Year 12 of the SuaChie Calendar.
The next day, the sun had not yet fully risen over the Eastern Sierra Madre Mountains when the Suaza reconnaissance unit, guided by Lion (Chuta), crossed into the territory of the Triple Alliance.
They were moving southwest of the Northern Fortress, the stone and wood structure that the Tlatoani Cuitláhuac had discovered the day before.
The first light of morning served them for their first objective. From a wooded ridge several kilometers away, they detected a Mexica checkpoint. Thanks to the spyglasses created by the Suaza Kingdom, the post appeared to be within arm's reach.
"The perimeter is loose; they are concentrating on direct lines of fire," analyzed Lion, adjusting the lens of his spyglass. "They have perhaps fifty men, mostly militiamen. Observe the direction of the canoes and porters. It is the main supply route."
Jaguar, the youngest of the group, meticulously recorded every detail on light paper, tracing small symbols for the tents, campfires, and trails. Owl noted in his mind the exact times of the changing of the guard and the frequency of patrols.
Then, they moved even further west, following the supply route at a safe distance. Their objective: to find important towns or military centers. Lion was tasked with capturing all the information on a leather map, creating a detailed topographical image of the enemy deployment.
After a few kilometers, the terrain became more mountainous, forcing them to take a detour that led them away from the main route. This allowed them to infer that, outside the primary supply route, many settlements were simple villages without military use and, therefore, posed no immediate threat.
They stopped for lunch in a quiet forest, the silence broken only by the sound of the horses' straps and the whisper of the wind through the pines. They ate biscuits, dried meat, and dehydrated fruits—nutritious rations that the Suaza Kingdom's military was accustomed to, an austere contrast to the feasts Mexica warriors celebrated after recent looting of enemy lordships.
After eating, they set out again.
The team traveled for kilometers until they reached a wide, mighty river. Lion was able to identify it. It was the commercial route previously used by the Mexica, which had even served for trade with the Suaza Kingdom until recently, but had not been used for a couple of months due to the declaration of hostilities.
"Look," signaled Alligator, pointing to the water.
Lion and the rest could spot several large boats navigating slowly, propelled by oars and square sails. They were similar in design to the Alligator boats created by the Suaza Kingdom, but with stylistic changes, featuring Mexica decorations and a structure that distinguished them from the originals. The circulating intelligence had not failed: they had adopted naval technology.
Fearing that the Mexica might be using the river as an alternative route to attack them from the north, the Suaza team followed the river's course. They maintained a steady pace, avoiding villages, moving like ghosts through the undergrowth.
Upon reaching towns with distinct characteristics—more robust houses, temples with an architecture different from that of Tenochtitlan—Owl, who had been stationed longer than the rest on the plateau as an undercover scout, informed Lion.
"Young Lion, we are on the border of the Metztitlán lordship's territory."
This lordship had proudly kept itself free from Mexica control for decades. However, Owl confirmed that it was now facing constant raids by the Triple Alliance's militias.
While the situation was not as serious as the war with the Tlaxcaltecas, the Mexica incursions had taken advantage of the situation to force this lordship to join the alliance, aiming to secure more men to fight the Suaza.
With this intelligence gathered by the Shadows and the Suaza Kingdom army, Lion (Chuta) could understand that this lordship, like many others on the frontier, would find themselves embroiled in conflicts. The painful difference was that, this time, they were involved because of him.
"If the kingdom hadn't settled so close," Lion lamented to himself during his journey north, following the river, "these towns would have been free of these disputes. We are the anchor that drags the conflict."
The dual reality of being both progress and war at the same time, a dichotomy the Suaza kingdom had accepted, but which weighed heavily on Lion's soul.
Several days later.
They arrived at the river's mouth north of Suaza territory on the gulf.
A little further south of that point was one of the coastal towns built by the merchants of the Suaza Chamber of Commerce.
After spending some time there, resupplying and reporting their findings to the nearest base, they departed back along the borders of the Metztitlán lordship.
Just when they were a day away from that forest where they first established themselves, to the east in Metztitlán territory, the group stopped abruptly.
Lion raised his spyglass. They saw, with brutal clarity, a small village being attacked by Mexica warriors. The sight was depressing. Unlike previous raids, intended to take provisions for arriving warriors, these fighters were killing innocents, leaving them no chance of escape. It was a massacre intended to inflict terror.
