I Became the First Prince - Chapter 72

What You Lost, What You Forgot (3)

“Fire!”

Bernardo Eli was riding hard for the bridge.

The nobles turned toward the archery commander, who shook his head.

“They are outside our range, my lords.”

The nobles clucked their tongues upon hearing this. The weary horses and their riders were about to be overrun by the orcs.

Bernardo’s shouting showed that he was aware of his peril.

“The Eli family has a relationship with my own Bradenburg line. Although it’s not a deep relationship, it is enough to spare a few arrows,” Count Brandenburg said. He then beckoned a couple of his Iron Hawks from their position atop the hill. They came and took up places before the heavy infantry. Their tunics had black hawks embroidered upon them, and their longbows stood almost two meters tall.

“There are the iron hawks!” shouted someone who recognized the Brandenburg’s sharpshooters, who now lined up facing the river.

“The goal is to slow the enemy! Focus on their advanced ranks!”

The archers strung their bows and leaned back to find the perfect angle.

“Fire!”

The sound of two-hundred arrows hurtling into the sky resounded over the river banks.

The orcs who had been fiercely running were hit, crashing to the ground. Those behind them jumped over their fallen kin. Another volley was loosed, and more orcs fell, the others now stumbling over their corpses. As the charge of the orcs was halted, Bernardo and his party thundered onto the bridge. Still, they did not slow down, and infantrymen and nobles alike scattered before their horses. The nobles angrily pointed their fingers at the riders, who ignored them. Eli rode straight to the command tent on the nearby hill where so many flags fluttered.

“I am Bernardo of House Eli, and I came here with news from the north!” he shouted at the knights guarding the tent as he vaulted from his horse. “What news from the north?” the nobles demanded as he entered the tent.

“Many of the lords had led troops south and had encountered orcs. They were all annihilated, along with their men.” The nobles groaned collectively upon hearing this.

They had heard rumors among the refugees that the lords, including Count Ghern, had fled like cowards from Shurtol Keep, dying as they fled. To hear that these men had marched south sounded far better than them having failed to flee from the orcs.

“Currently, the four families of Shurtol, Eaton, Cardane, and Barheim have taken in refugees and are at war with the orcs.” Bernardo gave these nobles no time to think about the northern lords’ disgraceful deaths – he moved to more current reports.

He told the nobles where defeats had taken place and how many soldiers had died.

He told them what noble families had been killed outright and what castles had fallen. He did not have a grain of good news.

“Huh, this isn’t even the worse of it!” he stated, and the nobles groaned once more.

When they had encamped here, they had thought that the northern lords would at least hold back the orcs to some extent. Their families had, after all, been in many wars against monsters. However, it was now a month after the news of Winter Castle’s fall had reached them, as well as the news that the orcs had ravaged twelve of the sixteen provinces and counties. All the great northern lords had died, and only four nobles in total remained.

The central nobles now felt a sense of crisis that they had not even felt when the great host of refugees had crossed the bridge. It was the first time that they realized how easily death could claim them.

The last great wars the kingdom had fought were against the empire. They had lost one of these wars one-hundred-and-twenty years ago, then winning the next war about twenty years later. And in not one of those wars had so many nobles died.

Except in very rare cases, nobles had been taken prisoner only to be released for ransom. It was the tacit and well-established practice of respecting the sanctity of life of another nation’s aristocracy. Such customs seemed useless before the orcish tide. For monsters that did not even speak human languages, the rules by which humans conducted themselves held no value. These dead northern lords, so many of them, clearly showed this. Their bodies hadn’t even been found, so completely had they been consumed by the orcs.

The nobles were all sweating as they considered the horror of this.

They had been sleeping on the most comfortable of golden beds, yet now it felt as if they had been thrust upon the hard ground of a thorny field.

While they blankly considered their doom, Bernardo exchanged meaningful glances with Maximilian. Bernardo nodded, and the Second Prince shook his head.

Maximilian knew that Adrian’s knights must have struggled to lure the orcs here and that Bernardo had told a great many lies. The nobles had died under the First Prince’s wrath instead of under the orcish horde’s hunger.

Many had died in the north, but the details of their deaths had been fabricated, and Bernardo relayed this fabrication. The other lie was that the surviving four lords did not plan to war against the orcs; no, they were waiting for an opportunity to flee south. Maximilian now ran with the lies, as had been planned all along.

“My lords, as you have heard, the orcs are cruel and show no mercy. Their brutish nature has been bred into them over so many countless centuries,” Maximilian said, taking on a tone of grief.

“If our lines are broken, the central part of the kingdom will face the same bloody fate as the north.”

Realization flowed from the faces of one noble to another.

“The orcs have fallen back!” came the cry of an officer outside the tent.

The nobles now headed to the front, their faces having hardened like stone upon hearing Bernardo’s reports. Dozens of orcs lay dead on the bridge. Their corpses looked like big, green hedgehogs with all the arrows that stuck from them. The troubling thing to consider was how far they had come under that hail of arrows. Most of them had died halfway across the bridge. However, the larger ones had nearly succeeded in crossing the bridge and reaching the lines of infantry. The nobles were shocked.

