Chapter 496: Trust Him!
He turned to the three hundred young warriors behind him, his voice calm but carrying easily across the dry air.
"Remember this place," he said. "This is what defeat looks like. Keep that image burned in your minds. We are not going to let our home become another dead wasteland."
The recruits straightened a little, their nervousness mixing with renewed resolve.
Sol turned forward again, his hand resting lightly on the hilt of the Dreadwing Blade.
"Keep moving. The enemy is coming."
The group of young Veynar warriors continued their march across the cracked, lifeless ground... three hundred souls walking straight into the heart of the trap they had prepared.
The wasteland stretched endlessly before them, silent and unforgiving.
And somewhere far beyond the horizon, the massive Coalition army was marching closer with every passing minute.
...
After walking a short distance onto the parched gravel flats, well clear of the mountain’s shadow, Sol stopped and raised his hand.
"Sit down," he ordered the recruits, his tone flat and relaxed. "Loosen your leather bindings, relax your muscles, and wait for the Coalition army to break the horizon."
The young warriors froze in place, staring at him in pure confusion and disbelief.
They were standing in the middle of a completely open, barren wasteland with nothing but cracked clay, white limestone gravel, and their own weapons to protect them. To their inexperienced minds, sitting down in the dirt before facing a massive enemy horde felt like inviting death to come early. It was suicide. Pure, incomprehensible suicide.
One of the bolder recruits... a seventeen-winter boy named Lirren, whose hands were still shaking against his spear shaft... stepped forward nervously, his voice cracking slightly.
"Lord Sol... shouldn’t we hide somewhere? Or at least send someone ahead for reconnaissance? Someone to climb the low ridges and inform us about the incoming army’s size and distance? If they sprint through the dust, they could be on top of our lines before we can even stand up properly."
The other recruits nodded frantically, their faces pale beneath the charcoal paint. Many were clenching their spears so tightly their knuckles had turned white.
A few were visibly trembling, their eyes darting toward the distant horizon as if expecting the Coalition army to appear at any second like a wave of death.
Sol casually looked down at the boy, his lips pulling into a small, amused smirk. He rested his forearm against the pommel of his sheathed Dreadwing Blade, looking as relaxed as if he were about to take a nap under a tree.
"Don’t worry too much," he said, his rough voice carrying a lazy, joking weight. "Aren’t I standing right here in front of you? Just sit down and relax your body. You’ve walked a long distance through the jungle, and trust me... you’re going to be doing a hell of a lot of running later too."
A few of the young recruits let out weak, nervous chuckles. The sheer absurdity of Sol’s total calmness helped break the icy knot of terror in their stomachs.
One by one, they began dropping onto their haunches, sitting cross-legged on the hot gravel, spears resting across their knees as they tried to rub the cramps out of their calves and thighs.
Some closed their eyes and tried to breathe steadily. Others kept glancing nervously toward the horizon, unable to fully relax.
However, looking at him so completely relaxed in the face of a four-thousand-man horde, the old elders who were hidden behind the thistle nets on the lower cliff edges were utterly speechless.
They clutched their bone-knives tightly, their faces pale with a mixture of shock and severe irritation.
One of the gray-haired elders leaned closer to Warchief Veylara, his hands trembling with barely contained frustration, hissed under his breath, "Is that boy insane? Warchief... is it truly right for him to be so relaxed? Look at him! He’s treating this like a casual hunting trip!
He is standing there joking with the children in the middle of an open desert, right in front of a major event that will decide the survival of our entire bloodline! Four thousand enemies are coming, and he tells our children to sit down and relax?!"
If Bruga’s vanguard breaks the ridge while our recruits are sitting in the dirt like old women, they will be trampled to ground before we can even rush there!"
Another elder, a wrinkled woman with deep scars across her face, shook her head in disbelief.
"I’ve lived through countless major events, and I’ve never seen a commander this... this casual before a battle of this scale. Does he even understand what’s coming?"
A third elder, gripping his staff until the wood creaked, muttered angrily, "If we survive this, I’m going to give that black-armored brat a piece of my mind. Sitting in the open like bait... what kind of lunatic plan is this?"
High Shaman Zephyra, who was also hidden among them, couldn’t help but smile faintly despite the tension.
"Trust him," she whispered softly. "He has never failed us yet."
But even she looked a little worried, her fingers twisting the hem of her robe nervously.
In fact, Veylara was also momentarily speechless.
She stood hidden among the thistle nets on the lower cliff edge, her single good eye tracking the lazy way Sol was rolling his massive shoulders in the blazing sun below.
The black Rockhorn armor gleamed darkly against the pale wasteland, still streaked with the dried blood of last night’s enemies.
For a brief second, even the iron-willed Warchief felt a flicker of doubt. Sending their youngest and least experienced warriors out as bait in such an open, exposed position... it went against every instinct she had honed over decades of brutal warfare.
But then her jaw tightened, as she remembered the Zerith night raid, and how he saved so many of their warriors, and later planned an outrageous counter raid plan, and miraculously... no, it was not some miracle.
Instead, it was all his clever planning, they succeeded and managed to inflict massive damage before even the start of war, she remembered the later plan to feed enemy fake information and get rid of all hidden eyes at once.