Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Chapter 313: Swapping head

Chapter 313: Swapping head

Pasha Mamud bit down a curse as he spurred his horse forward, the powerful animal snorting and kicking up dust beneath its hooves. Behind him rode sixty of his Sipahi guards, their lamellar armor glinting in the fading sunlight. Despite their orderly formation, their grim faces betrayed the truth: the battle had been lost. The banner of the Sultanate, once proudly billowing above the ranks of Azania's army, had fallen amidst the chaos, with its bearer unknown whetever alive or dead .

Mamud's thoughts seethed with fury as he pushed his mount harder. Fool, he snarled inwardly, the word echoing like a drumbeat in his mind. That pompous fool. We had the strength, the numbers. We had the ground. And still, he squandered it, by putting that fool of his brother in command of the right...

The battle had begun well enough—or so it had seemed. The Sultan, in his arrogance, had positioned the army with their backs to a shallow ridge.Initially, both armies stood on the opposite side of the river, and given that none of the two would march through it and contend with the river on their backs, they stood on a standoff for a few hours, until the horse King retreated a few hundreds of steps, inviting the Sultan's army to pass through unmolested, which they did.

Those bastards had thousands of horses and the horse tribes were known to have no discipline; we needed to just maintain our positions until night fell and then attack their camp at night.It would have been slaughtered and instead we gave battle...