The Battle of Albredo, Part Three
A loop shaped like a cat's paw.
The instant I fired, the loop lashed across the front of the sniper rifle shivered.
Magic Item
Reduces the noise of its target to one-tenth.
Because of it, the report that should have cracked the air razor-sharp came out blunted, shaved dull. The quiet changed nothing about the round itself. It still tore away at two and a half times the speed of sound, and five hundred meters out it buried itself in a priest caught mid-chant.
Through the scope I watched the shoulder rip open and the man pitch backward, driven into the dirt.
A little high. I'd been aiming for the solar plexus.
At long range the point of impact shifts with every distance. A real marksman would take the head on the first shot. For a half-assed sniper like me, it paid to aim at the torso or the legs—targets big enough that I might actually hit them.
The moment a 7.62mm round struck, the flesh at the point of impact tore and burst. Bleeding out from a hit like that took only a few minutes.
Even with the attack coming out of nowhere, the priests were too stunned to think of cover. They still hadn't worked out what was happening.
Bolt-action. I hauled the bolt handle back, kicked the casing clear, and chambered the next round, then settled my grip and evened out my breathing. This time I held on the navel, and I picked a priest frozen stiff, with no idea what to do with himself.
Half a second. The bullet crossed five hundred meters in a blink, and this time it punched clean through the chest. I watched him spray blood and fly backward, slammed into the ground.
Bingo. That's two.
A clack, a snap, and the reload was done.
I never bothered with the knights. There was no chance of hitting a man on the move, and even a lucky hit would only drag the enemy down on my position. So I kept taking the priests, one after another.
Six priests dropped in the space of a breath.
No enemy could be seen. There wasn't even the hint of an attack coming. Bellies and chests simply burst open, and the men died where they stood. A few took the hits in an arm or a leg, and they bled out all the same.
The priests beside them hastily poured out holy power to treat the wounded. But the wounds were too large. The wider and more fatal the injury, the more holy power it drank—that much was obvious. Spent on saving the fallen, the strength they had left for the fight itself dwindled by the moment.
"Who in the world is doing this?"
"It seems to be coming from the enemy lines, sir."
"And where in the enemy lines would that be?"
"That watchtower standing up over there looks suspicious."
"What? That's more than five hundred meters. Magic from a distance like that—you're talking sixth circle at the least!"
Fear settled over the chief priest, and with it a creeping puzzlement. A sixth-circle mage could throw wide-area magic. If the enemy truly had one, the battle would already have tilted their way. They could simply hurl an area spell in this direction and be done with it. He could not understand why they were picking his people off one man at a time.
Then it came again.
No one died this time. Instead a shield-shaped ripple of light spread through the empty air. Unable to tell what the attack even was, the chief priest ordered a bulwark of holy power raised across their front. The thunder answered anyway. Twice more, one right after the other, the shield of light shuddered where it hung.
The chief priest gathered holy power into his eyes. Sight steeped in divinity, he finally made out what was hitting them.
"A tiny scrap of metal?"
What struck the shield and skipped away was a small piece of iron, no bigger than a knuckle.
"They attacked by flinging that?"
"What do we do?" asked a priest who had been listening at his side.
They knew the method now. No way to actually stop it came to mind.
"Fall back, for now."
The priests pulled back behind the soldiers.
The moment they vanished, the buffs laid over Zahed's slave-soldiers and regulars lost their hold all at once, and the loss turned on the men it had been holding up. Their sturdy shield was gone, and the unease only climbed.
"A demon!"
"It's a demon's attack!"
"The priests fell to a demon's attack!"
"The enemy is using a demon's power!"
With the priests who had been holding the defense and the buffs pulled off the line, Drail's mages seized the opening and poured on everything they had. Both center armies were already marching on each other, so the range happened to be just right.
"Fireball!"
"Fireball!"
"Fireball!"
⟨ Fireball ⟩
Fourth-circle work, but Fireball was sound enough in both effect and hitting power, and they sent it screaming into the enemy center. Each blast landed with about the force of a grenade.
In a heartbeat the field turned over. The slave-soldiers, already caught in the middle and taking it from front and rear, began to come apart in a ragged rout. Drail's army, morale surging the other way, broke through them and launched its charge straight at Zahed's center.
Viscount Malic was burning up inside.
At the start, everything had run to plan. The slaves had fallen on one another, and as expected the advantage seemed to lean toward Zahed, who had the numbers. He had committed the mercenaries as a matter of course. After that the cavalry of both sides had crashed together, and he had even succeeded in throwing the center armies into the fight.
Let the melee tangle itself like this, and it would be nothing strange for the Third Prince to die on a stray blade.
