Chapter 172: Mantis Stalks the Cicada...

"We are attacking straight away, Sire?" Duke Ryder was decisive but not normally this decisive. His knights had expected that they would only attack Duke Burn after waiting for the next day. After the forced march they had had minimal rest and now he expected them to fight a battle to top it off?

"Did I stutter?" It was not just his men that were worn thin from the past few days. Duke Ryder himself would not have made such an order if he could see any better options. Regardless of if he won, there would still be the King left for whomever came out on top. And after all of the action that he men would have gone through at that point, he did not exactly see himself winning the battle that would follow. Not that that mattered if he could not get rid of Duke Burn.

"No, Sire!" Had it been any other situation he might have asked more questions. However the string of dead scout captains that Duke Ryder had left over the past few weeks did not bode well for those who displeased the Duke. He did not want to join that number just yet."

Then why are you still here? Go get the men ready!" Ryder shouted at the knight. He was not about to try and get his men ready himself. He knew his own temper better than anyone. If he saw how reluctant his men were to fight a battle after marching for the better part of three days he might just kill more of them than Duke Burn's army would. Even if they won.

"So this is what those pious bastards bring a priest with them for, huh." Ryder had never been much of a pious man, like most of the Fiverian nobility, but there were always a few that did not follow the trends. If he had a priest on hand he might just have been tempted to ask for Elanitia's blessings. Or mercy. He'd need one or the other. Though he doubted that a priest truly had that power. Why else would the Pope no longer rule a Kingdom if the priests could call on a literal Goddess?

It did not take as long as Duke Ruder had expected for his men to get ready. Something he was glad for. His thoughts had been getting so desperate that he had started thinking more about Elanitia in the past hour than he had in the past ten years. Not something that he wanted to do again.

"So, let's see how the scheming bastard fairs in battle." Even after all the years that he had been rivals with Duke Burn, Duke Ryder had never fought alongside or against an army that Duke Burn actually led. There was no way a man so slimy would take to the field personally unless he had to. That the man had even gone to the north in the first place was surprise enough for Ryder. Though he had Duke Oakley to thank for that. Not that he could. He very much doubted the man was alive.

"Does he know we are about to attack?" The first thing that the Duke noticed when he left his tent was that Burn's formation was for lack of a better word a shambles. It could barely even be considered one. He did not think that Duke Burn would be a tactical genius but he had seen first hand that he could command troops better than this when he had gotten them out of the way of his attack from behind at the start of the war. This was nothing like that.

"He might be planning something." His knight offered the most uselessly obvious statement that he had heard in a while. Ryder looked to his noble allies to see if they had anything more constructive but what he saw disappointed him. He should have known that that lot had outlived their usefulness once that had given him command of their men for the duration of the war. There was a reason that he could consolidate his control over the south so easily after all. It was not much of a challenge to be the dominant man in a group of halfwits.

"Even if he is, there is no turning back now. We attack at once." Ryder was not about to wait for them to think of anything. He might lose more mental capacity if he actually heard what they had to say. He was not about to test that theory. He had done it before.

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"Looks like the battle is long over." They already knew from scout reports but seeing the battlefield was another thing. Not just Braydon but everyone on the King's side had thought that Duke Ryder would let his men rest before throwing them at Duke Burn but apparently Duke Ryder disagreed. And his army had already left. Not even waiting to burn or bury his own dead.

"So Duke Ryder won." Braydon did not have much to say. They all thought that he would win in a one on one against Duke Burn but that did not account for Ryder's army having been run ragged beforehand. Though apparently that did not matter. He had still won.

"Indeed he did, but I have no clue how he plans to win anymore." Gerald did not have high expectations of Duke Ryder looking at the body count. This had been a particularly bloody battle, not quite on par with the decimation of Duke Oakley's faction but it was by no means as clean as a practise duel.

"We will have to wait for an accurate view of how many men he has left." Braydon could see that a lot of people had died but this was war, not a plague, there were still more than half of both side's men left alive. It was just a matter of how many. Because these were peasant conscripts it mattered little to them who they fought for so long as they could go home at the end.

"Seen a field so bloody before?" Ethan had made his way towards Braydon whilst he was talking to Gerald, putting an end to their conversation. He had been with the King and Cinar when they made it to the battlefield, so his presence here meant that he probably had come to fetch Braydon.

"No. My father took me to war but you do not usually get a field with so many bodies without armies much bigger than Ryder and Burn's." Isaac was an earl, not a Duke. there was little chance for him to participate in battles of such a scale. Not when the last big war happened when he was still a small child.

"More than me, Oakley's folly was my first. And we sat behind castle walls whilst that was going on." Ethan had inherited an earldom that his father had ruined. Let alone taking part in a war, he had a fief to build from scratch. It was only in recent years that he had gotten enough men to man more than his castle.

"The King has a need for my presence?" Braydon asked after a few moments of silence. It was not every day you had a casual chat over a field where more than 2000 men had died.

"If not you then who did I come here for? The rest of them are far too squeamish to stare down half of this number of bodies." Ethan joked. And it was true. Whilst most of the nobles were fine with other people dying that did not mean that they had to see it most of the time. They were not about to change that.