Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1043: Slight (4)

At that singular, blood-chilled cry, the gates of hell swung wide upon the road.

Every carriage the outlaws had eyed with greed, thinking them laden with soft soaps, sweet ciders, or vintage wines, burst open with a violent, synchronized roar. The canvas was shredded from within like the womb of a woman birthing a new life, revealing only the sharp steel and blackened iron of a trap meticulously set.

The three riders who had lingered at the rear, leering at the supposed "wealth," were the first to receive the day’s dividends. They were plucked from their high pedestals as if by the hands of vengeful spirits.

One moment they were kings of the road; the next, they were screaming in the dust as the Mashki, Valakii, and Aranuai, the newest savage hounds of the Yarzat new frontier, tasted their first draft of foreign blood.

They found it to be to their liking, visibly enough from their smiles.

Then It was a cold, brutal kiss. The heavy, bearded axes of the monsters bit deep into mud-ridden clothes and the soft flesh beneath, butchering the outlaws limb from limb, not surgical, not precise, but messy, even that could carry a job well enough. They mastered the art of the silent wait, but once the first vein was opened, they became a whirlwind of unrestrained violence.

The atmosphere shifted in the heartbeat it takes for a lung to collapse. What had been promised as an easy haul, a milk-run against trembling merchants, had transformed into a slaughterhouse where the outlaws were the cattle.

Danger swept up like a dust storm riding a gale. From every corner of the caravan,they emerged like a swarm of carrion worms wriggling out of a fresh corpse, relentless, numerous, and hungry. Even the lone, squalid cart at the center, where a dozen peasants, had stood shivering under white blankets of wool, revealed the monsters lurking beneath the fleece.

At the first howl of pleasure from the initial kill, the blankets were cast aside. These men did not rise with swords or steel in hands but long, weighted nets of the coastal fishers, swinging them toward their haul.

What once was now was no more.

First, the outlaws were high in their stirrups, blades raised to plunge downward into helpless victims; then, the world flipped. The weighted nets hissed through the air, entangling limbs, catching sword-hilts, and dragging the riders screaming from their saddles. Suddenly, they were the ones looking up from the dirt, staring into the cold eyes of the men about to deliver the final harvest.

What a man sows in the morning, he reaps by noon.

Bound in the hempen cages of the fishnets, the outlaws struggled like landed trouts. Their fine steel was useless, trapped against their own bodies as the Yarzat monsters leaped from the wagons to finish the work. There was no room for parley, no mercy for the "bandit-hunters." There was only the wet, heavy thud of axes meeting bone and the silence that followed an ended life.

The dry earth, which had tasted only dust and sun for years and that would never bear fruit to man, was suddenly gorged on a banquet of hot crimson.

In the opening seconds of the collision, more than a dozen outlaws were already incapacitated or dead before they could even draw a full breath to scream. One of the Yarzat savages, a man whose eyes burned with the frantic light of a mountain cat, leaped from the top of a grain cart with his arms flung wide like an eagle soaring toward its prey. In each hand, he clutched a heavy, black-iron axe. He descended with a peaceful, almost holy smile on his face, a silent angel of the butcher’s block.

The first axe plunged into the shoulder of a mounted rider, cleaving through chained mail as it were butter , the collarbone gave way as it always did with a sickening, woody thunk. The second followed a heartbeat later, finishing the arc the first had started by burying itself in the rider’s chest. The man’s expression as he died was made of confusion and raw, naked terror, the look of a man who had walked into a dream of wealth and woken up in the grip of a nightmare.

The rest of the bandit company fared no better. Their steeds, high-strung and sensitive to the sudden scent of gore, began to rear and dance in frantic circles. The beasts had been trained for a chase, not for a melee this intimate and claustrophobic. Riders were thrown from their saddles or dragged down . They clutched at the gasping sides as they did , their fingers slipping in the very blood they had hoped to spend on ale and whores, caressing the hilt of the steel that woke them up from their reverie of dreams.

They howled piteously, the sound indistinguishable from the merchants they had butchered weeks prior. They were finally paying the bill for the high-life they had craved, collected in bone and marrow.

Near the front, the man that appeared to be their captain tried to rally the men, his sword whistling in an arc against the coming danger. He managed to catch a Valakii warrior across the ribs, but the savage didn’t flinch, not that the blade bit deep. It was a shoddy swing that met against fucking cream of the cop armor.

For a moment both men shared a look of shock, the first at the knowledge he had failed and would soon reap the consequence of that , the second at the knowledge that indeed steel was stopped by the work of a gods’ arm.

The Malakii stepped inside just to get close enough to wrap his massive, hands around the captain’s throat. They went down together in a tangle of limbs, the captain’s muffled screams silenced by the sound of choking breaths. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

They thought they were escaping a wasp’s nest they could outrun. They realized too late that they had actually stepped into the maw of their death.

Just as they reached the edge of the road, death came from afar.

A volley of javelines and iron dart hissed through the air, finding the gaps in the bandits’ mail and where they did not they instead cut through, the steel doing easy work against the nearly rusted chains. One rider took a shaft through the eye and was jerked backward out of his stirrups, the wood going from one ear to the other; the other horse was hamstrung by a dart, sending man and beast tumbling into a heap of broken bones, mania getting hold of the beast movements as the man squirmed down against the beast in a bid to get out.

Any chance of getting out of it alive was over before the dust had even settled.

It would been complete slaughter had not been for a calm voice that rose admist the hellish landscape.

"HOLD!"

The man who spoke didn’t look like a warrior. He wore the wide-brimmed hat and salt-stained tunic of a merchant, yet he stood amidst the mangled corpses with a stillness that could have rivalled a lake. His skin lacked the deep, sun-baked bronze of the mountain tribes; he was a creature of these lands, yet the savages stopped as if hit by a physical wall or better yet reined it by a leash. Some held their axes inches from caved-in skulls, the steel trembling with the repressed urge to finish the kill.

But the blood-lust of the frontier was not so easily caged.

One savage ignored the command. With a guttural snarl, he brought his bearded axe down one last time, cleaving through the collarbone of a pleading survivor. The sound of the bone snapping was loud in the sudden silence.

A fleeting, razor-sharp expression of anger flickered across the merchant’s face. He didn’t shout again. He merely gave a sharp, downward nod to the man standing at his right hand.

The man waded through the mud and the dead, his heavy boots splashing in crimson pools, until he reached the unruly warrior. He grabbed the man by the shoulder with a grip of iron, spinning him around.

"Ovatko korvasi vuoren harjaamaa kiveä, mies?" the veteran roared.

The savage didn’t cow. He shoved the hand off his shoulder, his chest heaving, and pointed his blood-dripping axe at the veteran’s throat. "Sain vapaan valinnan, hihnaa ei voi laittaa päälleni!" he spat back.

A challenge had been issued.

The veteran didn’t hesitate; he unslung his own axe.

It was over in a heartbeat, three savage ringing strikes of steel against steel. On the third exchange, the veteran caught the unruly warrior’s handle on his haft, twisted, and delivered a clean counter-stroke. The heavy iron bit straight through the savage’s maw, quickly followed by another on the top of the skull.

The man collapsed into the mud of blood he had helped create. The veteran wiped his blade on the dead man’s tunic and stepped back into line, as all that happened was just a neighbourly argument.

The merchant watched the execution without batting an eyelid, his face as cold and indifferent as the stone of a dungeon.

After the deed was done he spat on the ground.

’’What a bad batch I ’ve been given...’’