Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Death was everywhere.

It seeped into the soil. It clung to the steel. It screamed from the mouths of dying men and whistled in the breath between blade strikes.

Wherever Valen looked, he saw corpses, some still twitching, others silent and mangled, their eyes wide as if shocked by the speed with which life had abandoned them. Every groan, every howl of pain or fury, echoed in his ears like the drums of the underworld welcoming their arrival.

But none of it mattered now.

His eyes narrowed. His fingers tightened white around the rough shaft of the javelin. His mind carved away the battlefield, the dead, the living, the smell of iron and churned dirt, the rising dust cloud that veiled the world in bronze mist, until only one thing remained: the target.

The chieftain.

The monster.

The war-chief of the Duskwindai was a beast wrapped in man's flesh. A mountain of muscle wrapped in thick rings of chainmail, his breath visible in bursts of bloodied steam. He bellowed, triumphant, as he split open the skull of one of Valen's men, red mist spraying across his face.ù

Somehow, impossibly, his features were even more drenched in gore than the twin axes in his fists. It dripped from his beard like grease from a roasting pig, soaking into the bone collar that curled like serpents along his jaw and neck.

He's reveling in it, Valen thought

His arm shook.

He clenched his forearm, locking every tendon, every muscle. The javelin felt like it was made of stone.

He exhaled and forced himself to relax it

He needed stillness. Precision. He could not afford emotion. Hate. Disgust. Even the grudging respect he felt for that monstrous man. All of it would cloud his aim.

He stripped it all away.

He stripped himself down to a simple soldier again, to the cold nights on the plains when he served with the White Army.

He drew back his arm.

His torso turned. Hips locked.

He could feel his horse shifting beneath him, the battle pressing in at the edges. But it was distant now. Like a dream half-remembered.

There was only the javelin.And the man.

The chieftain was mid-roar, mouth wide, blood dripping from his tongue, arms lifted in challenge to the world. A god of slaughter standing tall atop a pile of the fallen.

Valen's breath slowed.

He would fell, no matter how big he is, all things will fall, and he will now.

One second.A heartbeat.

Now.

He loosed the javelin.

It soared through the sky like a predator unshackled.

A sleek shadow slicing the air.

It danced on the wind with purpose, as if fate itself had drawn back Valen's arm and guided its flight. It was an eagle descending upon the neck of a hare, silent and final, carried on the breath of gods who had grown tired of waiting.

And when it struck, it did so with truth.

The chieftain, roaring like a beast drunk on carnage, his bloodied arms raised in grotesque triumph, stopped.

The scream died in his throat. His head snapped back. His chest—massive, barrel-thick—jolted as if some invisible god had punched through it.

The javelin buried itself half its length in his sternum, a wooden spike piercing through chainmail, flesh, and bone like they were paper. It did not impale him like a pin, it crashed into him like an avalanche

He didn't fall, not right away. One of his own, kin, perhaps, or a loyal hound, rushed to his side, catching him before he could crumple. For a moment, the two stood there, frozen. The javelin pinned from his chest like a banner planted in the soil of his body.

Then came the sound.

Not a roar. Not a scream. A cough, wet, gurgling, full of copper and finality.

Blood painted his beard, bubbling up past his lips and trickling in a lazy stream down his chin.

The warlord's legs buckled. He twitched once, then again, nerves firing their last commands into a dying machine. His mighty frame sagged in his companion's arms, no longer a symbol of terror but a man like any other.

Just meat. Fading meat.

Valen stared. Distant, but not detached. He had seen men die. Hundreds. He had put many in the ground himself. But watching that colossus shudder like a felled ox was… different. He couldn't see the expression on the man's face, but he could guess it. He had seen it often.

First: confusion. How could this happen?Then: pain. The slow, creeping burn of finality.Finally: fear. The realization that death had come. That nothing could stop it now.

Valen had faced that fear once. He remembered the taste of it. Cold and metal-slick in the throat.

A shout broke his trance.

