Chapter 685: Battle for a crown(6)
The ground ran slick with blood.
Not in streams. Not in rivers. But in sudden, uneven pools—sticky and steaming, sinking into the grass like the earth itself had grown a thirst for men.
It was Herculean blood mostly, bright and wild and spattered like the careless splash of a farmer’s pail across a field. Blood that once pulsed in veins with dreams of glory, home, or simply another day lived.
Now it lay wasted. Soaked into roots. Slurped by worms, to be taken back by what they came from.
They had been crushed—smashed by hammers, split open by halberds, minced with axes, stabbed with blades, and impaled with spears until there was no telling where one man ended and the next began. They died on their feet, on their knees, flat on their backs choking on their own teeth. And the manner of death didn’t matter. The shape of it changed nothing. Once fallen, they were equal in value: kindling for war’s infernal fire.
And Jarza?He watched.Eyes dry. Face unreadable.
He stood behind the surging press of his men, half-shadowed by a rise in the hill, the black plumes of his officers marking his presence like a shiver on the wind. His gaze swept over the scene—over the chaos, the violence, the horror—and all he saw was efficiency.
His Black Stripes carved through the Herculean levy like farmers through a harvest gone wild. Not with the frantic fervor of men desperate to survive, but with the terrifying rhythm of soldiers trained not just to kill—but to cleave. They didn’t fight like men. They fought like parts of a great, snarling machine. A beast made of flesh and iron, breathing smoke, blinking black.
Two years of peace. And not a single tooth dulled.
Jarza almost smiled.
Good, he thought. They haven’t grown soft.
He’d worried. He always worried. War made warriors sharp, but peace turned them dull, letting them rot inside their armor. But now, watching the serrated choreography of violence unfold before him—how the Yarzat right flank didn’t just advance but folded inward like a black-winged hook, crushing through disorganized ranks with the weight of a descending sky—he knew.