Chapter 169: Chapter 169: Smack Some Soldiers Around

“Sufficiently bored that you came to bother me?” Rhydian asked as Braydon approached, a small smile on his face. He doubted that Braydon would come to tell him anything new that happened, the King had already sent word of the most important bits.

“You know me well.” Braydon acknowledged, he didn’t have much to do but he did not want to hang around for more political dances between the King and Duke Tetland. Even if they were not actively negotiating something, it would still happen regardless. Braydon was fine sticking around if the political dances were for a reason like the negotiations that he had just sat through, but not if there would be nothing of value. He would rather do absolutely nothing than do that.

“Anything happening that the King’s guard did not tell me?” Rhydian asked. He knew that the discussion had been successful and that he would be in command of half of Duke Rotleach’s men but that was about all that he had been informed of.

“The summary torture and execution of Duke Rotleach’s knights?” Braydon asked, not sure of how much extra that the guard had thought it necessary to tell. At least to him that felt like the only other important event to come of the past hour.

“Well, we already knew that was going to happen regardless.” Rhydian shrugged, apparently caring about as much as Braydon and Cinar did.

“So now we just have to wait for the theatrics to happen. How long do you think it will take to organise the new men?” Braydon asked. It was one thing to make sure that they were not causing trouble; it was a complete other thing to organise them to work alongside the army that they already had.

“Well, to make sure that they are not counterproductive would take at most a day. To make sure that they can be anything more than numbers would take more than we have.” Rhydian did not have much hopes for rigorously training them to work in tandem with the men already under his command. He was barely happy with the men that he had under his command to begin with. Since they were all men brought by different lords, they had wildly varying levels of training; some more would hardly make much of a difference in difficulty for the commander. At least he could hope that Duke Rotleach had thought somewhat about training his men.

“In this situation, numbers are all that we need.” Braydon nodded, agreeing with Rhydian’s analysis. He had not hoped that they would be some elite fighting force, just that they would not do more harm than good. It was not like the other factions were in much better situations. Duke Ryder might have had a more organised army than the rest had he not taken the remnants of Duke Oakley’s faction under his wing but that had gone out of the window in favour of having more men. Something that had been very effective at limiting the choices of Duke Burn and the King thus far.

“Numbers we have. All that is left is to actually fight.” Rhydian was not a fan of the wait and see kind of war that they had been fighting so far. Though, Braydon doubted that anyone was more in favour of that kind of war than just fighting it out. It just left more time for things to go wrong, not to mention that it was draining. Braydon was sure that they had spent more effort on this than Fiveria had in any of the wars it had fought in the past century.

“Before or after those two go at it?” Braydon was not sure what would happen but he would definitely rather that it was after. Even if one side won clearly, it would only wear them down in the end. It was not the first battle that mattered most in a war, it was the last.

“You know as well as I do what we would rather happen but I would like to focus on what is happening.” Rhydian did not want to fool himself by thinking about the coulds and could nots. He would take things as they came.

*chatter*

“It looks like things are well underway over there.” Braydon commented. They could hear the commotion coming from Duke Rotleach’s men from quite a distance. It was apparent that Duke Tetland was in the midst of executing his plan. And the knights.

“I have told a number of the lords to have their men on standby if anything gets out of hand.” Rhydian was not too worried about Duke Tetland’s plan causing a riot amongst Rotleach’s men. Most of them were peasants that had been trained to fight as soldiers, like any army. Very few were actually die hard supporters of Duke Rotleach and he was sure that Duke Tetland would already be aware of most of those who were.

“Then shall we see how good a job they are doing at being on standby?” Braydon asked. He could guess that a number were slacking off in that duty and he was still bored. It would at least give him something to do.

“You just want to smack some soldiers around. Lead the way.” Rhydian shook his head but he was in agreement about checking on if the troops were doing their jobs. Just that he was more interested in keeping things in line. Braydon, on the other hand, was hoping that there were some slackers so that he could get some exercise in and Rhydian knew it.

“Haha!” Braydon just laughed. He had proposed the idea because he knew that Rhydian would want to. It didn’t matter to him if they had different motives. And he knew that Rhydian was not going to stop him from ‘smacking some soldiers around’ if they were not paying attention to their jobs. He would have done it himself if Braydon were not offering to.