The renowned Iron Hawk archers had shot at these orcs from afar, and when the monsters had come into range, the other archers had fired at them as well. The archers accounted for about ten percent of the total defending force, and these orcs had come so far despite constant volleys.

The nobles turned their attention to the opposite banks of the river.

Countless orcs were upon the plain, just outside of a longbow’s range. The soldiers were agitated, seeing so many beasts that wanted to tear them apart and feast upon their flesh.

A wind blew in from the river, and the nobles trembled as the chill penetrated their thick furs.

“It will be a long night tonight,” a common soldier said.

The nobles unintentionally nodded their heads at the man’s words.

* * *

The soldier had been right, for the night was indeed long.

It stretched out for those that guarded the river banks. It stretched out for the nobles who lay sleepless in their luxurious tents.

Even if all were awake, they were still suffering a nightmare.

“More of them came during the night.”

At dawn, more Orcs were to be seen across the river.

“They seem to be 10,000; having doubled from yesterday,” a soldier stated in an idiotic tone of voice.

“They are more than we expected, but not that much more. Maybe the fact that their bodies are so big makes it seem that there are more of them that there are in truth.”

The nobles were silent after the commander’s words. They could all see that there were more orcs and that they were very large in size.

When Maximilian looked at the orcs, he could not help but shudder. The nobles on the command hill felt fear. The soldiers on the front lines were even more afraid. The nobles had boasted of their heavy armored infantry, but these men now seemed very nervous as they clutched their shields. A few spearmen kept nervously glancing behind themselves.

“Calm your minds! There aren’t that many of them who can cross at one once!”

“Our Knights of the Red Iron Chain will stand before you, so take heart!”

It was only the knights, men whose minds were as sharp as their blades, veterans of war, who remained calm. They only numbered four-hundred in total.

The nobles had thought that so many knights could easily deal with a few orcs. The nobles now understood how small a force these were.

An old knight had come to the front lines, not saying a word. He had been observing the sheeplike nobles and soldiers for some time.

He was Count Richter Lichstein, the greatest swordsman in the kingdom. He had even been classed as a better swordsman than Bale Balahard.

Richter drew his sword. It shone with a brilliant light, the aura so great that it banished the last vestiges of night, heralding in the brightest of dawns. The overwhelming magical presence of this gifted lion of a knight spread in all directions.

The soldiers trembled, all of them feeling as if they had been woken from a nightmare.

Count Richter re-absorbed the magical light and sheathed his sword. He then quietly stepped back, having given everyone his message. He had calmed the restless hearts of soldiers.

However, this display of his prowess had not only excited humans.

The orcs began to breathe loudly in anticipation. Among them, an unusually large orc suddenly bellowed out a roar. The orcs were now all lining up in ranks, and a few of them took elongated shields from their backs that looked very cute in their hands.

The nobles gasped as they saw these shields, for familiar crests were engraved upon them.

“That is the heraldry of House Ghurun, a snow deer!”

“And there is the coat of arms of the Winterwolf family!”

The orcs now held many emblems and treasures of northern families. More than ten noble houses had their symbols displayed in the crude hands of the monsters. It was a visual expression of the utter destruction that the north had undergone.

Once more, the large orc roared, and the others rattled their looted shields.

“They are coming!” one of the officers screamed, and he was right.

The orcs surged forward, the earth quaking under the tread of their feet and the roars that came from their maws. The archers fired as soon as they had range.

Orcs had the shields raised above their heads as they charged on like enraged bulls. Only a scant number of them fell under the hail of arrows. One more volley fell among them, and this time a few more died, yet the great majority still charged at the bridge.

Their vanguard reached it soon enough.

“The Iron Hawks should fire again, kill more of them!” The longbowmen fired once more at this command, targeting the vital spots of orcs under the shields. The orcs that had gained the bridge fell in short order. Still, there were too many orcs, and the only archers who could target and penetrate their tough muscles were the Iron Hawks.

Even so, just because one fired their arrow into a vital spot of the orc did not mean he would die. Many of them had survived multiple such hits. Their toughness was comparable to the orcs that had chased Bernardo.

“They are Orc Warriors!” the Second Prince shouted, identifying their nature.

The Orc Warriors that had survived and had crossed the bridge now charged at the ranks of men.

“Rose Thorn Infantry!”

“Hah!”

The heavily armored infantrymen pressed their shoulders against their shields and braced their legs for an impact.

“Hold! Hold!”

“Hah!”

The soldiers with long spears waited for the moment when they would thrust forward and halt the Orc Warrior’s charge.

That moment never came. The orcs sprinted the last few meters and banged into the shield wall, charging clean through the hedged formation of long spears. Men were crushed by their shields, and their cries of pain ran against the river banks.

Orc Warriors slit the throats of the fallen or wrung their necks until their spines broke.

The long spearmen had been battered back, with many of those who survived thrown onto their asses.