Jarza, commander of the Primogenia , sat high in the saddle, the stink of churned earth and blood rising to et him.
Below, a thousand of Yarzat’s finest tore into the enemy like a tide through rotted timber. The "unbreakable" wall of pikes, so stiff and proud in the morning, now lay in splinters, scattered like the toothpicks of a drunken feast. His soldiers sward through the gaps, steel flashing, shields smashing, cutting down anything that dared to move in colors not their own.
It wasn’t a battle. It was an unraveling. An unmaking.
Jarza had seen n break before, but he was still surprised by how well it was going.
He thought back to Alpheo’s face earlier, calm as still water while the enemy ford their ranks. Not a twitch of doubt. Not a flicker of concern.
It concerned him sotis how confident he looked, he of course knew it was only a facade, as while he liked to project the image of a stone wall,he inside was instead rotten wood.
Then Jarza had taken it for false confidence, now?He was not so sure, as he knew better.Alpheo had never even considered them a threat.
The ladders had been the spark, the wedge of the battle. That strange, almost laughable assault had gutted the pike formation before it had a chance to bite. And the legionnaires hadn’t hesitated. They’d poured through, turned those long, proud spears into anchors, each Oizenian stuck fast and waiting to die.
They’d co in braced for a grind. Thought they’d be trading steel for steel, shield for shield, bleeding for every step like the good fight they expected.
But the Oizenians?They lost pieces like wet clay.
The pikes, those long, proud spears they’d trained to fear, were nothing now. Dead weight in the crush. No ti to lower them, no room to pull back for a thrust, even those standing behinds that could have thrust it could not, as there was a mass of bodies standing between them. The Oizenians then swung them like broom handles, clumsy and slow, just trying to keep space between themselves and the teeth at their throats.
Of course it did not work.
Yarzat soldiers slip inside the reach. Easy. Too easy.
One heartbeat, there’s a man standing in front of you, spear braced. Next heartbeat, your axe is in his collarbone, and he’s gone.
Everywhere, gaps open. Holes in the line. Like pulling loose threads from a tapestry, one tug and the whole thing unravels. They carve where they want, when they want. A slash to the left. A thrust to the right. No danger. No counterstrike. Just n dying with the look of realization dawning too late.
It was almost frightening how simple it was. No art to it. No great clash of equals. Just the steady, thodical tearing apart of sothing that thought itself unbreakable.
So of the legionnaires cutting their way through the Oizenian ranks had seen their own villages burned by these sa n, they had buried children, friends and parents under the ash. Yet even they began to wonder, mid-swing, what it was they had feared so much now that they were just a sack of whimpering at.
What was it that had made these soldiers,now writhing in the mud, faces twisted into eternal screams, seem so terrible in the telling?What phantom of invincibility had haunted them?
The truth lay broken at their feet. And it bled like any other man.
They spit on the corpses as they set themselves to the work of making more.
Jarza tore his gaze from the slaughter directly ahead. His eyes moved left, sweeping over the field, mapping the fight as it unfolded. He compared the positions, his own front, with the other’s.
He saw it.
The prince’s right wing had surged. The enemy there was buckling too, their line bent inward like a shield dented under too many blows. They were one hard push from shattering.
A thin smile pulled across Jarza’s face.
He would have never thought that such good news could spell any trouble. They were in fact close, too close....Alpheo would have said was he there.
For if the enemy truly broke before the trap was sprung, the fight would dissolve into chaos. And chaos would cost them the clean kill that Alpheo searched for and prepared so thoroughly.
For the efforts he could not bring to the battle, he spent elsewhere...
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Sorza could not believe his eyes. His mind refused to keep pace with what was unfolding before him.
In every drill the formation had been flawless. The wall of pikes always held keeping the enemy at a safe distance while the front ranks plucked n from their lines like harvesters cutting wheat, morale rotting away with every skewered body.
That was how it was supposed to be. That was how it had always been.
