Chapter 364: Chapter 348 – Changed Priorities

“It’s not strange for people to find themselves changing their minds as they grow older and experience what life has to offer. If anything, I’d be more worried with those who never changed their minds despite the changes in their life. Those people are either very determined, or too stubborn to realize that they were wrong.” - Liovar Rhodes, Philosopher from the Clangeddin Empire, circa 419 VA.

Andromarche had abandoned many things in the past decade of her life.

 

She had abandoned her homeland, where she was born and raised. She abandoned her status as a knight, one that she only earned through over a decade of hard work from her early teenage years. She left the rest of her living family behind, as to return to them would just make them complicit in her perceived dishonor, a crime in the eyes of the people of her homeland.

 

She had abandoned her dreams, the lofty thoughts she once had as a young girl growing up on the suburbs of Lavinja with her many siblings and cousins. She left behind the dream to become a knight in shining armor, and maybe one day swoop a handsome young nobleman off his feet and carry him away with her on a white horse.

 

Instead, over the past decade she had built a life just for herself in the prairie, as part of Clan Bloodfang. She found a man who she felt fondness for, even though he was from a completely different race. She even had children, a naughty boy and a sweet little girl she was fond of spoiling, waiting for her back at the tent they called home in the clan’s territory.

 

It was for their sakes that she turned her blade on people she would have once called her comrades, even if none of these ones were likely to be anyone she knew personally.

 

She stabbed through the chest of another man as she deflected the spear he carried with her shield. The man was likely a levy, poorly equipped compared to the rest, yet she felt more resistance than she expected when her blade bit into his flesh. With a frown Andromarche kicked the man away and extracted her sword at the same time and took the brief moment she had to inspect the blade.

 

Her frown grew deeper when she noticed the nicks and notches on her blade. She had maintained the sword as best she could in the past decade, but she was from a poor family to begin with, and couldn’t afford a sword made from materials as good as the ones used by those knights from rich families. The weaker steel of her sword blade had started to fail from the heavy wear and tear she subjected it to in this battle.

 

Before she could mull over it or regret the state of the sword that had accompanied her since before she was fully knighted, another knight in liveries Andromarche recognized as one of the smaller landlords that used to be under Lavinja rule rushed towards her. Andromarche readied herself to face the knight before her as she raised her shield and sword to a ready position.

 

Her opponent must have been a young knight, given how his swordsplay showed many gaps, but he also wore better armor, with good riveted chainmail and a breastplate that easily turned blades away. In contrast, Andromarche was more skilled and experienced, but she lacked such luxuries and needed to parry or block the young knight’s swings carefully.

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She took her time fighting the young knight. By then the orcish horde had mostly scattered the human army’s formation and the fighting had devolved into more chaotic melees where the orcs handily overpowered their human opponents. None of the orcs joined in the fight as they saw the young knight as Andromarche’s to handle, while any human soldier or knight that tried to interfere in their battle found themselves impaled or pierced through by a large arrow all of a sudden.

 

It warmed her heart that Dagna kept watch on her even in the chaotic situation of the battle.

 

After a short while, the young knight she faced seemed to lose his patience as she skillfully parried or blocked his every blow, and started to make less measured strikes. Wide swings that created openings in his defenses. She held her hand at the first two in case they were feints or traps, but soon realized that it was truly a case of a young inexperienced knight who lost their rationality to emotions.

 

So she stepped in and made use of the next such opening.

 

Andromarche used her sword to bind her opponent’s weapon and keep it extended and out of position, while in the same movement she dove in close and shouldered aside the young knight’s shield. She then brought her shield upwards in an uppercut movement aimed at the young knight’s chin. The wood at the rim of her leather-covered shield splintered as it struck the helmet worn by her opponent, but at the same time the young knight’s head snapped backwards from the impact.

 

Even as the young knight fell over, Andromarche pulled back her sword and grabbed the center region of the blade with her shield hand. She used the sword like a short spear as she plunged the blade into a slight gap that showed between the young knight’s helmet and neck armor after her blow, and pushed with her entire body weight behind it.

 

The young knight’s falling motion combined with the tight fit of the gap she forced her blade into eventually placed too much stress on the already damaged metal of her sword, and the blade snapped in half even as the knight fell on his back and lay still. Andromarche stared at her broken sword for a moment, before she snapped out from her reverie and shook her head.

 

With a firm and determined expression on her face, she shoved the remainder of her sword back into its scabbard hanging from her waistband, then bent down and picked up her dead opponent’s sword, before she waged further ahead towards the direction the fighting had moved on to.

 

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