The high granite saddle two miles west of the crossing offered cold, bitter shelter.
Squad Leader Bram's third company had formed a bristling perimeter of ash spears and iron shields along the rim of the rocks, while the few surviving healers moved through the mud with strips of boiled linen and clay jars of grease.
Nearby, Captain Rodrik stumbled toward a supply crate, his face the color of wet parchment. He tried to raise his left hand to point Bram toward the southern picket lines, but his breath caught in a wet, ragged rattle, his eyes rolling back into his head as his knees buckled completely beneath him.
"Catch him!" Bram yelled, lunging forward to catch the mercenary captain before his head struck the stone.
The company healer rushed over with shears, cutting away Rodrik's shredded gambeson to inspect the damage. Beneath the quilted linen lay a jagged puncture where an imperial Menavlion had punched through his leather collar, the surrounding flesh already swollen, purple, and burning with a foul heat.
"The blade took rust and ditch water with it," the healer muttered grimly, pressing a cloth to the wound while Rodrik shuddered in delirious, feverish fits. "He is burning up. If the fever does not break by tomorrow night, his heart will give out."
A heavy, uneasy silence fell over the surrounding camp. While the healers tended to Rodrik, Master Osric emerged from between the two remaining supply carts holding a grease-stained piece of parchment and a charcoal stub. He walked over to where the officers stood, his thick grey beard twitching with grim exhaustion as he read aloud the tally of their headcount.
"Here is the butcher's bill," Osric rasped, holding the parchment up to the fading light. "Rodrik's main assault force is gone. Over seventy cavalry and line infantry were cut to pieces in the trench at Veron, and Vice-Captain Kaelen is buried under dead mounts. Only Rodrik and four wounded infantrymen made it up from the river ledge."
Osric tapped the charcoal against the paper, looking directly at Mira.
"As for battle-ready fighters, we are down to seventy-nine men," Osric continued. "Bram has forty fresh infantrymen from the third company who avoided the fighting. Mara brought back eighteen veterans from Goleryn, eight archers and ten heavy infantry. Mira has thirteen surviving scouts holding broadswords. And Jade has his squad of five, plus the three line levies clinging to his coat."
Numerius glanced across the rocky saddle. "Seventy-nine men who can actually hold a line."
"Seventy-nine effectives," Osric confirmed grimly. "Everyone else in this camp is dead weight for a fight: myself and my four wagon guards, two camp cooks, three healers, and sixteen maimed soldiers on litters who cannot stand without screaming. If Cataphracts hit this ridge, more than a quarter of our camp cannot even hold a dagger."
With Rodrik unconscious and burning with infection, the chain of command collapsed down to a single person. Only Captain Mira held the rank, the standing, and the authority to make decisions for what remained of the company.
A soft chime sounded in the minds of the Calamity Squad, followed by glowing blue text that materialized across their vision:
[Instance Quest Cleared: The Slaughter of Veron] [Survival Objective: Completed] [Combat Experience: +850 XP] [Renown Gained: +5 | Total Renown: 46] [Influence Gained: +2 | Total Influence: 12]
[Feature Unlocked: Party Morale Meter] [Current Squad Morale: 38/100 (Shaken / Sustained Catastrophic Company Loss)] [Morale Penalties Active: Recent Ally Decimation (-30) | Extreme Fatigue (-15)] [Morale Buffs Active: High Leadership Anchor (+15) | Emergency Wealth Preserved (+8)]
Jade blinked, studying the new bar that hovered in the corner of his interface. Below the main squad tracker sat a curious sub-entry:
[Attached Recruits: 3 Line Infantry | Status: Devoted Followers | Morale: 45 (Clinging to Squad Leadership)]
Jade looked up from his screen and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Three paces away, the three line soldiers who had rallied to his voice at the bridge were standing in a tight cluster. Their names were Jorik, Corin, and Hobb, three younger levies from the villages near Ocs Hall who had survived the ditch.
They looked like lost chicks, clutching their notched spears with white knuckles, their eyes tracking Jade's every movement with desperate dependence. When Jade took two steps toward his horse, the three men took two steps with him. When Jade paused, they froze in unison.