Lion's face hardened. The guilt he had felt for dragging the conflict to the Metztitlán people transformed into a cold fury.
"Charge! To the rescue!" he ordered without hesitation, immediately mounting his horse.
Owl, always thinking of the leader's safety and the mission, seemed ready to object.
"Young Lion! Our mission is intelligence. It's too dangerous!"
But seeing Lion's determined look, the righteous anger in his eyes, he swallowed his words. He only prepared himself mentally to protect his leader, regardless of the mission's cost.
The six warriors quickly galloped towards the village. The horses seemed to sense their riders' urgency without needing whips and accelerated their pace, their hooves rhythmically pounding the earth. As they approached, they could hear the screams: some of sadistic excitement from the Mexica, while others were of fear and desperation from the victims.
For Lion, this was the first time he had seen such a scene up close, not in a report, but in the flesh. The stench of blood and the panic hit him. It made him feel guilty for having underestimated the cruelty of the Triple Alliance. He needed time to digest the situation, but he knew the villagers awaited their help.
When they reached the village outskirts, the situation was a chaos of shouts and machetes. The six Suaza scouts split up, each taking a path. Lion's horse, a noble animal, burst onto the main street, its gait resounding like thunder.
The confusion was absolute, but not for these Suaza warriors; it was for the Mexica, the Metztitlán warriors who were desperately defending themselves, and the rest of the village civilians.
It was the first time they had seen horses in person. The unknown beasts, gigantic, maddened by the excitement of the gallop, were as terrifying as the riders armed with steel. The Suaza took advantage of this, using the surprise factor of animal terror.
Each skillfully cleared the streets of Mexica warriors. Obsidian macuahuitl smashed ineffectively against the light bronze armor, while Suaza steel spears and swords cut with precision. A single scout, like Monkey or Alligator, killed three or four warriors in one sprint.
Upon reaching the other end of the village, without stopping, they returned. They checked house by house, guided by the cries of despair, or by the same people who now realized that these riders on unknown beasts were there to help them. The scouts had transformed, for a moment, into a shock force.
Lion knew this action was a risk. It broke the rules of his mission, but the image of the silent massacre on the Tlaxcalteca front, combined with the brutality of this raid, had compelled him. The Suaza Kingdom not only brought war; it brought a promise of protection, and Lion had just honored it.
----
The echo of the horses' hooves and the grating sound of the steel swords ceased as abruptly as they had begun. Ten minutes after the skirmish started, a dense, suffocating silence settled over the small village. The air was saturated with the acrid stench, the salty sweat of battle, and the unmistakable metallic smell of blood.
Lion (Chuta) dismounted near the center of the village, his legs feeling unstable. Although his mental maturity allowed him to analyze the situation with coldness, his 'childish' body registered the terror and nausea of intimate combat. He found himself facing the few Metztitlán men still standing, wounded and terrified militiamen.
Owl approached a group of survivors and began to converse using the little Otomí he managed, a dialect that barely served him for the essentials.
Chuta, feeling that the communication was too slow for the urgency of the moment, decided to intervene. He stepped forward, and with a linguistic fluency that came from his perfect memory and advanced knowledge, he began to speak in the local dialect, with a courtesy that contrasted with his youth and the scene of massacre around him.
"I am Lion, a scout from the mountains," he said, making a slight bow. "We saw your suffering and acted. Tell me, please, why has such a violent conflict begun against the Culhua-Mexica?"
The oldest man standing, the local tecutil with a superficial wound on his shoulder, replied, his voice deep and loaded with resentment.
"Young lord, our village is on the border. We receive constant extortion, but everything worsened with the arrival of new warriors moons ago. They feared we would revolt, especially after our people discovered a Mexica weapons cache east of our territory. They came to take it and to punish us to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Tlaxcaltecas or, worse still, into yours."
The information was an electric shock to Chuta and the rest of the Suaza scouts.
A weapons cache! They had not explored in enough detail.
The Triple Alliance had managed to conceal an important supply route, showing that the terrain advantage belonged to the Mexica, who knew ancient shortcuts and hideouts in the Metztitlán mountains.
Lion nodded, his face impassive, assimilating the new strategic information as he continued to listen to the Metztitlán men's story about the arrival of the warriors and the subsequent attack.
