Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 559

Chapter 559: Last effort(4)
Jarza marched forward.

Ahead of him, four hundred men moved as one, boots pressed tight to the earth in silence—no clink of loose armor, no stray coughs, no whispered prayers. Only the soft, almost ghostly sound of leather and breath and the brittle tension of men walking toward blood. In the black of a moonless night, they became shadows of themselves.

He rode behind them, as was his way—not leading the spearpoint, but haunting it. Watching. Feeling the rhythm of the line, the shudder of nerves hiding under hardened faces. His horse’s hooves had been wrapped in cloth, muffling each step to little more than a breath against the dirt. Even the animal seemed to understand that this was no time for noise. No time for mistakes.

But Jarza’s mind was not on the path ahead.

It was behind him.

In the camp.

At the bait.

The thought gnawed at him, steady and patient as rot. He could stomach much—he was not a man who shied from harsh necessities, his life as a mercenary had seen to it . But this… gods above and below, this chilled him more than any enemy blade.

He liked to think himself a pragmatic man. Ruthless, when needed. Sharp-edged as a mountain winter.

And yet Alpheo scared him in moments like this.

Not his rage, nor his strength—those were human things, familiar. It was his calm that unnerved Jarza. That cool, clinical willingness to lay men down like cards on a table, knowing full well the deck would be soaked in blood before the night was done.

He could never have done it.No amount of gold, no stretch of promised land would have been enough.

The illusion had demanded life to breathe. Not just tents. Not just song. It needed laughter. Staggering drunks. The clatter of dice on wooden tables. The sleepy bellow of a sentry half a drink past sober.

You can’t fake the scent of warm meat, the sound of false security.

And Alpheo knew that.

Jarza’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.

He had watched it happen. Had stood silent, a ghost among the living, as Alpheo wove his offers into the ears of petty lords. Men with swollen ambitions and thin spines, eager to barter the flesh of their peasants for a slice of victory. Alpheo hadn’t used his own soldiers—no, never. Those were investments, sharpened steel he wasn’t about to dull.He found others to pay the price.

The broken, the desperate, the dispensable. A few barrels of wine, a feast, the promise of rich plunder—and the lambs went willingly to their own slaughter. Jarza thought he had seen cruelty before. In war. In famine. In the slow grinding ruin of sieges.But this—this was cruelty sharpened into art.

He looked up, the distant flicker of firelight blooming against the edge of the night.The trap was almost sprung.

He would be the teeth. The blade in the dark.

But inside, something twisted and coiled like a wounded thing.

I could never do that.Not to my men.Not for land.Not for crowns.

He would have liked to believe, once , that Alpheo would never cross that line either. That somewhere, buried beneath the iron, there remained a thread of reluctance.A hesitation.

But tonight, that hope seemed thin as mist.

He rode on, the cloth-wrapped hooves of his horse whispering over the dirt, his men slipping through the night like drawn knives. No songs on their lips. No banners raised high. Only the grim promise of what they had come to deliver.

Bit by bit, the veil began to lift.

And Jarza, feeling the weight of every screaming soul left behind, gritted his teeth and rode faster into the dark.

The flicker of torchlight broke the edge of the trees like a phantom sunrise, the royal camp glowing warm and open, a firelit illusion of triumph. Jarza could make out their silhouettes—figures moving carefree, confident, celebrating already, weapons loosened from blood, backs turned to the night.

They hadn’t seen his men yet.

But the archers had seen them.

The rebel force hadn’t even realized they were being watched. So swollen with victory, so drunk on the scent of loot and smoke and blood, they thought themselves conquerors, the climber of the mountain, not realising that all they had climbed was a small hill.

The trap’s lid was nearly shut, and still they crowed like roosters at dawn.

The torchlight betrayed them, a cruel mirror against the dark. The rebel soldiers had lit up their triumph like a feast—but they hadn’t noticed that the opposite hill remained shrouded, not a glimmer, not a spark. The dark was still hungry.

And by the time they heard the thrum of bowstrings and the first steel hissed through the air—They still thought they were winning.

———————

The gates of the royal camp were yawned wide like the mouth of some ancient beast, and the rebels surged toward it with the glee of men who believed the gods themselves had opened heaven’s vault for them.

“Move, move, move! We’ll be left with the horse dung if we don’t get in!” someone yelled, pushing against a mass of helms and armor.

“Make way! I haven’t stolen a single silver spoon!I ain’t going back as poor wretched ” barked another, elbowing his way through.

It was a roiling sea of men—a living tide of greed and sweat and steel, crashing at the bottleneck of the gate, they were like a single squirming organism.

The smell of blood hadn’t faded from their blades, and yet already they dreamed of silks, of gold buckles and full purses, of the soft beds their boots would trample and the wine skins they’d burst between their teeth.

The mass swelled, a press of flesh and steel and breath, all clawing for entry. The shouting grew louder—not of battle, but of hunger. Loot was meat, and they were the starving.

And then—

The shouting changed.

It twisted, as if the wind itself had turned against them.

The first screams cut the air like knives. Not of triumph, but of pain. Not hunger, but terror.