Numerius leaned against a boulder, wiping black grease from his two-handed mace, and stared at the trio with an intensely bewildered expression.
"Why are you three hovering around us like confused ducklings?" Numerius asked, his brow furrowing as he gestured with his chin. "Go sit with Bram's third company. They have the stew pots."
Jorik, a skinny youth with a split lip and mud coating his cheek, swallowed hard and shook his head. "Our sergeant got dragged into the stake ditch, and the captain is half-dead. Everyone else was screaming and running into the river. Your leader was the only man whose voice was giving actual orders instead of dying."
Numerius grunted, looking between the three nervous recruits and Jade. "You think standing near his spear is going to keep you breathing when the next charge hits?"
"He got us across the bridge," Hobb muttered from behind his shield, his eyes staying on Jade. "That is more than our sergeant managed."
Beside them, Nathaniel was sitting on a flat stone, both arms wrapped tightly around the iron-locked coin satchel he had hauled out of their wagon before fleeing the crossing.
His eyes were wide, staring at the mud between his boots as the adrenaline that had kept his legs pumping finally drained away. A sharp tremor began in his fingers, spreading up his forearms until his whole frame was shaking violently.
"Nathaniel?" Yuzon asked, stepping over with his bow slung. "You alright?"
Nathaniel did not answer. He let go of the satchel, clutched the sides of his face with both hands, and let out a strangled, breathless gasp that sounded half like a sob and half like a laugh.
"We survived again," Nathaniel muttered, his voice climbing an octave. "We actually survived again."
Numerius glanced over. "Nate, take a breath."
"We survived again!" Nathaniel yelled, his voice cracking into frantic hysteria as he shoved himself up from the rock, his knees wobbling like loose reeds. "There were sixty barded tanks with ten-foot lances! The ground literally collapsed into stakes! People were drowning in their own mail! We survived again!"
He took a wild, stumbling step, threw his hands into the air, and shouted at the sky: "HOW ARE WE STILL BREATHING?! WE SURVIVED AGAIN!"
His eyes suddenly rolled back into his head, his jaw slackened, and his knees gave out completely.
Nathaniel pitched forward, dropping face-first into the damp heather like an axe-felled birch.
Numerius walked over, looked down at Nathaniel's limp body in the dirt, and nudged the unconscious quartermaster's boot with his toe. "Classic Nate. Screams at the clouds, then takes a nap."
Mataranas walked over, unhooked his cracked cavalry shield, and bent down. With one smooth, effortless pull of his uninjured arm, Matty hoisted Nathaniel by the collar of his leather jack, carried him over to a dry patch beneath a pine overhang, and laid him out across a wool blanket.
"He carried the silver," Matty said quietly, setting the heavy coin satchel beside Nathaniel's head. "Good job."
Matty reached down with his broad, calloused hand and gave Nathaniel's messy hair an awkward, gentle pat. In his deep faint, Nathaniel let out a soft, contented mumble, a faint smile touching his bruised mouth as he curled onto his side like an exhausted cat and kept snoring.
Twenty yards away, the remaining officers stood in a grim circle near Captain Rodrik's stretcher.
Captain Mira leaned heavily on her massive two-handed greatsword, her broad shoulders tense beneath her bloodied mail. Beside her stood Scout Officer Mara, nursing a bruised shoulder, while Squad Leader Bram paced back and forth across the shale, chewing on an unlit wooden pipe with an ugly scowl.
Jade walked over to the council rock, Mataranas and Numerius falling in beside him, while their three new followers trailed cautiously five paces behind.
"Veron Crossing is gone," Bram spat, kicking a loose rock over the rim. "Achios has sixty Cataphracts controlling the riverbanks, and sixty Menavliatons holding the stone bridge. If we try to push north toward Vlandia, we hit the Battanian raiding parties Mira ran down this morning."
"We cannot stay on this ridge," Mara pointed out, crossing her arms. "As Osric said, we have seventy-nine battle-ready fighters, twenty-six wounded and non-combatants, and zero grain left."
Jade looked at the map pinned under a flat stone, his mind working through company deployments. "What about the second company? That captain with the big belly who took his men north toward Sargot when we split up outside Ocs Hall?"