They could notice the pain in their accounts: the desperation for life. Lion, who had already felt guilty about the weight of responsibility, seeing that the Suaza Kingdom had indirectly impacted these towns by being the catalyst for the war, felt that guilt weigh even heavier. He, the bearer of progress, was also the bearer of death.
Just as the elder tecutil was asking Jaguar about the nature of the beasts they were mounted on, a desperate-looking woman burst into the center of the group of survivors. She ran up and pleaded with the elder.
"Tecutil! Help me, please! My baby! My baby is gone!"
The worried elder asked her what had happened. She, between sobs and broken words, managed to explain that she had left her baby in its cradle to go see the saviors mounted on beasts, and when she returned to her hut, the child was no longer there.
Lion and Owl immediately understood the gravity of the situation. Owl looked at Chuta, expecting the order to continue with the original mission, but knew he was going to contradict it.
Lion stood up, his expression a mask of determination. The baby was collateral damage of their intervention. He would attempt to amend the situation.
"Everyone! To the woman's hut, and then we will look for the trail. Owl, and Hummingbird, come with me."
The three Suaza scouts set off swiftly, circling the advancing crowd. Chuta feared the baby might already be far away. He ordered Owl to follow the main track.
Outside the village, among the bushes, Lion and Owl noticed the mother. Her instinct had led her to separate from the group, desperately following a faint track of large footprints leading away from the village.
Both set off in her direction. After riding a few meters through a small grove, they noticed the woman had stopped, trembling, looking ahead.
From their mounts, Lion and Owl spotted a straggling Mexica warrior. He looked furious over the defeat, but at the same time displayed a macabre joy. The woman knelt and began to implore.
The warrior held the baby in one hand, while the other brandished a bronze knife with the edge of the blade near the baby's neck. The weapon was Suaza-made, acquired through trade. That irony struck Chuta: the product of his kingdom was transformed into the weapon that would kill an innocent.
The Mexica laughed at the woman. "Your scream is music to Huitzilopochtli!" He insulted her, assuring her that only the child could compensate for the defeat.
The woman continued to implore, even offering her life for her son's.
The Mexica warrior, almost delirious with madness from the fear of being caught, told her that her life would not be enough, that the offering must be the pure blood of the child.
Lion observed the knife, his mind reviewing the guilt. The weapon of his kingdom, the war he had brought. Just as he gathered his courage and attempted to mediate with the warrior, his youthful but firm voice, the Mexica turned.
"You? Foreigner! This baby will be the first. Then all foreigners will be expelled from our lands."
As he said this, he quickly raised his arm and began to lower it with the clear intention of stabbing the baby.
Lion closed his eyes, afraid to witness the scene. He heard the mother's heartbreaking scream, a sound of pure agony.
----
[At the same time, 30 kilometers south, at the Mexica checkpoint]
The air at the checkpoint was thick, and the morning light revealed the imperfections of the makeshift fortification. Cuitláhuac, Moctezuma's brother, a man with a brilliant tactical mind, was meeting with his advisors.
He listened patiently to the veteran generals, who spoke of the Suaza with contempt.
"They are tortoises, my lord Cuitláhuac," an old captain scoffed. "They hide behind their shell of stone and mud. This seems to demonstrate they fear the alliance, and especially Mexica ferocity. Their cities of teponaztli and glass must be equally fragile."
Cuitláhuac did not share that arrogance. He had seen the reports: the Suaza used weapons that cut obsidian and unknown beasts of war. Those two isolated fortifications were not a sign of fear, but of a logical and cold strategy. He knew that the Suaza Kingdom's tactics could not be so foolish as to display all their power at two static points.
He traced the map with his finger; his eyes fixed on the two square structures.
"If they are fortresses, they are designed to force us into a useless siege or a costly frontal assault. That is what they want… Evidently, their defense focuses on the immediate area of their walls and the channel they have dug."
His analytical mind began to devise countermeasures. The Suaza had fortified the direct line of contact, but they had left their flanks open. For Cuitláhuac, the solution was obvious.
"If we directly avoid those structures and go for the villages further east, it will not be necessary to confront those stone walls and the traps around them," Cuitláhuac declared, his voice gaining authority. "It is foolish of this kingdom to build those structures so close to the front while neglecting their rear positions. If it were a continuous wall, it would make sense to me, but these two 'tortoises' are isolated points. We will surround them and strike where it hurts them most: their supplies and their morale."
