Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The Yarzat lines descended like a black tide, no gallant trumpet, no soaring banners, just the sheer, dreadful rhythm of boots on earth and the grim silence of men who knew their trade.

The First , the most veteran of the legions, led the charge with mechanical purpose, their formations fluid and coiled like a serpent about to strike.

Just paces before contact, a sudden cry broke from their line, not a war-cry but an order.

"First volley!"

Like breath expelled from a great beast, hundreds of javelins snapped through the air with a low, buzzing hum. They did not scatter wildly but flew in precise arcs. The Herculeian front, still patching gaps and elbowing into vague positions, received the volley not with shields raised and braced—but with disjointed chaos.

The sounds soon revealed the effectiveness of the attack: meat punched through with iron, wooden shafts cracking on bone, screams shrill and sputtering as men dropped with weapons still half-lowered. Dozens fell before their feet could dig into the ground, dropped by missiles they had not expected, nor were prepared to answer.

A lord's banner sagged as its bearer's throat was opened mid-yell , his only duty falling onto the grass, being stepped on by hundreds of feet; two brothers, barely armored levy, clutched each other as one of them bled out with a javelin lodged in his guts.

Then the Yarzat lines collided.

They didn't just hit the Herculeans. They entered them—like a blade into soft flesh. There was no clashing of valorous knights or grand duels beneath fluttering standards. There was screaming. There was a wet sound, the kind that sticks behind the ears long after the battle's done—the slapping of blood-soaked steel on open torsos, the crunch of iron-capped boots stomping down on hands and faces and ribs.

Halberdiers from the Third moved like threshers in a wheat field. Their long, blades hacked in downward arcs that didn't just kill, but unmade anything in their path.

A levy who raised his spear too high had it torn from his grip, and his jaw smashed in by the flat of a halberd. Another tried to turn and flee—only to feel a hook behind his knee and the world turn sideways as the ground rushed up to meet his face, and the next moment tore his neck open with a gurgling spray, like a spring coming out of a rock, the water being , however,crimson red.

The Herculeian right wasn't broken all at once, but it was clear where the advantage was held.

They suffered. Trapped between their own disorganized rear and the Yarzat front that came at them with clockwork violence. Limbs were lost before lives. Eyes gouged before skulls caved in. A man who fell was a man trampled—sometimes by his enemy, sometimes by his friends. Often both, either killed by the lack of air, given the multitude of feet on their chest, or instead, a broken neck.

Hell was empty, and all the devils were there, relishing in the deaths of their enemy clamoring into the skies with howls and cheers as the sight of the bloodshed they were causing.

Their elation found its source not in the death of their enemy but in the repayment of the humiliation and shame they had brought to their prince.

"Push forward! Push forward!" some lord shrieked, voice cracking with desperation, giving an order as useless and meaningless as his soldiers' resistance against the inevitable, that they so feebly thought they could stop.

They now realize its futility.

His command vanished into the tide. The Yarzats gave no space, no rest, no rhythm to counter. They didn't fight for honor or for glory, for in the midst of screams, howlings of pain, and shrieking of steel, there was only one truth and one truth only tangible in that crisp day.

All of those values and ideals were gone, for out of a man's dying breath, the only thing that came out was the spoiled breath of death reeking the air of the still-living

And as the Herculeians began to fold, localized collapses where the Black Stripes creeped in the enemy lines, the truth became violently clear to every man still clutching his spear with white-knuckled fear:

They were not soldiers standing in defiance.

They were meat, caught in the gears of a black, grinding machine, their flesh and bones broken for the feed of the Great Beast, the very being that each man fears and is fascinated by, its great maws opening to devour anything that fell in it and failed to get out.

And no god, no prince, no banner would save them.

They fought for nothing.

Given spears by hands they would never shake, pointed toward enemies they did not hate, the men on that field were not warriors in the truest sense. They were flesh wrapped in orders, trembling hearts bound together only by fear. They did not stand for glory, or faith, or homeland—they stood only because someone told them to.

Useless and meaningless their death was, for they had no meaning to be there in the first place.

Their failure did not lie in the steel they carried, nor the strength of their arms—it was rooted deeper, in the marrow of their being. For no matter how solid the walls, a house built upon sand will always collapse. And so too did they, for theirs were souls without foundation. No conviction. No loyalty. No love for their lord. No pride in their prince. No faith in the crown that had summoned them.

When the tide of black came for them—unyielding, silent, absolute—they met it not with fire, but with the cold dread of men who already knew they were lost. There was no light in their eyes. No last words whispered in hope or defiance. Only the silence of those who die for nothing and know it.

There was no honor in their end. No one would carve songs into stone or write poems in memory of what they did that day. No child would remember a name. No friend would carry a legacy.

Just bodies in the dirt, faceless and forgotten.Their blood soaked into ground that did not care.

A useless death.And worse—a lonely one.

-------------------------------

15 minutes.

That was all it had taken.

Lord Stilicho stood motionless atop the slight ridge where the rear of the army was staked, his gaze lost somewhere beyond the haze and dust curling from the far-left of the battlefield. The courier before him—hardly more than a boy, red-faced and panting—had galloped over with the kind of urgency that announced disaster even before a word was spoken.

Now, with his chest heaving and tunic soaked in sweat, the boy delivered the news not as a message but as a eulogy.

There should have been pain.

There should always be pain when something you've built, something you've believed in, collapses before your eyes. When a flame you thought sturdy enough to weather the world's storms flickers out at the faintest breath of wind. But Stilicho felt nothing—not grief, not rage, not even the numb sting of disappointment.

He turned, his cloak whispering across the dust, and called for his second-in-command with the casual gravity of a man ordering wine at a quiet feast.

"Send 200 footmen to reinforce the right and aid the prince."

His voice carried calm, practiced authority. His officer bowed and moved to obey.

But the courier, sweat still clinging to his jaw like dew on scorched earth, stammered again, this time with just a bit too much fire: "My lord—His Grace requested as many men as possible. The flank is collapsing. They—"

Stilicho's head turned slowly, and when his eyes locked onto the boy's, the words dried like blood in the sun. The stare was not cruel, but cold enough to steal breath. There was no anger in it only silence. The kind that made men understand things they were not told.

"You'll tell His Grace," Stilicho said, each word sharpened like a blade honed on ice, "that he may have 250 men for his trouble."

The courier blinked, unsure if he was being indulged or dismissed, until Stilicho added, with a slight, steely narrowing of the eyes not impart its meaning, "Not one more."

The boy bowed and left, boots kicking up the dust of the dying day as he vanished into the storm that the Yarzat had brought upon them.

Stilicho exhaled quietly. Not a sigh. A release. He turned back toward the distant lines where men screamed and steel rang out like funeral bells, and there ,amidst the chaos, he found his proof.

I did well to keep other roads open, he thought to himself.Sharing the boat with Lechlian had always been a risk. I just never thought the damn fool would capsize it so quickly.

The fool clamored for a war that he could have never won.

And now?Now the waters were rising, reaching his knees, its cold grip cooling his skin.But he was not worried for Stilicho would swim.

He always would