21 Close Call

At first, the situation looked good. With 9 of their best men attacking 8 fishermen Iceborne they should've gotten an easy victory, yet this isn't what happened.

When the Iceborne saw 2 of their own fall they quickly grouped up and stood in a simple circle formation. This wasn't an unexpected thing and even though it might take a while, Jay had confidence his men would be able to break it.

In turn, it would give the soldiers great experience in how to deal with formations, something they hadn't really practiced yet. But when the soldiers got close to the formation everything went wrong.

The place they stood at now wasn't just a great fishing spot. Other than to fish this place could also be considered a guardpost. This was a logical thing to set up, after all, it was likely the Iceborne knew where First City was located.

Just after the 2 groups engaged something happened, Jay was the first to see that there was movement underneath the ice close to his men but before he could say anything an armored Iceborne jumped out of one of the fishing holes. The Iceborne had a blue scaley armor that covered his torse, his fur was also a deep blue yet despite coming from underwater his fur hadn't absorbed any of it. In his hand, he held a long trident.

A moment passed and more of these dark-blue Iceborne jumped out of the fishing holes, immediately attacking the soldiers.

Before the soldiers even had time to properly turn around 3 of them were already skewered on top of a trident.

Jay and General Green still stood a distance away and even though they immediately started running when the first new Iceborne appeared they were still quite a distance away.

The soldiers were now outnumbered by 3 to 1. Despite being extremely surprised they still managed to group up and defend themselves. They knew very well they had to try to break through the enemy Iceborne and group up with their Lord.

The battle was extremely hard, the fishermen despite being quite weak individually were in a formation and were heavily restricting their movements. The armored Iceborne, on the other hand, were as strong as they were.

Just as they were about to take an extremely high risk to break out of the encirclement they were saved. A blue ball was thrown out by their Lord and landed in the middle of the fishermen's formation. When this ball landed on the ground a gust of wind came from it because of this some of the fishermen stumbled, breaking the formation.

Seeing the formation break, the strong soldiers quickly moved. Inevitably one of the soldiers still got killed when turning their back on the Blue-skinned Iceborne but the others managed to break their encirclement successfully.

Before the blue-furs could chase them down Jay and general Green appeared, killing 2 of the blue-furred Iceborne, causing the others to become aware of them.

At this point, the battle divided into 2 fights. The remaining soldiers were fighting the fishermen while the 2 of them fought the blue-furs.

General Green was extremely surprised at how strong the scaley armor was. His F grade spear didn't even manage to penetrate it, making him having to aim for the head.

Jay also limited his strength to 50%. He didn't want the enemy to go and scatter since they might not be able to kill all of them in that case. Additionally, just slaughtering people with a big gap in strength wasn't a way to learn anything so he limited his strength to the same as theirs, only prevailing because of technique.

The first to finish their fight was surprisingly the soldiers, while the other group was defeated just a few seconds later.

Now knowing that some of the Iceborne could stay underwater for a long period of time, Jay was glad none of them tried to escape and warn the village. And he could only hope that all of the Iceborne here had shown themselves and nobody hid underwater.

After grabbing the weapons and armor off of the blue-furs Jay was positively surprised. The weapons were F grade and the armor was F+ grade. It should also be said that graded armor was a lot rarer compared to weapons. Armor took more materials to create after all. Because of this, the only graded armor they had prior to this was his own and Geralt's.

Now that they had 10 pieces of F+ grade armor their Vanguard had sufficiently better battle prowess.

After everyone donned their armor they pushed all of the corpses into the fishing holes before departing again. Jay had attempted to make a culture where corpses were just corpses and no longer held any of their previous self.

This seemed to carry over to the soldiers as they didn't seem emotional at all when throwing their comrades' corpses into the water.

The vanguard that now consisted of just 7 people in total kept moving. The only other encounter they had was with a peaceful Ice Elemental who simply moved out of their way to let them pass.

After a bit longer they found the town. There were now standing on a small mountain and they could see the town about 200 meters in front of them. The town was surrounded by a 3-meter tall wall made entirely out of ice, additionally, there was also a wall separating the east and west sides of the town.

On the west side was a militarized zone. Every person there was holding a weapon and most had armor. On the east side seemed to be citizens. Other then the very old and very young it seemed to mostly consist of Iceborne with bright colors of fur, such as green, yellow and red.

This caused Jay to alter his plan. He took an educated guess and assumed the brightly colored Iceborne were nobles. When the main army arrived he decided they would attack there and none of those nobles could survive. If when the town surrendered nobles were still amongst them the other Iceborne would probably still treat them as such. This wasn't something he could allow as the existence of nobles, Iceborne or otherwise, could cause for a lot of trouble in the future.

The last thing he wished was for there to be a divide in his town. Right now military strength was the thing people valued each other with. Once the first mages appeared intelligence would also become a valued trait. This was the best possible scenario for a Lord such as himself.

Some more time passed before Geralt found him. As expected he hadn't had much difficulty getting here. From his position, he could also see the Giants were walking a decent distance behind the rest of the troops to attempt and avoid the enemy noticing them prematurely because of their stature.

And so soon, after talking for a bit they had decided on their strategy, it was time to attack!