NOVEL WEB Chapter 14: Battle, part three (85)
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Barbro looked on. Utter confusion and fear were gripping him. What was once a simple village was now a large fortress. The strangeness of the sudden shift made him stop. His horse that he was riding upon was also confused. That made the two of them.
The Baron looked on at what was now in front of him and gawked like a fish. The men behind him also seemed just as startled by the sudden shift in scenery. Well, it wasn’t really a different location. Though really just a change in the, well, everything else.
The wooden walls that had surrounded this village were replaced with a shift of the air into large and imposing walls. The woods around the, now fortress, had been cut down; and had been replaced with a field of different obstacles that the men, the baron, and the prince had never seen before. It was truly imposing.
The levees didn’t know what to do. They had simply been trained to hold spears and block cavalry charges. They hadn’t the faintest idea of how to siege a fortress. Much less a fortress that appeared to use tech and obstacles that Re-Estize had never employed before.
The Baron also didn’t know what to do. After all, he had been trained in siege warfare, but the sieges that Re-Estize had participated in weren’t all that advanced. It mostly boiled down to battering down that door to the city they were sieging and rushing inside and killing everyone.
The only person right now that actually had an idea was Prince Barbro. The man himself put a hand to his chin after his men and his horse calmed down and spoke out loud. The baron and the current levee commander hurriedly listened, while making sure to memorize the plan.
“The info we got on this place was wrong. Whoever wrote it up needs to be drawn and quartered after we get back,” he mumbled, but then continued, “First we will build a battering ram. After all we need to break down those doors. Second, we need to get our men to carry it to the doors safely. To do that we need to draw the attention of their men away from our men with fore from our archers. Maybe even have the cavalry charge to the back of the fortress,” he said.
The two other men nodded at his words and began to make them real. First, the levees that had brought axes for one reason or another began to chop down the most suitable trees.
While they were doing that, the cavalry spurred their horse and galloped them to the back of the fortress. Aeskell looked at this whole thing with an amused smile on her face. She raised her hand, the men she trained herself knowing what to do after that.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the soldiers that had been trained in bowman ship marched to the edge of the obstacle and trap filled area and loosed their bows. They drew back the strings on their bows, taunt and fired. The arrows sailing through the air and impacting the wall.
The bows were too weak, in the end, it only made the men on the wall amused as they smiled underneath their helms that masked their faces. The men on the wall obeyed the order to fight back and raised their crossbows onto the edge of the wall to the steady them, and fired. After Aeskell had lowered her hand and given permission to fire.
The bolts came flying down and impacted their targets. While the bows of the kingdom had rather good range for what they were, cheep wooden thing that they were. The crossbows that Aeskell and Pandora’s Actor had given the men and women of Carne were simply better.
While the range of the bows of the Re-Estize kingdom that the men that were laying siege was only about 300 yards at max, the max range for the crossbows that the men and women of carne had were 500 yards.
All in all, the levees that probably just wanted to go home were outmatched and outgunned. The Archers then decided it was a good idea to try and hide behind the concrete dragon teeth that had been placed all around the outside of the fortress to stop cavalry from charging around and to break up formations.
This blocked a good amount of the fire, and Askell made a note to remove them later and get better ones for sieges. The bolts from the crossbows weren’t completely blocked, however. The men were getting hit.
Meanwhile, the prince was watching from outside the range of the bolts with shield men around himself to protect him. A deep scowl on the man’s face was plain to see. He turned his head to the men chopping down a couple trees to use as battering rams.
He turned back to the walls surrounding the village and its people. There, he spotted an crimson haired woman on the wall, and shook his angered fist at her.
…
All the while this was going on, Enri looked down at the men that had formed a shield wall. She was rather nervous and was fidgeting all the while. The reason wasn’t that she was scared of her people. No, their safety of them was well in hand, Lady Aeskell made sure of that.
What she was worried about was the number of people laying siege to her town, and she didn’t know if they had enough numbers. Sure, they could guard all the sides of the walls, but what if that wasn’t enough? What if some of her friends died?
Yes, they had equipment, but she had learned from all the lessons that Lord Ainz’s son had told her. Equipment wasn’t everything. People could still die. She shivered at the images of her parents dying to those theocracy men that had disguised themselves in empire armor.
Enri grabbed the Horn of The Goblin General in her hand. She had always kept it with her as a ways of comforting herself. The thoughts of her saviors made her mind settle. Yet today, all she could think about was blowing into the horn.
Aeskell noticed this and turned her head to her. a smile graced her face as she looked at the girl. The little girl in Aeskell’s arms also looked at the young woman with slight confusion.
“Enri, you’re nervous, aren’t you?” when the girl nodded Aeskell’s smile deepened, “that’s fine, it’s ok to be nervous. I was nervous the first time I went into battle. In fact, I used to be a mercenary, then after that I became a security guard for a museum. Every time I went out I was scared I would die. Well, not so much with the security guard job, but you get the picture.”
“How did you handle it?” Enri asked.
“I added things to my routine that made my job feel safer. Like checking my equipment a couple times after I did so the first time. Sometimes I would pray to my weapons,” when Enri, Ninya, Leinas, and Tanya looked confused at that, she chuckled, “That was a habit from my grandfather I picked up. He said it made the weapons more comfortable with the one using them,” she finished.
Enri looked at the goblin horn in her hands, and rubbed it like a lamp. She took in a deep breath and let it out, the nervousness she had didn’t go away like she was hoping, but it did lessen. Aeskell smiled at that, then spoke.
“If you want to, you could use that one. After all, we could always use more hands up on the wall. There is plenty of room up here, after all, for another troop of goblins,” she said.
Enri looked at her with a slightly thankful smile, then down at the horn. She shook her shoulders and breathed deeply again. She then heard the enemy army leadership, mostly the prince, order the charge to the gates.
She then blew into the horn.
All hell broke loose after that.
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