Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 545

Chapter 545: Observing the enemy
It was a sunlit day, one of those early spring afternoons when the air carries both the warmth of the sun and the chill of yesterday’s breeze. The forest canopy above swayed gently, dappling the forest floor in scattered light and shadow. Beneath that leafy ceiling, lying perfectly still in the low underbrush, were two scouts of the White Army—flat to the ground, quiet as a breath.

They weren’t dressed like the rest of the army, not even close. No black-and-white wool cloaks, no polished breastplates, no proud crests or gleaming helmets.

That was for men on parade routes and battlefields. These two wore plain brown and green, threadbare and dusted with dried mud, their chainmail hidden beneath loose cloth dyed to blend with the bark and moss. The metal links barely whispered when they moved, and even those whispers were rare.

A scout who made noise was a dead scout.

The older of the two, a man with a greying beard and a long scar that snaked down the side of his face like a dried river, had positioned himself facing a narrow road cutting through the trees. His chin rested on his forearms, elbows nestled in the dirt like roots. Beside him, his younger companion—barely out of boyhood—fidgeted, not nervously, but with the soft, subtle movement of someone still growing into silence.

They had no banners. No horns. Just their eyes, their ears, and the blades by their sides. But even those were not meant for combat. Their swords were shorter than standard, worn low on the back or side, positioned more for cutting foliage or the throats of sleeping guards, should the need arise. But their training never demanded they draw steel unless every other option had failed. They were scouts, not warriors. Their purpose wasn’t glory. It was knowledge.

And knowledge, in the right hands, could crush armies.

From this vantage point—hidden in a patch of brush that had grown wild from years of disuse—they watched. Listened. Waited. The road ahead was still, save for the occasional fluttering of a crow or the creak of tree limbs.

They had spent hours like this.

No bard sang of the man who crawled two miles through mud to count wagons. No toast was raised for the one who memorized the numbers of tents in the enemy army.

But every victory—the kind that brought cities to heel and crowned princes—stood on the shoulders of shadows like these.

The warm sun filtered through the trees, but neither spared it a glance. Their eyes were fixed ahead—up the hills, where the enemy had decided to make their stand.

Nearly a thousand men toiled in the valley below, felling trees with axe and saw, the dull thuds of wood splintering faintly carried by the wind. The fallen timber was swiftly reworked into sharpened stakes, stacked and arranged like an enormous mouth of wooden fangs, biting toward whatever poor bastards would be made to climb those slopes. Above them, another thousand men moved with slow, brutal rhythm, digging deep into the flesh of the earth. Shovels and pickaxes rose and fell, carving trenches, terracing the slope, and sculpting a fortress from mud and sweat.

There was no question about it.

The enemy was not just camping.

“They’re digging in,” the younger scout finally whispered, his voice low but steady. “Fortifying the hill.”

The older scout turned his head and gave the boy a look sharp enough to shave bark off a tree.

They flared with a fire that only years of war—and an endless chain of foolish companions—could kindle.

“No shit,” he said, voice dry as sun-baked leather. “What’s next? You gonna tell me they’ve got weapons too? Maybe boots on their feet? Gods help us if they brought food.”

The younger man’s mouth opened, then closed again. He blinked, swallowed, and lowered his chin to his arm, cheeks reddening like a boy caught stealing apples, deciding that silence, in this case, was the better part of wisdom.

The older scout didn’t even sigh. He just turned back to the hill, eyes narrowing into practiced slits as he watched the enemy move like ants across the rise.

He missed his old partner—a bastard just as bitter as he was, with a sharp tongue, a keener blade, and the sense to keep his mouth shut when there was nothing worth saying. But that man had done his time, taken his silver, ridden off to retirement from his wounds and land to his name, leaving him here in the brush beside a freckle-faced farmboy still wet behind the ears.

The veteran didn’t blame the kid, not really. But it was the tradition for the older one to peck at the younger ones, so that he may learn the job

Still if he was to point out at one of his bad point, it was eagerness.

And that word had gotten men killed more times than steel ever had.

He shifted slightly to ease the cramp in his ribs, then squinted up at the hillside where a thousand men hacked trees to stakes, while another thousand dug trenches and churned the soil with pickaxes and boots.

They were preparing to bleed whoever dared climb it.

The young scout turned slightly, like he might say something again.

“We should go back,” the young man said, a little too quickly, as though saying it aloud would make it the truth. “And report this”

The older scout remained silent, his one good arm , the one that had not been battered by a mace, rested against his knee. He didn’t even look at the young scout, just continued observing the distant hill with the same hard, unblinking stare. The quiet stretched between them like a tight rope.

The youngerone could feel the weight of that silence, knew what it meant, but wasn’t sure if it was worth breaking.

He waited for the old man’s voice, to either agree or give a scathing comment. But nothing came.

Finally he spoke, his voice rough, as if he’d been holding it back.

“You’re right,” he said, the words coming out like sandpaper. “Get back and report. Tell them what you’ve seen. But while you’re at it, keep your head down. They’re no idiots.” His eyes didn’t shift from the hill. “I’ll stay here.”

