A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

But Gorm had done it. And he'd done it well, as the King knew he would. The King even believed that they'd make it back to the Salt Sea before the enemy cut them down, so that they might return home, with their numbers still intact, after weakening their enemy rather significantly.

So far, it had indeed been going well.

The enemy was slow to respond, or so Jok thought. They'd slaughtered a few villages without resistance. The Stormfront dogs seemed unused to war. They hardly put up any struggle. They'd not even really had a single man wounded since the start. But nor had any army really stood in their way.

And now here they were, for their first true battle of their raiding trip, facing off against an enemy of such magnitude.

Besides that first one, who Jok could only assume was their commander, he noticed a second. A bearded man, with a mighty blonde beard at that. He, Jok thought he could take. He'd likely only been visited by the Goddess of War twice, and there was weakness in his eyes. Jok was sure he wouldn't be able to hold him back.

Tolsey met the man's gaze from across the battlefield. It was hard to stop himself from shivering. The might of the enemy, when within arrow range, was nearly overwhelming. A single Yarmdon soldier was worth two Stormfront ones, or so it was said. Tolsey had never paid such things credence before, thinking it unlikely.

But now that he saw the sheer size of the enemy, he was starting to believe that it was true.

Their spear wall was all that could be relied upon, mighty weapon that it was. The first row of men – near fifty in total – were positioned in between the stakes, with their spears facing outwards, ready to intercept the enemy.

But amongst this enemy, each of them seemed to carry a shield. It was a weapon that had become nearly outdated in the Stormfront. The battles that they fought favoured maneuverability. If ever their troops were to be caught in an arrow storm, the shields would offer them no extra advantage, for the enemy cavalry would already be closing in, ready to take care of the immobile target.

Against an enemy with such shields, Tolsey feared for the strength of their spear wall.

"They're eyeing you, Vice-Captain," Lombard noted. The gaze of his pale-blue eyes was fastened across the battlefield. He'd already locked eyes with who he thought to be the enemy's leader. He turned behind him. "Have you made note of the enemy, boy? You can tell who their commanders are?"

Shielded from the eyes of the enemy, Beam was sat on a discarded log, waiting. He nodded at Lombard's question. "There's three of them, right?"

"As far as I can tell," Lombard agreed. If the enemy had made any attempts at hiding their aura, then they would have been harder to see through. But the foes that approached them were as bold as Lombard remembered. They'd marched forward with undisguised hostility, projecting their strength to the maximum, seeking to cower the enemy before they even crossed blades with them.

"So, I just have to kill their commanders, then?" Beam said.

Tolsey grimaced at the straightforward way that the boy had put such an unlikely task. He looked unphased, all things considered. In fact, the Vice-Captain thought there might even have been a bit of madness in his eyes. He hadn't seemed right since he'd come back from the Elder's house, and for good reason, Tolsey guessed.

He'd seen such atrocities. He'd even seen one of his friends killed that very morning. Or at least, Tolsey had assumed it was a friend. At the very least, it was clear the boy knew the woman. He'd seen the turmoil on his face as he'd looked upon the corpse.

And then he'd fought the entire day against a magnitude of enemy that Tolsey couldn't hope to match. He'd led that mission to subjugate the rebellious Elder… And now he was here, sat in the snow, shivering, as he waited for battle.

"It would not do to catch a cold before you even begin fighting," Lombard noted, seeing the same shivers that Tolsey had.

"I don't want to be too hot when the fighting begins," Beam said, rubbing his shoulders.

"Then we had better not keep you waiting too long," Lombard said, before raising his hand to give his first order. "Archers," he said.

The thirty or so men were ready and waiting behind the first row of spearmen, each with bows in hand. At Lombard's command, each of them notched an arrow, and drew back their bowstring, nice and taught.

"Fire," he said, his face as expressionless as it usually was, as he cast his arm downwards and gave the signal. He kept his gaze locked on that enemy commander. That huge bearded man, with that vast rippling aura.

Their arrows streamed into the air, disappearing in the night sky. They were all but invisible, until they began once more to return to the earth, and the enemy torchlight was able to pick them up.

The enemy leader eyed the attack with a wide grin on his face. His men had thought themselves to be just out of range of the enemy's arrows, yet here they were, easily able to be fired upon.

Gorm liked enemies like this. Enemies that had all sorts of tricks up their sleeves. This commander, it seemed to him, had put extra effort into training his men to fire just a little bit further, just so he could get the upper hand at the opening of battle. And Gorm had no doubt that it had worked innumerable times before.

The tricky enemies were certainly the best. That was what Gorm thought, as a wide grin spread across his face. The pleasure from barrelling through all the traps and tricks set by a tricky enemy – there were few sweeter tastes. To render all his tricks useless, to disregard them, and then to kill him anyway. It was bliss.

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