Enlightened Empire

This was already his fourth true battle, but Alcer still wasn’t used to it. He wondered if he ever would be. Despite his reservations, the decorated soldier had learned a thing or two about combat in his time with Saniya’s army. As far as he was concerned, there were two types of battle the southern soldiers could face. The first type was the kind he had lived through in his first skirmish, as well as his first major engagement against Lord Rupilo’s forces.

In those fights, Alcer and the other troops had fought without concern, and destroyed all in their path. These had been one-sided affairs, decided by only the gun in his hands. In these fights, they could fight without a care in the world, only repeating the same motions until the enemy was routed. Apart from the noise, he wouldn’t even be aware of the battle around him. In those times, war felt easy.

The second type was a battle like the final engagement against the northern armies, a desperate struggle between two evenly matched opponents. During those moments, war had felt like hell. At last, he had understood his opponents how must have felt every time they were faced with his musket fire. To his good fortune, and to the misfortune of their most recent foes, today’s battle was of the first type.

Ever since the start of the battle, Alcer’s platoon had stayed atop of the rampart they had spent days to construct. To his right and left, the muskets cracked and launched their projectiles down the hill, into the muddy fields, or into the men who were stuck inside them. Meanwhile, in his front, the halberdiers had the easiest job of them all. They simply stood and watched, as not one of their enemies had made it even close to their position.

The angry, uncoordinated mob had rushed up to them full of bravado, but most of their scattered, individual groups had simply halted in front of their moat, clearly confused on how to proceed once they were confronted with their first obstacle. They were all powerful warriors, so they could have swam through or jumped over the moat and continued, yet almost no one did.

There was no coordination between the groups, so hardly any were willing to take the first plunge. The scant few who tried their luck looked exhausted from their spirited, but pointless rush up the narrow pathway, when they had pushed their own allies into the mud to the sides. Now that they were drained and still had to climb a hill, their enthusiasm came back to haunt them.

They somehow jumped over or swam through the moat, but were gunned down before they could even make it halfway up to the rampart’s crest. A select few others thought themselves clever and tried to circumvent their position, but got stuck in the muddy fields and were taken out by the defensive army’s flanks. A handful of arrows flew back to reply the incessant musket fire in kind, but most lost steam before they even made it up to their elevation. Once more, war seemed easy.

All the while, most of the powerful enemy warriors were still stuck at the foot of their earthen wall. By now they would have realized that it was the most dangerous spot they could have chosen in the world, but their overeager and oblivious allies at the back pushed against them and prevented their retreat. At the same time, the moat and rampart in their way prevented their advance. All they could do was curse or beg as they fell one by one.

Where their previous enemies would have used sandbags and shovels to fill in the moat, they only had pointless stares to offer, filled with pleas or wrath. Where their previous enemies brought with them weapons to match their own, they only had a few, disjointed arrows to offer in reply.

Yet just as Alcer was convinced that this battle would end in an overwhelming, one-sided victory again, just as he was convinced that their battle was of the first type and that everything was long decided, he saw some unusual movements within the enemy army. However, they didn’t come from the elephants in the back, no doubt to most of his allies’ surprise. Unlike them, Alcer knew better.

While the giant beasts in the back were intimidating, he didn’t feel as great a threat from them as his fellow officers did. Earlier in the day, Alcer himself had struggled to walk up their rampart, which would give in under his weight and slide back down in muddy waterfalls. He couldn’t even imagine how hard it would be for such a giant monster to go up the same path. The rampart would collapse and bury the beasts under it before they would ever reach the top.

No, instead of those monsters, he was much more concerned with the enemy troop movements. If only they could organize a proper charge, the enemy warriors would still be dangerous. In their war against the north, he had lived through a close-combat battle with real cultivators, and was wary of any push-back even from a wounded enemy. So when he spotted some proper movement in the midst of the enemy formation – movements which seemed coordinated and planned for once – it took his attention right away.

In the center and somewhat towards the back of the mess of bodies, a group began to ball up and form proper lines. He wasn’t sure if it was a new unit the various sects had formed on the spot to break through, or if one of the sects had finally decided to step up and take the lead, but it wouldn’t matter much. Either way, he felt like they would be trouble.

"Guman, what is that group doing down there? The ones in the center, a dozen or so heads from the front." Since his own eyes weren’t good enough to make a proper judgment, he asked Guman the former hunter in his team, the one who had eyes as strong as a cultivator. For a second, Guman concentrated on his orders, before he called out in surprise.

"That’s ridiculous."

"Report, soldier!" Alcer shouted back, annoyed and flustered. "What’s going on down there!?"

"There’s a group making their ways through the masses, they’re trying to get to the front. They are just... shoving other warriors out of the way as if they were kids. What’s with these people?"

At this point, Alcer felt his bad intuition confirmed. His heart sank as he watched the formed lines push their way through the mass of bodies around them as if they weren’t even there. Not long and they were close enough that even he could observe them. When the new threat first made its way to the front of the formation, it didn’t look especially impressive to Alcer.

