Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 934: Boredom

On the broad shade cast by an olive tree he sat, the rough bark at his back and the silver–green leaves shedding above him.

Asag found himself struggling to reconcile the figure before him with the memory that still clung, even ten years later to the past still burning in his heart: the furious young rebel who had thrown the first stone of their uprising against their masters, leading a bunch of famished slaves to their freedom.

From that trail a princedom had been born.

He remembered him as small, short, taut with coiled rage that had radiated outward like a storm barely contained. In those early days he had seemed immense despite his size, a force of will wearing a young man’s body, something so unstoppable that even the finest army on the continent had not truly daunted him. Back then he burned; now he endured.

Years had reshaped him. He had grown, never the tallest among them, but no longer the shortest either, standing now as the third....now second tallest after the ever–looming Jarza.

His body had hardened and toned from training.

Though the privileges of his title could have drowned him in all the indulgences men in his station so easily slipped into, he had never once allowed them to swallow him whole. While the others allowed idleness to creep into their days whenever duties permitted, finding comfort in wine, company, or distraction, he refused such softness.

His life had fallen into a strict rhythm of labour, drills, and planning. Only one afternoon a week, one, no more, he surrendered a sliver of time to himself, and even then Asag suspected he used half of it thinking of work.

None of his friends, knew how he hadn’t burned out from all of that.

He had become strong, undeniably so.

Yet that new strength was a shell that did not quite match what sat inside him.

The way he leaned against the tree, back bowed, legs stretched before him as if exhaustion had sanded down his bones, gave the impression that the faintest shift in the breeze might whisk him away entirely.

And still, when Asag studied his eyes, those same eyes that had stared down masters, soldiers, and death without blinking, he recognized at once that the man he had followed into battle, the one who had ignited them, the one he was honored to call brother, was still there.

Dimmed, perhaps, wounded certainly, but alive.

Watching him there with his back arched , made Asag feel a fierce and almost painful swell of protectiveness rise in him.

He wanted to shelter him away from any harm, just as he done to them ten years ago.

A small sound, just the whisper of a twig snapping somewhere nearby, cut through that quiet. He moved at once, head turning sharply with the alertness of a stag catching a hunter’s footfall. Only when his eyes settled on Asag, recognition softening their edge, did his posture ease, the tension draining from him like breath after a long–held fear.

"Everything good?" he asked at last, doing his best to keep his expression neutral, though his eyes betrayed the faint suspicious flicker of someone who had noticed more than he intended to reveal, namely the small urn half–hidden behind the crooked roots of the olive tree where Alpheo had tucked it away.

"As good as a man can hope to be when wrestling with nothing but boredom," Alpheo replied, tipping his head back and offering a faint, almost careless smile that did not quite reach his eyes. He made a show of stretching his legs, as though the shift of posture could disguise the tension that sat beneath his skin. "Nothing urgent has happened, I hope?"

"Nothing that ought to worry you" Asag answered with a loose shrug of his shoulders. "The men go about their work with the kind of diligence commanders write letters home about, and the legionnaires have been spared from the indignity of digging thanks to the laborers we dragged from the surrounding villages. Had we lacked them, you would have heard complaints before sunset, for all their discipline, they would not appreciate being handed a shovel instead of a shield."

A week had crawled by since the besieging army had finally brought down one of the outer walls of the Fingers. That moment had been a brilliant flare of triumph, an eruption of cheers and shouting and the mad spark of hope as the great stone barrier had folded inward. Yet the swell of adrenaline had long since receded, leaving behind the thick sediment of monotony that settles over any siege once the initial excitement fades.

What had seemed like the beginning of the end now felt like yet another stage in a long ritual of waiting.

And now, with most of the frontal assaults halted, having fulfilled their purpose during the first wall as distractions , now the real effort burrowed beneath the earth.

It was boring.

No charges at dawn. No volleys at dusk. No sudden cries sweeping across the lines to ignite the soldiers from their stillness. Just the quiet groan of a siege settling into its patient, grinding phase.

"The greatest danger they face out there is boredom," Asag murmured, arms crossing as he glanced toward the distant encampment. "Other than the handful of men rotated into the tunnels, there is nothing that stirs the blood. Little action to seize. Nothing to chase. Nothing to guard against except their own minds. Except, of course in a few months I believe we will cross paths with those bastards creeping out to harass our diggers, at which point we all resemble rats hissing in the dark."

"Any complaints from the ranks?" Alpheo asked, though his tone carried the unspoken agreement that he, too, had felt the drag of stillness.

"From ours?" Asag barked a soft laugh, arching a brow high enough to make the question ridiculous. "You would sooner hear a cat bark before any of our legionnaires began whining about anything. Was their training for naught?

They are starving for movement, for a real clash against the men behind those walls. They think everything has gone too quiet, too stale, too... tame.But you won’t hear them complaining as long as they got what they need to pass the days."