The turn had come the moment the holy power of the priests bracing the enemy cut off. He couldn't tell how it had been done, but he had a fair guess as to who. The watchtower still standing alone where the camp had been pitched. That one they'd called a mage baron, if he remembered right.
Damn it all. The thought that the whole design might come apart because of some unheard-of scrap of a noble set his guts on fire. Ride this chance properly and he could catch a line to those above—take a real shot at a count's title.
In the end, desperation made him reach early for the card he had been saving. The viscount's gaze slid to the mercenary companies moving with the cavalry in the rear.
Where that gaze landed, the Blood Axe mercenary company was locked with the enemy horse.
A company of some hundred men, large enough to matter, its captain having taken his own nickname—the bloodstained axe—and hung it on the company as its name. A look passed between them. Blood Axe nodded and sent the signal to his men.
The Blood Axe company rode with the right-wing cavalry. Drail's horse numbered roughly four hundred to a wing, eight hundred in all. On the right, that meant thirty knights sent out from the kingdom, two hundred light cavalry, and the rest filled in by Blood Axe and Marcus's company.
They traded spear and sword with the enemy riders in a frenzy, holding their balance in the saddle while they loosed crossbows. They were no knight order. Even so, the mercenaries fought harder than ordinary light horse, and on the strength of that unexpected showing the right wing drove in against Zahed's left.
In the middle of it Hans found a spare breath, glanced around, and opened his mouth.
"Hey. I think we're actually gonna win this! Long as nobody betrays us..."
Even while they fought for their lives, the men of Marcus's company did not miss the careless line Hans had just tossed out.
"Damn it! Everybody watch yourselves!"
"Hey! What the fuck are you doing?! Why are you behind me!"
"Captain!"
"I know!"
Every man snapped his eyes to the ground around him. And then Captain Marcus caught sight of the mercenaries sitting behind the Drail riders who had been driving the enemy horse.
"Those men..."
Blood Axe's own, come out to brace the same right wing.
"Please."
But it was the same as ever. The surely not is what kills a man.
The mercenaries who had drifted off their own enemies suddenly drove steel into the backs of the Drail cavalry fighting ahead of them.
"Aaagh!"
"What the—!"
"The enemy—"
The cry spread like fire through dry grass. The right wing, which had been shoving the enemy's left, lost its strength all at once.
A hundred men out of four hundred had turned. It was not simply that a hundred swords had left the line. In a flash, cavalrymen and knights stabbed in the back died in heaps or tumbled from their saddles. The wounded piled up, and though the confusion lasted only a moment, the advantage flipped before anyone could catch it.
"Kill them!"
"Push! Push!"
"Sweep them under!"
Under that assault, the horse—too busy watching their own backs to answer properly—saw the formation come apart in a heartbeat, riders going down in droves.
"Shit! What do we do, Captain?!"
The momentum had already gone over. Stay and get rolled up by the enemy knights, and they wouldn't even keep their lives.
Marcus roared at his men.
"We ride straight through their lines!"
"What? Through the enemy?"
"The captain's finally lost his mind!"
"This is your fault, Hans!"
"Why is it my fault!"
Still fighting, the company put their heels to their horses and followed him, driving for the heart of the enemy cavalry.
"Have those bastards gone mad!"
"Hey—hey, these sons of bitches!"
"It's a last thrash! Don't panic!"
The enemy horse had never imagined cornered men would try to punch straight through the front. They had no time to dress their ranks before Marcus's mercenaries broke into the center.
"Out of the way, you bastards!"
"Waaaaah!! Kill them!!"
"Kill them!!"
Howling themselves raw, the mercenaries hurled themselves into the middle. What enemy riders were left barred the way and leveled their spears. The company took the charge anyway, and took the losses with it.
Then sparks spat across the light cavalry's armor. Riders and horses spouted blood. Gobbets of flesh flew. Shocked horsemen pitched off the backs of their mounts one after another, and horses punched clean through toppled sideways where they stood.
Only then, from far behind, did the thunder arrive. A long, ripping roar, rolling in late.
A familiar sight.
Captain Marcus shouted.
"We break through!"
The mercenaries slammed straight into the panicked light cavalry and drove in among them. The riders in their path were swept aside in a single instant, and the company punched the line and rode on through.
"Those bastards! After them!"
"No. The main body comes first!"
"Sons of bitches. Catch them and they don't walk away!"
Having broken Drail's right wing clean in half, Zahed's cavalry let the fleeing mercenaries go. They wheeled and drove into the rear of Drail's center. Soldiers of that center, watching the horse come down on them, froze in terror and milled in a panic.
Beyond them, the watchtower.
"Damn it. I fired because I was in a hurry. Shit. Feels like I just stepped in it."