Chapter 1004

The Empire tried to fight back.

Ten thousand men did not simply watch their front line collapse and politely accept that the day had become inconvenient. Officers screamed orders. Horns blared. Mage squads raised barriers. Shield bearers rushed forward to patch the ruptures opening in their formation. Archers loosed in waves, and the second rank of infantry pushed behind the first with spears leveled.

It looked impressive. For about ten seconds. Then the Lionsguard truly hit them.

The second clash sounded less like two armies meeting and more like a wall being introduced to a landslide.

Lionsguard veterans crashed into the imperial line with Overdrive burning in their limbs. Their bodies blurred forward in short, brutal bursts, not wasting movement, not chasing glory, not screaming about honor. They aimed for knees, throats, wrists, gaps in armor, shield edges, and exposed armpits. Every strike had a purpose. Every kill opened space. Every step forward made room for the person behind them.

The northerners were less neat. They were also worse.

Kharnek’s warriors struck like winter had grown arms and decided diplomacy was beneath it. Axes split shields. Clubs caved helmets. Heavy blades punched through breastplates and kept going until the men behind the target suddenly discovered they had also joined the fight. A northerner with half his beard burned away caught an imperial spear under his arm, yanked the soldier forward, and headbutted him so hard the man’s helmet bent inward.

Then he used the corpse as a shield. Practical people, northerners. The imperial front bent. Then cracked. Then began to fold.

“Hold the line!” an imperial officer screamed. “They’re just frontier rabble! Hold—”

A Lionsguard recruit slammed into him from the side.

The boy could not have been more than twelve. Maybe thirteen if someone was generous and blind. He was thin, soaked, pale, and had a bandage wrapped around his head. His sword looked too big for him.

He also hit the officer with enough force to lift the man off his feet. The officer’s armor dented inward. Air and spit burst from his mouth. He hit the mud, rolled twice, and tried to rise.

The boy stepped on his sword wrist, punched him in the face with the pommel, and kicked him unconscious before turning toward the next soldier with frightened eyes and a shaking mouth.

The fear did not stop him. That disturbed the imperial troops more than the veterans. Men could understand strong adults. They could understand monsters. They could understand northerners, in the way one understood storms, avalanches, and tax collectors, unpleasant forces that existed and ruined days.

But children? Barely grown boys and girls pushing back trained soldiers? That did something ugly to morale. One recruit with freckles and a chipped front tooth ducked under a spear thrust, drove his shoulder into a grown man’s stomach, and shoved him three steps backward into his own formation. Another girl caught a sword swing on her shield, screamed more from terror than courage, and still broke the attacker’s knee with a low kick taught by Tali three weeks ago.

They were not elegant. They were not calm. Some cried while fighting. Some vomited after killing. Some shook so badly between exchanges that veterans had to shove them back into position. But when the enemy reached them, they held. More than held.

They overpowered. The imperial soldiers did not know why. They did not know that every sworn Lionsguard member carried the invisible weight of Ludger’s class.

Guildmaster.

A title that had sounded almost silly when attached to a young man with dry eyes and too many contingency plans. It was not silly now.

The class made the recruits many times stronger and made the veterans with a new edge. Training yielded more. Coordination came easier. Members adapted faster under pressure. Their bodies squeezed more out of stamina than they should. Their mana recovered in scraps when others would have been dry. Their instincts sharpened around allies.

None of the enemies knew that. They only knew the frontier guild was wrong. Too strong. Too organized. Too difficult to scare. And much, much too angry.

Arslan advanced at the center with his sword low. He did not rage wildly. That would have been wasteful. His fury had been compressed into something cleaner. Every swing killed.

An imperial shield captain lunged toward him with three men at his back. Arslan stepped inside the first spear, cut the shaft, opened the man from collarbone to hip, then turned the motion into a horizontal slash that took the second man across the throat. The third tried to retreat.

Arslan let him take one step. Then his sword punched through the man’s back and out through his chest. He pulled the blade free and kept moving. Around him, the Lionsguard followed. Not because he shouted. Because they trusted where he stepped. That mattered more than any speech.

“Left flank!” Darnell barked somewhere behind him. “Close the gap! Don’t chase! Let the scum come to you!”

A pair of recruits overextended toward a stumbling mercenary.

Brann caught one by the collar and yanked him back just as three arrows sliced through the space where his head had been. The boy stared.

Brann shoved him behind a shield line. “You can thank me by not being stupid twice.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good. Now stab that one.”

Farther ahead, Tali’s squad rotated like a grinding machine. Shields forward. Spears through gaps. Overdrive bursts only when the enemy tried to break contact. They were exhausted, bruised, and running on the stubborn fumes left after proper stamina had died.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

They still killed. Jori laughed like a madman while splitting a mercenary’s axe haft.

“Come on!” he shouted. “We had a terrible night and you brought breakfast!”

A soldier charged him. Jori buried an axe in his chest.

“Not you. You taste like disappointment.”

The enemy line shuddered again. The first thousand broke faster than expected. The second tried to stabilize. The third realized the first two were becoming bodies and began to develop serious personal doubts about imperial service. Morale spread both ways. So did collapse.

The Empire had numbers. Training. Equipment. Mages. Command structure. Support from runic golems waiting farther back.