Confident in his analysis—a strategy that exploited what he perceived as a Suaza deployment error—and eager to earn the trust of the elders who observed him, Cuitláhuac made his decision.
"Prepare a group of one hundred chosen men! They will avoid the main road, surround the southernmost Suaza structure during the night, and head directly toward the nearest village, the one east of their supply line. Destroy the food reserves, kill the civilians to demoralize them, and return with the largest number of prisoners for sacrifice. War is fought on the front, not hidden behind walls!"
The order felt like a torrent of fresh air in the Mexica camp, a return to the proven tactics of assault and terror. Cuitláhuac, though cautious about Suaza technology, had opted for an offensive based on maneuver and flanking, assuring his army that the Triple Alliance still had the ingenuity to overcome stone and metal.
----
The woman's scream filled the small clearing.
Lion (Chuta) kept his eyes closed, bracing himself for the sound of tragedy. But the noise that came was not that of tearing flesh.
It was a dry thud, like a stone hammer, followed by the sharp sound of metal against wood.
Clang!
Lion snapped his eyes open. His heart was racing. Just as the Mexica warrior brought his arm down, a long, thin, and exceptionally swift arrow had struck his wrist, just above the knife's handle.
The bronze knife, Suaza-made, was flung away by the force of the impact and embedded, trembling, in a tree trunk. The warrior's wrist bent at an unnatural angle, broken.
The Mexica screamed, not only in pain, but in fury and bewilderment. The baby, now freed from the warrior's grip, fell safely onto the soft bed of leaves at the foot of the trunk. The mother, overcoming the shock, lunged for him, embracing him and crying equally.
Owl, seeing the opportunity, dismounted and, with a lethal agility different from that shown by other Scouts, rushed the wounded Mexica. The warrior, dazed, tried to defend himself with his broken macuahuitl. It was useless. Owl's armored fist struck his temple, and the Mexica collapsed unconscious.
Lion dismounted, approaching the embedded knife.
"That was an incredible shot," he whispered, looking at the warrior's shattered wrist. It had been Hummingbird, shooting through the foliage with inhuman precision, not to kill, but to neutralize the threat.
"It was not me, Young Lion," Owl replied while tying up the warrior. "It was Hummingbird. He knew your heart would not let you kill, and that you needed this man's knowledge."
Chuta looked at the Suaza knife's edge, reflecting the sun. The symbol of his progress, the weapon of his guilt, now neutralized by the precision of his Scouts.
"Take him to the Northern Fortress," Lion ordered, his voice now firm, the terror replaced by cold determination. "Let him be interrogated. Let him know the cost of cruelty."
Lion's innocence had died in that clearing, replaced by the serious face of one of the Suaza Kingdom's leaders, now ready for war.
.
----
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[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Hello everyone.
I want to apologize again for not giving you more notice, but it hasn't been a quiet week. My mother, in addition to her previous pneumonia, was diagnosed with gastritis from very strong medication, and my sister also got sick, so I had to help them a lot with my nephew's and little brother's end-of-year activities.
I wanted to post a return date, but this time, just like last time, I wasn't sure.
Anyway, if nothing complicated happens these next few weeks, I'll try to make up for the chapters I didn't post.
Back to the novel.
This chapter continues directly from the previous one, and so we don't forget, Lion is Chuta (I've already corrected the key names from the previous chapter). Furthermore, this chapter also serves as a guide to understand the specific context of both forces and a way to explain the scenario for the next two chapters.
By the way, there's another nod to Chuta's early years, specifically regarding the baby theme.
On another note, I want to clarify that Chuta isn't going to become drastic in his decision-making, but rather that he'll no longer shy away from taking direct action when necessary.
NOTICE
Map in the comments.
QUESTION
Should I add the last excerpt from the linked chapters (previous chapter or chapter corresponding to the section)?
I ask because there have been times when I've revisited some plot lines after 20 chapters, and you might have forgotten. However, this won't count towards the chapter length; it will just be extra text at the beginning.
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Read my other novels.
#The Walking Dead: Vision of the Future (Chapter 91)
#The Walking Dead: Emily's Metamorphosis (Chapter 34) (INTERMITTENT)
#The Walking Dead: Patient 0 - Lyra File (Chapter 14) (INTERMITTENT)
You can find them on my profile.]