Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

“We’re out of arrows over here!”

The shout rang sharp through the chaos of the ensuing battle.

An archer waved his last shaft in the air, trying to catch the attention of a boy sprinting past with a bundle of quivers strapped to his back.

But the boy didn’t stop, he couldn’t. There were too many like him, too many stops to make. His path was already mapped , and this man wasn’t next.

Which meant, for now, they had nothing.

And as if the gods themselves wanted to mock the moment, the archer who had shouted and was ready to deliver another shaft found his voice, and life, cut short.

He crumpled where he stood, twitching once before going still, the feathered shaft jutting out of his throat like a bloody banner planted on fleshy ground.

Apparently, standing tall and waving one’s arms wasn’t the wisest strategy under a sky full of enemy archers.

Because the defenders, even perched upon their mighty walls , were not immune to death. The attackers might have to aim uphill and shoot from the ground , but they had the numbers and more than enough arrows to keep the sky busy.

And volley after volley, at least someone would be unlucky enough to get his soul yeeted away from this existence.

In this case the bastard had a bad roll.

It had been forty minutes since the night assault began. The first moments of fear, born of sudden horns and shadows moving like ghosts through the dark, had dissolved like sugar in milk. In their place came the hardened rhythm of desperate routine.

Stones. Fire. Timber.

Crude, but effective. Hurling down boulders and broken beams had saved countless lives. A single heavy stone, if dropped with timing, could crush a line of men scaling a ladder, smashing the front ranks and scattering the rest in pain.

And yet, the attackers persisted.

The defenders had learned early that the enemy ladders were reinforced, planks fixed along the sides, shielding the climbers from direct arrow fire. No longer could they easily pick off silhouettes scrambling up with exposed limbs and unarmored flanks. Spears, once used to push ladders away or skewer men mid-climb, found less room to thrust, hemmed in by the invaders’ ingenuity.

Still, they were holding.

The worst pressure came from where the enemy’s massive siege tower met the wall. There, the fighting was even, raw, brutal, and unrelenting. But it was a fixed point, one they could prepare for. The defenders were dug in, and for now, the wall still belonged to them.

To the surprise of many officers on the wall, the enemy had shown no signs of faltering, even after nearly an hour of bloodshed and relentless losses. Their discipline was unsettling. Men climbed to their deaths with the grim focus of machines, wave after wave pressing forward with eerie resolve.

What the defenders didn’t know, what they couldn’t know, was that this wasn’t courage. It was currency.

Each man who reached the wall, or died trying, had been promised a reward by Prince Alpheo himself. Wounded or fallen, it didn’t matter, their family would receive those coins.

It was the kind of reckless promise that would have driven most princes into the abyss of debt.

But Alpheo was not as most princes.

He had spent the last two years building a war chest for moments like this, when the mettle of men might fail, but their hunger for coin would not. Where courage was absent, he paid in silver.

And honestly…it worked, allowing an assault that would have in any other case failed after half an hour, to push on even after doubling that time, and still not giving any sign of stopping.

But the defenders too had something now, something more than the instinct to survive.

Hope.

Word had reached them from outside: if they held until the end of the month, the enemy would be forced to lift the siege and march for the upcoming peace conference. If they endured, they would live. If they resisted just long enough, they would deliver the first blow of failure to an army that had only known triumph since their creation.

So they kept fighting.

Not just for the wall. Not for glory.But for the taste of victory, for a future that hadn’t yet burned in front of their eyes.

Still, the fighting was brutal.

“Fuck off!” a spearman atop the wall roared, driving the iron tip of his weapon straight into the throat of an enemy just cresting the ladder. The point sank in with a wet crunch, disappearing nearly to the shaft as the man’s eyes went wide in shock.

He grasped the wood in both hands, blinking as if unsure whether it was real, whether the pain blooming in his neck was something his body could accept.

Then the spear was yanked free with a sickening slurp, and the man toppled backwards, crashing three meters to the earth below. His body barely hit the ground before another soldier shoved up to take his place.

“Why the hell do they keep coming?!Don’t you fear death?” a defender gasped, hurling a timber plank down at the base of the ladder. His shoulders heaved with exhaustion, sweat pouring down his face as if his body were trying to wring itself dry.

“I don’t fucking know!” another man barked, ducking instinctively as an arrow zipped past, slicing a whisper just inches from his ear. “Every other time they’ve pulled back by now. Where the fuck are our reinforcements? Ten minutes since we sent word and—!”

“Do I look,” the first man growled, gritting his teeth as he rolled another boulder off the ledge and watched it shatter a shoulder below in a spray of screams and dirt, “like the fucking commander?!”

Then a voice shouted over the chaos, sharp and cutting through the din.

“There!”

Dozens of heads turned.

“Reinforcements! They’re coming!”

The man’s tone climbed from relief to disbelief. “There must be a hundred of them! Maybe more!”

For a moment, the air was lighter. A ragged cheer rose from the wall, desperate and contagious. The fight was hard, and they were tired, but with their arrival hope spread like fire among men who had only known strain and silence. Arms raised, weapons lifted, and once again they turned to hold the line.

It didn’t take long for the first of the defenders along the wall’s edge to meet the so-called reinforcements approaching from the rear.

“Welcome along, brother—” He said widening his arms for a hug

An axe answered in kindness.

It cleaved clean through his neck, the torchlight catching the gleam of iron just before it disappeared into flesh. His body crumpled with a wet thud, the sound masked only by the sharp clack of boots behind him.

Then came the shouting.

“Enemy! ENEMY! We’ve been flanked!”

The cry tore down the wall like wildfire through dry brush, panic bubbling to the surface as more torches lit up the distinctive split-colors of the enemy’s tabards, black and white, the two colours feared from Herculia to Oizen, now standing in front of them, stained already with blood.

“Where the fuck did they come from?!”

“HOW?! HOW DID THEY GET BEHIND US?!”

The defenders spun wildly, backs now to two fronts, unsure of where to strike, where to turn, where to flee, because there was nowhere to flee. The wall they had once believed unassailable now felt like a tombstone, their shouts of warning swallowed by the clash of steel and the roar of flames catching on canvas and tar.

The legionnaires showed no mercy. Their axes and maces hacked through stunned men still holding their weapons sideways, some not even fully turned around. Blood splashed against stone as the attackers drove into the rear lines with practiced, merciless precision. There was no challenge in it.

Only slaughter.

Down below, the soldiers still climbing the ladders suddenly heard the change in tone. At first, they slowed down, only to pick up the slack as soon as they realised.

Those were screams of fear.

And with it came opportunity.

The wordless understanding passed like lightning through the ranks of attackers still scaling the ladders. Blood was in the air. The enemy was faltering.

“Go! Go!” one of them snarled as he shoved the man in front of him up the rungs faster. The ladders began to creak under the renewed weight as dozens more piled on in frenzied desperation.

No formation now. No caution. They climbed like animals, round shields strapped to their backs, teeth bared behind iron.

“They’re breaking!” someone shouted from below, half-crazed with bloodlust. “We have them now!Kill them all”

And it was true.

The walls that had held them back for weeks, that had broken men and crushed bones, were now cracking.

The defenders were crumbling from within, their line folding under a blade they never saw coming.

Above, behind, and now ahead, the enemy was everywhere.

And in that madness, the storm Alpheo had planned for weeks finally broke in full, along with the defender’s hope of reaching the end of the month alive and standing.