Chapter 665: The road forward(1)
Chapter 665: The road forward(1)
“The scouts have returned.”Egil’s voice cut through the flap of the command tent like the first cold wind of autumn. “The Herculean host has kept their pace—still retreating east. Seems your little gamble paid off after all.”
There was no triumph in his tone. No celebration, no hint of the thunderous satisfaction that should have come with such news. He delivered it like one might read a weather report: dry, measured, almost resentful.
Alpheo looked up from his maps, eyes narrowing as he studied his companion. Egil stood there, arms folded loosely, one hip cocked to the side with his usual lazy slouch. But behind the casual stance was something far less idle. Boredom. Frustration. A restless predator denied its kill.
He wanted that battle.That was the first thought that crossed Alpheo’s mind as he observed the man’s furrowed brow and languid posture. He wanted the blood. The break. The chaos.
And who could blame him? Egil was not a man made for stillness.
Alpheo leaned back in his chair, running a hand down the length of his jaw in idle thought. He had long since stopped questioning the strange stroke of luck—or curse—that had brought Egil into his life. The man was a brute, to be sure, but a cunning one. Loyal, in his way, and endlessly useful. Especially during campaigns.
In fact, Egil was less of a commander and more of a sharpened blade—one that Alpheo drew whenever he needed something unseemly done with efficiency and plausible deniability. Raids, kidnappings, food seizures, terrorizing enemy supply chains—these were Egil’s domains. He was the smoke that filled enemy valleys before the fire. The whisper of famine after the reapers had been cut down. The reason why Herculeian lords had bled coin to feed refugees, or turned peasants into thieves out of sheer neglect.
Egil’s work sowed chaos, and chaos was the slow poison that Alpheo had administered across the entire western neighbor of his.
But now? Now there was no one left to burn. Not yet. Not here.And Egil was, unmistakably, chafing at the stillness.
“Say, Alph…” Egil began, and Alpheo already knew where this was going. “Seems to me there ain’t much work left here for my kind. The Herculeians have tucked their tails, and the lads and I are just sitting on our arses collecting dust.”
He said it with a crooked grin, but his eyes didn’t match. They were dull, lifeless in that unsettling way they became whenever his hands hadn’t been red for too long.