Lionfang had something simpler. Everyone knew what happened if they lost. There would be no ransom. No mercy. No honorable occupation. No fair trial. No imperial law gently applied to a rebellious frontier town. There would be pyres. There would be fingers in bags. There would be children dragged from shelters and called traitors because they had been born behind the wrong walls.

That clarity made people difficult to negotiate with. The northerners hit another formation from the side.

Kharnek led them.

The chieftain moved like a siege engine that had gotten tired of being pulled and decided to handle matters personally. His weapon smashed down onto a shield wall, and the first three shields broke. The men behind them broke worse.

An imperial knight with a plumed helmet stepped forward, glowing with some defensive skill.

Kharnek backhanded him with the haft of his weapon. The knight spun sideways and collapsed into the mud. Kharnek did not even look down.

“Too soft,” he growled.

Sigrid fought near him, colder and cleaner. Where Kharnek broke formations, she cut the threads holding them together. Officers died when they opened their mouths. Standard bearers dropped before signals could be raised. Mages found knives in their ribs when they thought the frontline was still twenty steps away. Together, they made the northern advance look inevitable.

It was not. Arslan knew that. Inevitable things did not sweat, bleed, or limp.

Their fighters were spending themselves quickly. Too quickly. Rage, discipline, Overdrive, and class bonuses could push bodies beyond reason, but beyond reason still had a bill attached. Every burst of speed cost stamina. Every reinforced strike ate mana. Every wound closed by Healing Touch stole power that might have blocked the next blade.

They were winning. Clearly. And that was what bothered him. The enemy should have changed tactics. They did not.

That awareness came slowly at first, buried under the rhythm of battle.

Another enemy squad collapsed. Another officer died. Another imperial formation began falling back in ragged pieces. Still, the commands from the rear remained steady.

Push.

Hold.

Advance.

Replace losses.

No real retreat. No shift to ranged containment. No attempt to flank with cavalry.

No organized withdrawal to preserve forces. They kept feeding men into the grinder as if bodies were a resource to be spent until some hidden mechanism activated. Arslan cut down a spear wielder, stepped over him, and looked past the immediate battle.

His instincts tightened.

“Darnell!” he shouted.

Darnell turned from where he was directing a shield rotation. “What?”

“Something’s wrong.”

Darnell glanced at the enemy line. “Only something?”

“They’re not trying to win this front anymore.”

Darnell’s expression changed. Because once said aloud, it was obvious. The enemy army was about to be defeated. Not someday. Not eventually. Soon.

Their center had taken too much damage. Their left flank had nearly collapsed twice. Their mages were struggling to maintain barriers under Maurien’s wind pressure from the wall, and Gaius’s geomancers had turned enough ground into sucking mud that several armored squads were fighting the battlefield as much as Lionfang.

Ten thousand men had come to bleed Lionfang. Instead, they were bleeding out faster. And their commanders were allowing it. Arslan’s gaze moved toward the enemy backline.

At first, he saw only rain, banners, and movement.

Then the movement became pattern. Reserves. All of them. Units that had remained behind the main formation were advancing. Not trickling forward to reinforce weak points. Not rotating in disciplined waves.

Moving as one.

Heavy infantry. Cavalry dismounting to cross the ruined mud. Mage companies tightening into protected blocks. Crossbow lines shifting. Mercenary bands that had been held back until now. Adventurer groups, bright armor and mismatched weapons gleaming through the rain.

And at their center, beneath two separate command standards, rode the men Arslan had been waiting to see.

Orleandul.

Armandis.

The imperial commanders had finally stepped onto the board.

Orleandul was tall, narrow, and wrapped in pale armor that looked ceremonial until one noticed the enchantment lines moving beneath the surface. He rode without hurry, spear upright, cloak barely touched by rain due to the shimmering barrier around him.

Armandis rode beside him in darker armor, broader, heavier, face hidden beneath a helm shaped like some snarling beast. A massive blade rested across his shoulder as if the weapon weighed nothing.

“There,” he said.

Darnell followed his gaze.

“Commanders.”

“Yes.”

“About damn time?”

“No,” Arslan said. “Too convenient.”

Then the horns sounded. Not from the center. From both sides. Deep metallic horns that did not belong to human lungs.

Arslan looked left. His blood went cold. Runic golems were approaching from the western side of the battlefield. Not a handful. Not a squad. Dozens. Then more behind them.

Their metal bodies moved through the rain in steady formation, optics glowing, weapons unfolding from arms and shoulders. Some carried shield attachments. Others had long-barreled cannons. A few were larger than the rest, bulky and hunched beneath reinforced plating.

Arslan looked right. More golems. Countless was an exaggeration. Unfortunately, not by much. They advanced from both flanks, wide and deliberate, using the chaos of the battle to slide around Lionfang’s outer forces. Not rushing. Not firing yet. Just moving into position.

To surround them. Not the town. The army outside the walls. Lionsguard and the northerners had pushed too far forward in their counterattack. Not recklessly. Not stupidly. The pressure had demanded it. The prisoners, the pyres, the enemy formation, the opening created by detonated runes—it had all drawn the battle outward step by step.

Now the trap closed.

The first ten thousand had not been meant to win.

They had been meant to hold Lionfang’s best fighters outside the walls long enough for the reserves and golems to complete the encirclement.

Arslan felt the shape of it settle around him. A slaughter bowl. Bigger this time. The enemy had learned that rage alone would not pull Lionfang into the first trap.

So they had given them a battle they could win. Victory as bait.