Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The ground ran slick with blood.

Not in streams. Not in rivers. But in sudden, uneven pools—sticky and steaming, sinking into the grass like the earth itself had grown a thirst for men.

It was Herculean blood mostly, bright and wild and spattered like the careless splash of a farmer's pail across a field. Blood that once pulsed in veins with dreams of glory, home, or simply another day lived.

Now it lay wasted. Soaked into roots. Slurped by worms, to be taken back by what they came from.

They had been crushed—smashed by hammers, split open by halberds, minced with axes, stabbed with blades, and impaled with spears until there was no telling where one man ended and the next began. They died on their feet, on their knees, flat on their backs choking on their own teeth. And the manner of death didn't matter. The shape of it changed nothing. Once fallen, they were equal in value: kindling for war's infernal fire.

And Jarza?He watched.Eyes dry. Face unreadable.

He stood behind the surging press of his men, half-shadowed by a rise in the hill, the black plumes of his officers marking his presence like a shiver on the wind. His gaze swept over the scene—over the chaos, the violence, the horror—and all he saw was efficiency.

His Black Stripes carved through the Herculean levy like farmers through a harvest gone wild. Not with the frantic fervor of men desperate to survive, but with the terrifying rhythm of soldiers trained not just to kill—but to cleave. They didn't fight like men. They fought like parts of a great, snarling machine. A beast made of flesh and iron, breathing smoke, blinking black.

Two years of peace. And not a single tooth dulled.

Jarza almost smiled.

Good, he thought. They haven't grown soft.

He'd worried. He always worried. War made warriors sharp, but peace turned them dull, letting them rot inside their armor. But now, watching the serrated choreography of violence unfold before him—how the Yarzat right flank didn't just advance but folded inward like a black-winged hook, crushing through disorganized ranks with the weight of a descending sky—he knew.

His men were still blades. And blades that kept their edge didn't need replacing.

The real marvel wasn't in their slaughter—it was in their order. There was no single man screaming commands at the top of his lungs, no chaos of hierarchy. Instead, the system moved like clockwork. Sub-Centurii barked clipped orders that didn't need repeating. Formations rotated every few minutes, tired warriors stepping back behind the shield wall, fresh lines taking their place like tide rolling in.

No gap was unguarded. No strike was wasted.

It was a dance, a doctrine of death. Where other armies fought with the noise of panic, the Yarzat moved with something worse—silence. The kind that came from competence. Cold, impersonal, deadly.

A bad sound could etch fear for what it meant and brought, but silence was far scarier because it did not.

The Herculeans stood no chance, they never did.

Their chain of command was a mosaic of vanity and feudal confusion—lords barking over each other, levies looking to the wrong banners, men unsure whether to charge or brace. They died without understanding why they were dying. They broke in dozens. Then in hundreds.

A man with half his jaw gone screamed something to the wind as he staggered back and was trampled by his own comrades. Another ran with his arms held up, begging, only to catch a javelin through the spine and pitch forward like a puppet cut loose from its strings.

Jarza said nothing.

His role was not to interfere, not here. The battle was in its meat-grinder stage now. Prince Alpheo had already issued the macro orders; now the weight fell on the Black Stripes' sub-commanders, men bred not to think in grand strategy, but in the nuances of inches. They rotated blocks of men as one might turn cogs in a machine, managing fatigue like an alchemist managing heat, ensuring their edge stayed sharp for every brutal second of contact.

This was what made them different. Not just that they fought harder. But that they fought smarter. More precisely. Beautifully where other were barbarous

"Tell those on the right to get ready for a surge," Jarza finally muttered to a nearby aide, his eyes never leaving the blood-soaked field. "The center of the enemy will crack before long."

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The 250 men sent from the rear were swallowed whole—consumed like ants before an anteater's tongue.

There was no clang of triumph, no echo of vengeance—just silence, broken by screams. They'd entered the gaping maw of the great beast that the Yarzat army had become, and not even their bones were spat out. In they went, shields raised, spears lowered, discipline still intact… and then they were gone. Their banners disappeared like feathers in a storm. No one ever saw them again.