Mira raised an eyebrow, a cold, sardonic smirk cutting across her scarred cheek.
"Captain Beric," Mira said, the name sounding like gravel in her mouth. "That fat pig has more men under his banner than the rest of us combined, around hundred and twenty swords. But eighty percent of them are undisciplined green levies and cheap line fodder who would drop their shields and bolt the second Cataphracts hit their line. It is not wrong to call in another company under the Golden Boar charter to share a contract when things turn sour, but we cannot just abandon our post here. We are signed under King Derthert's royal decree."
Bram scoffed loudly, his face reddening with long-standing venom. "I would rather tear the royal parchment in two and throw it in the river than share a single copper with Beric! That bloated swine left my third company stranded in the mud two seasons ago during the siege of Usanc Castle. He would take the contract, claim command over our heads, and leave us holding the rear while he ran off with the plunder!"
It was clear enough that Bram had bitter blood with Beric, but in the mercenary trade, breaking contracts was common currency. When a job turned into a slaughterhouse, most sellswords cut their losses and vanished into the hills without looking back.
Yet Captain Mira was cut from different iron.
Her riders did not break contracts, and her scarred jaw showed no sign of yielding to panic. Still, practical reality was a harsh master. Even if they swallowed their pride and called on Beric, adding more undisciplined infantry would make little difference against sixty barded Cataphracts in open terrain. Besides, Beric was days to the north on his own garrison contract near Sargot, entirely unaware of the disaster at the crossing.
Worse, the Western Empire was not sleeping. With Lord Ingalther's main baron army laying siege to Garontor Castle forty miles south, Emperor Garios and the imperial senate were almost certainly amassing an army to relieve the fortress.
"So calling Beric is out," Jade said, leaning over the map. "And breaking contract to flee north leaves us marked as deserters with no food and Battanians in the woods. What do we do?"
Mira looked at the map, then out over the southern horizon where thin smoke marked the distant siege lines. A tired, bitter sigh escaped her lips, her voice dropping into a dry rasp.
"I just hope Thomund and the rest of the high nobles understand why we failed," Mira muttered, rolling her stiff neck until the joint popped. "Barons sitting in silk tents do not care about hidden trenches, stake ditches, or lost horses. They only see an empty village still standing and their silver unearned."
Bram grunted in dark agreement. "Thomund will demand someone's head on a plate to explain the two hundred denars."
"He can talk to my greatsword if he wants an explanation," Mira said, her tone hardening back into cold resolve. "We move south. We do not break our contract, but we do not suicide against Achios's bridge either. Lord Ingalther has four thousand Vlandian troops surrounding Garontor Castle. If we march through the foothills along the western bank, we can reach the baron army's rear supply train in two days. They have grain, surgeons, and enough heavy knights to shield our wounded."
Mira tapped the table, her eyes shifting to the empty wagon beds.
"We cannot reach Garontor on empty bellies," Mira continued. "As we march south through the foothills, we scour every friendly hamlet and trading post we pass. Buy grain, requisition dried meat, and gather fodder for the mounts."
Mira's gaze flicked toward the three line infantrymen hovering quietly behind Jade's shoulder, watching him with dog-like loyalty.
"Those three are glued to your shadow anyway," Mira grunted, gesturing toward Brand and the others with her chin. "Take them into your unit. If you find farm boys on the road south willing to hold spears, recruit them under your squad. Just drill them so they do not fold the next time a horn blows, because I am not feeding dead weight."
A new prompt flickered across Jade's peripheral vision:
[Company Authorization Granted]
[Role Expanded: Autonomous Unit Commander]
[Party Capacity Unlocked: Up to 15 Men]
Jade met Mira's gaze and gave a firm nod. "We will keep them in line."
"Get the wounded onto the carts," Mira ordered, turning toward the perimeter. "We move as soon as the sun dips behind the ridge. If Rodrik dies, I carry the company banner myself. We march south."
Jade turned back to his squad.
Nathaniel was still curled peacefully on his side beneath the pine overhang, snoring softly with his cheek pressed into the wool blanket. Beside him, Jorik, Corin, and Hobb sat quietly on their haunches, watching Jade with expectant eyes, ready to follow the spear wherever it led next.