But this? This was madness. His proud, drilled, disciplined ranks were being hacked apart like green recruits. The wall was crumbling. Sections of the line bulged forward or sagged backward, breaking the unity that was their only real strength. The pattern was gone. The rhythm gone.
And all because of... ladders. Fucking Ladders!
All those months of hardening farrs into piken, undone by a few pieces of timber bound with iron. The insult of it burned worse than the loss itself.
He had co prepared. More than prepared. He had chosen this ground precisely for its protection, flanks shielded by natural obstacles so the Yarzat would be forced to et him head-on. Here, in the killing ground he had chosen, his n should have been invincible.
Instead, they were failing in the one place they were ant to be strongest.
Of course, it wasn’t as if this disaster could be laid entirely at Sorza’s feet. This was, after all, the first ti a pike formation had been tested against infantry in earnest.
Against almost any other opponent, it might have worked beautifully. But against a commander who fought with the stolen advantage of centuries of warfare yet to be invented? Against soone who could cheat , with the dozens of ways to neutralize the very weapon he himself had brought to the field? It was dood from the start.
Truthfully, even without the ladders, Sorza’s proud hedge of steel would have lost to the White Army nine tis out of ten.
They could have simply refused to engage, hovering six ters away while pelting the formation with arrows, javelins, and stones. The n in the front wore armor similar to Yarzat’s finest, but those in the rear did not, and casualties would have mounted until the formation cracked.
And to that Sorza would have had no solution; after all what was he to do?Order his formation to break and charge ahead?
If they preferred to engage, they could have instead, in the middle of the fight started on falling back in deliberate steps, drawing the pikes away from supporting ground, isolating them, then enveloping them with a sudden strike from footn held in reserve. The Third Legion, whose equipnt and training were built for exactly such work, could have gutted them at leisure.
No, the fault was not in failing to stop the enemy from neutralizing the pikes. Alpheo had a dozen ways to do that.
The fault was in how Sorza chose to answer once it beca clear his great wall of spears was failing.
Any sensible commander, seeing the battle turn against him, would have done the hard but correct thing , cut his losses and preserved the core of his force to fight another day. But Sorza could not bring himself to yield. The iron mines were too important, the humiliation too bitter to swallow.
Pride and greed chained his hands to the fight that would see him defeated.
And so, rather than withdraw, he gave the fatal order: half his remaining reserves were to be thrown into the at grinder, sent rushing to the front to plug the gaps and hold the line.
It was not a counterstroke. It was a sacrifice.
And soon the consequences of that would be revealed in the form of a boy riding atop a horse, with a ribbon tied around the steed’s neck.
Soldiers stepped aside just in ti, so cursing, others calling after him, but he didn’t spare them a glance. His eyes were locked on the prince’s banner ahead.
He pulled hard on the reins, the horse skidding to a halt so sharply its forelegs struck the dirt and sent another spray of earth forward. He swung out of the saddle before the beast had even stopped moving, boots hitting the ground heavy and fast.
"Your Grace," he barked, voice rough with dust, "Enemy cavalry! They’re moving to wheel around our line."
Sorza’s brow tightened. He didn’t need a map to see it, the enemy sweeping wide to bite into his exposed side, turning the neat wall of pikes into a crushed, twisted ss. His jaw clenched as he pointed toward the fresh troops just arriving at the rear.
"Tell Lord Amarath to move the reinforcent to the flanks," he ordered the boy, voice like steel striking steel. Hold them back before they turn on our side. Tell them to brace for the charge."
The rider shook his head, chest heaving. "No, my lord," he said quickly, urgency snapping in his tone. "They’re not slowing to hit the flanks. They’ve gone wide, too wide. They’ve already passed our line entirely."
Sorza’s eyes clouded in confusion. "What! Where, then?"
"Here, Your Grace. They’re coming here....’’
At that truth, that the enemy sought not his n but him—Sorza of Oizen, First of his na, Son of Shaleik, Prince and Protector of the Rightful Lands East of the Zauern—promptly turned his horse and ran.
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