cloth trailing them like a comet’s tail. Steel armor, polished to a sheen, sparkling in the afternoon sun like reflections on a lake. The hooves of their mighty mounts, themselves clad in colorful barding and armor, shaking the very ground he stood on as several hundred soldiers on horseback galloped onto the field.
“Enemy cavalry!” Edwin screamed. “Behind!”
At first, his warning was met with shocked silence, as adventurers tried and failed to see anything past the press of bodies that surrounded them. Then, Lindvar division answered their allies’ horns with their own, and the Marradi soldiers began to cheer even as they set after their previous attackers with a vengeance.
“Full retreat!” Bordan shouted. “Stay together, run for the hill!”
The adventurers could have easily outdistanced the soldiers giving chase, except their path to safety was blocked by their own allies, not all of whom were nearly as quick on the uptake or at deciding on a course of action. Within seconds, they were fighting a pitched melee again, though this time they were being pressed hard instead of the opposite. After seconds that felt like minutes, second and third division’s officers had finally brought their men under control and were moving off the battlefield.
With the Marradi snapping at their heels and hundreds of allied soldiers ahead of him, Edwin looked on as the cavalry streamed onto the field. Things seemed to move too quickly to understand and in slow motion at the same time as the front of the mounted formation wheeled around in a well-coordinate maneuver, then charged straight at the rear-most Harvand units – the crossbows, thought to be safe at a distance from the fighting. They weren’t alone, of course, as flanking maneuvers were nothing out of the ordinary. A cohort of infantrymen had been kept back to screen them, should the enemy try to attack them from behind. When planning their positioning, 5th division’s tacticians had assumed the flanking force would be on foot, however, and they weren’t in any position to intercept the cavalry.
Edwin grit his teeth and balled his fists, watching on helplessly as the front of the mounted unit crashed into the fleeing crossbowmen, knocking the lightly armored soldiers over and trampling them into the ground as their curved swords rose and fell. Officers shouted commands, trying to bring order to the fleeing forces and whip the infantry into a defensive formation before their new foe charged them, but Edwin couldn’t hear anything. He just watched numbly as the Marradi riders caught up to the second cohort of crossbows, the few brave souls trying to turn their crossbows or arming swords on their attackers being the first to die under the violent onslaught.
He had never felt so helpless.
The third ranged cohort had been closest to the division’s main body, and they reached the allied forces before the cavalry caught up to them. For a moment, Edwin thought the pursuing riders would simply smash into the infantry as easily as they had the crossbows, but they turned aside at the last moment, allowing the ranged soldiers to get to safety.
“We need to get off this field!” Bordan shouted from somewhere ahead. While spacing out, Edwin had lost him in the press of fleeing adventurers and was at the very back again. “Run for the hill, eyes open against the cavalry, shields up against the archers!”
The next minutes were pure madness. The beleaguered Harvand forces were running across the open plain in a mad dash, their former prey following hot on their heels while the cavalry circled them at speed, striking quickly and veering off whenever those at the outside were inattentive for even a moment. Banners and adventurer teams lost cohesion and were mixed into one large mass as all sense of coordination and order was lost to the growing panic. Edwin wished he could do something, to run somewhere and fight someone, but he knew that there was nothing for him to do but to continue running at his comrades’ slow pace until they reached the hill and climbed its steep side, where the horses couldn’t easily follow.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
And so he ran, alternating between cursing Duke Marrad and tamping down his growing bloodlust to keep himself from breaking ranks and rushing the first red-clothed soldier he could find. They had almost reached he hill, the first elements of the Harvand formation slowing to ascend the incline, when the arrows began to fall. Over time, the lighter armored and terrified Harvand forces had managed to outpace those who pursued them on foot, leaving only the cavalry nipping at their heels. While that should’ve been a good thing, it also meant that Lindvar’s archers didn’t have to be concerned about hitting their own allies anymore. The horses veered off, and the barrage began. Edwin cursed loudly as arrows scraped across his back, sliding off his armor and into the ground. With his luck, he’d come out of this looking like a porcupine.