Just like the soldiers around them, they wore all kinds of armor and held all kinds of weapons, a strange mesh of styles so typical of the patchwork army they had come here to fight. Even so, their attitude was incomparable to that of the men around them. Even now that they had been trapped in the hell of war, they still had confident, almost zealous looks on their faces, their backs straight and their eyes calm, so very different from the panicked and hunkered allies around them.

While Alcer’s men around him still appeared confident and continued their target practice, the officer began to get worried again. He had already gone through one close-combat encounter with cultivators, himself without a weapon in his hand, and he wasn’t about to repeat the horrors of that day.

In fact, after his first experience, he had been thinking about how useless his flintlock had been in the most crucial time in his life. Together with a local blacksmith from Saniya, he had searched and found a solution to their problem. To his good fortune, they had managed to finish their prototypes and get them approved by the army’s higher-ups just before they had to move out for this war. Now, his unit had already been equipped with their newest invention, and it appeared time for its first proper field test.

"Bayonets!" Alcer shouted back towards his men. Yet when he turned around, he could only see those close enough to hear stare back in confusion. Meanwhile, the rest still happily fired away, eager to prove themselves in the war and get a commendation from their king.

"I said take out your Bayonets! That is an order!" Finally, his lower-ranked officers reacted to the unusual command and carried his command to his soldiers. In the meantime, Alcer got his own weapon ready. He pulled the thin spear blade from the side of his flintlock and planted his weapon’s stock down into the soft soil to stabilize it. After he had checked that there were no bullets left in the barrel and no powder left in the chamber, his trembling fingers inserted the round end of his spear tip into the flintlock’s barrel. That was it, his new invention. Like this, he had transformed his gun into a spear, good enough to offer resistance in close quarters.

However, as he had been working to transform his weapon, he became more and more flustered. Unbelievable scenes had played out at the bottom of the rampart. Despite their armors and weapons, the newly arrived warriors jumped the moat with ease. Without pause they proceeded to charge up the rampart as if on flat ground. He had seen many powerful warriors back in Medala, but none would even come close to the strength these monsters displayed.

Yet even worse than their power were their faces. The entire time they stormed towards them, they did so without any cover. As the spearhead of the enemy’s attack, they were pelted with gunshots from all sides. Though they fell in droves, they seemed oblivious to their impending deaths. All this time, they held manic smiles on their faces. Some of them laughed even as they went to the ground, as if they welcomed their own demise with open arms.

Confronted by beasts far worse than the elephants, the tremble in Alcer’s hand got worse, but then he remembered the hundred men behind him, the men he was responsible for, and the men whose lives depended on him. The badge on his chest felt heavy as strength returned to his spine.

"Halberds brace for impact!" he shouted in the bravest tone he could muster. "Muskets, defensive positions!"

As the halberds closed their lines before him and pointed their long spears down towards the charging enemy, the musketeers did the same and pointed their bayonets up towards the sky. Their entire front line section turned into a porcupine, ready to repel any predators that would dare attack them. Yet even then, the warriors wouldn’t slow down. If anything, they sped up even more to greet the countless deadly points with glee.

Even from the third row, Alcer could feel the impact on the front. As simple mortals, his halberds succumbed to the force and were pushed back a few steps, by only a handful of men who had charged for over fifty meters, up a muddy hill. Even worse, the sun’s light darkened as some just passed over the formation entirely and jumped above their heads.

Unlike anything a human should be capable of, they leaped over their front line and simply landed among the musketeers. Many impaled themselves on the readied muskets, but there were still too many holes to stop everyone, despite their best efforts. Right before Alcer’s eyes, a warrior bolted over the outstretched halberds and straight towards him. He moved his bayonet to meet the enemy, but his blade slid off the other man’s armor. As the crazy face became larger and larger in Alcer’s view, the firm impact was just enough to push the inhuman warrior off balance. When the warrior landed, he struggled to stay on his feet.

Presented with a chance, Alcer shoved his new weapon forward once more, without remorse. He could feel the spear blade pierce the armor and hit bone, yet the warrior looked up and only smiled at him. As his enemy’s blade raised above his head, Alcer watched in shock as the warrior tried to take one last soldier with him. When he thought all was lost, another Bayonet came from the side, to pierce the attacker’s arm and hold his weapon in place.

Next to Alcer, Guman stared back at him with the same horror and disbelief he himself felt. Even now, the beast’s muscles bulged, as he forced his way towards them. They were desperate to keep the beast at spear’s length, and somehow managed to hold their own long enough for reinforcements to arrive. One after another, more soldiers around them joined in, and blade after blade entered the intruder’s body. Only then did the inhuman beast succumb and fall to the ground, still with a manic smile on his face.

When Alcer looked back up, there were fights everywhere around him, but there was order to the chaos. Their training had paid off and they had begun to suppress the crazy attack into their midst. For now, they had withstood the enemy’s charge.