Ruin has come to our family

"Barristan, protect him. Watch for crossbows," Lance quickly commanded, seeing the landowner's agitation.

"Leave it to me." Barristan raised his shield and followed the man onto the platform.

The landowner stood on the high platform, looking out. His appearance indeed caused the guards below to hesitate. The message they had received was that an intruder had killed the landowner, but why was he appearing before them now?

"David is a traitor! You all..."

Before the landowner could finish, a crossbow bolt suddenly shot out from some hidden corner, flying straight towards him. Just as it was about to strike, a shield appeared in front of him, deflecting the bolt.

"Behind me!" Barristan shouted, raising his shield high. He tucked his body in, crouching slightly to minimize his exposure. On the other side of the yard, Dismas had already located the half-exposed body of the crossbowman. Without a moment's hesitation, he squeezed the trigger. In the next second, the crossbowman fell to the ground with a bolt through his neck. Death was not yet upon him; he struggled, fighting for life, but only succeeded in drowning in the blood that flooded his lungs.

The landowner snapped back to his senses. His fear turned to rage, and he began to curse. "What are you worthless fools doing? Look! It is I! Lower your weapons and get out of here!"

CRACK! A gunshot interrupted his tirade, followed almost simultaneously by the clang of metal on metal. It was a bullet against the shield. The distance had robbed the shot of most of its power, and the soft lead pellet flattened into fragments upon impact, one of which even managed to scratch the landowner's cheek.

Barristan stood firm, not moving an inch from the impact, his experience in battle allowing him to protect himself perfectly. The landowner, however, was not so resilient. The two successive attacks had terrified him. He collapsed to the platform, cowering with his head in his hands, hiding from the unseen gunman. Seeing this, Barristan simply kicked him off the platform. The landowner tumbled down like a sack of gourds but landed safely behind the earthen wall.

Lance had known before he arrived that David had replaced all the guards with his own men. So why had he risked putting the landowner on display? Because he needed a lure to draw out their fire, to trigger any hidden dangers. At the same time, it would buy him time for his next move.

And now, that had been accomplished.

The horse that had been pulling the wagon was gone. In its place stood Lance. With a powerful shove, he sent the carriage that was blocking the gate rolling backward, clearing the way and revealing the tall, mounted knight waiting behind it.

The sight alone was enough to instill a suffocating pressure in the guards outside. The difference in power between an armored and unarmored knight is immense. The same is true for a mounted and unmounted one. The only weapon that could possibly threaten Reynauld, the flintlock, required at least thirty seconds to reload. That would be more than enough time.

"For the Light!"

With a roar, Reynauld kicked his heels into the horse's flanks. The pained animal whinnied and charged, heading straight for the guards cowering behind the wooden doors. These men were already on the verge of breaking from Dismas's unerringly accurate bolts. The fact that they hadn't already fled and were still maintaining a defense was a testament to their ten-odd days of training. But now, to face a charging, fully armored knight... the sound of his horse's hooves was like the tolling of a funeral bell.

Their last shred of sanity shattered.

The guards broke and ran in all directions, the two wooden doors they had been holding up crashing to the ground. But Reynauld had no intention of letting them go. He spurred his horse onward. One guard, realizing he couldn't escape, turned in a mad frenzy to attack, but his desperate blow failed to even slow Reynauld's charge. A single sweep of the Crusader's longsword, and another head went flying.

"Drop your weapons!"

"On the ground!"

"Surrender and live!"

The guards were utterly routed by Reynauld. At his shouts, they began to throw down their weapons and fall to their knees, surrendering. Reynauld rode in a circuit around them. Not a single man dared to remain standing.

From a wooden shed on the other side of the yard, the barrel of a long gun extended, taking aim at Reynauld.

CRACK!

A flash of fire, and a plume of black smoke drifted into the air. Reynauld seemed to sense it, turning his head to look at the smoking gun barrel protruding from the shed. He knew what had just happened.

"Argh!"

In the next moment, a scream came from the shed. Something tumbled out and hit the ground with a thud. It was a person.

Dismas lowered his own long gun and began to reload, scoffing as he did so. "Doesn't he know to change positions after firing?" A flintlock's flash and smoke were a dead giveaway. Any experienced sniper would move after every shot. An amateur like this, who took two minutes to reload, was nothing but a target to him. He was not the only one with a long gun; the one they had taken on the Old Road had finally proven its worth. How else could one man have suppressed more than a dozen guards with firepower alone?

The man who had fallen from the shed was not dead. He struggled to his feet and turned to run.

"That's David! Seize him!" Lance shouted.

Reynauld immediately spurred his horse forward. As he passed, he smacked David on the back with the flat of his blade, knocking him to the ground. But the man was incredibly tenacious and still tried to resist, only stopping when the cold steel of a longsword was pressed against his neck. He was captured and brought back.

Lance and Barristan began to clean up the battlefield, collecting the weapons of the living and dragging the bodies of the dead into the wagon to be [Sacrificed]. Feeling the [Boon] flow into him, Lance finally smiled. Like a field mouse storing grain for the winter, he felt the joy of a bountiful harvest.

The cleanup was quick, mainly because there were few survivors. The seven guards in the manor were all dead. Of the fourteen in the attacking force, including David himself, only eight were still alive.

Twenty-one against four. A five-to-one advantage. Anyone would have said the odds were in their favor. But from the moment the two forces clashed, David's painstakingly built guard detail had been almost completely wiped out. Lance's small squad, on the other hand, had not suffered a single wound.

It was no contest. Lance's men were all seasoned veterans, forged in battle. They were simply not comparable to guards who had only been hastily trained for a dozen days. To say nothing of the massive gap in equipment. Dismas had been a one-man fortress, with three crossbows and two firearms at his disposal. Reynauld and Barristan were both heavily armored, one mounted, one with a shield.

And then there was the effective strategy. By using an elite squad infiltration, they had avoided a direct confrontation, negating the enemy's advantage in terrain and numbers, and instead leveraging their own strengths to divide and conquer the battlefield.