Hero's Dead Brother

46. War

A few days had passed on the battlefield.

Wisingham's troops had attacked from the West border and as our soldiers headed that way, a new wave of attacks arrived from the North.

The bastard was sly and knew exactly how we would answer his attacks. Because of that unpredicted strike, many villages were burned to the ground, many soldiers died because of being outnumbered.

Only a month of fighting and we already lost one tenth of our troops.

King Wisingham, from Ilon, was a tyrant that took the crown by killing his own brother. He knew that without expanding his territory, he wouldn't be able to keep his Kingdom and would fall eventually.
His natural ressources weren't enough to keep up with the neighbouring kingdom's commerce.

What he had, on the other hand, was a huge army of fire mags.

Even though one light mage is a lot stronger that a fire mage, only nobles in Leon had powerful attributes. The majority of the population were shadow or water mages.

That made us vulnerable and Wisingham knew that.

He had proposed to the older Prince to divide Leon and give him a part of it's territory in exchange for peace.

But the King knew that he wouldn't stop there, just as Queen Caroline knows. If we just give him those lands, he will get greedy and swallow the rest.

We need to stand and fight.

Even though she's the Queen and should be in a safe shelter, Caroline was risking her life on the battlefield. She gave the order of passing all her power to my brother in case something happens to her.

They argued for days, my brother forbidding her to participate in the fights and her insisting that she trusted him with the empire and that she couldn't just sit and do nothing.

Then she found out that she was pregnant and everything changed in her head. She got scared to die and stopped risking her life.

Greg took the responsibility as the King and swore to her that he'd come back with a victory before we both left for the battlefield.

Blood, screams, agonizing bodies on the ground, burns, the smell of roasted human skin, clashing iron, spells screamed with broken voices was all we knew for the next months.

As I was killing more and more people, some were surrendering, begging to let them live. Some killed them, some took them as slaves.

My decision made Noah frown as he appeared next to me with his terrible looking, bruised fifteen year old body.

'Why don't you kill them?'

I ignored him and pushed the enslaved soldiers I captured forwards.

My brother, Caleb, Mika, Joy, Emilia and I were fighting as the knights, shielding and launching the attacks. Kevin was with the mages, supporting our troops.

As we were fighting, some days we were holding our positions, some days we were moving forwards as Wisingham's troops were backing down. And some of the days we were retreating, giving miles and miles of territory away.

When their troops got exhausted, Greg called us to the tent and we looked at a map, Caleb and I spending hours and hours thinking of a better strategy to fight without harming their villagers, thousands of citizens living in the city the next battle shout take place in.

They would have no time to evacuate.

We decided to let them get forward and surround them from behind as they would think that we were retiring. That way, the battle would take place outside the city and the lives of their women and children would be spared.

Noah appeared next to me again.

'This is pathetic. What are they doing?'

'Shut up. This is the best solution.'

'What if it gives them and advantage? Are you all stupid?'

'Do you want us to slaughter innocent kids 'cause you wanna go forwards? We're just protecting out territory, not invading. We already won if we just hold this position.'

'Just because that bastard doesn't give a shit about his people doesn't mean you should!'

I ignored him but he got closer to my ear. 'Speak! Tell them it's stupid! You know that our brother is too kind hearted and Caleb is too innocent but we're not! Just fucking speak!'

I kept silent. I ignored his words. Amiel is not Noah. Amiel is a noble, virtuous knight, not a hateful, crude and broken soul like Noah.

That's what we did. We retired our troops as they came forward then came from behind them. Surrounded, they couldn't launch organized attacks and had to spread their powers all around and we were able to destroy them.

Caleb launched the merge of Thunderstorm Ring and Snake Circle and protected all of our troops all around, Greg and I launched the Rays of Sun attack, directed all our rays at them and while they couldn't do anything, we strikes and let our troops move forward and kill the rest or take prisoners.

What we didn't know, was that we destroyed the fire mages, while shadow mages were waiting for just that.

As we moved towards the center of the battlefield, Wisingham surrounded us in return and as we detected shadow magic with our light magic, we were surrounded by them and had to fight all of them while troops and troops of new fire mages were heading towards us.

The prisoners we took and decided not to kill attacked us from behind as the new troops were directed towards us.

Wisingham had predicted our every move.

Thank you for reading!