Chapter 359: Chapter 343 – An Escalation of Hostilities

“Once the spark of violence is lit, it often could only be doused with blood.” - Saying attributed to Uvenoa Embutu, Anti-War scholar from the Kingdom of Posuin, circa 12 VA.

Aideen noticed the death of Buknug shortly after it happened. Throughout the fighting, she had taken on several of the knights in succession, as she had dispatched four of them behind her. She had taken her time with them, fighting with her staff connected and the blades stored, as she wished to respect the desire that the old orcs possessed for a glorious death in battle.

 

It would not do for her to take on the majority of the opponents when their last battle was supposed to be the limelight, after all.

 

She might not have agreed with their thinking, but in the end, it was the decision that the elderly orcs had made for themselves, and she knew that it was not her place to dissuade them. In her past two centuries alone, Aideen had seen other unliving who had chosen to perish much like these orcs had, if for different reasons.

 

With the unliving, the most common reason for them to have wished for death was losing a loved one, a bond so deep that the survivor felt life was no longer worth living without them. Boredom and Ennui came as a close second, as there were some who found immortality more a curse than a blessing after a while, and chose to pass on instead.

 

On the other hand, the orcs wished for a glorious, meaningful death they could be proud of rather than an old age where they would languish on their bed, rendered invalid by their body’s deterioration and shamed by their inability to contribute more to the clan. For a tight-knit society like the orcs such a fate might be acceptable for those who were not warriors, as they were content with a life lived as best they could, but for the warriors it was but a nightmare.

 

Which was part of the reason Aideen respected the suicidal desires of the elderly chiefs and shamans and stayed her hand even as they died one after another around her.

 

Her staff parried one knight’s sword while at the same time she tripped the other knight with a blow to the leg. The knight whose sword rested on her staff decisively slid it down its length towards her fingers, but Aideen pushed the blade aside with a spin of the staff before it could reach her. She leaned into the spin and brought the end of her staff down hard against the back of the neck of the knight she tripped, shattering the man’s spine and incapacitating him on the spot.

 

Then she completed the spin and brought the back end of the staff against the top of the knight’s gauntlet, a strike hard enough to push aside the knight’s own attempted thrust and bent the handguard slightly, which made the man withdraw his blade in a hurry as he gathered himself for another strike at her. His eyes were wary, as he noticed by then that they were the last two standing within the tent, with everybody else already laying on the ground.

 

The knight gave a tentative thrust, which almost backfired on him as Aideen’s staff swooped in from the side and passed a mere hair’s width from the front of his helmet. He knew all too well that she had the reach advantage, and the armor he wore was not enough to balance it out as he had seen her deliver blows that broke bones and crushed flesh through the armor before.

 

Aideen could tell that the knight wavered between fighting her and running away. His liege lord had already fled at the first sign of trouble. Out of the soldiers and other knights, only he remained, and while none of the other knights had fled and instead all fought to their deaths, some of the soldiers had done so shamelessly. He probably weighed the possibility of being punished for cowardice with saving his own life at the moment.

 

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In the end, Aideen took the choice from him.

 

She noticed how his attention wandered for a brief moment, and struck right away. Her staff thrust forward with shocking agility even as the knight tried to parry it. The moment the side of the knight’s blade made contact with her staff, she applied force right back at it and pushed it until the knight’s hands almost twisted as he struggled to hold his sword. His guard was left open as a result, and Aideen had not let that chance go to waste.

 

With a twist of her staff she pushed the knight’s sword further away even as the man desperately hung onto the weapon, then she pushed the man off-balance with the body of her staff. Her left hand left the staff and landed on the forehead of the knight’s helmet and pushed down as the knight lost his balance, slamming his helmeted head hard against the ground and throwing the man into a daze.

 

It was a daze he would never recover from.

 

Aideen slammed the end of her staff against the knight’s throat with force, hard enough to bend the armor that covered his neck inward. Even if her blow had not collapsed the man’s windpipe, he would likely suffocate to death due to his airway being blocked by his own armor in a while, but Aideen’s blow was forceful enough to ensure his end.

 

She already noticed the echoing footsteps that kept sounding louder as time passed, and walked out of the tent on the orcish side and saw that the orcs had charged en masse towards the humans. They were merely a hundred meters or so away from the tent by then, and she noticed how they were all in full wargear. Clearly they had spotted the tent burning -- even now the fire still consumed the sides of the tent – and sounded the advance.

 

The onrush of orcs went around the burning tent, other than Orica who was mounted on her rhinoceros. The orcish warchief stopped next to Aideen and gestured for her to hop on board, which she did with some slight difficulty due to how broad the beast was. Only after Orica nudged the beast into a trot once more did she turn around and ask Aideen a question she clearly had in her mind all that time.

 

“Had the elders passed on well?” asked Orica with obvious concern.

 

“They died gloriously, each with several opponents taken with them to the afterlife,” replied Aideen with a nod.

 

“Then all is as it should be,” Orica nodded, her voice both relieved and satisfied. “I thank you for your indulgence of their desires, Everlasting One.”

 

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