Free Web NovelChapter 1412: The Ambush
Lord Pyrrhus had perfectly cooked this plan. freёwebnovel.com
Eight thousand soldiers from the remnants of the Legions, bolstered by three hundred of his own Blue Orchid clansmen and the household cavalry he had kept in reserve since the start of this campaign. He rode at the front because that was where the leader of this march belonged. At the very front, where the men could see his blonde hair catching the early light and know that their commander had staked his body beside theirs.
He had lost people whom he counted on greatly, Zebelon, Colak, the crude barbarian of the Ashlands and Adelaide and the girl from the Wager House.
He had lost everything the Sixth Prince had given him, piece by piece, like a gambler hemorrhaging chips at a table he refused to leave.
But Pyrrhus was not a gambler. He was a strategist who had been fed incorrect intelligence, undermined by incompetent subordinates, and blindsided by an opponent who had no right to exist in a nation this small. That was what he told himself as he rode, and he believed it, because the alternative was that he had simply failed.
And failure was not something that Lord Pyrrhus of the Blue Orchid Clan entertained.
’When I take Ryugan, none of this will matter. The Prince will see only results.’
He turned the blue gem ring on his middle finger.
The canyon opened before them like a wound in the earth. Two walls of reddish stone rising on either side, narrowing the path to roughly forty meters across. It stretched for nearly a kilometer before widening into the plains that led to the Ryugan mountain base.
Pyrrhus studied it.
Any competent commander would see the danger. A canyon was a chokepoint, and a chokepoint was an invitation for ambush. He was not so blinded by urgency that he’d forgotten the basics.
"Send scouts ahead. I want the ridgeline checked, both sides, before the vanguard enters."
The order was carried out. Twelve riders broke from formation and rode ahead, six scaling each side of the canyon ridge. They returned within the quarter hour.
"Clear, my lord. No movement on either side. No signs of encampment or fortification."
Pyrrhus nodded. He hadn’t expected anything. Ryugan’s military was concentrated behind their gate and their walls, defending the mountain. They didn’t have the numbers to project force this far out.
That was the logic.
He gave the command, and eight thousand soldiers began funneling into the canyon. The column stretched long and narrow, cavalry at the front and rear, infantry filling the center like blood through a vein. The sound of hooves and boots against stone echoed off the walls and folded back on them, making the army sound twice its size.
They were halfway through when the first arrow fell.
It came from above and to the left, a single streak of silver-blue light descending at a steep angle. One of the forward cavalry saw it and raised his shield.
The arrow passed through the strings of whatever had fired it. By the time it reached the column, it was no longer one arrow.
It was nine.
Nine shafts of silver-blue light fanned outward from the original trajectory, each one angling toward a different target. The cavalryman’s shield caught one. The other eight struck eight different soldiers in a rough circle around the impact point.
They were all clean hits. Chest, throat, shoulder, hip. The men dropped without sound, and for a moment the column didn’t even understand what had happened because the deaths were too spread out and too simultaneous to register as a single attack.
Then the sky turned silver.
Five hundred bows fired at once.
The sound wasn’t a volley. It was a hymn.
A single, resonant note that sang off the canyon walls and filled the air with something that felt less like warfare and more like ceremony. Each arrow split as it crossed the strings, multiplying into clusters of four, six, nine depending on how many strings the archer had drawn across. The canyon’s width became irrelevant. There was no space between the shafts.
Pyrrhus’s horse reared. He controlled it with his knees, his eyes already scanning the ridgeline, and what he saw made his stomach clench.
Archers. Hundreds of them were lining both sides of the canyon ridge in staggered rows, each one holding a bow that looked less like a weapon and more like the ribcage of something dead. The limbs curved outward in twin crescents, silver-blue plating crawling over the frame like frost on bone. Multiple strings ran between the limbs, each one pulled to a different tension.
And at the center of each bow, something pulsed.
It looked like an eye? Of something that was inherently demonic.
’What in the—’
The first volley struck the column and the dying began in earnest. But it was the second volley that told Pyrrhus what he was actually dealing with, because the second volley did something the first hadn’t.
The arrows changed direction.
Soldiers who had raised shields, who had activated defensive talents, who had ducked behind horses or pressed themselves to the canyon wall, watched the arrows curve around their cover and strike them from angles that shouldn’t have existed. One arrow punched through a shield bearer’s guard, missed, continued past him, turned in the air like a living thing, and came back to take him through the base of the skull.
The translucent eyes at the center of those bows were tracking them. Every soldier in line of sight was a marked target, and the arrows that left those strings did not stop until their target was on the ground.
"Shields! Defensive formation! Close ranks!"
Pyrrhus’s voice cut through the chaos. The soldiers responded because they were Imperial, because discipline was branded into them from birth. Shields locked together, defensive talents flared and the column compressed, seeking safety in density.
...
It was the wrong response.
Density meant more targets in a tighter space.
The archers above didn’t need to aim. The eyes on their bows did the aiming for them.
Each volley sent multiplied arrows screaming into the compressed formation, and each arrow that struck a body simply moved to the next target once the first was down.