The younger scout, feeling the tension of the moment begin to shift, nodded quickly. “What else are you going to watch?” he asked, already turning to go. The question had slipped out before he could stop it.

The old scout finally moved, the rustling of his body hitting the foliage barely audible . He turned his head, his eyes sharpening like a hawk.

“I’ll go around the hill,” he said, his tone becoming sharp with purpose. “See if they’re fortifying the whole damn thing. I’ll find out if they’ve got defenses along the backside, too. Where they built their camp. ”

The younger scout hesitated, about to ask if he should wait for him, but the older man already had the answer.

“Take my horse with you,” the scout added. “If they see them, they will realise they were being watched. If you get caught, slit your throat , trust me, it will be better than whatever awaits you if you are captured…”

The younger scout looked at him, eyes wide for a moment, then nodded once. He’d never been in a situation like this before, but he knew enough to trust the man’s instincts.

Without another word, he waved him off, gesturing with his left hand, the one not holding the sword, toward the path.

“Go on, then. I’ll take care of this.”

The young man hesitated, his mouth opening to say something again—but closed it before any words came out. The old man had a way of shutting him down with just a glance.

He had work to do.

———————

For the next few hours, the old scout moved like a shadow beneath the trees, his steps light, precise, and slow as honey in winter.

He kept low, hugging the slope, eyes flicking up often toward the crest of the hill where enemy silhouettes moved like ants under a sun too kind for a battlefield.

Yet it was harder than he’d hoped.

The tree line, dense and sprawling at first glance, thinned far too soon, leaving him too often exposed—forced to crawl on his stomach through tall grass or wait behind stubborn outcrops of stone for a sentry to pass.

They were busy, though. And that was the one thing working in his favor.

There were hundreds—no, thousands—of them, swarming like ants across the hillside, reshaping it into something mean and cruel. Logs stripped of bark were whittled into stakes, sharpened into teeth.

Dirt was moved in wheelbarrows, or shoveled in trenches that coiled like veins around the hill’s bulk.

The scout shuddered at the thought of attaking that position, imagining jumping through the trenches and palisades where the enemies would await him with their spears.

He was not wrong in his fears, as unfortunately, scouts during battle would still serve as soldiers, as they would fight along the other light rider in service of Egil, so of course that meant that he was not too keen on fighting uphills, making his interest in discovering any potential information about the location more than justified.

As he was observing the situation , he shifted his weight to the right .

-Crunch-

The old scout froze.

He looked down. A snapped twig stared up at him like an accusation, cracked clean beneath the weight of his heel. His breath caught in his throat, and he dropped instinctively to one knee, slipping behind the nearest bush.

But no shouting came. No sudden sound of charging boots. Just the same old symphony of labor and war preparations. Still, he cursed himself silently. He was too far out to run, too close to risk more missteps.

Then—an idea.

A mad one.

But maybe just mad enough.

A grin, crooked and worn by time, slipped across his face. Slowly, he straightened, backing into the woods again. And then he started gathering. Sticks, mostly. Bits of wood. Broken limbs from the very trees the enemy had felled and stripped. Nothing fancy, nothing big enough to look like a weapon—just enough to fill his arms.

When his bundle was decent—unassuming, believable—he took a deep breath.

Then he started walking. Not crawling, not sneaking—walking.

Leisurely. Steady. Like a man with a job to do. Like one of the hundreds that belonged to the chaos on the hill.

Toward the enemy lines he went, arms full of firewood, his steps confident, his eyes set forward. If anyone asked, he had his story. He was just another conscript. Another mule with two legs instead of four.

All he needed was a few heartbeats. A few blinks of an eye.

Maybe, just maybe, madness would serve where stealth could not.

—————–

It worked.

Gods help him, it actually worked.

Walking with a bundle of sticks tucked in his arms, back straight and pace unhurried, the old scout found himself utterly invisible. Not because no one saw him—on the contrary, several men glanced his way—but because no one looked. A soldier carrying firewood? Just another cog in the churning war machine. There was no curiosity in their eyes, only exhaustion and the dull glaze of routine.

And so he walked.

Past men hammering sharpened stakes into the ground, setting them at cruel angles to repel charges. Past trenches being lined with woven branches and mud to hold the earth in place. Past a knot of officers—real ones, with real armor—drinking some wine in the shade of a tent.

No one stopped him.

No one questioned his presence.

And so, behind the calm mask of a tired conscript, he observed everything.

He noted where the horses were stabled, a few dozen cavalrymen petting their steeds under a tarp. He counted the number of campfires and tents—too many to keep track of precisely, but enough to paint a picture in his mind.

And all the while, he walked with sticks in his arms and a casual squint in his eyes, as if deciding where to drop them off.

Then, when he’d seen enough to sketch the shape of the beast coiled atop the hill, he took a slow turn back toward the woods, still carrying his bundle.

Not once did he break stride.

And no one, not one soul, called after him.