"The general felled the enemy chieftain!" The voice cracked through the air like lightning. Valen didn't even see who said it. It didn't matter. Like a spark in dry grass, the cry spread.

"The general felled him!"

"The chieftain is dead!"

"The chieftain is dead!"

The words bounced from man to man like cannonfire, catching in the mouths of the weary, the bloodied, the battered. And where exhaustion had bowed their backs, hope now straightened their spines.

Valen felt it in the earth. The tremble. The shift.

The line surged. What was once a desperate melee became a storm renewed. The Yarzat soldiers bellowed like wolves uncaged, driving forward with a new, terrible rhythm. For the first time in hours, they were not merely surviving, they were winning.

And though Valen sat high on his mount, drenched in sweat and blood, his sword still warm in his grip, he allowed himself a breath.

He had not dreamed it.He had done it.

It didn't take long for the cries to echo across the other end of the field.

But unlike the shouts rising from Valen's men, roars of triumph, of vindication, these were shrill cracked with dread.

What had once been the press of a tide was now thinning into scattered ripples. The center of their line faltered. Their charge, once thunderous, now felt like a desperate shuffle into knives. The weight of numbers no longer protected them, it only slowed their retreat.

And into that moment of faltering, Valen's men poured like wildfire.

They fell upon the Duskwindai like starved hounds on a maimed stag. Spears drove forward, not in clean lunges, but frantic thrusts that hit ribs, caught on bone, and kept pushing until the point found something soft. One tribesman, chest bare and arms painted with ash, screamed as the gleaming steel tip punched into his sternum, eyes bulging as his breath escaped him in a wet, whimpering gurgle.

Another went down as a short sword carved into the base of his throat, the blade twisting sideways as it was pulled out to catch a second man across the cheek. Flesh split open with a spray. The attacker, young, no more than seventeen, didn't stop. He drove his boot into the dying man's gut and stomped again as he turned to stab another.

A soldier in Yarzat armor grappled with a taller foe, both men snarling like beasts. Their blades had been lost in the scrum. So it was fists, knees, teeth.

It ended when a soldier came to his friend aid passing a blade through the neck of the savage

From atop his blood-spattered steed, Valen watched the collapse unfold with the weary eyes of a man far too intimate with death to flinch at it anymore. He wasn't immune, no man truly was, but the ache it once carried had long since hardened into something colder, something quieter.

Acceptance, perhaps. Or something darker.

This was the true shape of victory. Not laurels and hymns. Not the swell of horns or the kiss of sunlight on polished banners. No—this was it. One man jabbing the haft of a broken spear into another's groin until the screaming stopped.

And yet, it was beautiful.

They were winning.

By the teeth of the gods, they were winning.

Valen hardly believed the ferocity spilling from his men, how they fought like demons unchained, cutting down the enemy with the desperation of those who had stared into the abyss and found rage instead of fear, and making it their fuel. Their grit. Their hate. Their elation. He had kindled it. He had salvaged the day from the gutter.

It was not arrogance. It was facts. His javelin had struck true. His voice had given order. His discipline had held.

And now, the Duskwindai line began to splinter.

It was subtle at first. A few backs turning. A few eyes darting. Then came the crack. A soldier turned to flee and was butchered by the man behind him. Still that was not the only one, others froze in place, gripped by indecision, and were swallowed whole by Yarzat blades, their hesitation punished in choking gurgles and the twitching of limbs in the mud.

Limbs flailed. Men shrieked. And the earth, hungry as it always was, drank it all in. The blood. The piss. The viscera. The boots it sucked down like a drowning man's last meal.

Victory reeked of iron , shit and burnt leather.

Valen inhaled the stench, let it settle in his lungs as he finally witness the enemy routing from the field..

He had given no final order, no flourish or fanfare. He merely watched. And in the din, the butchery, the chaos of a thousand men killing and dying, the only thought that rose through the haze like a whisper through smoke was simple.

I have done it.

And for a single breath, Valen let himself believe it, as the day became theirs.

He had truly done it.