Lechlian had watched them march forward, and now he watched them vanish—eyes fixed, jaw clenched, fists trembling not from rage but helplessness. He could feel the slow give of his line, the subtle but damning pressure that meant defeat was near. Inch by inch, the black tide was forcing his men backward, until their boots found no soil—only blood, corpses, and the slippery mud of lost ground.

Then came the fear.

Not in the men. Not yet. But in him.

He realized, then, that it didn't matter if he sent another 250. Or 500. Or his entire rear guard.

It was a meat grinder. A monstrous wheel of steel and black resolve. Whatever was fed into it would only serve to keep it turning while demanding for more.

His fingers twitched, and for a moment he gritted his teeth against the truth clawing at the edge of his mind.

Arnold had been right.How much it hurt him to admit it..

That thought landed like a dagger in the gut. His son—the boy he had publicly dismissed, humiliated even—had seen it clearly from the start. The whole thing had been a trap. The bait wasn't subtle either. It had been audacious. Brazen. But he had fallen for it anyway. Worse—he had doubled down, believing he could overwhelm it by sheer force, by pride and steel alone.

If the cavalry had remained... if they had not been sent galloping off after ghosts conjured by Egil... then that impossible and yet easy maneuver the Yarzat flank had pulled would have been madness. Unviable. He had given up his one hammer, chasing shadows, and now had nothing left but crumbling lines and screams in the wind.

He turned, fury brimming just beneath the surface, and snapped toward a waiting courier, fingers already pointing mid-air. "Get to Lord Stilicho. Tell him to send everything that isn't nailed down. I want every free man behind the center."

But before the youth could sprint off, a second courier burst through the clustered knights, nearly crashing into Lechlian's horse, panting, pale, and wide-eyed with terror.

"Your grace!" the boy gasped, voice cracking from the sprint. "The rear—our rear is under attack!"

Lechlian blinked. The world froze.

"What?" he rasped, his voice barely audible.

The courier doubled over, drawing in shaky breaths before forcing the words out: "Unknown force… hit the rear… chaos, my lord. Stilicho's men are engaged. He says—he says he cannot spare a single man, but that given time he will be able to repel the enemy and aid your Grace."

Lechlian's world twisted, the colors around him seeming to drain. The noise of battle in front of him suddenly felt distant—muted, like it was happening behind glass.

His thoughts reeled. Another force? How? How had another damned force managed to circle around and strike their rear? There were scouts, watchers, pickets—lines! There had been no signs. No movement. No reports. Nothing.

And, of course, there was nothing.

No sudden force from the woods. No hidden column bursting from the hills. No flanking maneuver sent by the gods.

The terrifying news that the rear was under attack was a lie—an invention.

A carefully crafted fiction, authored by none other than Lord Stilicho himself.

For in truth, no swords clashed behind the Herculeian host, no arrows darkened the skies over their rear. The only movement in the rear was that of Stilicho's own men, quietly and efficiently packing up and leaving. No banners of enemy horsemen swept across the horizon.

What had happened was far simpler—and far more damning.

Stilicho had seen what Lechlian had refused to see.

That this war had been lost before the sun had even risen.

And so, rather than throw his strength away like the rest of the loyalist lords, he had made the only rational decision left to a man with a sense of survival sharper than his sense of duty.

He had abandoned the field as the original plan was.

Of course, he had waited and watched.

If the tide of battle had somehow, by miracle or incompetence, shifted in the prince's favor—if the Black Stripes had broken, if the Yarzat army had been routed—then he would have marched his troops forward and did his duty

But now? The victors were clear.

"Did they tunnel out of the bloody earth?"Lechlain, meanwhile, muttered aloud, shaking his head, sweat chilling against his neck despite the heat of the day. His eyes scanned the far horizon as if some invisible answer would reveal itself; of course, none did as he was unable to see the writing on the walls and the only truth present at that moment.

He had lost.(third phase of battle)