Death After Death

It began with a massive ambush outside the tiny village of Brunn, where Simon used a hundred sheep to lure more than half that number of centaur warriors to their deaths under a fusillade of crossbow bolts and surreptitious magic spells. It was the first victory, but it would not be the last or the largest.

Every town he went through now, he compelled a few members of the village defense force to join his little band. He didn’t feel great about doing it, but his plans required numbers as much as they required picking just the right battlefield.

Sometimes, that meant box canyons or cliffs. Other times, it meant camouflage or even swamps, but with a little bait and the right edge, Simon was fairly confident they could win nearly every fight with a little planning. Eventually, the men who fought with him even believed him, and few of them died as a result of that trust.

Tchul. Krovel. Edenbrooke. Not every battle was bloodless, but everywhere they went, as Simon widened the scope to the north and east, he did his very best to take advantage of the terrain to make it more likely that their enemy would flee instead of fight to the last. Eventually, when they passed close through to Bellum’s Cross, Simon finally made a brief stop and retrieved his maps from where he’d left them with the survivors he’d started this chapter of his adventure with. He did this so he could add all the other places he was visiting to the paper he'd put so much hard work into, but mostly, the villagers took the opportunity to tell his companions about how he’d saved them single-handedly, further expanding his legend.

Less than two months after he started his second campaign as the Regent-General of the Raithewait Barony, he had a hundred men under him and was approaching a thousand centaur skulls. It was brutal, bloody work, and whenever possible, Simon did it all without magic. He could start to feel the pull of extra years on himself now, and he only spared weeks and months for the injured men who fought valiantly by his side.

But as time went on, especially during the winter months, new war bands and herds became harder and harder to find. Many of his men took that as a sign that they were winning, but Simon saw it differently. To him, it was evidence that they might never be able to win.

When all of this had started, Simon had been too simplistic about it. He knew that now. He thought he could hunt down the centaurs like mobs in a video game and grind on them until he reached a certain kill count, and then the future he sought to avoid would simply evaporate, like a quest that had been achieved.

They were intelligent, though, in their way. They found weakness and fled from strength. When the centaurs faced the inexplicable losses of Simon’s traps, they inevitably fled to another part of the prairie and found another opponent to face on more favorable ground. So, if he’d just been trying to keep them away from Crowvar, that would have been easy.

There was no guarantee that would prevent the rise of a warrior that would unite the tribes into a single terrible fist, though. That was what forced him out, ever further into the wastelands, away from the streams and the villages that made up the heart of the Barony. It was not a popular decision, but really, there was no one who could tell him no anymore, not after all the victories he’d given them. Still, he could see it in the eyes of his men. They wanted to go back to Crowvar, cash in their winnings, and move on with their lives.