Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1031: Key to the war(2)

They walked in silence toward the lower gate of the Bastion, the lush autumn grass cushioning their footsteps. Beneath the green, a carpet of dried leaves lay hidden; with every step, a sharp, brittle screech echoed up in the air as they shattered under their boots, like the snapping of dry bone.

Neither man spoke. Pontus had retreated into a defensive stillness, fearing he had finally overstepped the bounds of the Prince’s patience. Alpheo, however, felt a pang of guilt. He had silenced the man with the bluntness of a hammer, and the resulting quiet was far more oppressive than the engineer’s technical chatter.

In the silence that had ensued, of the two Alpheo was the first to speak.

"I apologize for my tone before, Pontus. It was ill of me . It was not my intent to be hostile. I simply... I find myself needing silence to organize the chaos in my mind. These are, as you might imagine, stressful hours."

"I understand entirely, Your Grace," Pontus replied, his voice small and carefully neutral.

"Know that I hold no ill will. On the contrary," Alpheo said, offering a small olive branch, "if you wish to speak of the work now, the floor is yours."

"Of course, Your Grace. When I find something worth the air, I shall relay it," Pontus said. It was a diplomatic answer, but as they delved deeper into the shadow of the inner keep, the architect remained a closed book. He had retreated into his shell like a threatened turtle.

Alpheo decided to give him a nudge. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the inner corridor of the gate way and muttered, "A bit cramped, wouldn’t you say?Isn’t this smaller than I ordered it?"

That did it. The turtle lunged outside his sheld. Pontus turned to face Alpheo with an expression of such profound offense it was as if the Prince had insulted his mother’s honor.

"Cramped, Your Grace?" Pontus sputtered, his eyes wide. "I have already stated repeatedly, that we were forced to cut corners to meet your calendar! It went without saying that the internal volume was one of the sacrifices! I assure you, it is precisely large enough to man the garrison required and not an inch more. It was a necessary evil! We compensated by ensuring the bastions at the meeting points of the curtain walls were as expansive as we could allow!"

He was waving his hands now, the wound to his professional pride bleeding freely. "We even took more precautions! Precautions you have yet to even see! If you would just follow me, I will show you why ’small’ is not a problem’!"

Pontus turned and hurried toward a narrow gatehouse that separated the inner hold from the main wall walk. Alpheo followed, a satisfied smile blooming on his face.

He had his genius back.

He looked at the gatehouse of the eastern stronghold, as they approached. It was a bottleneck, designed so that only two men could pass abreast. Alpheo paused in the threshold and looked up. Hovering directly above the narrow passage was a massive bundle of stone , suspended by heavy chains.

He didn’t need to be told what that was for, he had after all made use of it when he was still a mercenary defending Aracina from the Oizenian host. He recalled how they had lured the enemy in through their greed, then pressed on so sure that the last stone between Yarzat and them would fall that night. Their anticipation became dread when he sprang the trap, blocked the gate and massacred them to a man.

A wave of nostalgia hit him like a hurricane.

Those were good times....

As he stood in that tight space, Alpheo’s mind drifted. He closed his eyes and imagined the horizon not as it was now, empty and gold, but choked with a forest of enemy banners. He could almost hear the dissonant blare of trumpets and the rhythmic thud of ten thousand boots marching toward his throat.

He knew it would be a meat grinder. The coalition would not probe; they would hammer. They would hurl thousands into the breach in a desperate bid to end the "Fox" once and for all. All that stood between his family’s survival and a slaughter was this pile of clever stone and the frightened men he would station inside it.

His throat went dry. Ten thousand men. Perhaps more? The sheer mathematics of it was a shadow that no amount of engineering could fully dispell. The voice at the back of his mind, the one that whispered it is not enough, began to grow into a roar.

But it had to be.

Still...perhaps, he thought, looking at the stone weight above his head, it truly was time to send the some letters east.

Oblivious to the freezing dread pooling in the Prince’s gut, Pontus forged ahead, his eyes gleaming with the manic fervor of a creator who had built a perfect trap. He gestured grandly toward the massive bundle of jagged stone Alpheo had been studying, an avalanche held back by a single iron pin.

"It will be a graveyard, Your Grace," Pontus began, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr. "The geometry of the outer works leaves the enemy no choice. To mount a proper assault on the inner sanctum, they must seize at least one of these secondary keeps. They will be funneled into these narrow veins like blood into a gutter."

He walked to the crenelated edge and pointed down into the dry moat. "If they attempt to scale the curtain wall, they will be shredded. Shot, stoned before they even find a foothold." He nudged his chin toward a nearby catapult. It was an odd, squat machine, small enough to be easily dismantled or destroyed by the defenders should the position be overrun, ensuring the enemy could never turn the engines against the keep itself.

"It lacks the thunder of the great machines," Pontus admitted, "but it is an infantry-dispeller without equal." He patted the tension-beam almost affectionately. It didn’t fire single boulders. But instead bundles of pointy and sharp flints linked by weighted hemp ropes. A ’shredder’ shot. If properly aligned, one release could sweep an entire rank of five men into the dirt like dry wheat.

They were small enough to easily assemble and disassemble or destroy, plus the fact that they were small meant it would not put too strain on them if they lost their hold and found it being pointed at the defenders.

Alpheo shifted his gaze toward the massive Bastion gate. There, the "true" engines sat, monstrous catapults with enough torsion to shatter a siege tower’s spine or turn a battering ram into splinters.

"Each of these minor castles is an island," Pontus continued, wiping the sweat from his bald crown with a stained silk handkerchief. His smile was growing, blooming with a terrifying, ecstatic pride that rivaled even Merelao’s "They are easily reinforced , yet only a single lever-pull away from being completely isolated. If we lose one, we cut the bridge, drop the deadfall, and leave the enemy trapped in a stone box while we rain fire from above. It will be agonizingly costly for them to take, yet fatal for them to ignore. A negligible loss for us; a catastrophe for them."

He let out a short laugh. "I sure as all fuck do not envy the poor bastards the enemy will throw into this maw..."

Alpheo watched the architect’s excitement with a cold, detached clarity. Pontus would not be here when the screaming started. He would be miles away, tucked safely in a cellar, awaiting the reports of his success. He would not be the one bleeding in the dark, nor the one choking on the dust of shattered masonry.

And neither would the prince for that matter.

But Alpheo had the man for that. He knew exactly which commander possessed the iron required to hold this key.It hurt to put on him such a strain again, but he needed him.

He stood still, the wind whipping his cloak against his legs. This was it. The sum of his life’s work, his treasury, and his intellect had been poured into this singular point of failure. If this Bastion proved insufficient, there was no "Plan B." There would be no glorious retreat, no honorable exile. They would drag him from his throne, and they would kill him.

A sudden, violent shiver of white-hot anger lanced up his spine.

They were coming for him, the "High Princes," the "Noble men." They were coming for the prosperity he had carved out of the mud, for the stability he had bled to maintain. They stood on their pedestals of ancient honor and dusty laws, treating his life’s struggle as a minor entertainment, a corrective measure against an upstart.

They thought he was a fox to be hunted for sport. They thought his land was a board and he was a piece to be moved.

Alpheo’s jaw set, his teeth grinding with a lethal, silent promise. Let them come, he thought, staring out toward the empty horizon where the banners would soon appear. Let them bring their thousands. I will turn their ’just war’ into a slaughter that will haunt their lineages for a century. I am not their toy. And I’ll never be.

If they like sausages, then they must stomach seeing how they are made.