Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Garren was already moving before anyone explained anything to him.

He had heard the shouts and screams, the sight of fire burning from afar and smoke floating upwards. He immediately knew this was from Valdenmoor.

He tried to keep his calm but couldn’t really control his heart beating fast as he ran to rally the knights.

”Archers,” he said to the nearest senior knight.

The Archers were now part of Percvale’s force and this would be their first ’real test to the work’.

”Every one of them. Roofops and the castle wall itself. Now. Tell them neck shots, gaps in the armor, don’t waste arrows on chest plates.” He turned to the rest. ”Everyone else with me. We’re not fighting them in the open, we intercept near the farmland, use the buildings at the settlement edge for cover as long as we can.”

The knights moved.

The archers went up. Ten of them. They were obviously not many but hopefully they were effective.

They took their positions on the wall and the rooftops and nocked arrows and waited.

Garren took the main body out through Percvale.

The Valdenmoor knights had reached the edge of the settlement proper by the time Garren’s force came out.

A hundred and ten knights against two hundred, he knew the number, by rough calculations he knew what they would be facing. But they couldn’t run away, they would he facing it regardless.

”Hold the line at the market row,” he told the men around him. ”Don’t advance into the open ground. Make them come to us.”

The Valdenmoor knights leader (the leader for this mission) saw Percvale’s force form up and did not look particularly concerned.

He was like: ’Meh’

He raised his hand and the column reorganized into a wider formation, spreading out.

Then the first archer shot.

The knight at the far left of the Valdenmoor formation went sideways off his horse. Neck shot, clean. The horse kept moving for a moment without him.

It was that woman that had performed exceptionally well during the training sessions with Seren. She was a real bullseye.

The second shot took a knight in the gap between his helmet and his collar piece. He went down slower.

The third missed, this was from the rest of the archers now. The fourth hit a shoulder, not lethal but the man dropped his spear and pulled back.

The Valdenmoor leader looked at the walls and the rooftops and made the calculation fast. ”Push forward,” he said. ”Don’t stop.”

They pushed forward.

The archers kept shooting. Not fast, Seren had taught them that fast was how you wasted arrows and lost accuracy. One shot, breathe, one shot. By the time the Valdenmoor knights closed the distance to Garren’s line, ten of them were down. Ten out of two hundred was not a decisive number but it was a real one, and five of those ten had been taken by a single archer.

Then the lines met.

It was loud and close and went badly fast.

Not because Percvale’s knights fought poorly, they fought well, better than they had any right to given what they had been two months ago.

They held the line at the market row for longer than the numbers suggested they should. But two hundred against a hundred and ten, on open ground, with the Valdenmoor knights fresh and organized and riding horses while many of Percvale’s force was on foot, produced a specific and predictable mathematics.

Twenty down in the first engagement. Garren saw them go one by one, a knight he had trained for years taking a lance hit that drove him backward into the market stall behind him and didn’t get up, two junior knights who had come in with the recent recruitment wave going down together on the left flank before anyone could reach them.

”Pull back to the farmland wall,” Garren shouted. ”Archers, cover the retreat!”

The archers covered. They had gathered enough arrows since their recruitment and it they were really helpful now.

Another three Valdenmoor knights went down during the pull-back, the archers tracking the pursuers and making them pay for advancing too eagerly.

But the pull-back cost more knights too, men who didn’t hear the order fast enough, men who were already too deep into individual fights to disengage cleanly.

Two angry Valdenmoor knights aimed furiously at the archers, they threw their swords at them. It struck one on his shoulder but it wasn’t something that should kill him. It did make him fall backwards though with a loud THUD!

Garren took a hit during the pull-back. A sword caught him across the left side, skidding off his armor but with enough force behind it to crack something, he felt it immediately, the specific pain that came with breaking a rib.

He kept moving.

They reached the farmland wall and turned.

The damage had already started some minutes ago but now he watched the ending of it.

The pen fencing had went down in seconds, kicked apart by horses, and the animals inside had nowhere to go. The goats went first. Then the cattle. The Valdenmoor knights moved through them without hurry, and when it was done the eastern farmland had nothing living on it except the knights doing the killing.

They all slaughtered all the animals, brutally killed them all!

As Garren watched their corpses on the ground, he was almost close to tears.

Garren watched horses trample the rows. The dark restored soil, the soil Seren had spent weeks working on, the soil that had come back from nothing, the soil with green showing in it for the first time in years, churned under hooves and came up in clods and settled back as something that looked the way it had looked before any of the restoration work had been done.

He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say but the sight broke him in a way.

It was like watching everything you’ve built be destroyed right in front of you.

”Sir Garren.” One of the senior knights beside him, watching the same thing. ”We have maybe sixty men still standing. Should we push back?”

Garren kept his eyes on the farmland. He didn’t know what to say.

More fighting came to them anyway, a flanking group of Valdenmoor knights came around the settlement edge and hit Percvale’s remaining force from the side, and the holding position became a fighting position whether Garren had ordered it or not.

Another thirty men went down in the next twenty minutes. Garren fought with one working arm, his left side screaming at him every time he moved, and took two more hits that he felt and ignored because the alternative was the ground.

When the Valdenmoor leader finally raised his hand and they pulled back...