Alpheo nodded thoughtfully, though he could not help but wonder how long that hunger would survive once the true ugliness of the siege revealed itself. Morale was high for now, and the air still held only the early kiss of autumn rather than the merciless fuck of winter. His own men were prepared, of course, supplied with winter clothing, insulated tents, and stores of fuel that could keep fires burning for weeks, but their allies had come into the campaign with the dangerously naive belief that victory would be swift, and every man would be home before the first frost.

But the earth did not heed their wishes, and each day it hardened beneath the chill, making the digging slower, the tunnels colder, and the timetable tighter. If they did not act soon, the land itself would turn against them.

"I do not know if they understand yet," Alpheo murmured after a long pause, his gaze dropping to the ground beneath his boots as though he could see the tunnels carved beneath it, "but I suspect they may come to miss these quiet days once the true work begins. They will fight like animals down there. The sky will remain calm and innocent above us, nothing but sunlight and wind, but beneath our feet men will claw at each other in spaces barely wider than their own shoulders.

I don’t envy them."

Asag said nothing, simply watched him with a sharpened kind of concern as the prince continued.

"It is one thing to stand in the open with comrades on your left and right, to see your commander ahead of you and the sun on your helm. It is one thing to bleed beneath the sky, knowing that if you fall, your brothers will see you, hold you, carry you. But down there... in the dark... the only light will come from a candle strapped to a man’s helm, flickering as he grapples in tunnels. The air will be foul, the footing uneven, and the screams will have nowhere to go but into the stone and dirt." He exhaled slowly. "It is easy, so far as dying can be easy, to die with honor when you can see the horizon and believe your sacrifice means something. But to die alone under the earth, unseen, with only the sound of your own breath turning ragged... that must make even the bravest shit their pants."

His eyes lifted at last to the distant walls visible through the branches, the jagged silhouette of the Fingers standing stubborn and inscrutable. "I fear how eager they will remain once those bodies begin to be carried up from the tunnels. Once they see men hollowed of light, covered in dirt and blood, their final moments witnessed by no one. A siege wears on the mind long before it wears on the flesh.It is so for all sieges, and it will be so for this"

An awkward silence descended upon them. Asag shifted his weight, unsure of what to say, and Alpheo felt the slow, creeping awareness of just how grim his own words had sounded. For a moment they simply breathed beneath the olive tree, each waiting for the other to break the tension.

At last, Asag cleared his throat. "Well... I am certain you have something tucked up your sleeve, don’t you?" The hope in his voice arrived far too quickly.

To his friend’s great relief, Alpheo nodded. "I do. Though I will warn you, it will demand time, patience, and a handful of sacrifices, and it will likely horrify whoever has to implement it. But much like the first time, I believe the enemy will not realize what has struck them until the earth collapses under their feet."

This was enough to wake the mischief in Asag’s face. He nudged Alpheo’s elbow with the tip of his boot as if prodding a reluctant storyteller. "Any crumbs for an old friend? Something to gnaw on before I lose my mind entirely?Got nothing to do over here but wait..."

"I do not believe you would understand much of it," Alpheo replied with genuine honesty, which Asag of course interpreted as a challenge. His chest puffed out, his chin rose, and his entire posture rearranged itself into the unmistakable attitude of a man silently announcing, Go on then, try me. I dare you.

Alpheo inhaled, resigned to the performance, and delivered.

"We will have to rely on the Pythagorean theorem, or at least a mutilated battlefield approximation of it, because calculating the proper decline of our path . The instruments we are using are designed for surveying vineyards and property boundaries, not for determining the curvature of a descending tunnel, something that I will have to adjust for our future campaigns, I know very sloppy of me,considering we need it now.

Still for our current instrument this means the readings we obtain will be both insufficient for our sakes and dangerously misleading. We’ll have to do with what we have.

All of this, naturally, will need to be accompanied by multiple act of misinformation planted to confuse the enemy’s own counter-mine listeners, espionage of their efforts and , deliberate masking of our path with dead ends ,along with of course—"

He turned his head just in time to catch the slow collapse of Asag’s expression, which had fallen from determined confidence to absolute defeat in the space of a sentence.

Alpheo sighed, gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder, and lowered himself to sit beside him.

"In short," he said with a weary chuckle, "it will be manic. A proper shit show. Luckily we can wash our hands away from it, I assigned the task to Pontus; I am sure he won’t disappoint me given he hadn’t done so ever, so no reason to mistrust his effort right now. Still..." He tilted his head toward Asag, offering the faintest and best smile he could offer for now "I believe we have crawled out of worse and madder places than this.

If the sands didn’t swallow us all, no reason to think the dirt will."

Asag breathed out a long, quiet groan, the sound of a man who suddenly wished the gods had gifted him an easier friend.

But he smiled back, nonetheless.