Then came the sound—a sickening rush through the sky, like a hundred serpents shrieking at once.

Fffft. Fffft. Thunk.

“AAGH—MY SHOULDER!”

“WHAT—WHAT THE HELL—”

A man in the center of the horde staggered back, eyes wide as he stared at the shaft buried in his gut. He opened his mouth to scream, but only blood came out. Another dropped beside him, struck square in the neck—his head jerking back as if yanked by invisible wire. Armor clanged, bodies thudded to the dirt, the gate suddenly a choke point not for ambition but for carnage.

Someone shrieked— “ARROWS! ARROWS!”

Too late.

The sea of men buckled. Chaos erupted.

Some lifted shields, most did not even have the time. Arrows hailed down like vengeful stars, slicing through arms raised in panic, through open helms and unguarded throats. Men pushed in to escape, only to be pinned between their comrades and the blades ahead. Blood sprayed across polished mail, the taste of victory replaced by the stench of death.

The trap had been sprung, and those who’d raced for plunder now found themselves drowning in a tide of their own making.

“Where are they?! Who’s shooting at us?!”

The cries rang out from the press of rebel soldiers, frantic and high, tossed between the walls and the writhing bodies like echoes in a tomb. Helms swung wildly, eyes scanned the darkness, but there was nothing to see—only shadows beyond the reach of the camp’s torches.

How could they fight against an enemy they could not see?

The light that had led them in now marked them like cattle, their forms bathed in amber firelight while the enemy remained cloaked in black.

It was like being hunted by ghosts.

“Gods damn it, where are they?” someone bellowed, but the question had no answer. The arrows kept falling, and death kept finding them.

But the worst was not the unseen.

Not yet.

The worst came soon after—on the wind first, like thunder muffled by the hills. A rhythm. A pulse. A march of steel and will.

And then it emerged from the black.

Six hundred and fifty men, not a single torch among them, charging silently, their forms like living statues chiseled from night itself—except for one thing: the white visible in the whole darkness.

The White Army.

A wall of iron and ivory, , their armor kissed by white and black, a ghostly tide of death, descending upon the rebel flank with terrible purpose.

The rebels—most of them levied peasants —had heard of them, sure. Stories passed from lips drunk on myth and campfires. Tales of the men who’d broken five armies and left fields soaked in silence. But they’d never seen them.

Now they did.

And it was far, far too late.

The front line didn’t stand a chance. The charge hit the rebel left like a hammer to a wine jar—splinters of men and steel flew outward, the formation caved in like soft bread beneath a boot. The sheer weight of the advance crushed resistance, blades slicing through ribs and collarbones as shields splintered and screams turned to gurgles.

Some tried to run, only to be cut down from behind. Others stood dumbfounded, as if their minds refused to believe that this, this, was real.

But it was.

And the Royal host gave no quarter. They did not shout. They did not curse. They simply killed—cold and methodical, like winter itself marching on two legs.

The night, once their ally, had turned on the rebels.The darkness was no longer their cover.

It was the enemy’s throne.

In reality there were five hundred of them—not six-fifty, as the panicked minds of the rebels may had conjured them all to the same coin, in the blur of terror. The other hundred and fifty were noble levies trailing behind, less uniform in their dread countenance. But it didn’t matter. Five hundred was enough.

Five hundred was too much.

And gods, did they make it count.

The White Army didn’t shout battle cries. They didn’t chant slogans or howl the names of princes and lords. Their silence was worse. It was like watching a storm descend, emotionless, pitiless, and inevitable.

A rebel soldier lunged forward, shrieking as he swung his short blade at a soldier.

The man didn’t parry. He simply stepped in, let the blade scrape off his pauldron, and brought his mace down on the man’s shoulder. There was a wet, popping crunch—the kind that made nearby soldiers flinch—and the rebel collapsed with a scream, one arm flopping useless like a dead fish as his collarbone had snapped inward.

Another man tried to raise his shield to block the hammer of an advancing White—only for the head of the weapon to crash through the shield and into his face. The sound was like a gourd being stomped, and what had been a head was now pulp running down a shattered mail.

One decurio, massive even among the White, wielded his axe as if it weighed nothing. He cleaved through a man in a single stroke—his axe burying halfway into the victim’s ribcage. The scream that followed was choked, almost confused, as if the man’s lungs didn’t know whether to breathe or beg.

Nearby, a rebel dropped to his knees, arms raised. “Mercy! I yield—!”

The royal soldier didn’t stop. His warhammer struck the man’s face—once, then again—and again, until the man was unrecognizable, and his skull had caved into itself.

Another crushed a man’s knee with the spike of his hammer, letting him crawl for a heartbeat before driving the hammerhead into the back of his spine with such force the body jerked like a puppet mid-seizure, then stilled completely.

There was no valor in it. No glory.Just brutality. Raw and mechanical.

The rebels began to break, and rightly so after all it was dark, all they could hear were screams and the fact that they were all packed toghether meant that they couldn’t move as they wished.

Men sobbed as if they were children. Others dropped their weapons and ran, tripping over the bodies of their comrades or slipping in their blood.

It was a massacre.And the White Army moved like they’d done it a thousand times before.

Because they had.