A scream next to him caught his attention, and he turned to see Borm clattering to the ground. His leg had given out mid-run, courtesy of a wooden shaft sticking from his thigh.
“Come on!” Edwin shouted, stopping to run back to his guildmate. “Get up! I can carry you!”
Borm pushed himself up on his good leg, picking up his large sword with a pained grimace, then looked past Edwin and turned white as a sheet. A few mounted soldiers had spotted Borm’s fall, identifying him as easy prey, a wounded deer apart from its herd. With a determined scowl, he set his feet as well as he could and raised his sword.
“Go!” he shouted. “I’ll hold them off!”
“No!” Edwin yelled, arriving next to him and grabbing his arm. “We can make it if I carry you!”
Borm shook off his hand. “Too late!”
Edwin hesitated. He was sure that if he grabbed Borm and ran as fast as he could, he could make it back to his allies before the horses caught up… His moment of indecision had lasted too long. The galloping horses were almost upon them, and with a growl, Edwin took his stance next to his fellow adventurer.
There were four of them, seeming impossibly large, almost invincible in their gleaming armor, high up on their horses as they galloped toward him. But this wasn’t the first time Edwin had faced something large and threatening. What was a man on a horse compared to a direbeast?
A bolt flashed past his head, striking one of the riders in the helmet. His head snapped back, and while his armor turned the steel-tipped projectile, the sudden impact made him veer off course. The other three continued to bear down on the two adventurers, and a moment before they reached them, they both swung their weapons. Edwin aimed for the torso of the rider facing him, intent to cleave him in two at the waist. He swung mightily, bringing the heavy weapon around in a wide arc – only to realize mid-swing that he’d miscalculated the horse’s speed. He tried to correct his mistake with s last-second burst of mana-infused power, the glaive speeding up while it was halfway to its target, but it was all too late.
The ornamented shaft slammed into the Marradi soldier, almost throwing him out of the saddle, but he managed to hold on somehow. His horse continued on its course, and for the first time, Edwin didn’t win a contest of power. The speeding horse ran through him, tossing him on his back as if he was a child. As the blue sky spun into view ahead of him, Edwin couldn’t do more than blink in surprise, his mind catching up with the fact that he was lying on the ground.
An arrow thunked into the grass not far from his face and he shot back to his feet, looking around wildly to survey the scene. The riders were past them, but Lindvar’s infantry was getting dangerously close.
“Come on, I’ll carry you back to…”
Edwin trailed off as his eyes fell on Borm’s body lying lifelessly in the grass, his head cleaved in two by a cavalry saber. He hadn’t gone without a fight, the burly adventurer having succeeded in the maneuver Edwin himself had failed at. His two-handed sword was still stuck halfway through the midriff of a Marradi rider, lying on the ground where he’d been thrown off his horse. Borm’s first strike had been on target. He hadn’t gotten the opportunity for a second one.
Memories of Borm and his teammates drinking at the Pig and Scroll flashed by his mind’s eye, of the burly man excitedly swinging his sword around to prove its effectiveness, of his determined face as he placed himself in harm’s way again and again to protect others.
Edwin. Walter said quietly. You need to move, or you will have to fight the entire division.
“Then I’ll kill them all!” Edwin growled, hefting his glaive and facing the oncoming soldiers.
Remember who you are. Remember why you are here.
The red mist that filled Edwin’s vision receded, and he stopped, only now realizing that he’d already taken a step toward the two thousand enemy soldiers that were charging at him. He hissed in frustration, turning around and running to his dead guildmate’s body. He only paused long enough to place a foot on the moaning cavalryman’s head and rip Borm’s sword from his body, then scooped up the large man’s corpse and started running. Carrying a dead body as well as two unreasonably long weapons was a not easy, but he powered through it even as the blade of the sword bit through the palm of his glove.
I will kill you for this. Edwin swore. Whether commoner or king, whether mage or mundane, if you are responsible for all this bloodshed, there is no place in this world that is safe from my wrath.